Kevin Gosztola: Report Calls Attention To Capitalism’s Destruction Of The Press And Media System
December 20, 2025
By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter, 12/9/25
With Netflix’s bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount’s hostile offer for Warner Bros., a report from the Roosevelt Institute calls urgent attention to the way in which media consolidation and deregulation has impacted freedom of the press.
The Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, contends that the press clause in the First Amendment has all but disappeared. Instead, it is now widely accepted in government that the First Amendment defines the “freedom of private entities to operate without public accountability, rather than the right to know—citizens’ affirmative right to freely accessible, trustworthy, and democratically essential information.”
“The Political Economy of the US Media System” [PDF] was authored by Victor Pickard, a media professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Bilal Baydoun and Shahrzad Shams of the Roosevelt Institute, whose work for the Roosevelt Institute focuses on defending democracy.
As the authors outline, “[T]he structure of our laissez-faire media system—touted as a bulwark against the tyranny of state-run media—has not protected against threats from the state. Both public and commercial media outlets today face serious threats from the Trump administration beyond regulatory action alone, as it has pursued lawsuits widely believed to be ideologically motivated against the BBC, CBS, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal and defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”
“The administration has launched what amounts to a systematic campaign against press freedom, combining legal harassment, access restrictions, funding cuts, and rhetorical attacks to undermine independent journalism. While Trump himself has long delegitimized the press as ‘fake news,’ the current assault, backed by the power of the federal government and all the resources at its disposal, is an escalation that threatens the institutional foundations of American journalism.”
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The authors maintain that part of this escalation involves “rule by deal over rule of law,” where “commercial logics that animate our media system” subject media companies to “political jawboning, threats, and attacks.”
In 2004, media scholar and media reform advocate Robert McChesney declared, “Unique problems accompany constitutional protection of a free press.” He pointed out that these problems “tend to be shunted aside when the discussion is framed solely in terms of free speech.” That serves market capitalism, however, the report addresses how this is inconsistent with “both the intent of the framers and the history of the US press system.”
The authors focus their attention on the U.S. Supreme Court. Justices have time and time again nested press rights under the speech clause or failed to even grapple with the state of press freedom.
Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the court has “interpreted the Speech Clause not as a tool for empowering everyday people to speak their mind and enjoy access to a diversity of viewpoints, but as a vehicle for advancing deregulatory, corporate causes.”
A prime example is the lawsuit brought by the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Co-filed by then-Representative J.D Vance, according to the Lever News emphasizes, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce argues “party-coordinated contribution limits violate their free speech rights.”
“Precluding coordination by parties and their candidates undermines the availability and accuracy of electoral communication,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce declared. “In this way, free association, free expression, and free enterprise are deeply intertwined.”
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To the report’s authors, this represents a negative approach to the First Amendment that fails to fully protect press rights. This approach serves powerful corporate interests by declining to affirm any government obligation to enact policies that would “foster a speech environment or press system that supports a vibrant and inclusive democratic society.”
“In prioritizing the expressive rights of corporations over the informational rights of citizens, viewing the press as functionally the same as an individual speaker, the court has entrenched a deregulatory logic that structurally favors concentrated media power and commercial gatekeeping,” the report additionally states.
This dynamic fuels pressure on media organizations and makes companies vulnerable to threats from FCC Chair Brendan Carr, who has weaponized regulatory action to suppress journalism and silence those who speak out against the Trump administration.
It was the “neoliberal revolution” that by the 1980s led the FCC to allow “market forces” to effectively determine what was in the public interest. FCC Chair Mark Fowler referred to a television as nothing more than a “toaster with pictures” and “recast the media audience from citizens fulfilling the role of self-government to consumers of a good like any other.” All of which was backed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Telecommunications Act of 1996 brought about one of the most intense periods of media consolidation in the history of the telecommunications industry. That set the stage for the corporate libertarian policies promoted by Trump’s FCC.
But in the era of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the FCC actually had the “Mayflower rule” that “prohibited broadcasters from engaging in political or partisan editorializing.” There were “structural limits on ownership and contracts” that were aimed at ensuring the media played a constructive role in democracy. Media ownership rules weren’t a tool for extracting political favors, and the Supreme Court even upheld such public interest regulation in NBC v. United States in 1943.
Anti-communism hysteria combined with corporate libertarianism, as Congress and the FBI scrutinized members of the FCC. “The leading progressive at the FCC, Clifford Durr, effectively resigned from the agency in 1948 in protest over President Harry S. Truman’s loyalty oath order.”
The Mayflower rule was replaced in 1949 after political attacks. The new rule was known as the “Fairness Doctrine.” It was imperfect, yet much like public broadcasting in the United States it was relentlessly opposed by a right-wing conservative faction until Reagan eliminated it entirely.
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Trump proudly defunded public media, particularly the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR). It’s a predictable outcome, given how Republicans waged a decades-long culture war to discredit and curtail public service broadcasting.
As McChesney outlined in 1997, “[T]he attack on public service broadcasting is part and parcel of the current attack on all non-commercial, public service institutions and values.”
“Neoliberalism is not merely a set of economic principles; rather, it is implicitly a theory of democracy. And the democratic system that works best with a market-driven economy is one where there exists widespread public cynicism and depoliticization, and where the mainstream political parties barely debate the fundamental issues.”
“Or, as the Financial Times has put it, the best political system is one in which the capitalist control of society is ‘depoliticised,’” McChesney further asserted.
Media oligarchs have wildly succeeded in expanding their dominance and power in a manner that threatens the stability of the press and media system. Just look at what private equity has done to destroy local journalism in communities throughout the country.
Already in 2025, media oligarchs Larry Ellison and David Ellison took control of Paramount Global when their company Skydance merged with Paramount. There should be some call from within the FCC against the Ellison family’s attempt to own even more of the media system, but the opposite is happening. (The Associated Press reported that “an investment firm run by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner” is pushing for the deal.)
The history and analysis laid out by the Roosevelt Institute is a worthwhile plea for a radical shift that enables “a truly democratic information ecosystem”—one where corporate capture of media is as alarming as the potential for state control to erode liberties.
https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2025/12/kev ... ia-system/
******
Just for fun...
http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2025/12 ... s-man.html
Nailed it.
Censorship, fake news, perception management
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
CBS Censors Report on El Salvador’s CECOT Prison
December 23, 2025
CECOT prison. Photo: X/@OzorNdiOzor.
Its cancellation was political, Journalist Alfonsi denounced.
On Sunday, the CBS TV network pulled down the report “Inside CECOT” hours before its scheduled broadcast in the United States. It was part of their ’60 Minutes’ program, and it documented the torture, sexual, and physical abuse at the Salvadoran prison.
CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss justified the decision by saying that additional context and more interviews with officials in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump were needed, including Stephen Miller, former White House advisor and architect of the mass deportation policy.
Sharyn Alfonsi, the journalist who worked on the report, argued that the story had been reviewed five times and approved by lawyers and the CBS Standards and Practices department. She denounced that the cancellation was political rather than editorial.
However, the report was broadcast in Canada on Global TV, the network that holds the rights to 60 Minutes in that country, and remained available for two hours before also being taken down. The report quickly went viral on social media through clips shared by users.
Previously, human rights defenders denounced that Venezuelans deported from the U.S. to El Salvador were subjected to torture, sexual violence, and systematic ill-treatment at CECOT, a mega-prison built for gang members.
The Trump administration, in agreement with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, transferred 252 Venezuelan migrants between March and April. They were accused, without evidence, of belonging to the Tren de Aragua criminal group, designated as a terrorist organization by the United States.
According to human rights international organizations, the U.S. government paid El Salvador millions of dollars to arbitrarily detain Venezuelans, who were beaten almost daily and held for four months until their repatriation in July through a prisoner exchange between Washington and Caracas.
The abuses were not isolated incidents, but rather systematic human rights violations, including incommunicado detention, insufficient food, and precarious hygiene conditions.
Researchers interviewed 40 detained Venezuelans and another 150 people and documented sexual violence, enforced disappearances, and extreme overcrowding with ten people per windowless cell.
https://orinocotribune.com/cbs-censors- ... ot-prison/
December 23, 2025
CECOT prison. Photo: X/@OzorNdiOzor.
Its cancellation was political, Journalist Alfonsi denounced.
On Sunday, the CBS TV network pulled down the report “Inside CECOT” hours before its scheduled broadcast in the United States. It was part of their ’60 Minutes’ program, and it documented the torture, sexual, and physical abuse at the Salvadoran prison.
CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss justified the decision by saying that additional context and more interviews with officials in the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump were needed, including Stephen Miller, former White House advisor and architect of the mass deportation policy.
Sharyn Alfonsi, the journalist who worked on the report, argued that the story had been reviewed five times and approved by lawyers and the CBS Standards and Practices department. She denounced that the cancellation was political rather than editorial.
