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Revealing News For a Better World

Corporate Corruption News Articles
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Below are key excerpts of revealing news articles on corporate corruption from reliable news media sources. If any link fails to function, a paywall blocks full access, or the article is no longer available, try these digital tools.


Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news articles on dozens of engaging topics. And read excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.


A Weed Killer Is Increasingly Showing Up in People's Bodies
2017-10-24, Time
https://time.com/4993877/weed-killer-roundup-levels-humans/

The latest study to look at the long-term effects of Roundup, a popular weed killer developed by Monsanto in the 1970s, raises questions about the herbicide's possible contributions to poor health in certain communities. The study, published Tuesday in JAMA, tracked people over the age of 50 in southern California from 1993-1996 to 2014-2016, with researchers periodically collecting urine samples during that time. The percentage of people who tested positive for a chemical called glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, shot up by 500% in that time period. The levels of glyphosate also spiked by 1208% during that time. One trial from the UK, in which rats were fed low levels of glyphosate throughout their lives, found that the chemical contributed to a higher risk of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a condition in which fat accumulates in the liver and contributes to inflammation and scarring of the tissue. [Researcher Paul] Mills says that the levels of glyphosate documented in the people in his study were 100-fold greater than those in the rats. While Roundup was developed to eliminate most weeds from genetically modified crops – and thus reduce the amount of pesticides sprayed on them – recent studies have found that many weeds are now resistant to Roundup. That means growers are using more Roundup, which could only exacerbate potential negative health effects on people who consume those products.

Note: Bayer recently agreed to a $10 billion settlement over claims that its glyphosate-containing product RoundUp causes cancer. Meanwhile, Mexico is banning glyphosate and GMO corn. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption and GMOs from reliable major media sources.


You'd Think Doctors Would Know About Big Pharma's Rap Sheet – Many Don't
2024-09-11, The Brownstone Institute
https://brownstone.org/articles/big-pharmas-rap-sheet/

The pharmaceutical industry, as a whole and by its nature, is conflicted and significantly driven by the mighty dollar, rather than altruism. A 2020 peer-reviewed article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association outlines the extent of the problem. The group studied both the type of illegal activity and financial penalties imposed on pharma companies between the years 2003 and 2016. Of the companies studied, 85 percent (22 of 26) had received financial penalties for illegal activities with a total combined dollar value of $33 billion. The illegal activities included manufacturing and distributing adulterated drugs, misleading marketing, failure to disclose negative information about a product (i.e. significant side effects including death), bribery to foreign officials, fraudulently delaying market entry of competitors, pricing and financial violations, and kickbacks. The highest penalties were awarded to Schering-Plough, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Allergan, and Wyeth. The biggest overall fines have been paid by GSK (almost $10 billion), Pfizer ($2.9 billion), Johnson & Johnson ($2.6 billion), and other familiar names including AstraZeneca, Novartis, Merck, Eli Lilly, Schering-Plough, Sanofi Aventis, and Wyeth. Five US states – Texas, Kansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Utah – are taking Pfizer to court for withholding information, and misleading and deceiving the public through statements made in marketing its Covid-19 injection.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.


How US Big Tech Monopolies Colonized the World: Welcome to Neo-Feudalism
2024-08-20, ScheerPost
https://scheerpost.com/2024/08/20/how-us-big-tech-monopolies-colonized-the-wo...

In almost every country on Earth, the digital infrastructure upon which the modern economy was built is owned and controlled by a small handful of monopolies, based largely in Silicon Valley. This system is looking more and more like neo-feudalism. Just as the feudal lords of medieval Europe owned all of the land ... the US Big Tech monopolies of the 21st century act as corporate feudal lords, controlling all of the digital land upon which the digital economy is based. A monopolist in the 20th century would have loved to control a country's supply of, say, refrigerators. But the Big Tech monopolists of the 21st century go a step further and control all of the digital infrastructure needed to buy those fridges – from the internet itself to the software, cloud hosting, apps, payment systems, and even the delivery service. These corporate neo-feudal lords don't just dominate a single market or a few related ones; they control the marketplace. They can create and destroy entire markets. Their monopolistic control extends well beyond just one country, to almost the entire world. If a competitor does manage to create a product, US Big Tech monopolies can make it disappear. Imagine you are an entrepreneur. You develop a product, make a website, and offer to sell it online. But then you search for it on Google, and it does not show up. Instead, Google promotes another, similar product in the search results. This is not a hypothetical; this already happens.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Tech from reliable major media sources.


