In response to Jim DeMint, Michelle Malkin, Bill O’Reilly, and other wingnuts who are calling for an end of Federal government support for National Public Radio because it fired commentator Juan Williams for hate speech against Muslim-Americans, I am calling for the Federal government to close all those loopholes whereby Rupert Murdoch essentially usurps our taxpayer money and uses it to finance his massive airwave pollution projects.
That’s right, the US government is essentially underwriting Fox Cable News by allowing the Austrialian-American billionaire to evade the taxes that his secretaries and janitors have to pay.
Murdoch’s evasion of taxes may not be illegal, but it is immoral and unethical for someone who owns the Wall Street Journal and a whole cable news company, who is therefore part of the moral community of the United States, to avoid paying his fair share (in contrast, e.g., to the Disney Corp., which owns ABC). Murdoch’s tactics for stiffing the public and contributing to the national debt were uncovered in the 1990s. It was discovered that his news corporations worldwide were paying 6% in taxes! In contrast, Disney was paying 31%. Almost anyone reading this pays very substantially more in taxes than Mr. Rupert, and when he doesn’t pay for government services, it comes out of your pocket.
Murdoch has backed Glenn Beck, who called President Barack Obama a racist, and Sean Hannity, who has openly falsified an Obama speech by manipulating the video to make him seem to say the opposite of what he said. He is not only not delivering news under the guise of ‘Fox Cable News’, he is delivering intentional falsehood. In addition, Murdoch is a bad corporate citizen, contriving to be a free rider who will not pay his fair share of taxes. No wonder we have a big deficit!
As for the numbnuts who think that NPR can be cut off from federal grants, in fact National Public Radio, despite the name, is not funded by the federal government. Most of its funding comes from listeners. It gets a small amount of federal money very indirectly. It is public television and radio stations that receive some federal funding, but they are customers of NPR, not directors of it, and did not fire Mr. Williams.
Please write your senators and congressmen asking them to close the tax loopholes that billionaire media moguls like Murdoch use to make you and me support their dishonest and frankly stupid programming. And remind the Democrats that Murdoch is taking what is in effect a public subsidy in order to brainwash the public with Republican Party propaganda talking points. If they cannot see he is out to get them, and allow him to get away with legal tax evasion so as to gain ammunition with which to take them out, they deserve to be unemployed.
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