#propaganda

🚨 Oligarchy alert 🚨

Umm...so one of the richest men threw away tens of billions of doll hairs to ruin one of the most popular and influential platforms for news, information & many people's entertainment.

To allow unfettered access to an unlocked hallucinating chat/art bot to generate and propagate outright lies in catchy memes that project what the fascists want to do on the woman of color.

This plus teaming up with crypto bros & other tech billionaires. This in attempt to sway the electiom in November & probably every election after that.

Do I have that right? Am I exaggerating or overstating the nature of the threat?

"Twitter is Elon's "Dearborn Independent", if Henry Ford had bought The New York Times."
#JoanMastodon #TTJ

They just want to use the #Christofascists as foot soldiers. The scary thing is they have no problem with camps and "deporting" millions, either.

#FuckFascists #AI #Grok #Propaganda #Billionaires #Oligarchy

At this point I think it's safe to say that the protestations, by multiple large for-profit corporate media outlets, that the American inflation crisis had "nothing to do with corporate price gouging" can safely be dismissed as a form of national gaslighting based on class sympathies and antagonism. Not only were corporate executives literally bragging about using the pandemic and "inflation" as an excuse to squeeze the most out of consumers all the way back in 2021, but numerous independent studies by economists more or less confirmed as much as well. Now you can add testimony given to the Federal Trade Commission by a top Kroger executive to the mounting pile of evidence that folks in the media denying this are completely full of shit and trying to rewrite history for their fellow corporate actors.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/kroger-egg-prices

During Antitrust Trial, Exec Admits Kroger Jacked Up Milk and Egg Prices Above Inflation

"Andy Groff, Kroger's senior director for pricing, said during a court hearing on the FTC's legal challenge to the company's proposed acquisition of Albertsons—its primary competitor—that Kroger's objective is to "pass through our inflation to consumers."

Groff's comment came in response to questioning about an internal email he sent to other Kroger executives in March. In that note, Groff observed that "on milk and eggs, retail inflation has been significantly higher than cost inflation."

I don't know if anyone reading this needs me to translate that last statement from corporate greedbag to English, but if you're confused about what buddy means by these two types of "inflation" he's copping to Kroger raising the prices on milk and eggs by more than the increase in costs for the company to obtain and sell those products - in other words, he's confessing to (or rather, bragging about) Kroger engaging in price gouging. Of course this isn't exactly "news" to anyone trying to make ends meet and put food on their family's table the past 3-4 years, but given the aforementioned national gaslighting campaign corporate media is engaging in to deny this, Groff's testimony in an antitrust case challenging Kroger's merger with Albertsons seems pretty relevant.

As one of the links provided in this article goes on to note, the FTC has *already* produced a report indicating that corporations in the grocery business definitely seized on the fallout from the Covid 19 pandemic to milk customers for as much money as possible, above and beyond their own increased costs, saying "large market participants accelerated and distorted the negative effects associated with supply chain disruptions." This same FTC report also goes on to note that these price increases have long outlived the supply chain disruptions greedy corporations blamed them on, and remain in place as of the spring of 2024 when the report was produced: "some in the grocery retail industry seem to have used rising costs as an opportunity to further raise prices to increase their profits, which remain elevated today." As another link in this article notes, most of this has also been confirmed in a recent Financial Times story as well.

So if the FTC is saying large corporations in the grocery business are engaging in price gouging and using supply chain disruptions caused by the pandemic as an excuse, the Financial Times is confirming that's the case, and we have multiple instances of actual grocery chain executives confessing or bragging about doing so themselves, why are outlets like the Washington Post, and NBC News producing content that falsely claims otherwise? I can't profess to know what's in the mind of a mainstream American media executive, but I'd hazard a guess that if you study the inbred nature of the U.S. corporate sector and the long history of class war in this country, you'll find your answer. Corporate media muppets are just looking out for number one; and broke consumers like you "ain't even number two."