However, the report was broadcast in Canada on Global TV, the network that holds the rights to 60 Minutes in that country, and remained available for two hours before also being taken down. The report quickly went viral on social media through clips shared by users.
Previously, human rights defenders denounced that Venezuelans deported from the U.S. to El Salvador were subjected to torture, sexual violence, and systematic ill-treatment at CECOT, a mega-prison built for gang members.
The Trump administration, in agreement with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, transferred 252 Venezuelan migrants between March and April. They were accused, without evidence, of belonging to the Tren de Aragua criminal group, designated as a terrorist organization by the United States.
According to human rights international organizations, the U.S. government paid El Salvador millions of dollars to arbitrarily detain Venezuelans, who were beaten almost daily and held for four months until their repatriation in July through a prisoner exchange between Washington and Caracas.
The abuses were not isolated incidents, but rather systematic human rights violations, including incommunicado detention, insufficient food, and precarious hygiene conditions.
Researchers interviewed 40 detained Venezuelans and another 150 people and documented sexual violence, enforced disappearances, and extreme overcrowding with ten people per windowless cell.
https://orinocotribune.com/cbs-censors- ... ot-prison/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
How political analysis became a target of A.I. fakes
Pepe Escobar
December 29, 2025
Welcome to A.I. turning the net into an infernal machine bent on erasing meaning, culture and History – and sowing deep intellectual confusion. Exactly like Techno-Feudalism wants it.
A.I. is fast expanding as a plague all along the internet spectrum. That’s quite predictable, considering the Big Tech model for A.I. is techno-feudalism, relying on profit and mind/social control, and not on sharing/expanding knowledge and creating better conditions for a well-informed citizenry.
A.I. in many aspects is the antithesis of civitas. Prior to the A.I. boom, several layers of the internet had already been distorted into a series of minefields across a large-than-life sewer. A.I. – as controlled by Big Tech – in many aspects had already revealed itself as a fraud. Now it’s a weapon.
There are several channels on YouTube manipulated by A.I., stealing the image and voice by some of us, independent political analysts. A not-extensive list includes as targets John Mearsheimer, Larry Johnson, Richard Wolff, Glenn Diesen, Yanis Varoufakis, economist Paulo Nogueira Batista and myself.
It’s not an accident that all of us are independent geopolitical and geoeconomic analysts, mostly know each other personally, and are guests in roughly the same podcasts.
In my own case, there are channels in English, Portuguese and even Spanish: I rarely do podcasts in Spanish, so even the voice is fake. In English, usually the voice is approximately cloned. In Portuguese it comes with an accent I don’t have. In several cases, audience numbers are huge. Essentially, these come from bots.
In all cases, as far as we, the targets are concerned, all these channels are fake. I repeat: all these channels are fake. They may at least in some cases be set up by “fans” – certainly with an eye for profit via monetization.
Or the whole scam may be part of something way more sinister: a strategy bent of loss of credibility. As in an operation by the usual suspects to sow confusion amongst the – large – audience of several independent thinkers.
It’s not an accident that quite a few viewers are already deeply puzzled. Cue to the most common question: “Is this really you, or A.I.?” Many apparently have denounced these fake channels, but YouTube, so far, has done absolutely nothing about them. The algos keep suggesting these channels to large audiences.
The only realistic way to fight the scam is to file a complaint with YouTube. But that, in practice, is pretty useless. YouTube management seems to be more interested in occasionally erasing “inconvenient” channels displaying critical thinking and analysis.
Cracking the code of the scam
Quantum Bird, a physics and HPC (High Performance Computing) expert, formerly with the CERN in Geneva, has cracked the code of the scam:
“The proliferation of agents of deep learning digital neural networks capable of emulating writing, voice and video of human beings was inevitable, and their impact on scientific research, production of knowledge and art in general has a negative potential that has not been yet fully analyzed.”
He adds: “While writers and academics are detailing the springing up of texts attributed to them, and replicating to a certain extent their style and opinions, the latest fad is the blooming of whole channels on YouTube, and other notorious Big Tech platforms, that offer videos of popular content producers, communicating in their native language or other languages. In several cases, the quality of this synthesized material is sufficiently high not to allow immediate identification by an average viewer. In the context of the political analysis community, the impact is obvious: historic revisionism, erosion of reputations and distortion of news and analysis.”
And here Quantum Bird lays out the tech clincher:
“The synthetization of this type of content requires the availability of abundant samples and massive computational capacity, way beyond the reach of domestic users. While the popularity of the YouTube victims guarantees the first condition, the second one suggests the activity of large-scale state or corporate actors, since advanced deep learning models must be developed and trained by processing a huge quantity, in terms of “disk space”, of audio and video. The monetization of the content does not cover the costs of this operation. Ironically, it’s the availability and the excess exposure of voice and video online that allows this type of attack.”
Here we go. Welcome to A.I. turning the net into an infernal machine bent on erasing meaning, culture and History – and sowing deep intellectual confusion. Exactly like Techno-Feudalism wants it.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... -ai-fakes/
"Techno-Feudalism", meh...it's all capitalism.
Pepe Escobar
December 29, 2025
Welcome to A.I. turning the net into an infernal machine bent on erasing meaning, culture and History – and sowing deep intellectual confusion. Exactly like Techno-Feudalism wants it.
A.I. is fast expanding as a plague all along the internet spectrum. That’s quite predictable, considering the Big Tech model for A.I. is techno-feudalism, relying on profit and mind/social control, and not on sharing/expanding knowledge and creating better conditions for a well-informed citizenry.
A.I. in many aspects is the antithesis of civitas. Prior to the A.I. boom, several layers of the internet had already been distorted into a series of minefields across a large-than-life sewer. A.I. – as controlled by Big Tech – in many aspects had already revealed itself as a fraud. Now it’s a weapon.
There are several channels on YouTube manipulated by A.I., stealing the image and voice by some of us, independent political analysts. A not-extensive list includes as targets John Mearsheimer, Larry Johnson, Richard Wolff, Glenn Diesen, Yanis Varoufakis, economist Paulo Nogueira Batista and myself.
It’s not an accident that all of us are independent geopolitical and geoeconomic analysts, mostly know each other personally, and are guests in roughly the same podcasts.
In my own case, there are channels in English, Portuguese and even Spanish: I rarely do podcasts in Spanish, so even the voice is fake. In English, usually the voice is approximately cloned. In Portuguese it comes with an accent I don’t have. In several cases, audience numbers are huge. Essentially, these come from bots.
In all cases, as far as we, the targets are concerned, all these channels are fake. I repeat: all these channels are fake. They may at least in some cases be set up by “fans” – certainly with an eye for profit via monetization.
Or the whole scam may be part of something way more sinister: a strategy bent of loss of credibility. As in an operation by the usual suspects to sow confusion amongst the – large – audience of several independent thinkers.
It’s not an accident that quite a few viewers are already deeply puzzled. Cue to the most common question: “Is this really you, or A.I.?” Many apparently have denounced these fake channels, but YouTube, so far, has done absolutely nothing about them. The algos keep suggesting these channels to large audiences.
The only realistic way to fight the scam is to file a complaint with YouTube. But that, in practice, is pretty useless. YouTube management seems to be more interested in occasionally erasing “inconvenient” channels displaying critical thinking and analysis.
Cracking the code of the scam
Quantum Bird, a physics and HPC (High Performance Computing) expert, formerly with the CERN in Geneva, has cracked the code of the scam:
“The proliferation of agents of deep learning digital neural networks capable of emulating writing, voice and video of human beings was inevitable, and their impact on scientific research, production of knowledge and art in general has a negative potential that has not been yet fully analyzed.”
He adds: “While writers and academics are detailing the springing up of texts attributed to them, and replicating to a certain extent their style and opinions, the latest fad is the blooming of whole channels on YouTube, and other notorious Big Tech platforms, that offer videos of popular content producers, communicating in their native language or other languages. In several cases, the quality of this synthesized material is sufficiently high not to allow immediate identification by an average viewer. In the context of the political analysis community, the impact is obvious: historic revisionism, erosion of reputations and distortion of news and analysis.”
And here Quantum Bird lays out the tech clincher:
“The synthetization of this type of content requires the availability of abundant samples and massive computational capacity, way beyond the reach of domestic users. While the popularity of the YouTube victims guarantees the first condition, the second one suggests the activity of large-scale state or corporate actors, since advanced deep learning models must be developed and trained by processing a huge quantity, in terms of “disk space”, of audio and video. The monetization of the content does not cover the costs of this operation. Ironically, it’s the availability and the excess exposure of voice and video online that allows this type of attack.”
Here we go. Welcome to A.I. turning the net into an infernal machine bent on erasing meaning, culture and History – and sowing deep intellectual confusion. Exactly like Techno-Feudalism wants it.
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/ ... -ai-fakes/
"Techno-Feudalism", meh...it's all capitalism.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
From the Department of Arrogance:
The First Amendment must be limited to protect it.
January 2, 4:58 PM
On trends in "free speech protection."