We Built a Surveillance State. What Now?
2024-08-20, Project on Government Oversight
https://www.pogo.org/analysis/we-built-a-surveillance-state-what-now

Surveillance technologies have evolved at a rapid clip over the last two decades – as has the government's willingness to use them in ways that are genuinely incompatible with a free society. The intelligence failures that allowed for the attacks on September 11 poured the concrete of the surveillance state foundation. The gradual but dramatic construction of this surveillance state is something that Republicans and Democrats alike are responsible for. Our country cannot build and expand a surveillance superstructure and expect that it will not be turned against the people it is meant to protect. The data that's being collected reflect intimate details about our closely held beliefs, our biology and health, daily activities, physical location, movement patterns, and more. Facial recognition, DNA collection, and location tracking represent three of the most pressing areas of concern and are ripe for exploitation. Data brokers can use tens of thousands of data points to develop a detailed dossier on you that they can sell to the government (and others). Essentially, the data broker loophole allows a law enforcement agency or other government agency such as the NSA or Department of Defense to give a third party data broker money to hand over the data from your phone – rather than get a warrant. When pressed by the intelligence community and administration, policymakers on both sides of the aisle failed to draw upon the lessons of history.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


Paxton's win against Meta is a win for privacy. It's only a first step.
2024-08-12, Houston Chronicle
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/paxton-facebook-m...

If you appeared in a photo on Facebook any time between 2011 and 2021, it is likely your biometric information was fed into DeepFace – the company's controversial deep-learning facial recognition system that tracked the face scan data of at least a billion users. That's where Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton comes in. His office secured a $1.4 billion settlement from Meta over its alleged violation of a Texas law that bars the capture of biometric data without consent. Meta is on the hook to pay $275 million within the next 30 days and the rest over the next four years. Why did Paxton wait until 2022 – a year after Meta announced it would suspend its facial recognition technology and delete its database – to go up against the tech giant? If our AG truly prioritized privacy, he'd focus on the lesser-known companies that law enforcement agencies here in Texas are paying to scour and store our biometric data. In 2017, [Clearview AI] launched a facial recognition app that ... could identify strangers from a photo by searching a database of faces scraped without consent from social media. In 2020, news broke that at least 600 law enforcement agencies were tapping into a database of 3 billion facial images. Clearview was hit with lawsuit after lawsuit. That same year, the company was hacked and its entire client list – which included the Department of Justice, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Interpol, retailers and hundreds of police departments – was leaked.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and Big Tech from reliable major media sources.


We're Entering an AI Price-Fixing Dystopia
2024-08-10, The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/ai-price-algorithms-realpag...

If you rent your home, there's a good chance your landlord uses RealPage to set your monthly payment. The company describes itself as merely helping landlords set the most profitable price. But a series of lawsuits says it's something else: an AI-enabled price-fixing conspiracy. The late Justice Antonin Scalia once called price-fixing the "supreme evil" of antitrust law. Agreeing to fix prices is punishable with up to 10 years in prison and a $100 million fine. Property owners feed RealPage's "property management software" their data, including unit prices and vacancy rates, and the algorithm–which also knows what competitors are charging–spits out a rent recommendation. If enough landlords use it, the result could look the same as a traditional price-fixing cartel: lockstep price increases instead of price competition, no secret handshake or clandestine meeting needed. Algorithmic price-fixing appears to be spreading to more and more industries. And existing laws may not be equipped to stop it. In more than 40 housing markets across the United States, 30 to 60 percent of multifamily-building units are priced using RealPage. The plaintiffs suing RealPage, including the Arizona and Washington, D.C., attorneys general, argue that this has enabled a critical mass of landlords to raise rents in concert, making an existing housing-affordability crisis even worse. The lawsuits also argue that RealPage pressures landlords to comply with its pricing suggestions.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.


