Adapted from Project Censored’s “State of the Free Press 2023”
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 →
The purpose of a good government is to protect the lives and liberties of its people. Continue reading →
As western countries are floating the theory that Russia could escalate its conflict with Ukraine to a nuclear war, many western governments continue to turn a blind eye to Israel’s own nuclear weapons capabilities. Luckily, many countries around the world do not subscribe to this endemic western hypocrisy. Continue reading →
Progress is being undone by growth, especially as the climate crisis deepens.
In all of the news surrounding Vladimir Putin, it might have been easy to overlook that he had recently revived a Soviet-era policy called the “Mother Heroine” award, which goes to women who bear 10 or more children, offering financial incentives and other benefits in a bid to spur population growth. He is not alone, with a host of men who perch atop pyramids of power—from Elon Musk, to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to Hungary’s strongman Victor Orban—pushing women to have children as a means of growing the base of those power pyramids and further elevating the men at the top. Continue reading →
The Guardian has joined The New York Times, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País in signing a letter from the five papers which collaborated with WikiLeaks twelve years ago in the publication of the Chelsea Manning leaks to call for the Biden administration to drop all charges against Julian Assange. This sudden jolt of mainstream support comes as news breaks that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has been personally pushing the US government to bring the Assange case to a close. Continue reading →
Protesters in some nations are celebrated. Others are ignored. Protest is a human right to be respected but instead can be used as a pretext for nefarious motives such as regime change.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is on the verge of effectively making protest illegal. The Public Order Bill has passed in the House of Commons and is expected to be approved in the House of Lords and become law. The bill will ban any protest that “interferes with national infrastructure” or blocks construction or transportation. It gives police powers to search without “reasonable grounds.” It allows for Serious Disruption Prevention Orders (SDPO) which give police the right to arrest anyone who may have violated these deliberately vague rules and prevents them from attending another protest for up to two years. The ban gives police the right to electronically monitor anyone they think is in violation. These criteria effectively prevent any large scale public protest. Violators of these provisions may be sentenced to up to 51 weeks in jail if found guilty. Continue reading →
WASHINGTON—How do you know the presidential campaign season is upon us? When a right-wing presidential hopeful, Mike Pompeo, uses U.S. teachers, in general, and Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten, in particular, as a punching bag to harvest votes. Continue reading →
WASHINGTON, D.C.—Several rail union leaders, plus a top rank-and-file group, are protesting Democratic President Joe Biden’s request to Congress to impose a new contract on the nation’s 115,000 freight rail workers. Continue reading →
"Right-wing state lawmakers are obsessed with taking away the rights of trans people and we're obsessed with knocking them out of public office," said one rights’ group.
An analysis released Monday by NPR details what one rights advocacy group called the Republican Party’s “obsession” with curtailing the rights of transgender people, with U.S. state legislators proposing more than 300 pieces of legislation targeting the community over the past two years. Continue reading →
There will come a time in the not-so-distant future when the very act of thinking for ourselves is not just outlawed but unthinkable. Continue reading →
A delegation of farm workers lobbied Congress ahead of the holiday weekend to pass legislation that would provide a pathway to citizenship for thousands of workers who provide the food for our tables.
Farm workers mobilized in Washington, DC the week before Thanksgiving to push lawmakers to pass the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, a compromise bill that would help secure America’s food supply and put some of the nation’s most essential workers on a path to citizenship. Continue reading →
"This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America's First Amendment and the freedom of the press," The Guardian, The New York Times, and other media outlets warned.
The five major media outlets that collaborated with WikiLeaks in 2010 to publish explosive stories based on confidential diplomatic cables from the U.S. State Department sent a letter Monday calling on the Biden administration to drop all charges against Julian Assange, who has been languishing in a high-security London prison for more than three years in connection with his publication of classified documents. Continue reading →
The recent decision by the United States Department of Justice to open an investigation into the killing, last May, of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh is not a game-changer, but important and worthy of reflection, nonetheless. Continue reading →
As Twitter implodes under Musk’s rule, a lawsuit argues Tesla is vastly overpaying the world’s richest man.
A good day’s work for a good day’s pay. Should this age-old wisdom apply to overpaid CEOs as well as their workers? A Delaware court will soon decide, a turn of events that must have the richest man in the known universe, Elon Musk, feeling more than a little bit uneasy. Continue reading →
In early November, foreign ministers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Christophe Lutundula Apala Pen’Apala, and Rwanda, Vicent Biruta met in Luanda, Angola, to find a political solution to a conflict that has been ongoing in eastern DRC for decades. The foreign ministers agreed that the “peace roadmap” agreed to in a July meeting had to be implemented. Angola’s President João Lourenço shuttled between Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame and the DRC’s President Félix Antoine Tshisekedi in his role as the African Union’s “mediator in the crisis” between Rwanda and the DRC. Continue reading →
Michael McMullen spent years agonizing over the failing pension plan that put his golden years at risk. Continue reading →
Democratic opponent Sen. Raphael Warnock asked, "How can Herschel Walker represent Georgians when he doesn't even claim our great state as his primary residence?"
Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Herschel Walker is the beneficiary of a tax break meant for permanent Texas residents—a possible violation of both Texas law and residency rules for voting and political candidacy in Georgia, CNN reported last Wednesday. Continue reading →
The Warnock/Walker senatorial run-off election on December 6th seems to be “more of the same” campaigning and fundraising as occurred during the general election. “More of the same” with tens of millions of dollars spent on unimaginative TV ads is not smart if Warnock wants to win without a disputed razor-thin margin. Continue reading →
Western arrogance and anger about the economic prowess of a non-white nation resulted in Xi Jinping's very public dressing down of Justin Trudeau.
The Group of 20, or G20, comprises those nations said to be those with the largest economies in the world. The heads of state who attend the annual summit may have meaningful meetings with one another but the recently convened G20 in Bali, Indonesia was more a source of U.S. inspired drama than anything else. For example, it wasn’t clear if Chinese president Xi Jinping would meet with Joe Biden after the numerous insults involving Taiwan, including sending the Speaker of the House there after China made clear that this was a red line provocation. Of course, being more mature than the Americans, Xi met with Biden, perhaps only to determine if he was up to some new foolish behavior. The summit was fully devoid of any seriousness when the traditional group photo was eliminated because the U.S. and its NATO/EU vassals didn’t want to be seen with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov. But an interesting encounter between Xi Jinping and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was both amusing and instructive about China and how it is perceived and treated by western nations. Continue reading →
"At long last the Supreme Court has moved to end this farce," said Rep. Bill Pascrell. "Now let our committee get these documents. Let the sunlight in."
In a blow to Donald Trump, the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected an attempt by the former president to prevent a congressional committee from obtaining his federal income tax returns. Continue reading →
Renewable energy isn’t replacing fossil fuel energy—it’s adding to it.
Despite all the renewable energy investments and installations, actual global greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing. That’s largely due to economic growth: While renewable energy supplies have expanded in recent years, world energy usage has ballooned even more—with the difference being supplied by fossil fuels. The more the world economy grows, the harder it is for additions of renewable energy to turn the tide by actually replacing energy from fossil fuels, rather than just adding to it. Continue reading →
EXCLUSIVE TO INTREPID REPORT
Now that Donald Trump has announced his candidacy for a return to the White House, the Republican mainstream, under the assumption that Trump is the only Republican who can lose a general election, are hinting largely at two opponents with a shot at beating him in the primaries—Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin. Continue reading →
Does Elon musk have a right to destroy Twitter?
Posted on December 5, 2022 by Robert Reich
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 →