An Israeli billionaire calls on the US to repeal the First Amendment's freedom of speech rights.
Shlomo Kramer, co-founder of Check Point Software Technologies, a major global cybersecurity company, calls for complete government control over all social media platforms.
He argues that the First Amendment in the US should be limited, adding that AI will play a key role in restricting free speech.
"AI is going to revolutionize cyberwarfare... from critical infrastructure to the structure of society and politics—undermining it... And it's time to limit the First Amendment to protect it."
He adds: "We need to assess the credibility of every person expressing their opinion online and monitor what they say."
https://t.me/belshkvarka/182670 - zinc
Regarding the current topic of verifying LiveJournal commentators.
As mentioned earlier, the trends in this direction are obvious. Both in our country and elsewhere. The state will strive for complete control over its segment of the network.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10283353.html
Arrogance we of course expect from from the ruling class, it is exceptional for a foreigner to suggest changes in another's constitution.
The First Amendment must be limited to protect it.
January 2, 4:58 PM
On trends in "free speech protection."
An Israeli billionaire calls on the US to repeal the First Amendment's freedom of speech rights.
Shlomo Kramer, co-founder of Check Point Software Technologies, a major global cybersecurity company, calls for complete government control over all social media platforms.
He argues that the First Amendment in the US should be limited, adding that AI will play a key role in restricting free speech.
"AI is going to revolutionize cyberwarfare... from critical infrastructure to the structure of society and politics—undermining it... And it's time to limit the First Amendment to protect it."
He adds: "We need to assess the credibility of every person expressing their opinion online and monitor what they say."
https://t.me/belshkvarka/182670 - zinc
Regarding the current topic of verifying LiveJournal commentators.
As mentioned earlier, the trends in this direction are obvious. Both in our country and elsewhere. The state will strive for complete control over its segment of the network.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10283353.html
Arrogance we of course expect from from the ruling class, it is exceptional for a foreigner to suggest changes in another's constitution.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
Billionaire’s Mouthpiece Searches for Reasons to Avoid Taxing Billionaires
Jim Naureckas
Washington Post depiction of Billionaire Peter Thiel
California is considering a referendum on whether to impose a one-time wealth tax on the state’s billionaires. The paper’s hot take: “Many progressives think of taxation the way teenage boys think about cologne: If some is good, more must be great.”
The paper offers PayPal’s Peter Thiel and Google‘s Larry Page, both of whom have threatened to leave California, as poster children for why you shouldn’t subject billionaires to a wealth tax—both highly dubious examples.
Thiel is well-known for his use of an absurd tax loophole (ProPublica, 6/24/21): He put 1.7 million shares of PayPal stock—which he valued at 0.1 cents apiece, so $1,700—into a Roth IRA, and by 2021 that had grown through reinvestment into a $5 billion nest egg. (In 2026, it’s likely the bulk of his $25 billion fortune.) A Roth IRA means that if he waits until 2027, when he turns 59, he won’t have to pay any taxes at all on that. This is precisely why people want a wealth tax, because the tax code makes it easy for oligarchs like Thiel to pay little or nothing in income tax.
Page is also known for tax shenanigans, parking much of his wealth in a “charity” that distributes almost none of its wealth to disclosed recipients (Vox, 12/18/19). When ProPublica (4/13/22) analyzed tax filings from the super-rich, Page had one of the lowest effective federal income tax rates among prominent billionaires.
‘Blew a hole in the budget’
The only way Tepper would have paid “hundreds of millions” in Jersey state income tax would be if he were declaring several billion in income a year. But Tepper reportedly made $750 million in 2016, which would be $67 million at the top tax rate—which he wouldn’t pay anyway, since he’s a hedge fund manager and benefits from a special tax loophole designed just for them.
In any case, Tepper moved back to New Jersey in 2020 (Politico, 9/24/20)—so it’s not clear what kind of object lesson he should serve for California. Was his 2016 move representative of a broader problem of the flight of the wealthy from New Jersey? It’s hard to see how, as the state has the highest concentration of millionaires in the country (Kiplinger, 5/27/20)—up from third-highest in 2014 (New Jersey Policy Perspective, 4/13/16).
Imaginary exodus
The Journal leaned heavily on a study by two economists at the right-wing Hoover Institution, Joshua Rauh and Ryan Shyu, who the paper said found that “the likelihood of a wealthy resident moving out of California increased by about 40%” following an income tax hike on the ultra-wealthy. Hiltzik noted that the actual percentage of rich people moving out was quite small—increasing from 1.5% to 2.125%—and, more importantly, that Rauh and Shyu only looked at outgoing multi-millionaires, ignoring the fact that more affluent people were moving to the state than moving away.
More than six years later, the Post is still citing Rauh and Shyu, still talking about that same 2013 California tax hike and the imaginary exodus of plutocrats it caused. I don’t know why they should be any more convincing than they were a decade ago—but then, the editorialists only have to convince one reader that they’re doing their best to protect his fortune.
https://fair.org/home/billionaires-mout ... lionaires/
A one time wealth tax is hardly more than symbolic. It should be annual.
Jim Naureckas
Washington Post depiction of Billionaire Peter Thiel
The Washington Post, which exists mainly to serve the interests of its mega-billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, unsurprisingly thinks taxing the wealth of billionaires is a bad idea (FAIR.org, 12/11/19). Its recent editorial (1/1/26) warning California not to institute a tax on extreme wealth—headlined “California Will Miss Billionaires When They’re Gone”—illustrates that when you’re telling the boss exactly what he wants to hear, you don’t have to think very hard.
The Washington Post (1/1/26) illustrates an article on why states should worry about taxing billionaires’ wealth with a photo of Peter Thiel, a billionaire who has figured out a way to avoid ever paying most income taxes.
California is considering a referendum on whether to impose a one-time wealth tax on the state’s billionaires. The paper’s hot take: “Many progressives think of taxation the way teenage boys think about cologne: If some is good, more must be great.”
The paper offers PayPal’s Peter Thiel and Google‘s Larry Page, both of whom have threatened to leave California, as poster children for why you shouldn’t subject billionaires to a wealth tax—both highly dubious examples.
Thiel is well-known for his use of an absurd tax loophole (ProPublica, 6/24/21): He put 1.7 million shares of PayPal stock—which he valued at 0.1 cents apiece, so $1,700—into a Roth IRA, and by 2021 that had grown through reinvestment into a $5 billion nest egg. (In 2026, it’s likely the bulk of his $25 billion fortune.) A Roth IRA means that if he waits until 2027, when he turns 59, he won’t have to pay any taxes at all on that. This is precisely why people want a wealth tax, because the tax code makes it easy for oligarchs like Thiel to pay little or nothing in income tax.
Page is also known for tax shenanigans, parking much of his wealth in a “charity” that distributes almost none of its wealth to disclosed recipients (Vox, 12/18/19). When ProPublica (4/13/22) analyzed tax filings from the super-rich, Page had one of the lowest effective federal income tax rates among prominent billionaires.
‘Blew a hole in the budget’
To illustrate the fiscal danger California would be putting itself in with a wealth tax, the Post cited the example of New Jersey billionaire David Tepper, who “blew a hole in the state budget by moving to Florida.” That’s according to an article from Philadelphia public TV station WHYY (4/11/16), which said in 2016 that “while the amount Tepper paid in taxes last year is unknown to the public…a resident that rich [$11.4 billion] could pay tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in income taxes if they paid New Jersey’s highest rate, 8.97%.”
Contrary to WHYY‘s speculation (4/11/16), billionaire David Tepper moving to Florida did not “blow a hole” in New Jersey’s state budget, nor did his moving back in 2020 give the state a bonanza.
The only way Tepper would have paid “hundreds of millions” in Jersey state income tax would be if he were declaring several billion in income a year. But Tepper reportedly made $750 million in 2016, which would be $67 million at the top tax rate—which he wouldn’t pay anyway, since he’s a hedge fund manager and benefits from a special tax loophole designed just for them.
In any case, Tepper moved back to New Jersey in 2020 (Politico, 9/24/20)—so it’s not clear what kind of object lesson he should serve for California. Was his 2016 move representative of a broader problem of the flight of the wealthy from New Jersey? It’s hard to see how, as the state has the highest concentration of millionaires in the country (Kiplinger, 5/27/20)—up from third-highest in 2014 (New Jersey Policy Perspective, 4/13/16).
Imaginary exodus
This is a perennial problem with the oligarchy’s don’t-touch-our-money arguments: They want to claim that they’ll run away from high taxes, but they like living in high-tax states. The LA Times‘ Michael Hiltzik (10/24/19) pointed this out years ago, responding to a similar editorial in the Wall Street Journal (“California’s Tax-the-Rich Boomerang,” 10/21/19).
The LA Times‘ Michael Hiltzik (10/24/19) debunked most of the Washington Post‘s arguments more than six years ago, when they were deployed by the Wall Street Journal (10/21/19).