The global food system is owned by an ever smaller number of companies – it's damaging our health, our communities and the planet
2024-07-17, The Conversation
https://theconversation.com/the-global-food-system-is-owned-by-an-ever-smalle...

Across the world, over 800 million people spend their days hungry. More than 2 billion have limited access to food. Yet today's global food system produces enough to feed every person on the planet. To account for these trends, we need to look at market concentration, and how a small number of very big companies have come to dominate the production and supply of the food we all eat. The global food system has become much more concentrated in recent years, partly through an increase in mergers and acquisitions, where large firms buy up rival companies until they completely dominate key areas. High levels of market concentration mean less transparency, weaker competition, and more power in the hands of fewer firms. And our research reveals that a rise in the number of mergers and acquisitions is taking place at all stages of the global food system – from seeds and fertilisers to machinery and manufacturing. This is all part of food being increasingly seen as a source not only of human sustenance, but as a profitable investment – or what is known as the "financialisation of food". Just four firms control 44% of the global farm machinery market, two companies control 40% of the global seed market, and four businesses control 62% of the global agrochemicals market. This trend is matched in food retail, with four firms – Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, and Morrisons – estimated to control over 64% of the UK grocery market.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the food system and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.


‘Forever chemicals' used in lithium ion batteries threaten environment, research finds
2024-07-14, The Guardian (One of the UK's Leading Newspapers)
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/14/forever-chemicals-...

Toxic PFAS "forever chemicals" used in lithium ion batteries essential to the clean energy transition present a dangerous source of chemical pollution that new research finds threatens the environment and human health. The multipronged, peer-reviewed study zeroed in on a little-researched and unregulated subclass of PFAS called bis-FASI that are used in lithium ion batteries. Researchers found alarming levels of the chemicals in the environment near manufacturing plants, noted their presence in remote areas around the world, found they appear to be toxic to living organisms, and discovered that waste from batteries disposed of in landfills was a major pollution source. PFAS are a class of about 16,000 human-made compounds most often used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down and have been found to accumulate in humans. The chemicals are linked to cancer, birth defects, liver disease, thyroid disease, plummeting sperm counts and a range of other serious health problems. The paper notes that few end-of-life standards for PFAS battery waste exist, and the vast majority ends up in municipal dumps where it can leach into waterways, accumulate locally or be transported long distances. It looked at the presence of the chemicals in historical leachate samples and found none in those from prior to the mid-1990s, when the chemical class was commercialized.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on toxic chemicals from reliable major media sources.


Stop mourning the Murthy case, start fighting the censorship-industrial complex
2024-07-11, The Hill
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/4763829-big-tech-censorship-murthy-gove...

After government officials like former White House advisers Rob Flaherty and Andy Slavitt repeatedly harangued platforms such as Facebook to censor Americans who contested the government's narrative on COVID-19 vaccines, Missouri and Louisiana sued. They claimed that the practice violates the First Amendment. Following years of litigation, the Supreme Court threw cold water on their efforts, ruling in Murthy v. Missouri that states and the individual plaintiffs lacked standing to sue the government for its actions. The government often disguised its censorship requests by coordinating with ostensibly "private" civil society groups to pressure tech companies to remove or shadow ban targeted content. According to the U.S. House Weaponization Committee's November 2023 interim report, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency requested that the now-defunct Stanford Internet Observatory create a public-private partnership to counter election "misinformation" in 2020. This consortium of government and private entities took the form of the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). EIP's "private" civil society partners then forwarded the flagged content to Big Tech platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter. These "private" groups ... receive millions of taxpayer dollars from the National Science Foundation, the State Department and the U.S Department of Justice. Legislation like the COLLUDE Act would ... clarify that Section 230 does not apply when platforms censor legal speech "as a result of a communication" from a "governmental entity" or from an non-profit "acting at the request or behest of a governmental entity."

