... an objective which, at bare minimum, involves stitching his lips shut, clamping his rheumy eyes open and making him watch as each of his assets are seized, one by one, using any of the legal means at the DoJ's disposal (or just making shit up like the DEA does when it lusts after some yacht or a house overlooking the Pacific).
Next... dismantling his right-wing publishing empire right under his nose and, finally, when there's nothing of his left that anybody would want, consigning him to the foul-smelling slag heap where his fellow subspecies of vicious, world-class sociopaths spend the rest of their ideally short, miserable lives as ideological laughingstocks and powerless non-entities.
That would do it for me, and yesterday wouldn't be soon enough. However, reality intrudes...
Murdoch is an archetype representing the contemporary class of untouchable, stateless, multilateralist ubermenschen whose only allegiance is to money and power, and the continuous and exponential growth of both. He and the rest of his peers will continue to do whatever they please from anyplace on the planet, so deportation is completely useless.
National boundaries are arbitrary lines on a map and are completely irrelevant to these masters of the universe who see states, and notably their regulatory oversight agencies, as mere impediments to further self-enrichment.
So why bother with deportation?
Instead, let's move him into one of the bombed-out sections of the south Bronx. Let's watch him try and adjust to life in some cockroach- and sewer rat-infested, visibly rotting "apartment" -- an ice house in winter and a pizza oven in summer.
It's easy, and fun for the whole family, too. Just keep seizing his illegally acquired money, assets and media empire -- penny by gold ingot, empty lot by high-rise, radio station by TV network, newspaper by wingnut rag -- until he's reduced to living on the dole, which may even generously supply enough each month so he can afford some fifth floor, cold water tenement Skinner maze where the elevator stopped working decades ago and no repair person who values his life will go there to fix it.
Oh, and cut off his access to satellite TV so he can only guess at how many snippets of actual truth managed sneak through corporate mass media's filters -- the filters he helped create way back when message control and propaganda replaced reporting in US mass media.
It's either some version of the above or we let him go on sipping cutesy umbrella drinks on the shaded, bug-free veranda of an enormous tropical estate in some extradition-free island chain of a pretend country. Vanuatu comes to mind... Cheney comes to mind, along with Kenny Boy as he lives his second of nine lives and the former Codpiece in Chief his-own-seff.
One solution: Anti-trust legislation gathering dust waiting for an exhibition of Congressional courage Admittedly, that's a long, long wait, but still...
Seems to me that's a relatively simple and reliably effective way to reduce or eliminate Murdoch's toxic influence -- and that of the other five corporate disinfo chokepoints -- along with their control of more than 90 percent of everything Americans are allowed to see, read and hear.
That would mean resurrecting and enforcing numerous anti-trust laws already on the books, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act among the more effective. But of course, there's a very American problem in play here as well.
It's called campaign financing, usually with the customary peals of laughter erased from the sound track, and it's just another organized corporate shakedown in which various politicians are auctioned off to one or many huge corporations with the obviously implicit quid pro quo, an exercise in sleaze well understood by all parties.
So when a critical committee or floor vote comes up, one that could cut a whole nickel or two from their sugar daddy's quarterly revenue stream, the pol in question can always be counted on to vote in favor of their real employers. This is invariably against the interests of the peasants who elected them, but gee whiz, you can't please everybody....
Another way out: public financing of campaigns, with corporate money in all its cleverly disguised forms prohibitedWithout completely revamping the current madness that depends on high-dollar bribes to drive the entire political system -- including local, state and federal governments and public institutions -- any initiatives that benefit real people rather than fatten corporate bottom lines are simply going to die in committee... assuming they even make it that far.
Witness Baucus' refusal to even utter the words "single-payer," much less acknowledge the concept's effectiveness everywhere else but here in Dumbfuckistan. He's just making sure his corporate employers in the for-profit medical insurance rackets come out ahead yet again -- mainly so they'll continue to funnel money his way -- and fuck the idea that health care is a right and not a privilege.
And compliant intellectual midgets and super-sized, Dorito-eating, TV-addicted slobs that we are, the fact that some form of single-payer works as advertised in 18 of the 19 countries the World Health Organization classifies as "post-industrial" has somehow managed to escape most Americans attention. But shit, Dancing with the Stars is almost on and who has time for all that complicated medical stuff anyway.
Why a bribocracy? Because the courts said so…The slow, ugly descent from flawed democratic republic to overtly corrupt bribocracy has been arguably the worst of many outcomes -- planned and unanticipated -- stemming from the insane concept of "corporate personhood" granted the profiteering swine courtesy of an 1886 Supreme Court Case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad.
All the rights of a US citizen (predating the Bushean era during which the Fourth Reich's legal "experts" simply nullified the Bill of Rights) and none of the responsibilities; nice gig if you can get it. In other words, privatize profits and socialize risks. As Yakov Smirnov used to bellow, "America!! What a country!!"
Then, to make sure corporate officers got their priorities straight, the 1919 Michigan Supreme Court ruling in Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. held that profits are the only legitimate goal Ford, and therefore by precedent, any for-profit US public corporation was/is allowed to pursue.
The written decision went on blathering about the sanctity of the shareholder: "… A business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders… The discretion of directors is to be exercised in the choice of means to attain that end, and does not extend to a change in the end itself, to reduction of profits, or to the nondistribution of profits among stockholders in order to devote the to other purposes."
In other words, good-bye R&D, wage and benefits hikes, manufacturing plant expansion, technical improvements and the rest of the stuff that used to define American leadership in the production of finished goods. Oh, and fuck the nascent but increasingly powerful US labor movement – Debs, Joe Hill, Big Bill Heywood and the rest of the ball-breakers who used fists, axe handles and shotguns instead of ineffective restraining orders and smarmy cowards for legal help – and please pardon the gross generalization, but there's more than a little truth in the statement.
Buckley v. Valeo, which equated money with protected free speech, opened the floodgates to the zillions of dollars corporate PR skanks and admen use to keep us dumb, compliant, willing accomplices in our own devolution and witnesses as the Great Experiment in self-determination quietly dissolves from utter lack of interest.
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