The Journal leaned heavily on a study by two economists at the right-wing Hoover Institution, Joshua Rauh and Ryan Shyu, who the paper said found that “the likelihood of a wealthy resident moving out of California increased by about 40%” following an income tax hike on the ultra-wealthy. Hiltzik noted that the actual percentage of rich people moving out was quite small—increasing from 1.5% to 2.125%—and, more importantly, that Rauh and Shyu only looked at outgoing multi-millionaires, ignoring the fact that more affluent people were moving to the state than moving away.
More than six years later, the Post is still citing Rauh and Shyu, still talking about that same 2013 California tax hike and the imaginary exodus of plutocrats it caused. I don’t know why they should be any more convincing than they were a decade ago—but then, the editorialists only have to convince one reader that they’re doing their best to protect his fortune.
https://fair.org/home/billionaires-mout ... lionaires/
A one time wealth tax is hardly more than symbolic. It should be annual.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
The evolution of cognitive warfare
January 11, 11:05
The Evolution of Cognitive Warfare
From the NATO Chief Scientist's report on cognitive warfare (CogWar).
The nature of war may remain unchanged, but operationally, cognitive actions are changing three fundamental aspects of military missions:
The target audience expands from individual platforms or messages to human cognitive and social systems (trust networks, identity narratives, institutional legitimacy).
The battlespace becomes continuous, operating non-kinetically below the thresholds of armed conflict, combining strategic competition, hybrid pressure, and maneuvering in wartime conditions.
The criterion of effectiveness shifts from short-term information penetration to lasting changes in cognitive models and behavioral attitudes ( e.g., risk perception, threat assessment, civic cohesion, and willingness to support military action).
Neurotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly becoming dual-use tools for cognitive engagement, enabling the use of biological, psychological, and social levels of influence, namely:
Biological Level: The Ability to Manipulate. This level directly affects the nervous system as the primary substrate of thinking, emotion, and behavior.
Psychological Level: Manipulating Interpretations. This focuses on influencing cognitive appraisals, framing, emotions, and thought patterns that contribute to the formation of individual and collective attitudes, beliefs, and judgments.
Social Level: Manipulating Cohesion. This is the overarching level of influencing shared narratives, beliefs, institutional legitimacy, and societal attitudes, values, and activities.
These levels are not mutually exclusive but should be seen as complementary, reinforcing areas and dimensions of vulnerability, influence, and leverage. In this case, the approaches used are "bottom-up" (biological influence to cause psychological and social effects), "from the middle" (i.e. psychological influence to cause both biological reactions and social manifestations) and "top-down" (i.e. interaction at the social level to cause both psychobiological and biopsychological effects)
https://inss.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article ... or-operat/
https://t.me/budni_manipulyatora/4717 - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10298959.html
Italy demands Cloudflare remove websites without trial within 30 minutes.
January 11, 1:04 PM
Italy has ordered Cloudflare to remove websites within 30 minutes without a court order.
Cloudflare founder Matthew Prince was recently fined $17 million in Italy for refusing to censor websites. Cloudflare was ordered to remove websites within 30 minutes of notification, without a court order. The company stated that this approach threatens to block a number of resources worldwide, and not just in Italy.
Cloudflare is considering retaliatory measures:
Terminating cybersecurity services for the upcoming Olympic Games in Milan-Cortina and for users in Italy.
Removing all servers from Italy. Abandoning plans to invest or open offices in the country.
@banksta - zinc
The free internet is becoming "ever more free."
As has been noted many times, processes of increasing state control and regulation are underway both in our country and abroad.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10299388.html
Google Translator
January 11, 11:05
The Evolution of Cognitive Warfare
From the NATO Chief Scientist's report on cognitive warfare (CogWar).
The nature of war may remain unchanged, but operationally, cognitive actions are changing three fundamental aspects of military missions:
The target audience expands from individual platforms or messages to human cognitive and social systems (trust networks, identity narratives, institutional legitimacy).
The battlespace becomes continuous, operating non-kinetically below the thresholds of armed conflict, combining strategic competition, hybrid pressure, and maneuvering in wartime conditions.
The criterion of effectiveness shifts from short-term information penetration to lasting changes in cognitive models and behavioral attitudes ( e.g., risk perception, threat assessment, civic cohesion, and willingness to support military action).
Neurotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly becoming dual-use tools for cognitive engagement, enabling the use of biological, psychological, and social levels of influence, namely:
Biological Level: The Ability to Manipulate. This level directly affects the nervous system as the primary substrate of thinking, emotion, and behavior.
Psychological Level: Manipulating Interpretations. This focuses on influencing cognitive appraisals, framing, emotions, and thought patterns that contribute to the formation of individual and collective attitudes, beliefs, and judgments.
Social Level: Manipulating Cohesion. This is the overarching level of influencing shared narratives, beliefs, institutional legitimacy, and societal attitudes, values, and activities.
These levels are not mutually exclusive but should be seen as complementary, reinforcing areas and dimensions of vulnerability, influence, and leverage. In this case, the approaches used are "bottom-up" (biological influence to cause psychological and social effects), "from the middle" (i.e. psychological influence to cause both biological reactions and social manifestations) and "top-down" (i.e. interaction at the social level to cause both psychobiological and biopsychological effects)
https://inss.ndu.edu/Media/News/Article ... or-operat/
https://t.me/budni_manipulyatora/4717 - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10298959.html
Italy demands Cloudflare remove websites without trial within 30 minutes.
January 11, 1:04 PM
Italy has ordered Cloudflare to remove websites within 30 minutes without a court order.
Cloudflare founder Matthew Prince was recently fined $17 million in Italy for refusing to censor websites. Cloudflare was ordered to remove websites within 30 minutes of notification, without a court order. The company stated that this approach threatens to block a number of resources worldwide, and not just in Italy.
Cloudflare is considering retaliatory measures:
Terminating cybersecurity services for the upcoming Olympic Games in Milan-Cortina and for users in Italy.
Removing all servers from Italy. Abandoning plans to invest or open offices in the country.
@banksta - zinc
The free internet is becoming "ever more free."
As has been noted many times, processes of increasing state control and regulation are underway both in our country and abroad.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10299388.html
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
The rise of the West was made possible by its superiority in the use of organized violence.
January 11, 7:00 PM
Palantir pays schoolchildren to avoid becoming like its founders.
Palantir, a company that makes billions on contracts with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, suddenly decided to save American teenagers ( https://www.palantir.com/careers/studen ... ly-talent/ ) from higher education. They launched a four-month paid internship for high school graduates who decided not to go to college. The program begins with a four-week seminar on Western civilization—Lincoln, Churchill, Frederick Douglass. Then comes work with defense contractors.
The first intake received over 500 applications. They accepted 22 people. The requirements? Ivy League-level test scores. The pay is $5,400 per month. Some students turned down admission to Harvard and Princeton for this opportunity. The successful ones are promised a permanent job interview.
The most interesting thing is who came up with all this.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp has three degrees. A bachelor's degree and a law degree. Karp holds a PhD from Frankfurt University, where he studied critical theory with students of the Frankfurt School. A man who spent twenty years reading Hegel and Foucault now calls American universities "broken" and "hotbeds of extremism."
"If you didn't go to university, or went to a low-ranking one, or graduated from Harvard—as soon as you come to Palantir, you're a Palantirian, and no one cares about the rest,"
says Karp. He adds : "Every system is parasitic. Our job is to destroy it."
Palantir's second founder, Peter Thiel, is also a philosopher by training, and a Stanford graduate. He also criticizes universities. Back in 2011, he launched a program where he pays young people $100,000 to drop out of school and start startups. The two philosophers built a system of total surveillance for the state. Now they're recruiting high school students and teaching them that universities are evil.
But it's not just about education. Here's what they have to say about the world order. Karp quotes Huntington ( https://www.palantir.com/q4-2024-letter/en/ ):
"The rise of the West was made possible not by the superiority of its ideas, values, or religion—but by its superiority in the use of organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact. Non-Westerners never do."
Both are convinced: the West is waging war against Russia, China, and Iran.
"They are working together against us, and we must work together against them."
Twenty-two teenagers dropped out of Harvard to help this war. I wonder if they were told exactly what they signed up for?
https://t.me/darpaandcia/946 - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10300090.html
Google Translator
Well, the swine had it right, and it was not so much the superiority in weapons, which was not so great in the 16th century, it was the methodology and philosophy of war which cost First Nations their hemisphere. They couldn't believe the intense savagery and consuming greed of the invading white devils.
January 11, 7:00 PM
Palantir pays schoolchildren to avoid becoming like its founders.
Palantir, a company that makes billions on contracts with the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, suddenly decided to save American teenagers ( https://www.palantir.com/careers/studen ... ly-talent/ ) from higher education. They launched a four-month paid internship for high school graduates who decided not to go to college. The program begins with a four-week seminar on Western civilization—Lincoln, Churchill, Frederick Douglass. Then comes work with defense contractors.
