Cross-posted from Real Economics.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I have been openly questioning, in sundry forums around the pixelsphere, why Rupert Murdoch and Fox News have never been treated the same way RT is being treated now--forced to register as a Russian agent of influence because of a flood of suspicions regarding to what extent RT is controlled by Russian intelligence, or even Putin personally. Why have Rupert Murdoch and Fox News never been even considered as British agents of influence?

I should have seen it coming, but I did not, yet come it did, on--where else?--DailyKos. Someone informed me that I was wrong: Murdoch is not British, but Australian.

Well, OK, I should try to be more understanding that Americans have not really had first hand experience with the strict social and political hierarchy of Britain and the countries of the British commonwealth, and probably do not understand that Australia, when push comes to shove, is still under the thumb of the British monarch. The same is true for Canada and a bunch of other countries. The British monarch is head of state of 16 countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Grenada, Jamaica, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands, The Bahamas, Tuvalu and the United Kingdom. Note how many of these are hot money centers.

The head of government, usually the Prime Minister of the country, can be dismissed by the British monarch, usually acting through the monarch’s representative, the Governor-General. This happened in Australia in November 1975, after Prime Minister Gough Whitlam of the Australian Labor Party (ALP); began to prepare to break from the financial stranglehold of the City of London by reaching out to the Saudis and other oil states for financing. Governor-General Sir John Kerr dismissed Whitlam as Australian PM, and made the Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Fraser of the Liberal Party, the new Prime Minister. This is still a really big deal in Australia. It created a constitutional crisis that is called "The Dismissal". A series of movies have been made about it, and a number of books published. In the national memory of Australians, it is comparable to Watergate for Americans.

When I started searching the internet to verify a few details (for example, I had forgotten the names of Whitlam and Kerr), I found controversy over The Dismissal has been rekindled in Australia by a court fight to force Queen Elizabeth to release to the public her private files regarding The Dismissal. The court case apparently was initiated by a scholar after she found a handful of extracts from Kerr's letters to the Queen's private secretary in Kerr's journals. According to an Australian Broadcasting Company posting:

A handful of extracts from Kerr's letters to the Palace quoted in his own journal show that from as early as September 1975, the Governor-General had raised the prospect of him sacking of the Government, and of his own dismissal by Whitlam.

"The moment he set that out to the Queen she was already involved because the Queen from that point had options that she could take," Professor Hocking said.

"One of the options was to alert the prime minister Gough Whitlam to the fact that the Governor-General was speaking about these very extreme possibilities ... Now, from all accounts she chose not to do that."

This past November, ABC posted an article on the anniversary of The Dismissal: The facts of the Whitlam dismissal are more important than ever.

1. The 'supply crisis' was actually over
In the weeks before Whitlam's dismissal, the Senate was frozen. The Liberal opposition were starving the government of funds by repeatedly deferring the vote on its money bills, creating a "supply crisis"... Kerr "ambushed" Whitlam, dismissing him just hours after he announced the Senate election.

I find this very interesting, because over the years I have seen a number of indications that Reagan's "supply side revolution" was prefigured by what Margaret Thatcher did to Britain. Of course, one possible reason is probably that Milton Friedman's ideas were nurtured by the Mont Pelerin Society of which Friedman was a prominent member. Of 76 economic advisers on Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign staff, 22 were MPS members. Philip Mirowski has edited and written two excellent books on MPS, with excruciating details in how MPS has shifted both intellectual and public thinking on economics, labor rights, jurisprudence, and more. But while Mirowski listed many of the members of MPS, he never looked at the background of the British and other European members who were tied into the European royal families and establishments in one way or another. One of the founding members of MPS was British economic historian Sir John Clapham, who was also a senior official of the Bank of England. So, I wonder: was this parliamentary obstruction of the Australian national budget in 1975 a model for what the Republicans would begin doing in the United States on the issue of the debt ceiling?