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on censorship and government corruption from reliable sources.


Supreme Court opioid case makes it harder to shield wealth in bankruptcy
2024-06-29, Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/06/29/bankruptcy-supreme-court-p...

A Supreme Court ruling against the opioid company Purdue Pharma ... substantially raised the bar for executives and owners trying to shield their wealth. Johnson & Johnson, Boy Scouts of America and Rite Aid are among the entities trying to handle a vast number of lawsuits in bankruptcy court, seeking to resolve all claims in a single settlement. These proceedings have echoes of the Purdue Pharma case decided by the Supreme Court on Thursday, in which the Sackler family, which owns the bankrupt opioid-maker, offered plaintiffs about $6 billion of the $11 billion they extracted from the company. In exchange, family members would have received immunity from future lawsuits, without filing for bankruptcy themselves. A 5-4 Supreme Court held that settlement was inadequate. Its ruling threw the massive bankruptcy case against Purdue Pharma into doubt after years of court battles over the company's role in the nation's opioid epidemic. The decision also adds a fresh wrinkle to a controversial legal strategy, called the Texas two-step, in which companies use a Texas law to split into separate companies and shift a large volume of legal claims onto the newly created entity. In the second step, the entity carrying the lawsuits files for bankruptcy and seeks to release its parent organization from all liability in exchange for a payout. Johnson & Johnson transferred some of its assets and all of the legal claims against it over asbestos-tainted talcum powder into a new legal entity that filed for Chapter 11. Boy Scouts of America ... agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle claims of sexual abuse in bankruptcy court, a deal that shields from future litigation insurance companies as well as schools, churches and community organizations involved with the nonprofit.

Note: For more like this, read about how powerful corporations use the bankruptcy system to dodge lawsuits over sexual abuse and deadly products. Along US opioid industry lines, read how the industry operated like a drug cartel. Watch our Mindful News Brief video on how the deadly War on Drugs protects the activities of the rich and powerful: military-intelligence interests within the US government, big banks, Big Pharma, and drug cartels.


The Opaque Industry Secretly Inflating Prices for Prescription Drugs
2024-06-21, New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/business/prescription-drug-costs-pbm.html

Americans are paying too much for prescription drugs. Pharmacy benefit managers ... are driving up drug costs for millions of people, employers and the government. The three largest pharmacy benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, act as middlemen overseeing prescriptions for more than 200 million Americans. They are owned by huge health care conglomerates – CVS Health, Cigna and UnitedHealth Group – and are hired by employers and governments. The job of the P.B.M.s is to reduce drug costs. Instead, they frequently do the opposite. They steer patients toward pricier drugs, charge steep markups on what would otherwise be inexpensive medicines and extract billions of dollars in hidden fees. Most Americans get their health insurance through a government program like Medicare or through an employer, which pay for two different types of insurance for each person. One type covers visits to doctors and hospitals, and it is handled by an insurance company. The other pays for prescriptions. That is overseen by a P.B.M. The P.B.M. negotiates with drug companies, pays pharmacies and helps decide which drugs patients can get at what price. In theory, everyone saves money. But those savings appear to be largely a mirage, a product of a system where prices have been artificially inflated so that major P.B.M.s and drug companies can boost their profits while taking credit for reducing prices.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.


FedEx's Secretive Police Force Is Helping Cops Build An AI Car Surveillance Network
2024-06-19, Forbes
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2024/06/19/fedex-police-help-cops...

