Over two years after Big Tech Big-Tech made the historic decision to limit access to the New York Post’s story about President Joe Biden’s son Hunter, users are getting a glimpse into how Twitter came to that decision. However, delusional legacy and social media outlets are doing everything they can to misrepresent and bury the consequential details of the process. Continue reading
“There is no sense that inflation is coming down,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell at a November 2 press conference, — this despite eight months of aggressive interest rate hikes and “quantitative tightening.” On November 30, the stock market rallied when he said smaller interest rate increases are likely ahead and could start in December. But rates will still be increased, not cut. “By any standard, inflation remains much too high,” Powell said. “We will stay the course until the job is done.” Continue reading
Some workers began delaying doctor’s appointments and others started delving deeply into their pockets for care when Tecnocap illegally slashed health benefits at its Glen Dale, West Virginia, manufacturing plant last year. Continue reading
The problem with most Western media’s political analyses is that they generally tend to be short-sighted and focused mostly on variables that are of direct interest to Western governments. Continue reading
Avid supporters of coal, oil, and gas (and opponents of wind and solar energy, but I repeat myself) seem convinced that they’ve got the ultimate gotcha arguments in “intermittency” and “energy density.” They’re right, but not in quite the way they seem to think. Continue reading
WASHINGTON—The right-wing Republican-named U.S. Supreme Court majority appears to be on the verge of approving a Republican-pushed radical theory to give state legislatures, and only them, complete control of voting and elections—to the dismay of both the court’s three Democratic-named justices and of demonstrators outside the court yesterday. If they end up ruling the way they seemed to be leaning yesterday the entire U.S. election system will be upended, killing the ability of voters, not lawmakers, to choose the president. Continue reading
If there is one point on which there should be no political parsing, no legal jockeying, and no disagreement, it is this: for anyone to advocate terminating or suspending the Constitution is tantamount to a declaration of war against the founding principles of our representative government and the rule of law. Continue reading
The United States Senate acted in a show of rare unity recently in voting 80 to 15 to pass a bill forcing rail workers to accept their employers’ contract offer without a strike. There was no such unity to pass an amendment introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would have given rail workers seven paid sick leave days. That bill did not pass even though 52 senators voted for it, as it failed the requisite 60-vote threshold. Continue reading
June 6, 2021, was a day which shocked many in Peru’s oligarchy. Pedro Castillo Terrones, a rural schoolteacher who had never before been elected to office, won the second round of the presidential election with just over 50.13% of the vote. More than 8.8 million people voted for Castillo’s program of profound social reforms and the promise of a new constitution against the far-right’s candidate, Keiko Fujimori. In a dramatic turn of events, the historical agenda of neoliberalism and repression, passed down by former Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori to his daughter Keiko, was rejected at the polls. Continue reading
In a stunning finale to 2022’s federal elections, Georgians reelected Sen. Raphael Warnock in a runoff that concluded Tuesday night, where the incumbent Democrat and Atlanta pastor defeated Herschel Walker, a football star who was handpicked by Donald Trump but was rejected by the Peach State’s diverse urban and suburban voters. Continue reading
Joe Biden may be 80 years old but only Republicans and a few wobbly Democrats who think the president is out grazing in a pasture are underestimating someone who is, first and foremost, a politician of the old school. Biden’s decision to have the Democratic Party hold its first primary in 2024 in South Carolina, thus edging out traditional first primary state New Hampshire, as well as the first nominating process—caucus—state Iowa, is a political master stroke of genius. As it now stands, South Carolina will lead the Democratic primary calendar on Saturday, February 3. Having the primary election on a Saturday will likely increase voter participation among two Democratic strongholds, African-Americans and college students. Continue reading
Free press advocates this week urged people to contact Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s office and ask the New York Democrat to pass legislation protecting journalists from government abuses during the closing days of the current Congress. Continue reading
The Black Agenda Report team is proud to have coined the phrases “Black misleadership class” and “Black political class.” These words cannot be uttered and written too often because they name and shame the people who work alongside the neoliberal and imperialist order in the United States while also pretending to act on behalf of Black people, whose needs are antithetical to those of the oligarchy. Continue reading
The Supreme Court appears hell-bent on making America bigoted again. Step-by-step, they’re undoing every bit of progressive legislation from the past 80 years that they can find. Continue reading
Social Security was on the ballot in Georgia’s December 6 run-off election. Continue reading
Remarkably, the EU is beginning to wake up and realise not only that it is more servile to the U.S. than ever before, but in fact the relationship has reached farcical levels of master and slave since the Ukraine war started. And yet, despite the EU’s chief diplomat recently refusing to be drawn into a conflict scenario with China and MEPs pathetically voting to deem Russia a terrorist state, it was not the EU which came to the conclusion. It was the French president Emmanuel Macron. Continue reading