#Capitalism #PriceGouging #FTC #GroceryCosts #Kroger #Pandemic #Propaganda #ClassWar

Recently I've been writing a lot about billionaire Afrikaner shitlord Elon Musk's attempts to use his vast wealth to silence folks pointing out that advertisers are effectively paying him to run X (formerly Twitter) like a gigantic fascist propaganda machine that demonizes his enemies, marks out targets for reactionary political violence, and attempts to subvert Pig Empire democracies to help create the kind of world where billionaires like Musk can happily go on extracting wealth while billions of people die on a boiling planet. I take no joy in writing about Musk, and I'm fully aware that many people reading this simply don't want to believe in the sheer scope of his ambitions because it's much easier to write him off as an assclown desperate for validation from 4chan nazis and unhinged Republican conspiracy theorists. Elon Musk may indeed be all of these things as well, but I think it's important to remember that because we live in a capitalist society (on the brink of climate catastrophe and ecological collapse) where money is power, the fact that Musk is transparently a dipshit, is far less important than the fact that he's literally one of the richest, most dangerous, and most powerful people on the planet; no matter how unpleasant contemplating those facts may be.

Given all of this, I don't think anyone will be surprised to learn that Elon is now transforming his ongoing lawsuit against Media Matters for exposing his website's promotion of neo-nazi, white nationalist content to the advertisers paying for his propaganda machine, into a larger lawfare cudgel to go after other non-profit media outlets and public interest groups doing the same thing. What remains surprising to me however, is how easily the public at large dismisses these activities as merely a temper tantrum, when in reality what Musk is trying to do is make it effectively impossible to expose billionaire nazis like himself, while they try to reshape society in their own image, and for their own benefit.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/08/twitter-x-subpoenas-elon-musk/

Elon Musk’s Lawyers Quietly Subpoena Public Interest Groups

"The groups include the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the digital rights organization Access Now, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). The subpoenas represent a new chapter in the legal war Musk launched after advertisers fled X, and are part of a lawsuit Musk and X first filed about a year ago against Media Matters over a report it published documenting that ads appeared alongside extremist content. The subpoenas demand any correspondence the organizations have had with that progressive media watchdog group. Several targets told Mother Jones they’ve had no or limited interaction with Media Matters, and that the subpoenas feel, in the words of more than one person, like “a fishing expedition.”

As this piece, and many of the organizations quoted here note, on some level this absolutely *is* a temper tantrum by a billionaire man-child with far too much influence on our society, trying to punish his critics for daring to criticize the way he runs "The Daily Stormer the Social Media SiteTM." Musk is most certainly outraged that puny non-profits and public interest groups are going after the advertiser money he feels entitled to, and now he's going to make them pay by burying them under the cost of defending themselves in court; in precisely the way he's targeted Media Matters itself. But once again I think it's impossible to really understand the importance of this story without examining what it is these organizations are criticizing him for. When a bunch of reactionary investment firms and the richest guy on the planet buy one of the largest social media sites on Earth, and that billionaire nazi proceeds to transform that site into a platform that literally pays neo-nazis, white nationalists, and other fascists to produce content that normalizes fascist ideology, and targets his political enemies, including and especially state-level actors in a position to regulate billionaires, investment firms, and whole industries currently burning the planet to ash for profit, we've gone well past the point where any of this can be described as "internet nazi shitposting."

Whether folks want to believe Musk is capable of the kind of long term planning this sort of operation would entail or not, the obvious reality here is that Musk and his rich investors aren't just declaring war on Elon's critics, they're declaring war on Pig Empire society itself; or at least the parts of it that aren't willing to surrender to fascism and the absolute rule of nazi billionaires, as the world burns. Nobody spends forty-four billion dollars on getting approval and favestars from internet nazis, and everything Musk has done since he took over Twitter makes it abundantly clear that his ambitions far exceed creating a clubhouse for his nazi sycophants.

