>Israel’s decision to assassinate Nasrallah, using some of the enormous bunker-busting bombs the United States has been arming it with, is beyond foolhardy. It is outright deranged. Israel has removed – and knows it has removed – a moderating influence on Hezbollah. > >Israel’s action will achieve nothing apart from teaching his successor, and leaders of other groups and countries labelled as terrorist by western governments, several lessons: > >- That Israel, and the West standing squarely behind it, do not play by any known rules of engagement, and that their opponents must do likewise. The current restraint from Hezbollah that has been so baffling western pundits will become a thing of the past. > >- That Israel is not interested in compromise, only escalation, and that this is a fight to death – not just against Israel but against the West that sponsors Israel. > >- That Israel's ideological extremism – its Jewish supremacism, and its endless craving for Lebensraum – must be met with even greater Shia-inspired extremism. > >Decades of western terrorism in the Middle East unleashed a Sunni nihilism embodied first in al-Qaeda and then in ISIS. >Now, the West, via Israel, is fomenting for the Shia resistance its own ISIS moment. The moderates in what the West dubs “terrorist organisations” have once again lost the argument. Why? Because the US imperial project known as “the West” has once again demonstrated it will not compromise. It demands full-spectrum, global dominance – nothing less. > >Israel may make very short tactical gains in killing Nasrallah. But we will all soon feel the whirlwind.

>“I don’t think there’s any question that it’s a form of terrorism,” [Leon] Panetta said on “CBS News Sunday morning.”

>Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) condemned Israel over the pager explosions, saying the incident “unequivocally violates international humanitarian law and undermines U.S. efforts to prevent a wider conflict.”

The Global Engagement Center (GEC), a “counter-messaging” operation of the State Department created in Barack Obama’s last year in office, is raked over the coals in a new House investigation. The Committee’s work confirms reports by Racket and the Washington Examiner about taxpayer-funded censorship, but goes beyond to detail a more profound corruption of the agency’s ostensible mission.

“The Federal government has funded, developed, and promoted entities that aim to demonetize news and information outlets because of their lawful speech,” the House Committee on Small Business found, adding that GEC “circumvented its strict international mandate” by funding private contractors with “domestic censorship capabilities.”

Not only did the Committee find evidence the State Department strategized to discredit reporting both by me and by Gabe Kaminsky of the Examiner (see reader note, coming), it also showed the State Department blazing new trails in the annals of “the dog ate my homework” chutzpah in response to Congressional oversight requests. “Despite the fact the Committee subpoenaed documents which it had been requesting for more than 14 months,” the Committee wrote, “State said it would take approximately 21 months from the date of the subpoena to produce these documents in full — around March 2026.”

Worse, when the Committee asked GEC for basic contractor information: >Categories were provided for several recipients rather than specific organizations or individuals, such as $240,136 for “Radio Programmes” [sic] and $42,600 for “On-Air Discussion…” In six instances, subawardees were just the first names of individuals… in one instance the field denoted “Report mentions subpartners; unable to find details…”

Since January of last year, GEC has been the focus of multiple Racket and Twitter Files stories, because of its role in Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, the ties GEC personnel had to the infamous Hamilton 68 “Russian influence” dashboard, and other reasons. In February of last year, meanwhile, Kaminsky of the Examiner launched a brutal investigative series that began by describing GEC’s funding of the UK-based Global Disinformation Index, showing how U.S. taxpayers unwittingly funded conscious efforts to take away revenue from American businesses like the New York Post, the Federalist, and RealClearPolitics.

That latter angle inspired the Small Business Committee investigation. Chairman Roger Williams of Texas last year demanded the State Department turn over an “unredacted list of all GEC grant recipients” from 2019 through the present. As reported here at Racket and in the Examiner, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken responded with a remarkable letter. Complaining about Examiner reporting, Blinken declared that without a “better understanding” of how the Committee planned to “utilize this sensitive information,” he would only release information in an “in camera setting.” Even in camera, however, the State Department claimed lost records while submitting answers of the “We spent money on discussions and stuff” variety.

