Global military spending has reached its highest level since 1949

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/25/military-spending-reaches-record-levels-report

The Global Seafood Supply Is Being Contaminated by Microplastics, but No Major News Outlet Has Paid Any Attention

https://independentmediainstitute.org/efl-tat-20220301/

"The Rockefeller Foundation in the 1940s decided to launch what became known as the Green Revolution. It entailed the application of capital, machinery, chemicals, irrigation, consolidation of small farms, and migration to overcrowded cities, and it caused the destruction of “an agricultural system around which village life and livelihoods had revolved for thousands of years,”

The Foundation leaders ignored repeated warnings, including those by University of California geographer Carl Sauer about overlooking the possibility “that native practices represent real solutions to local problems.” As it turned out, Sauer was right. The results of the Green Revolution have been a social, cultural, political, and ecological disaster."

"One wonders, then, what great problems have been solved by philanthrocapitalism? After all the hype, the record—at best—is mixed. Most of what’s grown by brute-force agriculture goes to feed the wealthy, often at the expense of people on the land, tropical forests, and biological diversity. “What to make of the fact that growing philanthropy and growing inequality seem to go hand in hand?” Linsey McGoey asks in No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy. Increasingly, philanthropy, she notes, deprives treasuries of tax revenues that could otherwise be better spent to help the poor. And who holds the Bill Gateses of the world accountable?"

https://www.yesmagazine.org/democracy/2022/02/16/philanthropy-capitalism-climate-democracy

Just an update: due to exams coming up, I'll take a break this month.

"The researchers make “systematic use of web-scraping techniques to identify virtually all publicly available words and actions — concerning certain specific issues of public policy — by the one hundred wealthiest billionaires, over a ten-year period.”

They conclude that billionaires are extremely active in shaping political outcomes, but in a very particular way:

They try hard to influence public policy. They make large financial contributions to political parties, candidates, and policy-focused causes. They hold political fundraisers and bundle others’ contributions. They establish, join, or lead policy-advocacy organizations. But despite these billionaires’ prominence and their easy access to the media — which provides abundant opportunities to say just about anything they want to large audiences — they rarely talk openly about public policy.

The researchers call this approach to influencing politics — heavy on behind-the-scenes activity and light on public statements — “stealth politics.”"

"In short, billionaires are heavyweight political players, and as a group they are primarily committed to moving the country in a libertarian, free-market, pro-capitalist, pro-billionaire direction."

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/03/billionaires-political-influence-donations-conservatism

"TERFs and organized anti-trans groups are only one part of the global right-wing struggle against so-called “gender ideology”: roughly, the confluence of abortion rights, women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights, with trans people seeming to inspire particular fury.

That struggle is well-organized, well-funded and global. A 2021 report from the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF) found that, between 2009 and 2018, Europe had received USD$707.2 million in “anti-gender funding.” (Again, this comprises initiatives against abortion and LGBTQ2S+ rights more broadly, as well as anti-trans funding; to the opponents of “gender ideology,” they’re all the same thing.) Outside of Europe itself, there were two countries pouring money into the campaign: the United States and Russia"

https://xtramagazine.com/power/far-right-feminist-fascist-220810

"What if a hoax caused a national scandal, dominating Britain’s news for weeks? What if this hoax was used to whip up hate against a minority community, even being used to justify repressive new laws that disproportionately targeted that community? And what if journalists revealed that the politicians who stirred up this hate knew it was a hoax all along? That would be a big deal, right?

Wrong.

It’s more than three months since The New York Times and Serial Productions released The Trojan Horse Affair podcast, a years-long investigation into the ‘Trojan Horse’ scandal that rocked British politics in 2014 and cast a shadow over the country’s Muslim communities. But in spite of the podcast’s explosive revelations, it’s been met with near silence by the British media."

https://novaramedia.com/2022/04/19/the-response-to-the-trojan-horse-affair-tells-us-all-we-need-to-know-about-islamophobia-in-britain/