The first intake received over 500 applications. They accepted 22 people. The requirements? Ivy League-level test scores. The pay is $5,400 per month. Some students turned down admission to Harvard and Princeton for this opportunity. The successful ones are promised a permanent job interview.
The most interesting thing is who came up with all this.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp has three degrees. A bachelor's degree and a law degree. Karp holds a PhD from Frankfurt University, where he studied critical theory with students of the Frankfurt School. A man who spent twenty years reading Hegel and Foucault now calls American universities "broken" and "hotbeds of extremism."
"If you didn't go to university, or went to a low-ranking one, or graduated from Harvard—as soon as you come to Palantir, you're a Palantirian, and no one cares about the rest,"
says Karp. He adds : "Every system is parasitic. Our job is to destroy it."
Palantir's second founder, Peter Thiel, is also a philosopher by training, and a Stanford graduate. He also criticizes universities. Back in 2011, he launched a program where he pays young people $100,000 to drop out of school and start startups. The two philosophers built a system of total surveillance for the state. Now they're recruiting high school students and teaching them that universities are evil.
But it's not just about education. Here's what they have to say about the world order. Karp quotes Huntington ( https://www.palantir.com/q4-2024-letter/en/ ):
"The rise of the West was made possible not by the superiority of its ideas, values, or religion—but by its superiority in the use of organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact. Non-Westerners never do."
Both are convinced: the West is waging war against Russia, China, and Iran.
"They are working together against us, and we must work together against them."
Twenty-two teenagers dropped out of Harvard to help this war. I wonder if they were told exactly what they signed up for?
https://t.me/darpaandcia/946 - zinc
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10300090.html
Google Translator
Well, the swine had it right, and it was not so much the superiority in weapons, which was not so great in the 16th century, it was the methodology and philosophy of war which cost First Nations their hemisphere. They couldn't believe the intense savagery and consuming greed of the invading white devils.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
Think You Saw State-Sanctioned Murder? You Failed Media’s ‘Rorschach Test’
Janine Jackson
What you are instructed to believe, according to Donald Trump (USA Today, 1/7/26), and those in media who obey him, is that Good was “a professional agitator,” who was “very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”
You’re to understand that Good was engaged in “an act of domestic terrorism,” according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (PBS NewsHour, 1/7/26), and that “an officer of ours acted quickly and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him.”
‘Deep divide’
Only after setting up readers up with six paragraphs of (relevant, we’re to understand) details about how officer Jonathan Ross had previously “sustained injuries’ from “an anti-ICE rioter” who was a “Mexican national,” NPR allowed as how Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison “disagrees with Noem’s characterization of Good as a domestic terrorist.”
In the 13th paragraph, we get the mayor of Minneapolis: “Frey said of the self-defense explanation, ‘Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody that is bullshit.'”
Did the NPR reporters see the video themselves? Can they tell us whether or not this is bullshit? How exactly do they define the job of reporting?
‘Before facts could be established’
Setting aside whether there is a crackdown on “immigration” or on some and not other immigrants, that supposed journalistic bravery has to battle in Times readers’ minds with the textbook garbage they also put forward with the piece by Kurt Streeter headed “Video of ICE Shooting Becomes a Political Rorschach Test” (1/7/26).
That piece explained that you can’t really know what you saw, or what it means, because “in a polarized country, high-ranking officials were offering definitive, and starkly contrasting, accounts long before the facts could be established.”
The Times sees its role as telling you that whether or not you believe Renee Good deserved to be murdered depends on whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. Someone should tell them that millions of Americans are over that old line.
But still, for the New York Times, you are to ignore what you saw, and ponder:
Was the officer struck by the vehicle, as President Trump insists, or did the car pass by or around him? Was he positioned in front of the vehicle or to the side? Did he have a genuine, reasonable fear for his life in that moment, or did he create the very danger he then used lethal force to escape?
That pondering of never-answered questions, you see, is what smart people do. It leads to nothing changing, which is convenient, but you can always say you thought deeply and from all sides.
Even the Trump-pandering Washington Post (1/8/26) was able to perform the basic function of journalism by describing the reality shown in the video. Its headline stated: “Video Shows ICE Agent in Minneapolis Fired at Driver as Vehicle Veered Past Him.”
But the subhead had to say that the video “raises questions about claims by President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem about the fatal shooting in Minneapolis.”
Corporate media are demanding we ignore what we see and only listen to what they say.
https://fair.org/home/think-you-saw-sta ... hach-test/
Janine Jackson
Millions have seen the video, but some reports suggest that you should not believe your eyes that saw ICE agents murder Renee Nicole Good as she attempted to slowly move her car away from them.
Moments before the murder of Renee Good by federal secret police (X, 1/7/26).
What you are instructed to believe, according to Donald Trump (USA Today, 1/7/26), and those in media who obey him, is that Good was “a professional agitator,” who was “very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”
You’re to understand that Good was engaged in “an act of domestic terrorism,” according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (PBS NewsHour, 1/7/26), and that “an officer of ours acted quickly and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him.”
‘Deep divide’
NPR (1/8/26) underscored the idea that you should wait before decrying a murder, saying reactions to the killing “reflect outrage over Good’s death and a deep divide in how it’s portrayed—as either a tragic abuse of power or an officer acting in self-defense.”
NPR (1/8/26) wants you to know it doesn’t know much.
Only after setting up readers up with six paragraphs of (relevant, we’re to understand) details about how officer Jonathan Ross had previously “sustained injuries’ from “an anti-ICE rioter” who was a “Mexican national,” NPR allowed as how Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison “disagrees with Noem’s characterization of Good as a domestic terrorist.”
In the 13th paragraph, we get the mayor of Minneapolis: “Frey said of the self-defense explanation, ‘Having seen the video myself, I want to tell everybody that is bullshit.'”
Did the NPR reporters see the video themselves? Can they tell us whether or not this is bullshit? How exactly do they define the job of reporting?
‘Before facts could be established’
The New York Times (1/8/26) seeks points for having “pressed” Trump on what he insists is reality—”We Pressed Trump on His Conclusion About the ICE Shooting” read the headline—and for printing that he showed a “reflexive defense of what has become a sometimes violent federal crackdown on immigration.”
For the New York Times (1/7/26), the smart response is to say that reality is unknowable.
Setting aside whether there is a crackdown on “immigration” or on some and not other immigrants, that supposed journalistic bravery has to battle in Times readers’ minds with the textbook garbage they also put forward with the piece by Kurt Streeter headed “Video of ICE Shooting Becomes a Political Rorschach Test” (1/7/26).
That piece explained that you can’t really know what you saw, or what it means, because “in a polarized country, high-ranking officials were offering definitive, and starkly contrasting, accounts long before the facts could be established.”
The Times sees its role as telling you that whether or not you believe Renee Good deserved to be murdered depends on whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican. Someone should tell them that millions of Americans are over that old line.
But still, for the New York Times, you are to ignore what you saw, and ponder:
Was the officer struck by the vehicle, as President Trump insists, or did the car pass by or around him? Was he positioned in front of the vehicle or to the side? Did he have a genuine, reasonable fear for his life in that moment, or did he create the very danger he then used lethal force to escape?
That pondering of never-answered questions, you see, is what smart people do. It leads to nothing changing, which is convenient, but you can always say you thought deeply and from all sides.
Not like those “political leaders” who “deliver[ed] their verdicts within hours.” Or like all of us evidently unsophisticated people did in reaction to the slow-motion murder of George Floyd. We are all, the Times says, doing wrong by picking a pro– or anti–state-sanctioned murder side, when “facts are not established, but the first words from political leaders are conclusive and set the frame—and with it, the battle lines.”
The Washington Post (1/8/26) employs an advanced journalistic technique called “looking at the video.”
Even the Trump-pandering Washington Post (1/8/26) was able to perform the basic function of journalism by describing the reality shown in the video. Its headline stated: “Video Shows ICE Agent in Minneapolis Fired at Driver as Vehicle Veered Past Him.”
But the subhead had to say that the video “raises questions about claims by President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem about the fatal shooting in Minneapolis.”
Corporate media are demanding we ignore what we see and only listen to what they say.
https://fair.org/home/think-you-saw-sta ... hach-test/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
Prisoners for Palestine, Jaques Baud and the imperialist media machine
How much more proof do we need that the mass media are instruments of imperialist domination and class rule?
Proletarian writers
Wednesday 14 January 2026
The condition of the Filton 24 detainees and the demands of the Palestine Action hunger strikers are overwhelmingly absent from mass media, which prefer to fill our screens with distracting, misleading and even fabricated images and narratives aimed at lining up public sympathies with imperialist aims.
One of many systematically obscured facts about British history is that leading Nazis such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were looking with envy at the sophisticated deception machinery of British imperialism when they noted that it was easier to convince the population of big lies than of smaller ones.
Our exploiters continue to make full use of the fact that the sheer scale and brazenness of their frauds tend to make people wary of disbelieving ‘official truth’, even when it is at odds with their own experience.
