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‘Liberal’ Media Propaganda Tells the World: America Is First
CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and other outlets drive home the idea that the U.S. “has the absolute right to impose sanctions on country after country overseas if they violate human rights or are not democratic.”
During the Cold War, Martin Luther King Jr. denounced the U.S. government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Liberal outlets including the New York Times and Washington Post condemned King, essentially telling him to leave foreign policy to “us white guys.”
King criticized the arrogance of the West feeling that “it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them.” Now, that same arrogance pervades U.S. media. Whether China, Iran, or Venezuela, we have everything to teach with crushing sanctions.
Jeff Cohen, founding director of PCIM and founder of FAIR, writes, “Let’s do today what MLK urged us to do back then: look at ourselves in the mirror.”
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Corporate Media: California Only Gets Attention When It’s on Fire
Among 2020’s many disasters were the apocalyptic wildfires that raged in the American west. The infernos turned the skies eerie shades of orange and left over 4 million acres of land scorched in California alone.
According to CalFire’s list, six of the 20 largest recorded wildfires in California since 1932 raged during the summer of 2020, and unfortunately, California is poised for another catastrophic season.
Consistently devastated by extreme heat, drought, and wildfires in recent years, the state has been enduring the ravages of climate change. Yet, unless California is being actively destroyed by massive wildfires, its climate emergency sees little airtime from major news networks.
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Amazon’s Dollars Bust Unions and News
This spring’s union drive at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, saw workers attempting to organize to improve conditions under the company’s grueling pressure. Outlets in independent and mainstream media thoroughly covered the failed drive, which was mired with union-busting strategies, including cops hired to harass organizers and advocates, and an army of employees defending the brand on Twitter.
Continued reports of Amazon’s dangerous working conditions—which have led to the widespread practice of delivery drivers peeing in bottles—demonstrate the power massive corporations like Amazon hold over both workers and media. Ads in the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post suggest an idyllic work environment, while product promotions on CNN’s website bury reports of overworked employees.
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Time to Stop Modernizing America’s Nukes and to Start Negotiating Peace
The Biden administration’s proposed military budget calls for the production of nuclear “pits”—the spherical plutonium-based implosion bomb that dropped on Nagasaki. Not since 1992 has the U.S. arms industry invested in these, but Biden’s massive $753-billion National Security Budget has allotted funds to—prematurely—ensure the Plutonium-239 in America’s nukes hasn’t broken down enough to render them duds.
Dave Lindorff, 2019 Izzy Winner, deconstructs the reasons the U.S. has to restart its “pit” manufacturing: “to serve as triggers for new thermonuclear bombs and warheads planned for use by new planes, ships and ballistic missiles, and perhaps as small ‘useable’ tactical bombs with yields as low as 5 kilotons.”
“This is a bunch of really terrible ideas.”
Lindorff delves into the U.S.’s history of nuclear production during peacetime, including its “first use” strategy—contrary to common belief, “retaliation is not what the Minuteman or Trident missiles were designed for.”
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The Biden American Jobs Plan Is Also a Health Plan
Over a decade after the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and in the wake of the COVID-19 recession, Americans are experiencing precarity—“depending on the will or pleasure of another,” as author of “Having and Being Had” Eula Biss puts it.
Pay drops and job losses have largely hit low-income workers, disproportionately women, and especially women of color. In the first 10 months of the pandemic, women had a net loss of 5.4 million jobs, amounting to 1 million more lost than men. In December 2020 alone, 154,000 Black women dropped out of the labor force.
The Biden administration’s American Jobs plan of 2021 will help lessen this precarity, writes Jennifer Tennant. In bolstering infrastructure, supply chains, science, and care infrastructure, the plan directly and indirectly will improve the nation’s health, “particularly that of low-wage workers, women, and anyone affected by the care economy.”
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Billionaires Aren’t Paying Income Tax – and Mainstream Media Doesn’t Care
On June 8, ProPublica published an in-depth report revealing that American billionaires including Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos pay little to no income tax.
Information obtained from the Internal Revenue Service detailed how the nation’s wealthiest managed to dodge taxes—“The most alarming part of this revelation is that this extreme tax avoidance is all done through perfectly legal means,” with loopholes for the ultra-rich netting a collective tax rate of 3.4% against the average individual rate of 14.6%.
Still, some mainstream media outlets glossed over the gravity of this massive tax evasion. Read PCIM’s roundup here.
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Voting Rights Bill Will Be Blocked by the Anti-Democratic System It Seeks to Reform
On Tuesday, Congressional Democrats’ signature voting rights bill, the For The People Act, is set to be defeated by the system it’s meant to reform, writes Mother Jones. With automatic voter registration and early voting, the bill would expand voting access for millions of Americans while cracking down on partisan gerrymandering and dark money.
The 50 Democrats who support the For the People Act represent 43 more Americans than the 50 Republican senators who oppose it. But because of the 60-vote requirement to pass most legislation, 41 Republican senators representing just 21% of the country can block the bill from moving forward.
Because Democrats Sen. Joe Manchinand Sen. Kyrsten Sinema won’t support getting rid of the filibuster, Democrats must find GOP votes, even as Republicans enact a barrage of voter suppression bills.
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American Insurrection
For three years, FRONTLINE has collaborated with ProPublica to investigate America’s rise of extremism. Following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, they analyze how far-right extremist groups have evolved since the 2017 Charlottesville rally and the threats they continue to pose in the documentary American Insurrection, free to watch on PBS.
A written investigation details the path into extremism by an active duty Air Force sergeant and member of the anti-government Boogaloo Bois movement. The actions of Steven Carrillo, who began a decade earlier embracing the tea party movement and second amendment rights, culminated in the murders of a deputy sheriff and a federal security officer.
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Western States Face Record Heat & Historic Drought, But GOP Rejects Green Infrastructure Funding
Lawmakers in Washington are negotiating over an infrastructure bill that Democrats say needs to include major new funding to address the climate crisis. Much of the U.S. is currently experiencing record heat, with several western states facing severe drought and water shortages.
Democracy Now! speaks with climate and energy researcher Leah Stokes, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who says, “The climate crisis is really happening right now, and every single year we delay on passing a climate bill, the worse the crisis gets.”
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In Other News
1. White House reveals which countries will get the 55 million vaccine doses it is sharing globally (The Independent)
2. Cancel Prime (The Atlantic)
3. Republicans Object To Partisan Election Laws — Unless It’s Their Party Writing Them (HuffPost)
4. Ethiopia’s Tigray crisis: Heavy fighting reported (BBC)
5. Migrants turned away at border under Biden face shocking abuse in Mexico (The Guardian)
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