A New York jury on Tuesday found two subsidiaries of Trump Organization, former President Donald Trump’s company, guilty on all counts of criminal tax fraud. Continue reading
Immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S., the UK, and the EU placed major sanctions on Russia to constrict its economy and restrain its war effort. Having been updated several times since, these sanctions have compounded the effects of the previous sanctions placed on Russia in 2014 after it annexed Crimea. Continue reading
The artist formerly known as Kanye West has told Tucker Carlson he sees “good things” in Adolph Hitler. Continue reading
‘Tis the time to do our gift-buying for the holidays—and fill every recipient’s shelves and closets with more stuff. I wrote some of this last year at around this time, but so many of you suggested I do so again that I saw the wisdom of a bit of recycling today. Continue reading
The world should gird itself for what can be expected to be the most vitriolic show trial seen since Nazi “People’s Court” Judge Roland Freisler’s theatrics in humiliating from the bench the White Rose underground leaders in Germany and the Operation Valkyrie plotters who tried to kill Adolf Hitler in 1944. Freisler is best known for flying into fits of rage in order to psychologically disarm defendants brought before his court. Continue reading
With rights advocates rallying outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, the right-wing majority of the court appeared poised to rule in favor of a web designer who aims to discriminate against LGBTQ+ couples when she creates wedding websites, as the justices heard arguments in the case 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. Continue reading
Once upon a time, the United States seriously taxed the nation’s rich. You remember that time? Probably not. To have a personal memory of that tax-the-rich era, you now have to be well into your seventies. Continue reading
On November 27 morning, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel walked into a voting station in the Playa neighborhood to vote in Cuba’s municipal elections. He had landed in Havana an hour earlier from an intense tour of Algeria, Russia, Turkey, and China. Continue reading
To keep the planet from overheating, there’s just so much more carbon that humans can pump into the atmosphere. From the onset of the Industrial Revolution until today, humanity has used up approximately 83 percent of its “carbon budget”—the amount of carbon the atmosphere can absorb and not exceed the Paris climate agreement’s aspirational goal of a 1.5C degree increase in global temperatures since the pre-industrial era. At the current rate of emissions, the budget will be used up within the next decade. Continue reading
WASHINGTON—On Dec. 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy,” as FDR put it, the Empire of Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. On Dec. 7, 2022, the empire of the right-wing attacks the United States election system—at the Supreme Court. Continue reading
Repeating his thoroughly disproven lie that the 2020 election was stolen, former President Donald Trump called Saturday for discarding the U.S. Constitution to overturn his loss. Continue reading
As the House Select Committee on the January 6th insurrection by Donald Trump and his allies wraps up, there is hope that some details of the planned coup d’état will be found either in the main report or its appendices. As just one example, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have not advanced their investigations of who planted pipe bombs at Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters. Continue reading
Water is a finite resource on our planet. We can only rely on what we have, which translates to about 2.5 percent of drinkable fresh water. Of that amount, only 0.4 percent currently exists in lakes, rivers, and moisture in the atmosphere. The strain of this limited supply grows by the day and as this continues, the detrimental impact will continue to be felt in places least equipped to find alternative solutions—in particular, the African continent. Continue reading
You break it, you own it. That’s what I was told as a child. But for today’s billionaires, it seems like the opposite is true. Continue reading
Despite the promise of boundless access to information, Silicon Valley mirrors legacy media in its consolidated ownership and privileging of elite narratives. This new class of billionaire oligarchs owns or controls the most popular media platforms, including the companies often referred to as the FAANGs—Facebook (Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet). Their CEOs are routinely lionized in popular culture and the press as intrepid entrepreneurs, inventors of today’s must-have tools for work and play, and stewards of the public square. They include, but are not limited to Bill Gates (Microsoft, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, Facebook, Instagram), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon, the Washington Post)—all of whom are deeply involved and invested in computer software, social media platforms, and the worldwide web itself (e.g., Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube). Continue reading
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JCPA: A good idea, promoting a stupid behavior, rolled into an unrelated bill
Posted on December 13, 2022 by Thomas L. Knapp
It’s never really news that the annual “National Defense Authorization Act” is bloated. The 2023 version comes to $858 billion which, probably ten times what’s required to fund an actual “national defense” (as opposed to trying to maintain a sprawling global empire in terminal decline). Continue reading →