Tag: corporations

Proton Threatens to Leave Switzerland Over Proposed Surveillance Law Expansion

Proton, the Swiss tech firm recognized for its privacy-first services like Proton Mail and Proton VPN, has issued a stark warning: if Switzerland enacts a sweeping expansion of its surveillance law, the company will relocate out of the country.

The proposed legal overhaul seeks to broaden data retention mandates, extending them beyond mobile and internet service providers to encompass VPNs, messaging platforms, and social networks. Privacy advocates argue this would obliterate core safeguards around encryption and user anonymity, long considered hallmarks of Switzerland’s digital landscape.

Speaking to Swiss broadcaster RTS, Proton CEO Andy Yen cautioned that the move would not only undermine civil liberties but also tarnish Switzerland’s reputation as a haven for secure, privacy-respecting technology companies.

“This revision attempts to implement something that has been deemed illegal in the EU and the United States. The only country in Europe with a roughly equivalent law is Russia,” Yen said.

Under the proposed changes, companies classified as “derived service providers” would be brought under new monitoring obligations, with requirements to store specific categories of user data and submit to enhanced surveillance protocols. Such measures would force Proton to break from its no-logs policy and compromise encryption standards that its users depend on.

Yen was unequivocal about the company’s position. “I think we would have no choice but to leave Switzerland,” he said. “The law would become almost identical to the one in force today in Russia. It’s an untenable situation. We would be less confidential as a company in Switzerland than Google, based in the United States. So it’s impossible for our business model.”

Although the consultation period ended on May 6, 2025, the backlash against the proposal has been gaining momentum. Swiss political parties, civil society groups, and private firms have expressed deep concern about the implications for digital freedoms. In some regions, including Geneva, officials have invoked the recently recognized right to digital integrity as a constitutional safeguard.

Roussel has been at the forefront of efforts to enshrine digital integrity into law. The principle was formally adopted by Geneva in 2023 and Neuchâtel in 2024, with more than 90 percent public support.

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Georgia Governor Signs Bill Granting Immunity for Harms Caused by Pesticides and Fertilizers

Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed SB144 into law, which has also been referred to as an immunity bill for agrochemical businesses that sell pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. The bill states, “a manufacturer cannot be held liable for failing to warn consumers of health risks above those required by the United States Environmental Protection Agency.” The Georgia legislature passed the bill and was awaiting Kemp’s signature, which he finalized on Monday.

Georgia became the second state in the nation to provide manufacturer immunity for harm caused by pesticides after North Dakota signed a similar bill into law last month. Bayer has been handling tens of thousands of lawsuits related to cancer allegedly caused by Roundup, a product that Bayer owns after the agrochemical corporation purchased Monsanto in 2018. In April, The HighWire reported about Bayer’s recent court loss in which the company is required to pay over $2 billion for causing a man’s non-Hodgkin lymphoma, but the high payout amount is expected to be appealed. This case was conducted in a Georgia courtroom.

The EPA is still awaiting a court decision regarding its most recent evaluation of glyphosate’s effect on human health. The EPA currently states, “No risks of concern to human health from current uses of glyphosate.” The EPA website also states, “No evidence that glyphosate causes cancer in humans.”

Meanwhile, the passage of SB144 in Georgia means a farmer cannot sue Bayer for harms allegedly caused by Roundup because the product contains the label required by the EPA. The label states, “Keep Out of Reach of Children CAUTION See [back/ side] [panel/ booklet/ label] for [additional] first aid and precautionary statements. Alternative Text: [See container label for [complete] use directions, first aid and precautionary statements.]”

Bayer issued a statement applauding the Governor for signing the legislation. The statement said, “The signing of SB 144 by Governor Kemp demonstrates that Georgia stands with its farmers, who work tirelessly to produce safe and affordable food for communities throughout the state. We thank Governor Kemp and the legislators, farmers and ag groups that supported this important piece of legislation.”

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Reports say corporations retreated from net zero, but critics say ESG policies still enforced

Shortly before President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January, the Net Zero Asset Managers (NZAM) initiative announced it was suspending its activities. The announcement came after the investment firm Blackrock said it was withdrawing, joining an exodus of firms from the group. That month, six of the largest U.S. banks also left a similar group for banks, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA).

Critics had called NZAM and NZBA “cartels,” and firms were facing Congressional investigations and lawsuits, arguing their activities violated anti-trust laws. By coordinating an effort to harm politically unfavored companies, the lawsuits argued, they were engaging in illegal collusion, accusations the firms say are baseless. 

