Tag: corporations

Fascism Is Actually a Merger of State and Corporate Power, Stamping Out Dissent

“Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

While this was originally written by Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile, Benito Mussolini took this statement and made it his own

The word “fascism” gets tossed around a lot, but let’s look at the history behind it so we can better understand this political movement. Mussolini used to confidently declare that the 20th century would be the century of fascism.  And while he was roundly defeated in World War II, his ideology may have been the winner in the long run.

Fascism was never a well-developed school of thought, in the way Marxism and Leninism were.  It emerged as a response to socialism in the aftermath of the First World War.

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Give Small Business a Fighting Chance Against Mega Marijuana

The SAFE(R) Banking Act vote and the Biden administration’s review of the federal status of marijuana have garnered headlines and applause from many drug reform advocates and cannabis industry leaders. But without congressional action to protect small businesses, federal marijuana reform threatens to give an unfair advantage to a handful of national corporations while hobbling thousands of local farmers and neighborhood shopkeepers.

Under current law, state-licensed marijuana companies are denied the use of basic financial services. That means no checking accounts, no tax credits, no small business loans. For the cannabis industry’s emerging billion-dollar corporations, that’s not a problem. They’re able to expand and gobble up smaller companies (and their licenses) using private equity money and funding rounds in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Small businesses can’t compete on that scale. Unless Congress acts, the Biden administration’s plan to merely reschedule marijuana is likely to supercharge the rise of national cannabis conglomerates while strangling local community-scale businesses.

This should be a bipartisan win-win. Support for small business and marijuana legalization are two rare issues where Republican and Democratic voters find common ground. A recent Gallup poll found Republican support for legalization now tops 51 percent, while 81 percent of Democrats want to end pot prohibition. Both parties compete to be seen as the one true BFF of Main Street mom-and-pops.

And yet party leaders on both sides are poised to embrace a lose-lose. In a study recently published by Ohio State University’s Drug Enforcement and Policy Center, we found that America’s $26 billion legal cannabis industry is quickly consolidating into the hands of a few well-financed national players. In 2018, the seven largest multistate cannabis companies accounted for only 3 percent of the legal industry’s annual revenue. By the end of 2022, that share had grown to nearly 18 percent.

If the trend continues, the cannabis industry might soon resemble America’s beer industry: a market dominated by a handful of global corporations with small businesses competing for an ever-shrinking slice of the pie.

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The New Colonialist Food Economy

This past summer, the global trade regime finalized details for a revolution in African agriculture. Under a pending draft protocol on intellectual property rights, the trade bodies sponsoring the African Continental Free Trade Area seek to lock all 54 African nations into a proprietary and punitive model of food cultivation, one that aims to supplant farmer traditions and practices that have endured on the continent for millennia.

A primary target is the farmers’ recognized human right to save, share, and cultivate seeds and crops according to personal and community needs. By allowing corporate property rights to supersede local seed management, the protocol is the latest front in a global battle over the future of food. Based on draft laws written more than three decades ago in Geneva by Western seed companies, the new generation of agricultural reforms seeks to institute legal and financial penalties throughout the African Union for farmers who fail to adopt foreign-engineered seeds protected by patents, including genetically modified versions of native seeds. The resulting seed economy would transform African farming into a bonanza for global agribusiness, promote export-oriented monocultures, and undermine resilience during a time of deepening climate disruption.

The architects of this new seed economy include not only major seed and biotech firms but also their sponsor governments and a raft of nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. In recent years, this alliance has cannily worked to expand and harden intellectual property restrictions around seeds—also known as “plant variety protection”—under the fashionable policy mantra of “climate-smart agriculture.” This broad rhetorical phrase conjures a suite of practical, climate-driven upgrades to food production that conceals a vastly more complicated and contentious effort to reengineer global farming for the benefit of biotech and agribusiness—not African farmers or the climate.

The tightening of intellectual property laws on farms throughout the African Union would represent a major victory for the global economic forces that have spent the past three decades in a campaign to undermine farmer-managed seed economies and oversee their forced integration into the “value chains” of global agribusiness. These changes threaten the livelihoods of Africa’s small farmers and their collective biogenetic heritage, including a number of staple grains, legumes, and other crops their ancestors have been developing and safeguarding since the dawn of agriculture.

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BP’s Financing of Colombia’s Murderous Military

Files unearthed exclusively by Declassified in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, shine a new light on British oil giant BP’s financial arrangements with the Colombian military during the 1990s. At the time, the Colombian armed forces were one of the worst abusers of human rights in the Western hemisphere.

