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2/20/24


In These Times: Starbucks Just Saw the Largest Single-Day Union Drive in the Company's History    


2/10/24


Guardian: Georgia Police and FBI Conduct SWAT-Style Raids on 'Cop City' Activists Homes - Corporate Police State - See entry below of 10/6


2/3/24


Time: East Palestine, Ohio: 1 Year After One Year After Toxic Train Derailment     


1/19/24


Guardian: Half of Recent US Inflation Due to High Corporate Profits Report Finds - Check out: Groundwork Collaborative  


1/11/24


The Verge: How SEO Killed the Internet    


11/17/23


Yahoo: Red Cup Rebellion: Starbucks Workers Stage Strike, Walkout - A very long list of court losses show that SB is attempting to illegally bust the union using all sorts of intimidation, and Here. Howard Schultz has tried to slink out of view, but Bernie says NO!


11/10/23


Guardian: Moody's Cuts Outlook on US Government to Negative - From the article: “In the context of higher interest rates, without effective fiscal policy measures to reduce government spending or increase revenues, Moody’s expects that the US’s fiscal deficits will remain very large, significantly weakening debt affordability”


11/6/23


Guardian: Fifty-Seven 'Cop City' Protesters Arraigned on Racketeering Charges  


10/6/23


Guardian: Georgia DA Will Not Charge Police Who Murdered 'Cop City' Activist - The autopsy showed that Teran was sitting up with his hands raised when he was shot 57 times. There were no gunpowder stains on his hands. “Did they shoot their own man?”


See entries below of 6/6, 4/20, 3/15, 3/10, 2/9, 2/3, 2/2, 1/28/23.


Also see entry of 3/22 - 25/23 discussing private equity funds Roark and Silver Lake Mgt. which sit on the board of the Alanta Police Fund and who own Motorola. They facilitate sales of surveillance equipment to the APD. They have acquired ownership of 40 acres of Intrenchment Creek Park in Cop City. Other activities/revenue gained from this cooperation remain secret because of a lack of reporting requirements for these funds.


The City of Atlanta first approved this project on 9/8/21.


10/3/23


Forbes: The 400 Wealthiest Americans  


7/5/23


Malwarebytes: Google Plans to Scrape Everything You Post Online to Train its AI  


USA Today: Richest People Add $852 Billion To Their Collective Wealth During First Half of 2023  


6/6/23


Democracy-Now: Atlanta City Council OKs $67M for Cop City Despite Mass Protests and Armed Raid on Atlanta Solidarity Fund - The people in charge of the fund to bail out protestors were over-charged with money laundering and charity fraud. Most of the protestors in jail have been over-charged with domestic terrorism. Over-charging protestors is a typical tactic employed by the state to cause those charged to bankrupt themselves on lawyer fees and thus discourage further protests. In the end, the charges will either be greatly reduced or dropped after the main purpose for them has been accomplished.


"...and after Atlanta police shot dead the environmental activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán in January. An autopsy shows they were sitting with their hands raised up in front of their body when police shot them 57 times."


See entry below of 4/20.


5/22/23


CNBC: META Fined a Record $1.3B Over EU User Data Transfers to the US - Collecting user data and using it to target consumer advertising (and for who knows other purposes) is just fine in the USA - despite the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution. But the EU specifically prohibits that.


5/18/23


Guardian: US Supreme? Court Backs Big Corps Over Injured People


5/4/23


Alternet: Memorial Day Massacre: Remembering Union Workers Deadly Clash With Chicago Cops    


4/28/23


Portside: Private Equity is Gutting America - And Getting Away With It and NYTimes and NYorker: When Private Equity Takes Over a Nursing Home  and NYTimes: What Layoffs? Top Wall Street Traders Score Giant Paydays    


4/20/23


Greenmatters: What's to Know About 'Cop City'? - A good historical narrative. The Dekalb Co. Medical Examiners Office ruled the death a homicide.


Common Dreams: Autopsy Shows Forest Defender Murdered by Police Never Fired Weapon - See entries 3/25, 3/22, 3/15, 3/10, 2/9, 2/3, 2/2, 1/28


4/14/23


CNBC: JPMorgan Chase Posts Record Reveue on Higher Interest Rates - Together with Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, these banks and their CEOs make $10s of Billions while regular working people struggle to feed and house their familes. These institutions, along with hedge funds like BlackRock (almost $10B in assets) fund most of development and infrastructure of big oil drilling and pipeline projects. They are also the entities that fund the wars in Ukraine and make $Billions more from inflation caused by wars.