Despite stonewalling, the Committee was able to answer a slew of key questions raised in nearly two years of reporting. The struggle to identify GEC’s contractors (especially those with stateside presences) ultimately revealed a larger ugly truth, namely that the ostensibly outward-facing State Department is pouring resources into a broad new propaganda mission at home:

In December 2022, while poring through correspondence at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco with Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang and others, I came across emails between Twitter executives about GEC. Created by Obama to counter messaging “directed at foreign audiences abroad,” GEC soon turned its attention to domestic speech. By early 2020, this new State Department censorship arm hoped to join the FBI, Homeland Security, and others in helping Twitter police content.

“GEC’s blitz on these issues is at least in part an attempt to insert themselves into the conversations we’ve had with DHS, FBI, ODNI, and others,” Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth wrote on May 6, 2020. Roth worried about letting State into the censorship trust tree, noting ominously “the GEC’s mandate for offensive [information operations] to promote American interests.” In less than a year Twitter rolled over, banning accounts GEC said were “GRU-controlled” despite a lack of clear evidence. Former CIA official-turned-Twitter exec Patrick Conlon commented on the turning-point moment: “Our window on [refusing] is closing.”

GEC soon began to pop up in correspondence related to Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), which was aggregating election “misinformation” complaints for Twitter and other platforms. This was problematic because both Twitter analysts and outside partners like the FBI seemed to be constantly complaining that GEC was sloppier and more politicized than other “anti-disinfo” groups.

Its methodology was “shoddy” and “pretty bogus,” said Roth. An analyst who’d trained the State Department to look for bad actors added that GEC was “more ideologically aligned than evidence-based.” As an example, he noted GEC “attributes membership in the yellow vests as being Russia-aligned,” and believed that “agreed with Moscow-aligned narratives = Moscow controlled.” In GEC country reports, some of which later became public, GEC formalized guilt by ideological association through a concept called the “information ecosystem,” under which accounts not directly tied to bad actors could nonetheless be labeled “highly connective.” Former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and Italian Democrat Nicola Zingaretti were among those demerited for spreading “legitimate and accurate” content that “attacks Italian politicians, the EU, and the United States.”

GEC’s idea of defining “ecosystems” to help bridge the gap between accounts with “clear links to Russia” and those “that are meant to be fully deniable” turned out to be easy to twist in the direction of US-based accounts.

When Twitter in the summer of 2020 agreed to label Chinese state accounts, GEC called that a “welcome step,” but asked if they could go a little further and consider “accounts run by organizations and media that heavily promote CCP propaganda media content.” Similar notices were sent about media in the Russian “ecosystem.” Who might qualify? GEC had already sent Twitter a report in February 2020 complaining about “flurry of disinformation” caused by the suspension of the well-known Zero Hedge account. In a report sent about “Russia-linked” media figures that were supposedly “sowing discord in France,” a now-suspended account called @buddendorf was dinged by GEC just for sharing a Zero Hedge article:

!

The New York Post last week reported that the State Department circulated an internal memo strategizing talking points to poke holes in reports by Kaminsky and me. The memo described in Christenson’s “State Department tried to discredit reporters” story is more amusing than scary. memo is more amusing than scary. It contains lines like “GEC does not and has never attempted to moderate content on social media platforms,” which is a little like Starbucks saying it never sold coffee. GEC’s claim that it never tried to “moderate” content is a semantic somersault: that above the gigantic lists of account names it sent to the platforms, it wrote things like “Below is an initial list of accounts that Twitter could consider,” instead of “Zap all 5000 of these.”

While the Twitter Files focused on “content moderation,” Kaminsky began looking into the funding of British outfit GDI. He found GEC’s connection to GDI through the good old-fashioned journalistic method of being a pest.

“During the months that I was first looking into GDI, I noticed that the British group listed one of its supporters on its website as Park Advisors, a counterterrorism firm affiliated with the State Department,” he says. “It was only after repeatedly contacting the State Department that the agency informed me that its Global Engagement Center awarded $100,000 to GDI through Park Advisors. The award was for a program that counted the Atlantic Council as a partner, among other organizations.”