However, with litigation risks mounting, the firms fled NZAM and NZAB. Blackrock, the world’s largest asset management company with $11.6 trillion in assets under management, said in a statement that its “memberships in some of these organizations have caused confusion regarding BlackRock’s practices and subjected us to legal inquiries from various public officials.” 

Not really the end of ESG

The environment, social and governance (ESG) sustainable investing movement recently appeared to be nearing its end. However, that may not be the case, at least for some companies. The American Energy Institute (AEI), which defends the production of petroleum as a means of reliable and affordable energy, was recently notified its insurance wouldn’t be renewed. 

According to AEI, the Hartford Underwriters Insurance Company reportedly stated the reason for the non-renewal was that the group’s Facebook page indicated that their operations “include trade associations involved in promoting social/political causes related to energy production. This is not an acceptable exposure under the Hartford Small Commercial business segment’s guidelines.” 

“They’re really not changing their behaviors whatsoever. They’re just dropping some alliances and probably saving a few bucks on dues,” Jason Isaac, executive director of the AEI told Just the News. 

Hartford-Boycott-of-American-Energy.pdf

The Hartford didn’t respond to Just the News‘ questions about its decision not to renew AEI’s insurance or what policies the AEI was violating. 

Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, testified before the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs last month in a hearing considering anti-ESG legislation. Hild argued that even though banks have left net-zero alliances, they continue to advance policies aimed at getting companies to reduce their emissions. 

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U.S. Companies Honed Their Surveillance Tech in Israel. Now It’s Coming Home.

Rita Murad, a 21-year-old Palestinian citizen of Israel and student at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, was arrested by Israeli authorities in November 2023 after sharing three Instagram stories on the morning of October 7. The images included a picture of a bulldozer breaking through the border fence in Gaza and a quote: “Do you support decolonization as an abstract academic theory? Or as a tangible event?” She was suspended from university and faced up to five years in prison.

In recent years, Israeli security officials have boasted of a “ChatGPT-like” arsenal used to monitor social media users for supporting or inciting terrorism. It was released in full force after Hamas’s bloody attack on October 7. Right-wing activists and politicians instructed police forces to arrest hundreds of Palestinians within Israel and east Jerusalem for social media-related offenses. Many had engaged in relatively low-level political speech, like posting verses from the Quran on WhatsApp or sharing images from Gaza on their Instagram stories.

When the New York Times covered Murad’s saga last year, the journalist Jesse Baron wrote that, in the U.S., “There is certainly no way to charge people with a crime for their reaction to a terrorist attack. In Israel, the situation is completely different.”

Soon, that may no longer be the case.

Hundreds of students with various legal statuses have been threatened with deportation on similar grounds in the U.S. this year. Recent high-profile cases have targeted those associated with student-led dissent against the Israeli military’s policies in Gaza. There is Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, taken from his Columbia University residence and sent to a detention center in Louisiana. There is Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts disappeared from the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, by plainclothes officers allegedly for co-authoring an op-ed calling on university administrators to heed student protesters’ demands. And there is Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia philosophy student arrested by ICE agents outside the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office where he was scheduled for his naturalization interview.

In some instances, the State Department has relied on informants, blacklists, and technology as simple as a screenshot. But the U.S. is in the process of activating a suite of algorithmic surveillance tools Israeli authorities have also used to monitor and criminalize online speech.

In March, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the State Department was launching an AI-powered “Catch and Revoke” initiative to accelerate the cancellation of student visas. Algorithms would collect data from social media profiles, news outlets, and doxing sites to enforce the January 20 executive order targeting foreign nationals who threaten to “overthrow or replace the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands.” The arsenal was built in concert with American tech companies over the past two decades and already deployed, in part, within the U.S. immigration system.

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Top Corporations Fund Former Obama Official Calling To ‘Wage War on Whiteness’

Procter & Gamble and other prominent corporations fund a “racial justice” group whose leader, a former Obama White House official, lashed out this week at what he called “white mediocrity” and urged a “woke” army of black youth “to wage war with whiteness.”

David Johns, who led President Barack Obama’s White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans, made the remarks at an event Tuesday to promote a boycott against Target for rolling back its DEI programs.