2. Kerr's second dismissal
After Kerr sacked Whitlam, the House of Representatives met in the afternoon. Kerr's newly-appointed prime minister Malcolm Fraser was defeated in a "no confidence" motion.

Next, the Speaker of the House went to advise the governor-general that the House had no confidence in the Fraser government.

Kerr simply refused to see the Speaker or receive the motion of no confidence.

In short, he rejected the democratic role of the House of Representatives in the making and unmaking of governments....

3. Kerr believed he had a green light from Buckingham Palace
Kerr's recently released papers show he was seeking advice on using the "reserve powers" to dismiss Whitlam long before was previously revealed.

This included consultations with Prince Charles, the Queen, and the Queen's private secretary, Martin Charteris....

4. Fraser and Kerr were in secret phone contact
Former Liberal Senate leader Reg Withers recently revealed that Kerr had already decided to act against Whitlam in the week before November 11 and Fraser was aware.

In utter disregard for our constitution and political conventions, the pair were in secret phone contact the week before the dismissal.

Their deception around this was sustained for decades....

5. Two High Court justices secretly advised Kerr
In an egregious breach of the separation of powers, Chief Justices Garfield Barwick and Anthony Mason advised how to dismiss a government.

Kerr's papers show Mason secretly advised him for months leading up to the dismissal, and both during and after it.

Mason even drafted a letter of dismissal for Kerr.

All very foggy and suspicious, isn't it? But if you really want to go exploring down some rabbit holes with some tin-foil wrapped around your head, I invite you to follow some links and learn about the Queen's private secretaries. According to Wikipedia, "The Private Secretary to the Sovereign is the senior operational member of the Royal Household of the Sovereign of the United Kingdom [and] is the principal channel of communication between the monarch and the governments in each of the Commonwealth realms. They also have responsibility for the official programme and correspondence of the Sovereign. Through these roles the position wields considerable influence."

The most recently retired private secretary is Christopher Geidt, Baron Geidt GCVO, KCB, OBE, PC, who held the post from September 2007 until this year, is a former officer in the British military's Intelligence Corps. Some highlights of The Lord Geidt's career, according to his Wikipedia profile:

In 1991 Geidt and Anthony de Normann sued the journalist John Pilger and Central Television over the documentary Cambodia: The Betrayal in which they were accused of being members of the SAS who had trained the Khmer Rouge to lay mines. Geidt and de Normann accepted ‘very substantial’ damages and all costs.[5] In a related libel action Ann Clwyd MP, then shadow minister for overseas development, issued a public apology to Geidt and de Normann and agreed to meet all legal costs.... During and after the war in Bosnia (1992–1995), Geidt was the British military liason with the Bosnian Serb leadership, including Radovan Karadžić, Momčilo Krajišnik and General Ratko Mladić, all later indicted for war crimes.

Kerr's dismissal of Prime Minister Whitlam was not the first time an agent of the monarchy removed a head of government. In May 1932, Jack Lang, the Premiere of New South Wales was dismissed by Royal Governor Philip Game. And get a load of the reason:

Early in 1931 Jack Lang released his own plan to combat the Great Depression in Australia; this became known as "the Lang Plan". This was in contrast to the "Melbourne Agreement", later known as the Premiers' Plan, which all other State Governments and the Federal Government had agreed to in 1930. Lang believed that the Depression was essentially caused by overseas bankers who were greedy for even more money and that this deflationary plan would only secure their wealth.[citation needed]

Key points of the Lang Plan included the reduction of interest owed by Australian Governments on debts within Australia to 3%, the cancellation of interest payments to overseas bondholders and financiers on government borrowings, the injection of more funds into the nation's money supply as central bank credit for the revitalisation of industry and commerce, and the abolition of the Gold Standard, to be replaced by a "Goods Standard," whereby the amount of currency in circulation would be fixed to the amount of goods produced within the Australian economy.