The documents show how BP not only offered to finance the military units operating around its oil sites in the department of Casanare, but also proposed funding Colombia’s “national defence activities” across the country.

On top of this, the files demonstrate how in 1994 BP collaborated with General Álvaro Velandia Hurtado, then the commander of the Colombian army’s notorious sixteenth brigade, on “conflict resolution” in Casanare.

An expert in military intelligence, Velandia has been accused of involvement in a series of brutal human rights abuses including the kidnap, torture, and murder of a social activist in 1987, and collaboration with a Colombian death squad. 

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COMPANIES ALREADY BAN THE USE OF THEIR DRUGS FOR LETHAL INJECTION. NOW THEY’RE BLOCKING IV EQUIPMENT.

MEDICAL EQUIPMENT MANUFACTURERS are refusing to sell their products for use in lethal injection, The Intercept has learned. The stance could further hinder states’ ability to carry out death sentences at a time when similar restrictions have limited access to drugs.

The four companies that have raised objections are Baxter International Inc., B. Braun Medical Inc., Fresenius Kabi, and Johnson & Johnson. In addition to manufacturing drugs, they make IV catheters, syringes, medical tubing, and IV bags, products states rely on to administer lethal injection. In statements to The Intercept, the companies said that the use of their equipment in executions contradicts their values.

“Johnson & Johnson develops medical innovations to save and enhance lives,” Joshina Kapoor, a spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson, wrote in an email. “We do not condone the use of our products for lethal injections for capital punishment.”

Fresenius Kabi, a German company that specializes in IV devices, told The Intercept that it would seize its products from corrections departments if it became aware of their use in lethal injection. B. Braun, which is also headquartered in Germany, said it prohibits its U.S.-based distributors from selling products to prisons for executions. Baxter International, a health care company based in Illinois, confirmed through a spokesperson that a 2017 statement opposing the use of its products in lethal injection applied to medical equipment as well as drugs.

For more than a decade, pharmaceutical companies have forbidden state corrections departments from using their drugs in U.S. execution chambers. The restrictions have led states to track down execution chemicals through unscrupulous suppliers, devise new lethal injection protocols using untested drug combinations, or pursue alternative methods of execution.

But there has been little inquiry into the equipment used to perform lethal injections. The manufacturers’ newly public positions are representative of the growing role private companies are playing in the future of lethal injection and could fuel a new swath of legal challenges as lawyers seek information about the products utilized to kill their clients.

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Dove hit by growing BOYCOTT for hiring BLM activist Zyahna Bryant who ruined white student Morgan Bettinger’s life

Furious conservatives have begun boycotting Dove after the soap brand hired a Black Lives Matter activist notorious for destroying a white student’s life over a remark she later admitted she may have ‘misheard.’ 

Carole Thorpe, from Charlottesville in Virginia, shared a snap of three bars of Dove soap tossed in the trash Thursday on learning the Unilever-owned brand had joined forces with Zyahna Bryant to push a ‘fat liberation’ campaign. 

Sharing her horror at news of Bryant’s glitzy Dove gig, Thorpe wrote: ‘After hearing that Dove Beauty chose Zyahna Bryant -who ruined Morgan Bettinger’s life – for their ‘fat acceptance ambassador,’ THIS lifelong large lady & now former Dove customer tossed out the last three bars of Dove product she will EVER buy. I have written to Unilever too.’

Scores of other angry users on X, formerly known as Twitter, also vowed to stop buying Dove products in protest at the campaign, which 22 year-old Bryant has been pushing on Instagram. 

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Dove partners with BLM activist accused of wrongly getting white student expelled to promote ‘fat liberation’

Beauty giant Dove has partnered with a Black Lives Matter activist to promote “fat liberation,” after she was accused of wrongfully getting a white student expelled from her university over a “misheard” remark.

Zyanha Bryant, a community organizer and student activist studying at the University of Virginia, made the announcement she was a “Dove ambassador” on her Instagram page at the end of August, as she spoke about her goal of ending the stigma of being overweight.

“My belief is that we should be centering the voices and the experiences of the most marginalized people and communities at all times,” Bryant, 22, said in a video.

“So when I think about what fat liberation looks like to me, I think about centering the voices of those who live in and who maneuver through spaces and institutions in a fat body.”

She captioned her video by saying, “Fat liberation is something we should all be talking about… Tell us what Fat Liberation means to you using the hashtag #SizeFreedom and tagging @dove to share your story.”