*****
Whilst many of us were settling in for the Christmas holidays looking forward to mince pies and roast turkeys, eight young pro-Palestine activists spent most of the festive season alone and hungry in cold, dark prison cells.
Prisoners for Palestine ignored by western media
Lewie Chiaramello, Jon Cink, Umer Khalid, Qesser Zuhrah, Amy Gardiner-Gibson, Heba Muraisi, Teuta Hoxha and Kamran Ahmed are members of the so-called ‘Filton 24’ – a group of Palestine Action activists who were arrested in mid-2024 following a break-in at an Elbit Systems’ facility in Filton, Bristol.
Elbit Systems is an arms manufacturer associated with the Israeli settler-colonial entity which has emerged as the principal designer and supplier of the instruments raining death and destruction upon the besieged Gaza strip.
The situation is evolving rapidly, but at the time of writing, 31-year-old Heba Muraisi and 28-year-old Kamran Ahmed continue to refuse food, whilst the others have broken their strikes owing to medical necessity, some after repeated emergency hospitalisation. Doctors have warned they could die at any point.
Ms Muraisi has now passed her 70th day on hunger strike, surpassing the 66 days without food which led to the martyrdom of Bobby Sands, the first of ten Irish republican heroes to die in the period from 27 May to 20 August 1981. The longest-surviving member of the ten was Kiran Doherty, who lived for 73 days.
That struggle was fought over political status for the many republicans who were incarcerated in the notorious H-Blocks – prisons whose architecture and regime had been specifically designed by the British occupiers to break the spirit of an armed liberation war that was then in its 12th year.
In Britain today, all 24 Filton detainees have been held without charge under ‘counter-terrorism’ legislation for almost a year and a half, although there are, in fact, no terrorism charges being made against them (Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation after the action at Filton and the arrest of the accused).
One of the primary goals of their hunger strike is that the 24 detainees should be released on bail, rather than being held indefinitely, segregated from other prisoners and moved far from their families and legal teams. At present, besides all this, the prisoners have their communications surveilled and curtailed and are kept in the harshest of conditions, treated by their jailers as if they were indeed convicted terrorists.
Despite this being the most significant hunger strike in a UK prison since the death of Bobby Sands and his nine comrades in 1981, media coverage has been minimal. There has been no rolling coverage, no daily updates, no sense of importance or urgency. Rather, there has been a studied silence: a determined campaign to keep the facts as far from the public view as possible.
Of course, the social media age means that newspapers have to give some token coverage, but while the odd story has been published (on the inside pages or buried out of sight on websites), it has been carefully calibrated to promote partisan ‘culture wars’ lines.
Supposedly ‘leftist’ outlets like the Guardian and various Labour ‘left’ figures like Jeremy Corbyn have expressed a milk-and-water ‘sympathy’ for the strikers (whilst doing nothing practical to advance their cause or mobilise the public in their defence), whilst right-wing so-called ‘patriotic’ figures associated with the Reform party/GB News crowd have denounced them as ‘lunatics’.
Suppression of stories, repression of truth-tellers
This should not be surprising to anyone. After all, this is the same monopoly corporate media that imposed a near-total blackout on the tragic story of Aaron Bushnell, a US soldier who died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC in February 2024 in protest at the Gaza genocide.
Despite being a white-skinned native US citizen and member of the armed forces, and despite the fact that he immolated himself in the heart of Washington DC, his name and story received far more attention in Yemen, Lebanon, Iran and occupied Palestine than it ever did in the supposedly free western world.
The Palestinian resistance issued a statement specially commemorating his sacrifice and his image adorned huge billboards in Yemen, whilst most Americans and Europeans do not even know his name.
Meanwhile, a growing number of independent journalists have been subject to Schedule 7 ‘counter-terror’ detention at the UK border as a result of their journalistic work on Palestine and the middle east, such as Kit Klarenberg, Richard Medhurst, Batool Subeiti and others.
Use of non-personing sanctions by western states
For journalists covering the war in the Donbass, the consequences have sometimes been much worse, as European regimes have been able to impose much harsher penalties owing to the great success of official anti-Russia propaganda amongst their populations.
British journalist Graham Philips was left penniless after having his bank accounts seized by the government, whilst Alina Lipp faces arrest and prosecution in her native Germany for her reporting from Crimea.
In Lipp’s case, the German state broadcaster even produced a three-part documentary solely dedicated to demonising her as an agent of the Kremlin (an allegation which, even if it were true, would hardly be worse than being an agent of bloody imperialist regimes in Berlin and Washington).
Such state persecution even extends to former members of the security establishment, if those figures are seen to be speaking too freely after retiring from their posts.
For example, the latest round of anti-Russia sanctions announced by the European Union now includes the former Swiss Army intelligence analyst Jacques Baud, who now works as an independent commentator on global affairs.
The typical EU ‘sanctions package’ includes a travel ban within the EU – despite the fact that Baud lives in the EU. Reportedly, he was staying in Belgium at the time, meaning that as a result of the ‘EU travel ban’, he is in the bizarre situation of being unable to leave the EU even to travel back to his native Switzerland.
As is typical for such ‘deviant’ individuals, there is a page on Wikipedia about Baud, in which he is introduced in the following manner:
“Jacques Baud (born 1 April 1955) is a former colonel in the Swiss Army, intelligence analyst who specialises in intelligence and terrorism.
“He has been criticised for his relaying of several conspiracy theories, his denial of the Syrian regime’s responsibility for several chemical attacks and for his pro-Vladimir Putin positions, including through the sharing of disinformation during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Of course, a critical-minded reader will immediately wonder how a specialist intelligence analyst who rose to the rank of colonel somehow transformed into a supposedly demented ‘conspiracy theorist’.
Despite a full 50 percent of the article being devoted to denouncing Baud’s supposed ‘disinformation’ (a euphemism for information that is objectively correct but goes against the interests of the Nato imperialist axis), this conundrum is never explained – because the correct explanation would be that most of his ‘conspiracy theories’ have largely been proven to be true, for example in the staged chemical attacks in Syria and Nato’s drive to war against Russia.
Journalists’ and ‘press freedom’ organisations absent from the fray
In all cases, the persecuted can expect no support from the ‘official’ journalist unions like the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) or from supposedly international groups like Reporters Without Borders, Committee to Protect Journalists, etc.
After all, these respectable bourgeois institutions, with their commitment to ‘freedom’ (ie, to the continuation of western imperialist rule) are far too busy glorifying either the paid pen-pushers of imperialism at the New York Times and the Washington Post, or various ‘independent’ employees of CIA-linked NGOs in Myanmar, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, etc, and they certainly cannot be bothered to trouble themselves with defending really independent journalists caught in the crosshairs of the imperialists’ fire.
Back in 2012, the media were filled with hysteria over the ‘assassination’ of the Sunday Times employee Marie Colvin, who was killed in an explosion in the city of Homs after illegally sneaking into Syria to report on intense fighting between the army and western-backed extremist mercenaries which was then raging in that city. By contrast, the sudden death of Press TV journalist Serena Shim in 2014 in an alleged ‘road accident’ in Turkey, merely a month after she had reported being threatened by Turkish authorities, elicited little to no reaction from the mainstream media.
The difference, of course, was that Colvin was a lifelong and loyal servant of US imperialism working for a ‘respectable’ pro-imperialist outlet, whilst Shim was associated with the Iran-owned Press TV and had spent her career covering stories that imperialism would rather were politely ignored.
A longstanding imperialist tactic
Many are under the impression that this is a new phenomenon and hark back to ‘the good old days’ when ‘democracy’ was still alive and the media still free. This is an illusion, however.
Back in the 1980s, US Marxist academic and writer Michael Parenti carried out a detailed study of imperialist media bias in his book, Inventing Reality, in which he clearly showed that corporate media is designed to serve the ruling class.
In particular, Parenti paid attention to mainstream journalists’ persistent crusade against Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinista government and their reluctance to criticise US-backed ‘contra’ mercenaries who were waging a brutal terrorist campaign against the Sandinista government and people at that time.
Going back further, in the days when the communist movement in Britain was still relatively strong and had a genuinely revolutionary line, the Communist Party of Great Britain’s official newspaper – the Daily Worker – would send its own journalists to cover imperialist wars in Korea, Malaysia and elsewhere from a revolutionary perspective.
Even in the 1950s and 60s, such journalism was harshly persecuted, with figures such as Michael Shapiro, Alan Winnington and Wilfred Burchett having their passports cancelled so that they were effectively rendered stateless – something which is supposedly prohibited under international law.
Clearly, the tactic of systematic lying combined with brutal suppression of those who step out of line is nothing new. What has changed is the economic situation as the imperialist powers sink deeper into economic crisis and seek to escape that crisis through war and austerity. When combined with the experience of 30 years of wars and 50 years of accelerated deindustrialisation, the result has been a huge surge in the number of workers in the imperialist heartlands who are questioning official narratives on all manner of topics.