The issue wasn’t the size of the award, but rather what that money funded. GDI puts out a product called a “Dynamic Exclusion List” — a blacklist— designed to help firms like Google “eliminate digital advertising as a revenue source” for disfavored outlets. Nearly all GDI’s blacklisted outlets were conservative, while NPR (rated “neutral, fact-based content”) and The Atlantic (a perfect 100/100) topped trust lists.

In efforts to investigate GEC, Kaminsky and I ran into the same problem: almost no other records of GEC contractors were public. An April 2020 audit of GEC by the State Department Inspector General showed a list of 39 agency contractors. As noted here before, 36 were redacted. If GEC was funding one contractor like GDI that impacted domestic news in defiance of State’s explicit legal mandate to keep its eyes overseas, how many other such contractors were there? What mischief was under these black boxes?

!

There were other reasons for wanting to know those contractor names. I’d learned by then that former GEC personnel helped design the Hamilton 68 dashboard, which Twitter executives decried as “bullshit” that falsely accused “a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots.” Sources in government told me to dig there and to not stop digging. The Twitter Files themselves spurred curiosity. Multiple GEC communications suggested Twitter execs make use of the Hamilton dashboard, or contact its parent organizations, the German Marshall Fund and the Alliance For Securing Democracy. I never published those communications, but for example:

!

For that reason, I raised an eyebrow at the new Committee report, which contains an entry about GEC briefing employees at Zoom. “Zoom staff asked about ‘lists’ that could be shared around ‘malign actors,’” the Committee wrote, “to which the GEC recommended the GDI and the Hamilton 2.0 dashboard”:

!

By the end of the Twitter Files project it was clear some NGOs and quasi-private entities who produced “anti-disinformation” tools for journalists, platforms like Twitter, and law enforcement agencies were receiving funding from GEC. This was odd for a few reasons, including the fact that there were so many complaints within Twitter about its methods. Eventually, in a deposition for the Murthy v. Missouri digital censorship case, FBI agent and Twitter Files all-star Elvis Chan complained about GEC and its universe of sub-contractors: >Q. And so your concern… was that the GEC’s kind of computer programs that they were making available to social media companies might be overinclusive and misidentify authentic accounts as inauthentic activity? > >CHAN: So the State Department is primarily a foreign-focus agency. I believe that in their estimation their tools would be deployed overseas, where I believe they do not have the same type of legal training that I do specifically about First Amendment protections. And so, you know, they are overseas in embassies and their analysts are overseas in embassies, and so they don’t have the same sorts of concerns that I would working at the FBI.

The House report raises these concerns and more, explaining why having a State Department entity marionetting American media traffic is a grave problem. “A foundational principle of American markets is that a business will be able to operate without unreasonable interference from the government so long as they obey the law,” the Committee staff wrote. However, they added, “the Federal government worked with the private sector extensively in recent years to remove or suppress certain disfavored speech… impacting the ability of businesses purveying that speech to use those services to compete.”

Contractors GEC employed used preposterous criteria to downrank media companies. The British site Unherd was demerited by GDI because it publishes Kathleen Stock, a “‘prominent gender-critical’ feminist.” The firm also considered the term “illegal alien” to be disinformation. Most ludicrously, it slammed sites like The New York Post, Reason, and The American Spectator for use of “sensational” language, apparently employing a subjective conception of the term. As the Committee wrote:

>The Washington Post was assigned a low risk level as it “largely avoids sensational [...] reporting.” It is clear from looking at recent headlines from opinion pieces such as “Yes, It’s okay to compare Trump to Hitler. Don’t let me stop you” and “Can anyone stop the coming Trump dictatorship?” that The Washington Post does not shy from sensationalism…

The Global Disinformation Index is just one GEC contractor and it estimates that between launch and 2022, sites on its “Dynamic Exclusion List” have “lost $128 million in annual revenue.” Our government has always been terrible at reaching the population using sites like RFE/RL or Polygraph because you can’t buy audience. You can, however, very easily cripple disfavored views using tools like GDI or NewsGuard. Trust is hard. Damage is easy, and even the dolts in our government can manage it.