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Cars are collecting data on par with Big Tech, watchdog report finds

An internet and privacy watchdog has a warning: Your car is tracking you, and it’s collecting far more information than it needs just to get you where you’re going.

Mozilla, the nonprofit that develops the Firefox browser, released a report Wednesday detailing how the policies of more than two dozen car manufacturers allow for the collection, storage and sale of a wide range of sensitive information about auto owners.

Researchers behind the report said that cars now routinely collect data on par with tech companies, offer few details on how that data is stored and used, and don’t give drivers any meaningful way to opt out.

“Cars are a humongous privacy nightmare that nobody’s seemingly paying attention to,” said Jen Caltrider, who directs Privacy Not Included, a consumer privacy guide run by Mozilla. “And they’re getting away with it. It really needs to change because it’s only going to get worse as cars get more and more connected.”

Unlike Europe, the U.S has few meaningful regulations on how companies trade and store personal data. That’s led to a bustling industry of companies that buy and sell peope’s information, often without their knowledge.

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Hackers Can Silently Grab Your IP Through Skype — Microsoft Is In No Rush to Fix It

Hackers are able to grab a target’s IP address, potentially revealing their general physical location, by simply sending a link over the Skype mobile app. The target does not need to click the link or otherwise interact with the hacker beyond opening the message, according to a security researcher who demonstrated the issue and successfully discovered my IP address by using it.

Yossi, the independent security researcher who uncovered the vulnerability, reported the issue to Microsoft earlier this month, according to Yossi and a cache of emails and bug reports he shared with 404 Media. In those emails Microsoft said the issue does not require immediate servicing, and gave no indication that it plans to fix the security hole. Only after 404 Media contacted Microsoft for comment did the company say it would patch the issue in an upcoming update.

The attack could pose a serious risk to activists, political dissidents, journalists, those targeted by cybercriminals, and many more people. At minimum, an IP address can show what area of a city someone is in. An IP address can be even more revealing in a less densely populated area, because there are fewer people who could be associated with it.

“I think just about anybody could be harmed by this,” Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior public interest technologist at activist organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said when I explained the issue to him. Quintin said the major concern was “finding people’s location for physical escalations, and finding people’s IP address for digital escalations.”

To verify that the vulnerability has the impact that Yossi described, I asked him to test it out on me. To start, Yossi sent me a link via Skype text chat to google.com. The link was to the real Google site, and not an imposter.

I then opened Skype on an iPad and viewed the chat message. I didn’t even click the link. But very soon after, Yossi pasted my IP address into the chat. It was correct.

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How a Well-Regarded Mac App Became a Trojan Horse

In the early days of macOS Mojave in 2018, Apple hadn’t offered users a way to automatically switch to dark and light mode at different times of the day. As usual, there were third-party developers eager to pick up the slack. One of the more well-regarded night mode apps to fix this issue was NightOwl, first released in the middle of 2018, a small app with a simple utility that could run in the background during day-to-day use.

With more official macOS features added in 2021 that enabled the “Night Shift” dark mode, the NightOwl app was left forlorn and forgotten on many older Macs. Few of those supposed tens of thousands of users likely noticed when the app they ran in the background of their older Macs was bought by another company, nor when earlier this year that company silently updated the dark mode app so that it hijacked their machines in order to send their IP data through a server network of affected computers, AKA a botnet.

After some users noted issues with the app after a June update, web developer Taylor Robinson discovered the problem ran deep, as the program redirected users’ computers’ connections without any notification. The real dark mode turned out to be the transformation of a respectable Mac app into a playground for data harvesters.

In an email with Gizmodo, Robinson broke down their own investigation into the app. They found that NightOwl installs a launcher that turns the users’ computer into a kind of botnet agent for data that’s sold to third parties. The updated 0.4.5.4 version of NightOwl, released June 13, runs a local HTTP proxy without users’ direct knowledge or consent, they said. The only hint NightOwl gives to users that something’s afoot is a consent notice after they hit the download button, saying the app uses Google Analytics for anonymized tracking and bugs. The botnet settings cannot be disabled through the app, and in order to remove the modifications made to a Mac, users need to run several commands in the Mac Terminal app to excise the vestiges of the code from their system, per Robinson.

It’s currently unclear how many users were affected by the seemingly malicious code, especially as NightOwl has since become unavailable on both the website and app store. The NightOwl site claims the app was downloaded more than 141,000 times, and that there were more than 27,000 active users on the app. Even if the app lost most of its users after Apple installed new Dark Mode software, there were potentially thousands of users running NightOwl on their old Macs.

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