3/29/23


NPR: Why Scrutiny of Starbucks' Alleged Union Violations is Boiling Over Now    


3/25/23


Guardian: Officers in 'Cop City' Raid Shot Pepperball Gun Into Activists Tent Just Before Murdering Him          


3/22/23


Guardian: Investment Fund Link to Atlanta Police and 'Cop City' Project Revealed - From the article: Roark Capital and Silver Lake Mgt. are private equity funds which have almost no financial disclosure rules. Their relationship with APD and the Atlanta Police Fund is all being done behind closed doors.


Company reps sit on the board of Atlanta Police Fund. They have a history of providing advanced surveillance equipment to the APD from Motorola. Several European trust funds divested from Motorola when the company was listed on a UN report detailing companies “that had raised particular human rights concerns” by providing surveillance tools and other services to the Israeli government...Motorola has sold more than $22m worth of products and services to the Atlanta police department since 2016."


"In 2022, Silver Lake added Shadowbox Studios (formerly Blackhall Studios), a television and film studio company, to its portfolio with a $500m investment. The studios are located south of the Cop City site."


The two companies are working on a land swap whereby they gain control of 40 acres of Intrenchment Creek Park. Other activities involving these 4 groups are totally secret despite the fact that taxpayer funds are used to support the APD. The 2023 budget for the APD totalled $754M.


“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini


3/16/23


Salt Lake Tribune: America is in a Disgraced Class of its Own - From the article: "A recent study estimates that collecting all unpaid federal income taxes from the top 1 percent — not raising their taxes, mind you, just putting an end to their tax evasion — would add $175 billion a year to the public purse...an additional $175 billion a year is almost enough to lift everyone out of poverty altogether."


3/15/23


Guardian: Tents Slashed and Supplies Destroyed: 'Cop City' Activists Describe Police Intimidation     


3/10/23


Yahoo News: Protestor Killed at Atlanta's 'Cop City' Had Hands Raised When State Patrol Shot Him: Autopsy - See entries of 2/3, 2/2.


Intercept: Cop City Body Cam Footage Suggests Fellow Cop Was Shot by Friendly Fire    


2/8/23


The Lever: Rail Companies Blocked Safety Rules Before Ohio Derailment       


2/6/23


MSNBC: We Don't Need Any New Ideas to Fix the Supreme Court. Just One Very Old One - From the article: "At least 5 members of the Supreme Court are comfortable ignoring the court's past decisions and manipulating the law to achieve more conservative goals."


The Whore Court has shown by numerous recent decisions, having thrown stare decisis to the wind, that the it lacks integrity, validity, credibility and legitimacy. These 5 members are incompetent political hacks. They are a reflection of the fascist corporate state in which we live. They rule only from the barrel of a gun.


See entry of 1/11 below.


2/3/23


Guardian: 'Cop City' Protestor Shot 13 Times by Police - no body cam footage despite the scores of police officers that were present - corporate stenographers (they're not reporters anymore) dutifully transcribe every word of the police state - undercover FBI clad in all black destroy infrastructure giving the governor the excuse to declare an emergency and invoke the equivalent of martial law - so what if the victim's family sues for $millions and wins; neither the city council nor the police enforcers will pay the fine, that will be left to the citizens of Atlanta - this is an old story; people of color routinely face this kind of violence and it never gets reported by the corporate stenographers - if it weren't for the progressive media like Guardian, Democracy-NOW, Socialist Alternative and Common Dreams, etc. we would never even be aware that this had happened


2/2/23


Democracy-NOW: Atlanta's 'Cop City' Moves Ahead After Atlanta Police Murder 1 Protestor & Charge 19 with 'Domestic Terrorism'     


1/31/23


Guardian: 'It Can be Scary': How Corporate American is Hitting Back against Unions    


Democracy-Now: Economist Richard Wolff How the Debt Ceiling is Used to Benefit the Rich and Powerful - A very short and succinct explanation of why this repeating issue is nothing more than '99% theatre.'


"If the government borrows instead of taxing, this is really good news for corporations and the rich, particularly. And here’s why. If they can succeed in cutting their taxes, as they did under Mr. Trump, for example, then the government has to borrow. You know who the government borrows from? Them. It borrows mostly from corporations and the rich. The average people of America do not lend to the government, because they don’t have the money. So, the irony is there’s an imbalance. For corporations and the rich, they can get out of the taxes they might have to pay, and instead the government comes to them and borrows from them the money they otherwise would have had to pay in taxes. They have to pay that money back to those people, plus interest for the time that they hold this debt. So you can see that when corporate America pushes for tax cuts, it’s looking at two benefits: It doesn’t have to pay taxes, and instead it gets to have a loan to the government."


