CORPORATE WHORES

GLENN GREENWALD–ver the course of five-plus hours on Thursday, a House Committee along with two subcommittees badgered three tech CEOs, repeatedly demanding that they censor more political content from their platforms and vowing legislative retaliation if they fail to comply. The hearing — convened by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Chair Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of its Subcommittees, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) — was one of the most stunning displays of the growing authoritarian effort in Congress to commandeer the control which these companies wield over political discourse for their own political interests and purposes.

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.

BRUCE LERRO—If you received an undergraduate college degree you probably never had a class in political economy. What you probably had is at least one class in political science and another class in economics. If you are like most people, you found these classes either boring or incomprehensible. Why? The answer is because both fields are riddled with capitalist propaganda that has little basis in most people’s experience. Sure, there are some people who are convinced that political science and neoclassical economics make sense but which social class is this? Chances are it is members of the upper middle class for whom political and neoclassical economics make sense from their class position. But upper middle-class people are 10% of the Yankee population.

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.”