Besides the quiet but absolute power of the British monarch, most Americans have no idea of how the British empire has been reorganized and pretty well camouflaged as a network of interlocking multinational corporations, investment banks, and insurance companies. This network not only ties together the British monarch with the British oligarchy, but it also extends their influence into very important corporations that are not British, such as Goldman Sachs.

Back in the late 1980s, I was working on a project that was trying to map out who controlled the world's finances and natural resources. There were a number of Australian and Canadian companies that were actually just fronts for the City of London (which means the financial elites of Britain, just like “Wall Street” denotes the financial elites of USA) and various British and European oligarchs. One of the most important was Broken Hill Proprietary, HQ’d in Melbourne, and known today as BHP Billiton. It is the world’s largest mining company, and together with  another nominally Australian company, Rio Tinto Zinc (today Rio Tinto Group) and Glencore (a British-Swiss group which controls what used to be the nominally Canadian mining company Noranda) exercises almost monopoly control over a number of resources such as lead, zinc, bauxite, copper, and tin. 

In other words, the British Empire never really ended. It has merely taken on a new, corporate appearance. In the 1980s, control was exercised through interlocking directorships and management positions. The other big multinational companies that were tied in at the time were British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Cadbury, Nestle, Unilever, Anglo American DeBeers, Imperial Chemical Industries, Lonrho (London Rhodesia Co.) and a few others I can’t recall off the top of my head. Almost all the directors and CEOs were “Sir”s and “Lord”s as I recall. 

The whole monster was interlocked with the major financial institutions in the City, with some connections to Wall Street as well. Barclays, Barings, Lloyds of London, Standard Charter, and HSBC (Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Corp.)  are some I remember. Some of these have died off in the financial collapses of the past few decades, such as Barings. 

A couple years ago, I poked around in the boardroom of HSBC, which gjohnsit posted about a couple days ago, and where I left a comment. Here are very brief profiles of just a few HSBC directors:
Jonathan Evans, Lord Evans of Weardale, former Director-General of the British Security Service, the United Kingdom's domestic security and counter-intelligence service. You really think this guy does not know what HSBC is doing while he's a director?

Joachim Faber, CEO of Allianz Global Investors from 2000 to 2012, and is chairman of the German Stock Exchange Group since May 2012. Allianz is the world's largest insurance company. In April 2001, Allianz bought 80 per cent of Dresdner Bank, the largest bank in Germany.

Sir Simon Robertson, former Chairman of Kleinwort Benson, which has historically been used by top British elites, particularly for off shore banking. Kleinwort Benson was a pioneer in privatisation: it was the lead adviser on the privatisation of British Telecom which, at the time in 1981, was the largest public offering ever. In 1995, Kleinwort Benson was bought by Dresdner Bank. Sir Robertson was also President of Goldman Sachs Europe.

Jonathan Symonds, CBE, former Chief Financial Officer of Novartis AG, the Swiss company which is the largest pharmaceutical company based on sales. Symonds was was a Partner and Managing Director of Goldman Sachs in 2007-2009.

Janis Rachel Lomax was Deputy Governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to 2008.

And here is a useful summary of the richest oligarchs of the British establishment: The 15 aristocrats who are richer than the Queen. Note how many of these oligarchs are of families that have held power and wealth in Britain for centuries, and how much many millions of acres in London and Britain they own. This is what Republicans are going to create in USA by eliminating the estate tax. Why are they even called the "Republican" Party? They're the Oligarchical Party.

Not much has changed. A few years ago, the computer model built by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology showed that Barclays PLC is the most connected and powerful of the multinational corporations in control of the world economy: Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world, 19 October 2011.

And this is a very useful report: Perpetual Decline or Persistent Dominance? Uncovering Anglo-America's True Structural Power in Global Finance.

The misuse of NZ companies, Part III. Backdoor access via the UK - a classic cross jurisdictional regulatory arbitrage play

Hiding in Plain Sight, how UK companies are used to launder corrupt wealth