"...over the last year, we’ve been told that the government, the Federal Reserve, has to raise interest rates. And the logic of hurting all the people whose credit card bills, whose college payment bills and whose car payments are all going up as interest rates rise, we are told this is necessary, because if interest rates rise, it becomes more expensive to borrow, and therefore people will do less of that, and they’ll have less to spend. And with less to spend, we will be slowing our inflation.


At the same time, the government is spending tens of billions of dollars on a new program — namely, the war in Ukraine — which has exactly the opposite effect. But the rules of our politics seem to mean we have to talk about Ukraine only in terms that are carefully cleansed from the inflationary impact such a plan has. It’s a kind of split consciousness that goes together with the theatrics of Biden and McCarthy, because they’re not facing the hard realities."


1/28/23


MSN: Georgia is Trying to Kill Protests With Terrorism Charges. Activists Are Not Impressed. - This is such a familiar tale. Police murder a protestor who stands in their way, and then plant a gun on him and take a picture. Undercover FBI agents dressed in black begin to smash windows and other infrastructure. Authorities label these protestors as 'terrorists'. The stenographic press eats it up without any questions. The fake protestors (FBI undercover) are loaded up in the paddy weapon, escorted to the front door of the police station and then walk out the back door - with or without charges which will later be dropped without explantion, jump in their vehicles and head for home. It's the standard MO for the fascist corporate-police state.


The next step will be an emergency declaration which will lay the legal justification for any level of shoot on sight martial law that Gov. Kemp pleases to use.


1/24/23


Common Dreams: DOJ Suit Against Google Heralded as 'Among the Most Important Antitrust Cases' in US History    


1/23/23


New Yorker: The Getty Family's Trust Issues - Japanese saying: "The third generation ruins the house."

"Between 1983 and 2020, the net worth of the Kochs, who prospered in fossil fuels and became right-wing mega-donors, grew twenty-five-fold, from $3.9 billion to $100 billion. The Mars-family fortune, which began in the candy business, grew by a factor of thirty-six, to $94 billion. The Waltons, of Walmart, expanded their fortune forty-four-fold, to $247 billion. The financial triumph of such clans helps explain how the imbalance of wealth in the United States has risen to levels unseen in a century. In 1978, the top 0.1 per cent of Americans owned about seven per cent of the nation’s wealth; today, according to the World Inequality Database, it owns eighteen per cent."

In 2021 the US Treasury Department issued a report stating that the top 1% of taxpayers are responsible for 28% of the nation's unpaid taxes; over $160 Billion. Most of that money is hidden in Panama, and Here, Here, Here, Here, Here, and Here.



1/11/23


Common Dreams: It's Time to Admit This Right-Wing Supreme Court is a Corrupt, Autocratic Tribune - “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini

See entry of 2/6 above.


1/9/23


Guardian: 'Lack of Respect': Outcry Over Amazon Employee's Death on Warehouse Floor


1/8/23


Robert Reich: The US Should Break up Monopolies, Not Punish Americans for Rising Prices  


1/4/23


NYTimes: Meta (Facebook) Fined $414 Million For Illegal Practices by EU  


12/2/22


Common Dreams: Betrayal of Railway Workers Ignites Working-Class Fury Towards Biden and Democrats


11/29/22


Guardian: Joe Biden on Collision Course With Unions     


11/28/22


Common Dreams: Biden Sells Out Union Workers by Urging Congress to Prevent Strike - Watch only what they do. Biden keeps chipping away at his base. The results should be easy to predict. Hello President DeSantis.


11/25/22


Guardian: Amazon Warehouse Workers Stage Black Friday Strikes and Protests Around the World


11/14/22


Guardian: Global Corporations 'Cheating Public Out of Billions in Taxes' Say Campaigners


9/27/22


Malwarebytes: Facebook Users Sue Meta for Alledgedly Building "Secret Workaround" to Apple Privacy Safeguards


7/29/22


Guardian: Oil Company Profits Quadruple as Americans Reel From High Fuel Prices


7/22/22


Guardian: Panama Papers Whistleblower: 'Politicians Must Act - Now"


7/20/22


Common Dreams: Sanders Files Amendment to Limit $76 Billion in 'Corporate Welfare' for Microchip Industry


Guardian: Facebook Zuckerberg Faces Deposition Over Manipulation of User Data - Again? This is Zuckerbergs 2022 version of the annual apology tour. It's been going on every year for the last 18. It's always some variation on: 'We had no idea or intention for the data to be used against our users, so we're going to work real real hard to make sure this never happens again.' Congress will do nothing and we'll be right back here again next year.