Johns is the executive director of the National Black Justice Coalition, a black LGBT group that aims to fight “anti-Blackness.” The nonprofit lists companies like Airbnb, Sephora, Sony, and Procter & Gamble as sponsors. Procter & Gamble, which sells household brands like Gillette and Charmin, contributed $515,000 to the National Black Justice Coalition in 2023, around one-fourth of the nonprofit’s budget, according to tax records. The Department of Health and Human Services under President Biden awarded the National Black Justice Coalition a $1.2 million contract through 2026 as part of the government’s “Let’s Stop HIV Together” campaign. It is unclear if HHS is still funding the coalition, but Johns said last month his organization was “proud to be a grantee” of the HIV program.

Speaking at the anti-Target event, Johns endorsed the boycott and railed against President Donald Trump as a “fascist trying to rob us of our wealth.” He also urged black consumers to shop at black-owned businesses as part of a movement to “reclaim … African ways of being.”

“We don’t need nothing from white people. We don’t need nothing from white people,” said Johns. “They can’t even make potato salad.”

“We have everything we need to ensure that our babies are woke, that they are critical thinkers, that they are equipped to do the kind of work to wage war with whiteness,” said Johns, adding that “we don’t need to be lulled by the trappings of white mediocrity.”

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The Rise of Corporate Totalitarianism

In 1992 following the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama’s published The End of History and the Last Man in which he argued that Western liberal democracy had triumphed over communism and represented the last stage of human ideological development. In response to his former student’s book, Samuel Huntingdon wrote the Clash of Civilisations thesis where he predicted that the post-Cold War period would see the emergence of conflicts along religious and cultural lines. However, what neither of them predicted was the emergence of a new threat to peace and security: corporate totalitarianism.

Corporate totalitarianism represents a new ideological development in the history of humanity. Its proponents are the oligarch class who own investment funds and corporations, dynastic families and individuals of extraordinary wealth. They belong to the same class from which powerful politicians and statesmen are drawn, and they help coordinate their activities at the helm of political parties, from within Government departments and across the multitude of non-governmental bodies that are involved in the policymaking process. Global in nature and outlook, their identification is not with any country, religion or culture, and among their chief goals is the continued accumulation of wealth and power.

This transfer is occurring under the ideological umbrella of ‘woke’; a set of values and beliefs that at first glance appear to be emancipatory and concerned with fairness, justice, health and environmental protection. Further scrutiny of the woke agenda reveals a set of deflections from actual progress and a lack of authentic concern about the human condition. Instead ‘woke’ is a vehicle for maximising wealth and power to corporations and fantastically wealthy individuals. The COVID-19 vaccination programme saw the transfer of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to pharmaceutical companies and their investors, while concerns about diversity and equity deflect scrutiny from growing class inequality.

But the woke agenda is more malignant than just a fig leaf for egregious acts committed by corporations, often referred to as woke washing, and the oligarchs are inspired by tactics from both ends of the political spectrum. A dissection of corporate totalitarianism reveals three core themes: alienation, fear and authoritarianism. The first theme of alienation seeks to introduce policies designed to destroy all social bonds between humanity, thus undermining family, marriage, parental authority, community, neighbourhood, religious faith, culture and national identity. The destruction of social bonds leaves people atomised and undermines solidarity that might result in a successful challenge to corporate totalitarianism.

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For 4/20, Ben & Jerry’s Teams Up With Marijuana Justice Group To Push Governors To Free Cannabis Prisoners

As consumers and businesses across the U.S. gear up for the 4/20 holiday on Sunday, ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s is drawing attention to the “tens of thousands of people who will spend their 4/20 in prison for the same cannabis-related activity.”

This year the company—which has regularly used 4/20 to highlight justice-related cannabis matters—has partnered with the advocacy group Last Prisoner Project (LPP) to urge state governors to grant relief to those behind bars for marijuana.

“This 4/20, the need for cannabis justice is at an all-time HIGH,” Ben & Jerry’s said about the new effort.

The groups are also encouraging supporters to take action, recommending they reach out to their state governors to call for clemency, sign petitions to free people incarcerated for cannabis crimes, spread the word using the #420ForFreedom on social media and attend a Washington, D.C. event—the Cannabis Unity Week of Action, held April 29 through May 1—aimed at promoting broader marijuana legalization.

The company says that as “cannabis businesses will rack up sales, public figures will use their platforms to highlight cannabis culture, and millions of Americans will take advantage of their freedom and consume with friends and family” on 4/20, it’s crucial that advocates continue pushing to right the wrongs of prohibition.