#Fascism #Musk #Twitter #Lawfare #FreedomOfThePress #Capitalism #Propaganda

In a recent speech to law enforcement officers in noted cracker enclave Howell Michigan, Donald Trump repeated four outrageous lies, and made an alarming campaign promise in an event that typifies the fascist political style and demonstrates precisely why politicians like him are such a danger to our society.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/20/trump-speech-police-crime

Trump attacks Kamala Harris and ‘Marxist left’ in speech to police

"Flanked by local sheriffs in Howell, a small city in greater Detroit where a group of white supremacists marched last month chanting “We love Hitler, we love Trump” and carrying signs reading “White Lives Matter”, Trump painted a picture of Americans living in fear of leaving their homes because of crime.

“It’s just insane, but you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get … whatever it may be,” he said.

The former president claimed that this alleged crime wave materialised when Joe Biden and Harris took office.

“Since Comrade Kamala Harris took office, her administration’s crime statistics show she’s presided over a 43% increase in violent crime. These are all government numbers,” he claimed.

In fact, official statistics show that violent crime is at an almost 50-year low in the US."

Given Trump's propensity for lying, I think many people in American political life have largely tuned out in response to the numerous times Downmarket Mussolini has been caught doing so. In this case however, not only were Trump's lies (delivered to murderpigs in a city known for its white supremacist extremism) completely unmoored from reality, but they also exemplified his use of what author and researcher Jason Stanley has described as "the fascist political style" in American politics; which is itself the missing context American media so rarely applies to studying Trump's lies and what purpose they serve.

First, Trump used completely made up statistics to fearmonger about a non-existent violent crime wave in America, while laying the blame at Harris's feet; as the quote above notes, violent crime is actually at an almost 50-year low and as Vice President, Kamala Harris has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the Department of Justice or local policing. Although there may be a tendency to assume Trump is a blathering idiot, I think that's misguided; the GOP nominee knows full well that he's lying about crime statistics and as a former U.S. President he's intimately familiar with the scope of any Vice President's job in American politics.

Secondly, Trump then promised to crack down on "Marxist" district attorneys who refuse to enforce the law; there are literally zero Marxist DAs in America. Here too however it would be a mistake to assume Trump is just rambling as a defining feature of fascist political techniques is to tap into latent Pig Empire anticommunism (and McCarthyism in America specifically) to portray even your liberal moderate opponents as an otherized communist threat to society. Trump then proceeded to share a completely fabricated story about shoplifters in California carrying calculators into stores to avoid prosecution while blaming Harris for allowing it; this never happened, Trump is referring to a ballot initiative called Proposition 47 that was approved by California voters in 2014 that made shoplifting under $950 a misdemeanor crime and as we'll show in a later story I'll share today, did not increase the rate of shoplifting in the state. Finally Trump tied all of this into his consistent fascist messaging demonizing migrants and holding them responsible for this entirely fabricated crime wave even though the data shows migrants commit crime at a staggeringly lower rate than the general American population; again, this too is intentional as the fascist political style reinforces white nationalism by blaming social ills on a racialized criminal "other" - in this case, migrants.

Alongside these lies, Trump also reiterated his (again, fascist) promise to provide murderpigs with guaranteed immunity from prosecution; which given how difficult our current qualified immunity laws make it to prosecute police for even heinous violations of civil rights during the course of their duties, makes for an ominous campaign promise to further empower abuses by a fascist police state. Perhaps most tellingly of all, Trump chose to utter these lies, and promise police guaranteed immunity in Howell Michigan, a place infamous for its support of and tolerance for right wing extremism, white nationalism, and the literal fucking Ku Klux Klan; as detailed recently by Hayes Brown, writing for NBC.

Folks, this isn't just about Trump being Trump; everything about this campaign stop in Howell is a glaring warning sign that Trump is openly running for president as a fascist, using fascist political techniques, and it's long past time the U.S. media started saying so out loud - before it's too late to do so.