Surveillance and data harvesting is the Facebook business model. It can’t be trusted to regulate itself, and Here. It uses a social-validation feedback loop, and subliminal stimuli and advertising to keep its users hooked. It is not your friend.


4/28/22


Guardian: Why Are Gas Prices So High? These Obsure Traders Are Partly to Blame


4/10/22


Guardian: 'A Marathon, Not a Sprint': How Chris Smalls Defied Amazon to Start a Union    


4/2/22


New Yorker: Joe Manchin Can't Shoot Down the Logic of a Wealth Tax - "Last fall, during the abortive Build Back Better negotiations, Senator Ron Wyden, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, revived the idea of taxing the unrealized capital gains of billionaires. The White House expressed interest in Wyden’s proposal but dropped it after it ran into internal Party opposition, including from Manchin and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Washington Post reported."


3/8/22


Guardian: Fears for Bees as US Set to Extend Use of Toxic Pesticides - Chemicals that are banned in Europe will continue to plague pollinators in the US for at least 15 more years.


Although this is an EPA decision, it is bound to have been reviewed by the Dept. of Agriculture which is headed by a purely political appointment


Tom Vilsack is the current Sec. of Agriculture. He was appointed by Obama and then again by Biden. He is a total industry insider.


Biden appointed former Biotech Governor of the Year Tom Vilsack: Sec. of AgriculturMonsanto provided the jet that Vilsack used to travel the state of Iowa during his gubernatorial campaign.


2/20/22


Guardian: Credit Suisse Leak Unmasks Criminals, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians


11/11/21


Washington Post: Democrat's Lofty Tax Agenda Imperiled From Within - Like from Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.


10/23/21


Nation of Change: US Billionaires Are $2.1 Trillion Richer Than Before the Pandemic


10/4/21


Guardian: Pandora Papers: What Has Been Revealed So Far


Guardian: Facebook Putting Profit Before Public Good, Says Whistleblower - "Last week, lawmakers grilled Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, and accused the company of “routinely” putting growth above children’s safety."


10/3/21


BBC: Pandora Papers: Secret Wealth and Dealings of World Leaders Exposed


9/22/21


Common Dreams: Report Shows Big Oil's Offshore Tax Loopholes Cost US Taxpayers At Least $86 Billion Per Year


9/21/21


NYTimes: Shrink Facebook - "Facebook has been used as a tool for violence and abuse in country after country."


NYTimes: No More Apologies: Inside Facebook's Push to Defend Its Image


9/13/21


NYTimes: Apple Issues Emergency Security Updates to Close a Spyware Flaw - For the first time ever, Apple admits that it could be and has been hacked.


9/7/21


US Treasury: The Case for a Robust Attack on the Tax Gap - "estimates from academic researchers suggest that more than $160 billion lost annually is from taxes that top 1 percent choose not to pay."


8/19/21


NYTimes: US Revives Facebook Suit, Adding Details to Back Claim of a Monopoly


7/14/21


Common Dreams: How to Pay for Infrastructure? Tax Billionaires' $1.8 Trillion Tax-Free Covid Windfall -The study found that they could afford the entire infrastructure costs plus tuition for 5.5 million community college students and could feed 29 million low-income public school kids over the summer. Why not? Capitalism


7/6/21


Intercept: Meet the Corporate Consulting Firm Staffing the Biden Administration - Previously they represented large defense contractors, the health insurance industry, pharmaceutical, big tech, cybersecurity, telecommunications, AT&T, Boeing, FedEx, etc. The Office of the President is now brought to you by WestExec. There will be no serious corporate anti-trust initiatives during the Biden administration.


6/15/21


Democracy-NOW: Disaster Capitalism: Puerto Rico Plunged Into Darkness After Privitazation of Electric Utility


6/12/21


NYTimes: Private Inequality: How a Powerful Industry Conquered the Tax System


6/10/21


Guardian: When America's Richest Men Pay $0 in Income Tax, This is Wealth Supremacy


6/8/21


ProPublica: How the Wealthiest Avoid Taxes - Their tax return data "demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most."