The State Department has spent decades learning to make simplistic decisions overseas about which politicians the U.S. should support, and which it should discourage or even topple. It spends gobs on that mission, working in concert with “Democracy Promotion” bureaucracies like the NED (whose efforts to influence speech are also profiled in this report). It’s impossible to imagine anything more destructive than letting the government meddle in domestic politics with the same monomaniacal bluntness it employs abroad. According to this report, it’s already doing it, and will be damned if it will submit to oversight from anyone, even Congress.

>In 2022, the international relations scholar Christopher Mott coined the term “woke imperium” to describe the most recent iteration of this mode of government, which doesn’t just seek to overthrow foreign rivals, “but [to] engineer their very cultures according to the Western progressive model”. Its real aim, he explained, is to “advance the foreign policy objectives of the liberal Atlanticist Blob”.

>What unites them is this: a settled commitment to American global supremacy. That is something far more important to Dick Cheney, the human embodiment of the existing global power structure, than a few points on the tax rate or a little more diversity in government hiring. Kamala Harris, in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, promised that “I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” This is enough for Dick Cheney. In this sense, she is a traditional Democrat.

>Even among Democrats, the baseline assumption that America must have enough guns to exert our will on the entire world is not questioned. Kamala Harris may push for paid family leave, but she is not going to dismantle the United States intelligence agencies. Kamala Harris may raise taxes on capital gains, but she is not going to meaningfully slash military funding. Kamala Harris may protect abortion, but she is not going to stop sending weapons to Israel, or remove America’s drone bases in Africa, or Give Schools All The Money They Need and Make The Air Force Hold a Bake Sale to Buy a Bomber. The harshest things that America does, its most uncompromising violence, its rawest assertion of pure power over weaker people, is always done overseas, far away from where we can watch it. For generations, there has been a mutual agreement from both major parties to do what must be done to protect America’s ability to militarily dominate the world—the gun that protects our concurrent ability to be richer than everyone else, the velvet fist that allows us to extract trillions of dollars in value from the Global South and use it to raise our own national standard of living. This commitment to maintaining the global order, people like Dick Cheney understand, is more important than all the other, smaller issues that voters get worked up about.

>Mostly, Democrats deal with this reality by not talking about it. […] We, as Democratic voters, pretty much just ignore this stuff. We may come out against specific wars that are particularly bad ideas, but we, as a party, have almost zero will to confront the military industrial complex and its global tentacles and the way that it maintains, at gunpoint, the complex system of global economic power that allows us to live nice lives.

>It’s not that Donald Trump has any ideological opposition to this commitment, which the Republicans have always embraced with relish. It’s just that he’s insane and an unpredictable egomaniac and therefore cannot be counted on to fulfill his role on this matter. […] They may prefer a Republican, but they need, above all, someone predictable. Someone who will not try to undermine the entire system. In this race, that person is Kamala Harris. And so Dick Cheney and the men like him will support Kamala Harris.

>An Al Mayadeen investigation of July 19th laid bare the US Navy’s crushing defeat by Yemen’s AnsarAllah, in Washington’s initially-vaunted Operation Prosperity Guardian. Western media has finally acknowledged the Empire’s comprehensive trouncing by God’s Partisans, in an epic David vs Goliath triumph. Elsewhere, reporting on the much-hyped USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier strike group’s return to base after months of relentless bombardment by the Resistance amply underlines how aircraft carriers - the core component of US hegemony for decades - are quite literally dead in the water.

Economically to the right of Genocide Joe.

>Long-term capital gains, or assets held for more than one year, are currently taxed at a maximum rate of 20%.

So not nothing, but not much, assuming the change can be pushed through at all. Nothing will fundamentally change. These taxes wouldn’t even affect well-paid workers; they only kick in at $1M.

