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Journalism’s Gates Keepers
“During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively—both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from ‘false conspiracy theories’ and ‘misinformation,’ like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead…
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Trump in Kenosha
President Donald Trump is scheduled to travel to Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, where Jacob Blake was shot repeatedly by police in the back.
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Could NBA Strike Fuel New Strike Wave?
Mike Elk, a reporter at Payday Report, has said that the NBA strike could inspire a whole new round of Black Lives Matter strikes across the United States.
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RNC, DNC and Anti-Palestinian Agreement
Michael Brown, a journalist with The Electronic Intifada, covers the intersection of white supremacy in the U.S. with anti-Palestinian sentiment and backing for an expansionist Israel. He remarked: “The Republican Party has made clear this month its absolute support for Israel and its de facto annexation of the West Bank.”
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Deadly Combination: Nursing Homes and Wall Street During Pandemic
Patrick Woodall, a senior researcher at Americans for Financial Reform, released a new study on the combination of nursing homes and private equity during a pandemic. Woodall said, “The COVID-19 pandemic has ravaged nursing homes around the country and has highlighted the role played by Wall Street private equity firms in degrading care when it buys up facilities and cuts costs while reducing staffing, all to fatten the bottom line.”
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Major Post Office Hearings Today
The House is having hearings with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on August 24, 2020. Two analysts, Christopher Shaw and Lisa Graves, have done extensive research on the issue. Shaw, a historian and author, has stated that Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s “actions have targeted the agency’s civic role and jeopardized voter participation in the 2020 election.” And, Graves, the executive director of True North, said, “Never before in the past century has the Postal Service leadership been held by such partisans as DeJoy and Mike Duncan [chairman of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service], both of whom have…
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Biden: An FDR or Deficit Hawk?
Branko Marcetic has found Joe Biden will not have “an FDR-sized presidency” unlike what Biden and his advisors have insisted since April and at the Democratic National Convention. Marcetic writes, “”Even Biden’s promise in his DNC speech last night to ‘protect Social Security and Medicare’ should be viewed with caution. A President Biden could try, as he suggested in 2018 and in private in 2014, to means-test Social Security and claim he is ‘protecting’ it from insolvency, without having technically cut it.”
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Big Media and DNC: Distinguishing Policy Criticism from Slurs
Robin Andersen, a professor of graduate studies at Fordham University writes on the criticism of VP-nominated Kamala Harris. Andersen writes, “Yet emerging as a corporate media frame is a sloppy, mystifying confusion that refuses to distinguish the racist and sexist slurs against Harris from an authentic discussion of the trajectory of her political positions, and what they might mean for her as a serving vice president and a potential future leader of the Democratic Party. Within this frame, criticisms from the left and the right are treated as equally offensive.”
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Twelve U.S. Billionaires Have a Combined $1 Trillion
“For the first time in U.S. history, twelve U.S. billionaires surpassed a combined wealth of $1 trillion… This is a disturbing milestone in the U.S. history of concentrated wealth and power. This is simply too much economic and political power in the hands of twelve people.”
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Behind the Attacks on the Post Office
Lisa Graves, the executive director of the policy research group True North, is pointing to connections in the Post Office itself that brought us to this point.
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“With a tiny staff, it has managed to place on the air and in newspapers, points of view otherwise excluded from the national debate.”
Howard Zinn