“When we say legalization without justice is half baked, we mean that legalization while people, disproportionately Black and Brown, are still sitting in prison for cannabis or reeling from the detrimental impacts of having a cannabis conviction on their records is simply not justice fully realized,” Palika Makam, Ben & Jerry’s U.S. activism manager, said in a statement.

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Points For Honesty: UK Tech Firm Says “Only Immigrants From India Will Be Considered” In DevOps Want Ad

UK tech firm Avantao Technologies has apologized after posting a job ad stating “only candidates who are immigrants from India will be considered”, according to the Daily Mail.

The listing, for a DevOps engineer role in Ilford, also asked visa-related questions like “What is your native country?” and “Are you seeking sponsorship for employment in the UK?”

The Daily Mail report says that the company claims the ad was a staff training “test” that was mistakenly published. Sure.

“Unfortunately, that has been published, and we are unable to retract it because it was a mistake made by the employee who posted it live and then departed on holiday,” a spokesperson told MailOnline.

“We are very sorry to hear that this has occurred… a mistake is a mistake, and we have taken action against the individual… we genuinely apologise.”

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Shopify CEO mandates AI-first hiring policy, reshaping workforce expectations

  • Shopify’s CEO Tobi Lütke mandates that employees must justify why a role can’t be automated before hiring, signaling AI adoption as essential for productivity and efficiency. AI proficiency will now factor into performance reviews.
  • Companies like Shopify, Google and Meta are cutting jobs while heavily investing in AI tools (e.g., Shopify Magic, GitHub Copilot) to handle tasks from customer service to coding, redefining traditional roles.
  • While AI displaces some jobs, it also creates opportunities for higher-value work. Critics warn of disproportionate impacts on junior or repetitive roles, citing challenges in rapid upskilling.
  • Shopify’s workforce shrank from 8,300 in 2023 to 8,100 by late 2024, reflecting a broader trend of tech layoffs (152,000+ in 2024) as companies prioritize AI-driven efficiency over traditional hiring.
  • Industries like legal, marketing and finance are adopting AI for tasks like contract review and data analysis. Experts predict a future where human-AI collaboration dominates, requiring new policies for reskilling and worker protections.

Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke is making one thing clear to employees: artificial intelligence isn’t just a tool—it’s a fundamental requirement. In a memo sent to staff last month, the e-commerce executive announced that teams must now justify why a job can’t be automated before requesting additional hires, signaling a seismic shift in corporate hiring strategies amid the AI revolution.

The directive underscores a broader trend in the tech industry, where businesses are aggressively investing in AI while simultaneously trimming headcounts. For Lütke, the mandate is about optimizing efficiency. “What would this area look like if autonomous AI agents were already part of the team?” he wrote in the memo, later shared publicly on X. “This question can lead to really fun discussions and projects.”

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Columnist Suggests Big Business Could ‘Put a Hit Out on Trump’

A prominent British newspaper columnist suggested that big business could ‘put a hit out on Trump’ in response to his tariffs.

Writing for the Telegraph, Tim Stanley made clear that he supported Trump’s tariff regime, asserting that the U.S. president is “trying to change history, rather than just caretake it.”

“In fact, Trump is correcting a 50-year misdirection in US life, and one that the hero of many Trumpers, Richard Nixon, also attempted to fix,” he wrote.

However, Stanley made clear that the backlash to Trump’s efforts to upturn the global order could be brutal.

“Were I a foreign manufacturer, I’d wager this policy will be reversed at least by 2028 when a new president is elected – or big business puts out a hit on Trump, because they’ll tolerate anything but the devaluing of their stock price. The next gun that fires at the president will probably be made in America,” he wrote.

It’s not clear whether the columnist was actually saying Trump could be physically taken out by monied interests, although his choice of words certainly seems to suggest this is the case.

As we reported yesterday, despite Trump surviving two assassination plots last year, vile leftists would be happy to see him killed.

A poll conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute found that over 55 per cent of respondents said it would be “justified” to murder President Trump, with just under 50 per cent believing the same about Elon Musk.

As we highlight in the video below, Stephen Colbert also ‘joked’ that if the deep state existed, it should step in to do something about Trump’s tariffs, referencing the word “Fidelio” from the movie Eyes Wide Shut, which is about a secret society that kills people who expose it.

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