Given the parlous state of the communist movement in the imperialist countries, we do not at present have a genuinely proletarian revolutionary media outlet with the capacity to send communist correspondents to far-flung parts of the globe. Today, the job of opposing imperialist lies and dissecting the evidence of its crimes falls to scattered individuals and small groups working independently of one another, with varying degrees of understanding regarding the class enemy or the imperialist system whose crimes they try to expose.
What we should strive to bear in mind is that, despite the many surface changes to our material conditions, the exploiting class in Britain (and most western countries) is the same one that workers have been facing for several centuries – with the same bourgeois class interests and the same irreconcilable hostility to the working masses.
Workers must always keep this essential truth in sight, and use the knowledge to resist the siren songs of ‘defending democracy’, ‘fighting authoritarians’ and so on with which revisionists and social democrats of all stripes try to seduce us into collaboration with our class enemies.
https://thecommunists.org/2026/01/14/ne ... a-machine/
How much more proof do we need that the mass media are instruments of imperialist domination and class rule?
Proletarian writers
Wednesday 14 January 2026
The condition of the Filton 24 detainees and the demands of the Palestine Action hunger strikers are overwhelmingly absent from mass media, which prefer to fill our screens with distracting, misleading and even fabricated images and narratives aimed at lining up public sympathies with imperialist aims.
One of many systematically obscured facts about British history is that leading Nazis such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels were looking with envy at the sophisticated deception machinery of British imperialism when they noted that it was easier to convince the population of big lies than of smaller ones.
Our exploiters continue to make full use of the fact that the sheer scale and brazenness of their frauds tend to make people wary of disbelieving ‘official truth’, even when it is at odds with their own experience.
*****
Whilst many of us were settling in for the Christmas holidays looking forward to mince pies and roast turkeys, eight young pro-Palestine activists spent most of the festive season alone and hungry in cold, dark prison cells.
Prisoners for Palestine ignored by western media
Lewie Chiaramello, Jon Cink, Umer Khalid, Qesser Zuhrah, Amy Gardiner-Gibson, Heba Muraisi, Teuta Hoxha and Kamran Ahmed are members of the so-called ‘Filton 24’ – a group of Palestine Action activists who were arrested in mid-2024 following a break-in at an Elbit Systems’ facility in Filton, Bristol.
Elbit Systems is an arms manufacturer associated with the Israeli settler-colonial entity which has emerged as the principal designer and supplier of the instruments raining death and destruction upon the besieged Gaza strip.
The situation is evolving rapidly, but at the time of writing, 31-year-old Heba Muraisi and 28-year-old Kamran Ahmed continue to refuse food, whilst the others have broken their strikes owing to medical necessity, some after repeated emergency hospitalisation. Doctors have warned they could die at any point.
Ms Muraisi has now passed her 70th day on hunger strike, surpassing the 66 days without food which led to the martyrdom of Bobby Sands, the first of ten Irish republican heroes to die in the period from 27 May to 20 August 1981. The longest-surviving member of the ten was Kiran Doherty, who lived for 73 days.
That struggle was fought over political status for the many republicans who were incarcerated in the notorious H-Blocks – prisons whose architecture and regime had been specifically designed by the British occupiers to break the spirit of an armed liberation war that was then in its 12th year.
In Britain today, all 24 Filton detainees have been held without charge under ‘counter-terrorism’ legislation for almost a year and a half, although there are, in fact, no terrorism charges being made against them (Palestine Action was proscribed as a terrorist organisation after the action at Filton and the arrest of the accused).
One of the primary goals of their hunger strike is that the 24 detainees should be released on bail, rather than being held indefinitely, segregated from other prisoners and moved far from their families and legal teams. At present, besides all this, the prisoners have their communications surveilled and curtailed and are kept in the harshest of conditions, treated by their jailers as if they were indeed convicted terrorists.
Despite this being the most significant hunger strike in a UK prison since the death of Bobby Sands and his nine comrades in 1981, media coverage has been minimal. There has been no rolling coverage, no daily updates, no sense of importance or urgency. Rather, there has been a studied silence: a determined campaign to keep the facts as far from the public view as possible.
Of course, the social media age means that newspapers have to give some token coverage, but while the odd story has been published (on the inside pages or buried out of sight on websites), it has been carefully calibrated to promote partisan ‘culture wars’ lines.
Supposedly ‘leftist’ outlets like the Guardian and various Labour ‘left’ figures like Jeremy Corbyn have expressed a milk-and-water ‘sympathy’ for the strikers (whilst doing nothing practical to advance their cause or mobilise the public in their defence), whilst right-wing so-called ‘patriotic’ figures associated with the Reform party/GB News crowd have denounced them as ‘lunatics’.
Suppression of stories, repression of truth-tellers
This should not be surprising to anyone. After all, this is the same monopoly corporate media that imposed a near-total blackout on the tragic story of Aaron Bushnell, a US soldier who died after setting himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC in February 2024 in protest at the Gaza genocide.
Despite being a white-skinned native US citizen and member of the armed forces, and despite the fact that he immolated himself in the heart of Washington DC, his name and story received far more attention in Yemen, Lebanon, Iran and occupied Palestine than it ever did in the supposedly free western world.
The Palestinian resistance issued a statement specially commemorating his sacrifice and his image adorned huge billboards in Yemen, whilst most Americans and Europeans do not even know his name.
Meanwhile, a growing number of independent journalists have been subject to Schedule 7 ‘counter-terror’ detention at the UK border as a result of their journalistic work on Palestine and the middle east, such as Kit Klarenberg, Richard Medhurst, Batool Subeiti and others.
Use of non-personing sanctions by western states
For journalists covering the war in the Donbass, the consequences have sometimes been much worse, as European regimes have been able to impose much harsher penalties owing to the great success of official anti-Russia propaganda amongst their populations.
British journalist Graham Philips was left penniless after having his bank accounts seized by the government, whilst Alina Lipp faces arrest and prosecution in her native Germany for her reporting from Crimea.
In Lipp’s case, the German state broadcaster even produced a three-part documentary solely dedicated to demonising her as an agent of the Kremlin (an allegation which, even if it were true, would hardly be worse than being an agent of bloody imperialist regimes in Berlin and Washington).
Such state persecution even extends to former members of the security establishment, if those figures are seen to be speaking too freely after retiring from their posts.
For example, the latest round of anti-Russia sanctions announced by the European Union now includes the former Swiss Army intelligence analyst Jacques Baud, who now works as an independent commentator on global affairs.
The typical EU ‘sanctions package’ includes a travel ban within the EU – despite the fact that Baud lives in the EU. Reportedly, he was staying in Belgium at the time, meaning that as a result of the ‘EU travel ban’, he is in the bizarre situation of being unable to leave the EU even to travel back to his native Switzerland.
As is typical for such ‘deviant’ individuals, there is a page on Wikipedia about Baud, in which he is introduced in the following manner:
“Jacques Baud (born 1 April 1955) is a former colonel in the Swiss Army, intelligence analyst who specialises in intelligence and terrorism.
“He has been criticised for his relaying of several conspiracy theories, his denial of the Syrian regime’s responsibility for several chemical attacks and for his pro-Vladimir Putin positions, including through the sharing of disinformation during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Of course, a critical-minded reader will immediately wonder how a specialist intelligence analyst who rose to the rank of colonel somehow transformed into a supposedly demented ‘conspiracy theorist’.
Despite a full 50 percent of the article being devoted to denouncing Baud’s supposed ‘disinformation’ (a euphemism for information that is objectively correct but goes against the interests of the Nato imperialist axis), this conundrum is never explained – because the correct explanation would be that most of his ‘conspiracy theories’ have largely been proven to be true, for example in the staged chemical attacks in Syria and Nato’s drive to war against Russia.
Journalists’ and ‘press freedom’ organisations absent from the fray
In all cases, the persecuted can expect no support from the ‘official’ journalist unions like the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) or from supposedly international groups like Reporters Without Borders, Committee to Protect Journalists, etc.
After all, these respectable bourgeois institutions, with their commitment to ‘freedom’ (ie, to the continuation of western imperialist rule) are far too busy glorifying either the paid pen-pushers of imperialism at the New York Times and the Washington Post, or various ‘independent’ employees of CIA-linked NGOs in Myanmar, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, China, etc, and they certainly cannot be bothered to trouble themselves with defending really independent journalists caught in the crosshairs of the imperialists’ fire.
Back in 2012, the media were filled with hysteria over the ‘assassination’ of the Sunday Times employee Marie Colvin, who was killed in an explosion in the city of Homs after illegally sneaking into Syria to report on intense fighting between the army and western-backed extremist mercenaries which was then raging in that city. By contrast, the sudden death of Press TV journalist Serena Shim in 2014 in an alleged ‘road accident’ in Turkey, merely a month after she had reported being threatened by Turkish authorities, elicited little to no reaction from the mainstream media.