I’m no expert on the Foreign Agents Registration Act, but the revisions to it seem to have removed “political propaganda” from it, such that it is focused on “lobbying,” so on first blush the executive branch seems to be on shaky legal ground. BlueAnoners will eat this up, though.

inb4 mbfc

>There will always be some ineradicable incentive for unions to do things that benefit their own members even if they do some vague harm to society at large. Corporations will always try to exploit this incentive for their own benefit. It is easy to say in an abstract sense “Unions shouldn’t give in to that,” but in the real world, it is not easy at all. Should the United Mine Workers demand that coal mines shut down, because of the environment? Should the Machinists union tell Boeing to shut its factories where its members manufacture weapons that are used to blow up poor people on the other side of the world? Etc. Antitrust issues can sometimes be seen as just another big picture dilemma that does nothing to help working people put food on the table right now. > >In lieu of solving this timeless tension in today’s little blog post, let’s think about the more modest goal of how antitrust and organized labor can work together more effectively. First, we all have to realize that we’re all part of one holistic policy goal. We think that allowing corporations to proceed unchecked down the road to ultimate power is a bad idea. It is bad for workers, who will be crushed, and it is bad for governments, who will be co-opted, and it is bad for all citizens, who will suffer as corporate power sweeps away regulations and rearranges all of society to benefit shareholders at the expense of everything else, like AI gone awry. Organized labor should make it a point to use its own political capital—a very real weapon, if Kamala Harris wins the White House—to support antitrust efforts and protect its enforcers. And the antitrust world should correspondingly recognize the fact that simply limiting corporate power by fighting monopolies will never be enough; unless there are unions inside of the companies to constantly exercise power on behalf of the workers, there is no actual institution that will be carrying on the fight to prevent companies from just proceeding right back down the same harmful monopolistic path over and over again. We’re peas in a pod here. Don’t want huge companies and their idiot billionaire bosses to run the world? Break them up, and unionize them. It’s the best program we have.

https://beta.maps.apple.com/

It doesn’t seem to support Firefox or mobile browsers, at least not.

Maps on the web is compatible with these web browsers >On your Mac or iPad >- Safari >- Edge >- Chrome > >On your Windows PC >- Edge >- Chrome

https://beta.maps.apple.com/

It doesn’t seem to support Firefox, or not yet at least. Maps on the web is compatible with these web browsers >On your Mac or iPad >- Safari >- Edge >- Chrome > >On your Windows PC >- Edge >- Chrome

>In the confidential assessments, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said 11 of the 22 large banks it supervises have “insufficient” or “weak” management of so-called operational risk, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public. > >That contributed to about one-third of the banks rating three or worse on a five-point scale for their overall management, the people said. The scores are the latest sign that US regulators are concerned about the level of risk at the country’s largest banks in wake of a series of failures last year. > >Operational risk is one of the categories by which regulators evaluate overall risk at the banks they oversee. Each bank’s individual ratings are closely held, but regulators sometimes use aggregate data on banks’ grades to highlight areas of concern in discussions with other agencies and the industry.

>Our understanding of China — and U.S.-China relations — has become a defining feature of all global politics. The China Report is a new show produced in collaboration with Pivot to Peace where every week, hosts Amanda Yee and KJ Noh will be helping through all the propaganda with an independent view of the country we are told to hate, but know so little about.

First two episodes:

• Exposed: Pentagon Ran Covert Anti-Vax Operation to Discredit China
• WSJ Accuses China of Secret Spy Bases in Cuba: Cold War Madness Gets Crazier

I’d never heard of Pivot to Peace.

• https://peacepivot.org/
• https://www.youtube.com/@pivottopeace2492

• Friedrich Engels
• Che Guevara
• Robert Owen
• Mao Zedong
• Peter Kropotkin

Also from Jamie Zawinski yesterday: Mozilla's Original Sin > Some will tell you that Mozilla's worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web. > >Those are different things and are very much in conflict. They picked one. They picked the wrong one.