#USPol #Fascism #Trump #PoliceState #Propaganda

Quite frankly, I don't know how many times we have to go through this song and dance; but if the posts in my replies are any indication, the answer is at least another time. Once again an incurious pro-colonization, pro-genocide Pig Empire media took U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at face value and is blaming Hamas for rejecting a peace deal that isn't a peace deal so much as a brief pause for the genocide, and an agreement to let Israel militarily occupy Gaza in perpetuity. These terms are part of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's "hard line," and they have been rejected before; something Blinken surely knows because he's overseen the entire negotiation process. This in turn means that this whole farce going on in our media right now is simply yet another tactic to stall peace, while allowing Israel to continue to conduct a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and blame it on Hamas; a farce that the U.S. Secretary of State is participating in knowingly.

While much of the Western corporate media has devoted itself to pushing this false narrative, Axios, who have maintained deep contacts within Israel's own negotiating team throughout this entire process, is at least printing the real story; Netanyahu doesn't want peace, is actively blocking his negotiator's attempts to end the conflict, and indeed only agreed to the latest (farcical) U.S. peace proposal because he *knew* Hamas would reject permanent Israeli military occupation of Gaza in exchange for nothing more than a pause in the slaughter.

https://www.axios.com/2024/08/19/netanyahu-ceasefire-hostage-deal-demands

Netanyahu's ceasefire doublespeak: Dovish with U.S., hawkish with negotiators

"Between the lines: Netanyahu endorsed the U.S. proposal — which incorporated several of his updated demands — knowing Hamas would reject it, senior Israeli officials tell Axios.

His public statement that Israeli negotiators were "cautiously optimistic" about concluding a deal were political posturing, the sources say.

Any gaps that were narrowed in Doha were between the U.S. and Israeli positions, not Israel and Hamas.

Despite the optimism from Washington, the Egyptian and Qatari mediators who were providing updates to Hamas didn't believe any real progress was being made, one Israeli official told Axios.

Israeli negotiators briefed Netanyahu over the weekend that Hamas would reject the deal and claim it represented the positions of Israel, rather than the U.S. On Sunday, Hamas said exactly that."

Look, I don't know who still needs to be told this but the reality here is that Netanyahu doesn't want peace, and even Israel's own negotiating team knows that. This is at least in part because the moment the "war" in Gaza is over, the Israeli Prime Minster will be forced to face corruption charges in Israeli court that most observers think will result in convictions and end his political career.

Furthermore, when the very same guy conducting a genocide acknowledges that continuing the "war" in Gaza drastically increases the risk of widening the conflict into a war that will include multiple MENA region states and likely draw the U.S. deeper into the conflict, and then repeatedly sabotages his own negotiator's attempts to end the genocide in Gaza, a reasonable person has to assume that Benjamin Netanyahu either wants that escalated MENA region war and all the complications for America that come with it, or at least doesn't give one flying fuck about it. From my perspective, it sure looks to me like "Bibi" wouldn't mind locking in U.S. military involvement in a conflict with Iran or Iranian allies before he has to care about the outcome of the 2024 U.S. election - but I'll concede that's only my eyes, ears, and brain talking.

The plain truth here is that "Genocide" Joe (Biden) can shed crocodile tears for dead children in Gaza, while admitting anti-genocide protestors at the DNC "have a point" all he likes; but so long as his own Secretary of State, Antony Blinken is actively manufacturing consent for Israel to continue the slaughter (and that's exactly what he's done by pretending the peace deal he negotiated is anything but total surrender to Netanyahu's demands) those are just going to be empty words that don't change the fact the U.S. administration is funding, supplying, and enabling a genocide in Gaza. This isn't fucking debate class folks, and dishonest word games don't stop the armament shipments, or the bombs raining down on schools full of refugees. Joe Biden owns this genocide lock stock and barrel; and if the Democratic Party 2024 platform approved at the DNC last night is any indication, a victorious president Kamala Harris will inherit that genocide. Pretty words and weeping don't and won't stop reality from being real.