The difference, of course, was that Colvin was a lifelong and loyal servant of US imperialism working for a ‘respectable’ pro-imperialist outlet, whilst Shim was associated with the Iran-owned Press TV and had spent her career covering stories that imperialism would rather were politely ignored.
A longstanding imperialist tactic
Many are under the impression that this is a new phenomenon and hark back to ‘the good old days’ when ‘democracy’ was still alive and the media still free. This is an illusion, however.
Back in the 1980s, US Marxist academic and writer Michael Parenti carried out a detailed study of imperialist media bias in his book, Inventing Reality, in which he clearly showed that corporate media is designed to serve the ruling class.
In particular, Parenti paid attention to mainstream journalists’ persistent crusade against Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinista government and their reluctance to criticise US-backed ‘contra’ mercenaries who were waging a brutal terrorist campaign against the Sandinista government and people at that time.
Going back further, in the days when the communist movement in Britain was still relatively strong and had a genuinely revolutionary line, the Communist Party of Great Britain’s official newspaper – the Daily Worker – would send its own journalists to cover imperialist wars in Korea, Malaysia and elsewhere from a revolutionary perspective.
Even in the 1950s and 60s, such journalism was harshly persecuted, with figures such as Michael Shapiro, Alan Winnington and Wilfred Burchett having their passports cancelled so that they were effectively rendered stateless – something which is supposedly prohibited under international law.
Clearly, the tactic of systematic lying combined with brutal suppression of those who step out of line is nothing new. What has changed is the economic situation as the imperialist powers sink deeper into economic crisis and seek to escape that crisis through war and austerity. When combined with the experience of 30 years of wars and 50 years of accelerated deindustrialisation, the result has been a huge surge in the number of workers in the imperialist heartlands who are questioning official narratives on all manner of topics.
Given the parlous state of the communist movement in the imperialist countries, we do not at present have a genuinely proletarian revolutionary media outlet with the capacity to send communist correspondents to far-flung parts of the globe. Today, the job of opposing imperialist lies and dissecting the evidence of its crimes falls to scattered individuals and small groups working independently of one another, with varying degrees of understanding regarding the class enemy or the imperialist system whose crimes they try to expose.
What we should strive to bear in mind is that, despite the many surface changes to our material conditions, the exploiting class in Britain (and most western countries) is the same one that workers have been facing for several centuries – with the same bourgeois class interests and the same irreconcilable hostility to the working masses.
Workers must always keep this essential truth in sight, and use the knowledge to resist the siren songs of ‘defending democracy’, ‘fighting authoritarians’ and so on with which revisionists and social democrats of all stripes try to seduce us into collaboration with our class enemies.
https://thecommunists.org/2026/01/14/ne ... a-machine/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."
Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management
From Assistant to Informant: The Dark Side of AI Chatbots
January 19, 5:00 PM
From Assistant to Informant: The Dark Side of AI Chatbots
Every time you communicate with ChatGPT, Claude, or other Big Five neural networks, you don't just receive responses—you share information about yourself. And we're not talking about what you write directly. The system analyzes how you formulate your thoughts, when you're active, what topics interest you, and how your emotional tone changes.
Research ( https://cambridgeanalytica.org/case-stu ... ata-50281/ ) has shown concrete figures on the effectiveness of profiling. After 50 or more interactions with AI chatbots, the accuracy of identifying personality traits reaches 85%. After just 20 dialogues, the system identifies your demographics with 78% accuracy: work schedule, time zone, education level, and professional experience. The emotional language in your prompts correlates with indicators of mental health.
Remarkably, conversation metadata—time, duration, and topic changes—reveal more information than the content itself. And "anonymous" data can be re-identified through writing style analysis with 89% accuracy. A study from King's College London found that specially configured AI chatbots can trick users into revealing 12.5 times more personal information than they intended.
However, a study from the University of Cambridge and Google DeepMind, published in December 2025, demonstrated the flip side: the personality of chatbots themselves can be reliably manipulated through prompts ( https://techxplore.com/news/2025-12-per ... human.html ), making them more persuasive to a specific user.
In June 2024, OpenAI appointed General Paul Nakasone, former NSA director and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, to its board of directors ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... e-to-board
). The man who led American cyberintelligence for six years now makes decisions at a company that collects an unprecedented amount of personal data on its users. In July 2025, the Pentagon awarded $200 million contracts to each of four leading AI companies: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Elon Musk's xAI. The contracts cover the development of agent-based AI systems for national security purposes. Anthropic has already integrated Claude into classified networks through a partnership with Palantir and created custom Claude Gov models for U.S. intelligence agencies.
Add to this the PRISM program, which has given the NSA access to data from major tech companies since 2007, and the picture begins to emerge.
In fact, the world is now divided into two poles. Either you use American systems, and your data is potentially accessible to agencies like the NSA, CIA, and Palantir. Or you use Chinese systems, and then it goes to Chinese intelligence agencies. National developments exist, but for now they are either significantly inferior in quality, strictly censored, or are forks of the same Chinese models.
In Russia, many large companies are already banning American AI models (Claude Code and similar ones) – for both employees and contractors. The current trend is forks of open-source AI agents, thoroughly audited, deployed on isolated corporate networks.
The code itself is often not secret. But the data it works with is a whole other level. Client databases, financial indicators, internal correspondence – all of this can leak through AI tools you consider safe.
If you work with sensitive information, using Western AI systems is a deliberate risk. And this is not paranoia, but reality.
https://t.me/darpaandcia - zinc.
Of course, some time will pass, and AI modules from countries hostile to Russia will be banned on Russian territory or placed under the control of Roskomnadzor. For the same reasons that the messaging market is being purged as part of sovereignty measures. I hope that by then, domestic models will be competitive. Otherwise, it'll be like always: oh, we need to block ChatGPT, and we're not ready for it.
I predict this will happen before the end of the 2020s.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10315470.html
Google Translator
January 19, 5:00 PM
From Assistant to Informant: The Dark Side of AI Chatbots
Every time you communicate with ChatGPT, Claude, or other Big Five neural networks, you don't just receive responses—you share information about yourself. And we're not talking about what you write directly. The system analyzes how you formulate your thoughts, when you're active, what topics interest you, and how your emotional tone changes.
Research ( https://cambridgeanalytica.org/case-stu ... ata-50281/ ) has shown concrete figures on the effectiveness of profiling. After 50 or more interactions with AI chatbots, the accuracy of identifying personality traits reaches 85%. After just 20 dialogues, the system identifies your demographics with 78% accuracy: work schedule, time zone, education level, and professional experience. The emotional language in your prompts correlates with indicators of mental health.
Remarkably, conversation metadata—time, duration, and topic changes—reveal more information than the content itself. And "anonymous" data can be re-identified through writing style analysis with 89% accuracy. A study from King's College London found that specially configured AI chatbots can trick users into revealing 12.5 times more personal information than they intended.
However, a study from the University of Cambridge and Google DeepMind, published in December 2025, demonstrated the flip side: the personality of chatbots themselves can be reliably manipulated through prompts ( https://techxplore.com/news/2025-12-per ... human.html ), making them more persuasive to a specific user.
In June 2024, OpenAI appointed General Paul Nakasone, former NSA director and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, to its board of directors ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... e-to-board
). The man who led American cyberintelligence for six years now makes decisions at a company that collects an unprecedented amount of personal data on its users. In July 2025, the Pentagon awarded $200 million contracts to each of four leading AI companies: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Elon Musk's xAI. The contracts cover the development of agent-based AI systems for national security purposes. Anthropic has already integrated Claude into classified networks through a partnership with Palantir and created custom Claude Gov models for U.S. intelligence agencies.
Add to this the PRISM program, which has given the NSA access to data from major tech companies since 2007, and the picture begins to emerge.
In fact, the world is now divided into two poles. Either you use American systems, and your data is potentially accessible to agencies like the NSA, CIA, and Palantir. Or you use Chinese systems, and then it goes to Chinese intelligence agencies. National developments exist, but for now they are either significantly inferior in quality, strictly censored, or are forks of the same Chinese models.
In Russia, many large companies are already banning American AI models (Claude Code and similar ones) – for both employees and contractors. The current trend is forks of open-source AI agents, thoroughly audited, deployed on isolated corporate networks.
The code itself is often not secret. But the data it works with is a whole other level. Client databases, financial indicators, internal correspondence – all of this can leak through AI tools you consider safe.
If you work with sensitive information, using Western AI systems is a deliberate risk. And this is not paranoia, but reality.
https://t.me/darpaandcia - zinc.
Of course, some time will pass, and AI modules from countries hostile to Russia will be banned on Russian territory or placed under the control of Roskomnadzor. For the same reasons that the messaging market is being purged as part of sovereignty measures. I hope that by then, domestic models will be competitive. Otherwise, it'll be like always: oh, we need to block ChatGPT, and we're not ready for it.
I predict this will happen before the end of the 2020s.
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/10315470.html
Google Translator
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."