Twenty years ago, FedEx established its own police force. Now it's working with local police to build out an AI car surveillance network. The shipping and business services company is using AI tools made by Flock Safety, a $4 billion car surveillance startup, to monitor its distribution and cargo facilities across the United States. As part of the deal, FedEx is providing its Flock surveillance feeds to law enforcement, an arrangement that Flock has with at least four multi-billion dollar private companies. Some local police departments are also sharing their Flock feeds with FedEx – a rare instance of a private company availing itself of a police surveillance apparatus. Such close collaboration has the potential to dramatically expand Flock's car surveillance network, which already spans 4,000 cities across over 40 states and some 40,000 cameras that track vehicles by license plate, make, model, color and other identifying characteristics, like dents or bumper stickers. Jay Stanley ... at the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was "profoundly disconcerting" that FedEx was exchanging data with law enforcement as part of Flock's "mass surveillance" system. "It raises questions about why a private company ... would have privileged access to data that normally is only available to law enforcement," he said. Forbes previously found that [Flock] had itself likely broken the law across various states by installing cameras without the right permits.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.


Global rush for farmland could trigger world war, documentary argues
2024-06-14, The Hill
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4720483-farmland-water-internat...

A global network of powerful entities, fueled in part by Wall Street, is buying up land and water around the world. This global land rush has led to wrecked wells and lost farms from Arizona to Zambia – and it risks sowing the seeds for future global conflict, according to "The Grab," a new documentary out today from Gabriela Cowperthwaite. The film follows a seven-year investigation by producer and journalist Nathan Halverson of The Center for Investigative Reporting. In part, "The Grab" argues that power is being exercised over individual landowners by a convoluted and opaque network of sovereign wealth funds, national governments and Wall Street. One critical focus of this push is Africa. Halverson interviewed Brig Siachitema, an activist in the Zambian town of Serenje, where he says foreign investors have been buying up the ancestral land of villagers and kicking them off it. Late in the movie, he presents La Paz County Supervisor Holly Irwin with evidence that the Arizona State Retirement System – her own pension fund – is invested in the project that is draining the aquifer beneath the county. Rather than fighting to protect U.S. land and food from other multinational corporations, "the governments are working for the corporations." There are enough calories worldwide to feed a growing global population, even with climate change, and even in 2050. The race to lock down resources, and governments' panic over the unrest caused by spiking food prices, risks scaling up to a war between great powers.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in the financial system and in the corporate world from reliable major media sources.


Cats on the moon? Google's AI tool is producing misleading responses that have experts worried
2024-05-24, Associated Press
https://apnews.com/article/google-ai-overviews-96e763ea2a6203978f581ca9c10f1b07

Ask Google if cats have been on the moon and it used to spit out a ranked list of websites so you could discover the answer for yourself. Now it comes up with an instant answer generated by artificial intelligence - which may or may not be correct. "Yes, astronauts have met cats on the moon, played with them, and provided care," said Google's newly retooled search engine. It added: "For example, Neil Armstrong said, ‘One small step for man' because it was a cat's step. Buzz Aldrin also deployed cats on the Apollo 11 mission." None of this is true. Similar errors – some funny, others harmful falsehoods – have been shared on social media since Google this month unleashed AI overviews, a makeover of its search page that frequently puts the summaries on top of search results. It's hard to reproduce errors made by AI language models – in part because they're inherently random. They work by predicting what words would best answer the questions asked of them based on the data they've been trained on. They're prone to making things up – a widely studied problem known as hallucination. Another concern was a deeper one – that ceding information retrieval to chatbots was degrading the serendipity of human search for knowledge, literacy about what we see online, and the value of connecting in online forums with other people who are going through the same thing.Those forums and other websites count on Google sending people to them, but Google's new AI overviews threaten to disrupt the flow of money-making internet traffic.

Note: Read more about the potential dangers of Google's new AI tool. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on artificial intelligence controversies from reliable major media sources.


With JPMorgan, Mastercard on board in biometric ‘breakthrough' year, you may soon start paying with your face
2024-05-20, CNBC News
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/20/this-may-be-the-year-you-pay-with-your-face-a...