#Gaza #Genocide #Israel #Colonialism #Imperialism #USPol #Blinken #Media #Propaganda

Recently I've found myself engaged in multiple discouraging conversations about our rapidly unfolding climate catastrophe with a number of disheartened people ostensibly on the left. While none of these discussions have been unproductive, I've frequently found myself having to push back on the prevailing sentiment that "it's far too late" and "nothing can be done" to stop climate catastrophe, or even the extinction of human life on Earth. Setting aside the fact that this sentiment is both counter-productive, and ignores the scaling nature of the climate crisis problem entirely, a recent United Nations report indicates that these sentiments are likely a product of an active propaganda campaign designed to convince folks that preventing the worst case climate scenario is too difficult, if not entirely impossible. And who might be behind that propaganda campaign? If you guess "fossil fuel companies profiting directly from boiling our planet like soup," you win a gold star.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/08/fossil-fuel-industry-using-disinformation-campaign-to-slow-green-transition-says-un

‘Massive disinformation campaign’ is slowing global transition to green energy

“There is this prevailing narrative – and a lot of it is being pushed by the fossil fuel industry and their enablers – that climate action is too difficult, it’s too expensive,” he said. “It is absolutely critical that leaders, and all of us, push back and explain to people the value of climate action, but also the consequences of climate inaction.”

He contrasted the perception of a backlash with the findings of the biggest poll ever conducted on the climate, which found clear majorities of people around the world supporting measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The survey found 72% of people wanted a “quick transition” away from fossil fuels, including majorities in the countries that produce the most coal, oil and gas. Green parties and plans may have suffered reverses in some parts of the world, he said, but in others they have gained seats, and seen policies that would once have been considered radical enter the mainstream."

Look, I'm not here to blow sunshine up your ass, and as I've written in the past, a simple transition from fossil fuel consumption to renewable energy isn't likely to solve *all* of our climate problems; at least in part because Pig Empire capitalism itself is unlikely to survive such a transition, and the rich people driving us all off the ecological cliff are fighting tooth and nail to preserve their wealth and power, which is itself underpinned by fossil fuel production and consumption. Despite these complications however, it's important to understand that combatting climate catastrophe is not impossible, it's not too late, and everyday people overwhelmingly support doing what must be done to preserve a habitable planet no matter how much our ruling classes and the capitalists who own everything in our society object to that proposition.

While it's true that taking action to fight the climate crisis sooner would have been better for humanity as a whole, and a certain portion of extremely negative effects on our society are already baked-in because of longstanding climate inaction, the idea that it's too late for our species and nothing can be done is not only inaccurate, but it's also being fed to you by folks who have a vested interest in continuing to burn the planet for profit, no matter how many people that kills. These people, whether they be fossil fuel executives or ruling class capitalists who're heavily invested in a fossil fuel driven world, want you to give up hope because it's worth trillions of dollars to them; to say nothing of the power over Pig Empire society the possession of all that money entails. If it truly were too late, if fighting back against the capitalist interests boiling us all for profit was truly pointless, they wouldn't be spending millions of dollars on propaganda campaigns and misinformation designed to get you to give up on the idea of fighting climate catastrophe and the capitalism that's causing it.

The plain truth, even if it's hard to recognize amid waves of disheartening propaganda, is that there is still hope for a planet habitable by 8B+ humans. Unfortunately however, that hope depends entirely on ending fossil fuel consumption, and the capitalist order that dominates all of Pig Empire society. Furthermore our leaders, who are wholly devoted to that capitalist order, and largely in the pockets of ultra-rich mass murderers who have every intention of killing billions to preserve their wealth and way of life, are at best unreliable partners (and at worst, an active impediment) to making the changes necessary to save our world, and the human species that lives on it. It's almost certainly going to take some type of global revolution to either convince them otherwise, or replace them with people who don't see murdering billions of people for the profit of a handful of billionaires as an acceptable option.

#ClimateCrisis #Capitalism #FossilFuels #Propaganda