Between 2014 and 2018, the wealth of the 25 richest Americans increased by $401 Billion. They paid only 3.4% in tax. The typical American family pays about 24%. Imagine what 24% of $401 Billion ($96 Billion) could do for American poverty, health care, education, infrastructure.


5/18/21


Ellen Brown: How America Went From Mom-and-Pop Capitalism to Techno-Feudalism - 'Free' people can be kept enslaved by permanent debt, if they can be paid wages that are less then their cost of living.


Stages:

M-a-P Capitalism before WWII >


Industrial Capitalism: WWII - 1970 - M-a-P coexisted with large manufacturers designed to create real goods and services. Unions and corporations, roughly equal in economic power, quasi-collaborated (with the federal government acting as referee) to keep wages livable and profits adequate, very low inflation, GDP grew slowly Govt. intervention?>


Predatory Capitalism: constant propaganda from bought-out media outlets create a popular outlook that makes unions look like villans, causing them to loose membership and power. Lacking any effective checques and balances, a few of these corporations gradually rise to the top, then merge, concentrating power in the very few. Many of these corporations now produce no goods or services, but rather exist to exploit the rental value of their assets, spend a great portion of their earnings on buying back their own shares. Economy, inflation became more volatile, boom and bust, periods of fast growth for the few, then recession for all, repeated boom/bust >


Philanthro-capitalism: the multi-billionaires, in order to shield themselves from taxes and a predatory capitalist image create foundations or LLCs that are designated as having charitable purposes but remain under the ownership and control of the donors, who can invest the funds in ways that serve their corporate interests.  The responsibility for public goods and services is gradually transferred from democratic institutions to the wealthy, who are looking after no one but themselves. >


Techno-Feudalism: All assets are owned by the very few. New-day serfs are 'happy and own nothing'. Any that get out of line can easily be tracked and dealt with by the completely invasive mass surveillance tools now available to the techno-feudal lords who control all of the assets.


Solutions:

wealth tax,


income tax,


corporate model overhaul (bring democracy to the market place and the job - one employee, one vote),


land-value tax: a tax on the rental income – the “unearned income” – of land, natural resources and monopoly takings - returning a portion of the land to the commons;


banking system reform: banks operated as a public utility could allocate credit for productive purposes serving the public interest;


Anti-monopoly legislation;


patent law reform


5/13/21


WaPo: Studies Show Unemployment Benefits Don't Stop People From Returning to Work - "...despite the highly meme-able frivolity associated with stimulus payments on social media, a study of how Americans spent the first stimulus by the Federal Reserve of New York revealed that only 29 percent of payments went toward consumption while the rest either went directly into debt repayment or savings."


4/12/21


Guardian: The Facebook Loophole That Lets World Leaders Deceive and Harass Their Citizens


2/25/21


Guardian: Bernie Sanders: US Sick of Subsidizing Starvation Wages at Walmart and McDonalds


2/23/21


Intercept: Corporate Lawyers Line Up For Justice Dept. Top Slots - An amazing list of corporate blue bloods whose whole lives have been spent defending the largest multi-national corporations against anti-trust and criminal prosecutions. There will be no meaningful anti-trust efforts on the part of the Biden Administration. See entry of 1/28.


2/18/21


Intercept: How Oracle Sells Repression in China - Oracle joins Google and Amazon in helping the Chinese government spy on its people's every move. Coming soon to the USA.


2/12/21


Guardian: Mars, Nestle to Face Child Slavery Lawsuit in US


2/11/21


Intercept: Former FBI Officials Tapped for Amazon's Growing Surveillance Network - Prime targets: labor organizers and journalists


2/8/21


Reuters: 'This is Not Justice.' Tenant Activists Upend US Eviction Courts


2/3/21


Democracy-NOW: Jeff Bezos Steps Down But Amazon's Predatory Business Model Won't Change - "On Tuesday, the company also reached a $61.7 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over charges it stole tips from its Amazon Flex drivers over two-and-a-half years. Amazon used the tips earned by the Flex drivers to pay the wages of these hourly workers, who don’t receive any benefits and make deliveries in their own vehicles." What kind of person does this?

Watch PBS The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos sometime.


1/28/21


Intercept: Merrick Garland Wants Former Facebook Lawyer to Top Antitrust Division - There will be no antitrust enforcement in the Biden Administration.