Automated fast food restaurant CaliExpress by Flippy, in Pasadena, Calif., opened in January to considerable hype due to its robot burger makers, but the restaurant launched with another, less heralded innovation: the ability to pay for your meal with your face. CaliExpress uses a payment system from facial ID tech company PopID. It's not the only fast-food chain to employ the technology. Biometric payment options are becoming more common. Amazon introduced pay-by-palm technology in 2020, and while its cashier-less store experiment has faltered, it installed the tech in 500 of its Whole Foods stores last year. Mastercard, which is working with PopID, launched a pilot for face-based payments in Brazil back in 2022, and it was deemed a success – 76% of pilot participants said they would recommend the technology to a friend. As stores implement biometric technology for a variety of purposes, from payments to broader anti-theft systems, consumer blowback, and lawsuits, are rising. In March, an Illinois woman sued retailer Target for allegedly illegally collecting and storing her and other customers' biometric data via facial recognition technology without their consent. Amazon and T-Mobile are also facing legal actions related to biometric technology. In other countries ... biometric payment systems are comparatively mature. Visitors to McDonald's in China ... use facial recognition technology to pay for their orders.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on AI and Big Tech from reliable major media sources.


What Is "Big Ag," and Why Should You Be Worried About Them?
2024-05-09, The Equation (Union of Concerned Scientists Blog)
https://blog.ucsusa.org/karen-perry-stillerman/what-is-big-ag-and-why-should-...

Corporations across the food system increasingly have the power, by virtue of their size, market domination, political connections, and deep pockets, to set prices, meddle with science, evade regulation, and write the rules to benefit themselves. "Big Ag" and "Big Food" are shorthand for a sprawling collection of giant, often multinational corporations that wield enormous market power throughout our food system. Some of these companies are household names–for example, Tyson Foods, John Deere, and General Mills–while others are virtually unknown to consumers. Those lesser-known companies tend to operate up the supply chain, and include Bayer and Syngenta, which sell the seeds farmers need and the pesticides they've come to rely on, and Nutrien and CF Industries Holdings, which manufacture synthetic fertilizers. The consequences of extreme agriculture and food industry concentration ... include supply chain instability, unsafe working conditions and downward pressure on wages, and higher food prices for consumers. Some 40% of farmland nationally is owned, in ever-larger tracts, by absentee landlords who don't farm but rent to others (in the Corn Belt bullseye of Iowa, it's more than half). Billionaires, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, are among the largest private owners of US farmland. And corporations and investment funds like Nuveen and Manulife are buying up farmland at a rate that should alarm you.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on food system corruption from reliable major media sources.


Israeli Weapons Firms Required To Buy Cloud Services From Google And Amazon
2024-05-01, The Intercept
https://theintercept.com/2024/05/01/google-amazon-nimbus-israel-weapons-arms-...

Google and Amazon are both loath to discuss security aspects of the cloud services they provide through their joint contract with the Israeli government, known as Project Nimbus. Both the Ministry of Defense and Israel Defense Forces are Nimbus customers. According to a 63-page Israeli government procurement document ... two of Israel's leading state-owned weapons manufacturers are required to use Amazon and Google for cloud computing needs. Though details of Google and Amazon's contractual work with the Israeli arms industry aren't laid out in the tender document, which outlines how Israeli agencies will obtain software services through Nimbus, the firms are responsible for manufacturing drones, missiles, and other weapons Israel has used to bombard Gaza. Project Nimbus ... has already created a public uproar. Google and Amazon have faced backlash ranging from street protests to employee revolts. Following anti-Nimbus sit-ins organized at the company's New York and Sunnyvale, California, offices, Google fired 50 employees. Emaan Haseem, [was] a cloud computing engineer at Google until she was fired after participating in the Sunnyvale protest. "A lot of us signed up or applied to work at Google because we were trying to avoid working at terrible unethical companies," she said. "Why are we pretending that because my logo is colorful and has round letters that I'm any better than Raytheon?"

