CORPORATE FASCISM

GLENN GREENWALD—In a January Wall Street Journal op-ed, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Yale Law School’s constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld warned that Congress is rapidly approaching this constitutional boundary if it has not already transgressed it. “Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats,” the duo wrote, “Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.” Added: Deleted: That article compiled just a small sample of case law making clear that efforts to coerce private actors to censor speech implicate core First Amendment free speech guarantees.

EGOR KUCHER—Integrity Initiative is the largest anti-Russian information and lobbying company in history, with central Anglo-Saxon support and a huge aggregate budget. Among other things, its activities are aimed at interfering in the internal affairs of other countries. The members of the organisation are politicians, scientists, officials, teachers, military personnel, activists, bloggers and journalists. Such, for example, as Grozev, Dobrokhotov and Navalny.

In 2018, Anonymous hackers broke into the servers of this organisation and posted some of the internal documents. Among them are a list of the organisation’s members by cluster in different countries, a list of operations, fees, requests for seminars, a manual on how to correctly lie about “Russian propaganda”, how to interpret the “Skripal case” and the MH-17 disaster. At the end of 2018, Tsargrad, as part of a special project, considered the activities of this British network of agents of influence in Europe. Now the documents of the Integrity Initiative can be found on the website fdik.org.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—We’re so far from justice that even the table scraps of “You’re too crazy to extradite” are welcomed. You want justice? Free Assange, shower him with awards and compensation, and lock up everyone who helped persecute him. That would be justice. Then you’d be getting somewhere.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Wednesday that it seized 27 online domains, claiming the websites were controlled by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). The DOJ seized the domains under the guise of enforcing US sanctions against Iran and the IRGC. Wednesday’s announcement followed the seizure of 92 domains in October that the DOJ also claimed were operated by Iran. The DOJ purports that the domains were being used to spread “Iranian propaganda” and “disinformation.”

RAINER SHEA—In Chile, the people just voted by more than two-thirds to throw out the constitution which was created for them during the Pinochet dictatorship. This means that the era of dictatorship can now honestly be considered over, and that the neoliberal policies which the old constitution enforced are vulnerable to being eliminated by the democratic will of the population-which has suffered on a unique scale from Covid-19 due to these policies.