1/2o/21


Oxfam: Working for the Few and Common Dreams: Abolish Billionaires - "The worth of the 10 richest men has grown by half a $Trillion since the pandemic began."


1/14/21


Center on Poverty and Social Policy, Columbia University: President-elect Biden's Economic Relief Proposal Has the Potential to Cut Child Poverty in Half


12/11/20

The Intercept: Tom Vilsack for Agriculture Secretary is Everything That's Wrong About the Democratic Party - Vilsack was originally a dairy industry and Monsanto lobbyist, and eventually became Governor of Iowa by shuttling around the state in a Monsanto Lear jet. Then Obama named him Secretary of Agriculture. His record since this has been abysmal, as this article details.


Another of Biden’s pro-corporate reruns, setting the stage for 2024 when all of the disillusioned young and minority voters who got out the vote for Biden will stay home, thus re-electing another Trump-esqe thug. Rank and file democrats are doing nothing about it. They will have only themselves to blame.


12/10/20


New Yorker: Billionaires Who Profited From the Pandemic Should Help Pay for Our Recovery - "...between March 18th and December 7th, Musk’s worth rose by $118.5 billion, Bezos’s worth rose by $71.4 billion, and Zuckerberg’s worth rose by $50.1 billion. The other five—Ellison, Page, Brin, Gates, and Ballmer—each saw gains of between twenty billion and thirty billion dollars. As a result of these developments, the report adds, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Gates have joined Bezos as “centi-billionaires,” meaning that each is now worth more than a hundred billion dollars

...and at least 10.7 million Americans are without jobs...The collective wealth gain of roughly a trillion dollars that the billionaires have enjoyed is more “than it would cost to send a stimulus check of $3,000 to every one of the roughly 330 million people in America”


12/4/20


Intercept: Congress Stalls on Stimulus Checks for Families While Corporations Continue to Reap Millions From Cares Act


12/3/20


Intercept: Amazon Workers Are Organizing a Global Struggle


11/30/20


American Prospect: Trouble at Treasury - Adewale Adeyemo will be Yellen's deputy Treasury Secretary. He worked for Timothy Geithner in Obama's Treasury Dept. He and Larry Summers came up with the idea of Quantitative Easing which gave $12 Trillion in corporate welfare to the banking sector. When he left Treasury he went to work for BlackRock.


11/27/20


The Atlantic: America Failed at Covid-19, But the Economy's OK, But It May Not Stay That Way


4/30/20


NPR Fresh Air: How the Cares Act Became a Tax-Break Bonanza for the Rich - $2 Trillion in cash and tax breaks most of which went to the richest 1%. Also ProPublica, Fortune, CNBC, NPR details.


2/23/20


Guardian: Charity Clearly Doesn't Begin at Home for Jeff Bezos


7/11/19


Intercept: How US Tech Giants are Helping to Build China's Surveillance State - Google, IBM, Semptian, Aegis


4/1/19


Vox: We Won't Get Out of the Second Gilded Age the Way We Got Out of the First


1/25/19


NPR: Oxfam: Taxing the World's Ultra-Rich Could Immediately End Poverty - From the article:

Overall wealth of the world's top 1%: $8.4T

Overall wealth of the world's poorest 50%: $1.4T

Simply applying a 0.5% tax to that wealth would provide enough money to educate all 262 million children who are out of school according to U.N. calculations and provide enough health care to save the lives of 3.3 million people who are likely to die from lack of proper treatment for medical conditions.


10/15/18


NYTimes: A Genocide Incited on Facebook By Burma's Military - Something else Facebook does really well: start wars


9/18/14

Cambridge University: Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens - Study by Princeton and Northwestern Universities. The study focused on 1,779 policy issues and found that in all cases, the preferences of the wealthy economic elite were enacted into law, while “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” A study in the Political Research Quarterly corroborates that conclusion. Democrats were actually less responsive to low income Americans and more responsive to the wealthy than Republicans.

From the article: “American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it's pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation's "news" media). The U.S., in other words, is basically similar to Russia or most other dubious "electoral" "democratic" countries.”

We live in a corporate dictatorship. The viewpoints of the average American voter do not count in the slightest.

See also Here.

6/18/09

Slate: When America First Met the Microchip - For the record, the inventor: Jack St. Claire Kilby of Texas Instruments (1960). Another case where the federal govt. financed an innovation, and private investors reaped all of the profits. Touted at the time as the result of American exceptionalism.





Corporate Domination

Progress?