Note: When Google employees protested Project Maven, a DoD drone program that used Google technology, the Big Tech giant dropped the contract with the Pentagon in 2018. Read about how Silicon Valley has been infiltrated by intelligence agencies.


Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls
2024-04-14, The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/paywall-problems-media-trus...

According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, more than 75 percent of America's leading newspapers, magazines, and journals are behind online paywalls. And how do American news consumers react to that? Almost 80 percent of Americans steer around those paywalls and seek out a free option. Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There's a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness–it dies behind paywalls. Less than a third of Americans in a recent Gallup poll say they have "a fair amount" or a "a great deal" of trust that the news is fair and accurate. Part of the problem ... is that the platform companies, which are the largest distributors of free news, have deprioritized news. Meta has long had an uncomfortable relationship with news on Facebook. In the past year ... Meta has changed its algorithm in a way that has cost some news outlets 30 to 40 percent of their traffic.

Note: It's ironic that this story is behind a paywall. Read the complete article here using Textise, an excellent tool that converts most webpages into text-only versions. For a powerful reflection on the rise of paywalls and online ads in news outlets, read this Substack piece written by our news editor Mark Bailey. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media corruption from reliable sources.


‘I wouldn't put my damn daughter in these': Toxic ‘forever chemicals' lurk in feminine products
2024-04-03, The Hill
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/4569864-pfas-toxic-forever-chem...

Forever chemicals, also known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), are a pervasive group of compounds that have been linked to a number of cancers and other illnesses. The toxic substances have become widespread in the air, soil and water via industrial discharge and are found in a number of common household items, from cookware to dental floss to stain-resistant furniture. And many of the products in which they have been detected – including waterproof makeup, workout leggings and period products – are primarily marketed toward women. In May 2022, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts-based Silent Spring Institute published a study ... looking at the presence of PFAS in underwear and several other consumer items. Among those products was menstrual underwear. Research released in August ... also found indicators of PFAS in some period products, including wrappers for several pads and some tampons and outer layers of menstrual underwear. A 2021 study ... tested 231 makeup products and found that 63 percent of the foundations, 58 percent of the eye products, 55 percent of the lip products and 47 percent of the mascaras it looked at contained high levels of fluorine. The Environmental Working Group has identified 300 cosmetic products from 50 different popular brands that contain PFAS in its Skin Deep database. The advocacy organization found that 200 of these products contain PTFE, which is also used in Teflon pans.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on health and corporate corruption from reliable major media sources.


Manufacturing Consent: The Border Fiasco and the "Smart Wall"
2024-02-19, Unlimited Hangout
https://unlimitedhangout.com/2024/02/investigative-reports/manufacturing-cons...

The disastrous situation at the US-Mexico border is, and has been, intentionally produced. Illegal crossings have risen to unprecedented levels. There is a bipartisan consensus about what must be done. Tellingly, the same "solution" is also being quietly rolled out at all American ports of entry that are not currently being "overrun", such as airports. That solution, of course, is biometric surveillance, enabled by AI, facial recognition/biometrics and autonomous devices. This "solution" is not just being implemented throughout the United States as an alleged means of thwarting migrants, it is also being rapidly implemented throughout the world in apparent lockstep. Global policy agendas, ratified by nearly every country in the world ... seek both to restrict the extent of people's freedom of movement and to surveil people's movements ... through the global implementation of digital identity. The defense tech firm Anduril ... is one of the main beneficiaries of government contracts to build autonomous surveillance towers along the US-Mexico border, which are now also being rolled out along the US-Canada border. Anduril will create "a digital wall that is not a barrier so much as a web of all-seeing eyes, with intelligence to know what it sees." While Anduril is one of the main companies building the "virtual wall," they are not alone. General Dynamics, a defense firm deeply connected to organized crime, espionage scandals and corruption, has developed several hundred remote video surveillance systems (RVSS) towers for CBP while Google, another Big Tech firm with CIA connections, has been tapped by CBP to have its AI used in conjunction with Anduril's towers, which also utilize Anduril's own AI operating system known as Lattice.

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