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The post PfizerGate: Official Government Reports prove Hundreds of Thousands of People Are Dying Every Single Week Due to COVID-19 Vaccination appeared first on Global Research.

The Reserve Bank of Australia has raised interest rates again, ostensibly to keep inflation in check. But the reality is that the move will only enrich banks and rich property investors — at the expense of renters and struggling mortgage holders.

Signage at the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) building in Sydney, Australia, on February 6, 2023. (Brent Lewin / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On Tuesday, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) raised interest rates for the twelfth time in fourteen months. RBA governor Philip Lowe justified the rate rises as an attempt to reduce inflation from the current 6.8 percent to his preferred range of 2 to 3 percent. Lowe, whose term as governor ends in September, heavily implied that this unprecedented run of rate rises will continue throughout 2023.

The rate rise will overwhelmingly hurt ordinary Australians. Mortgage holders — the majority of whose loans are on variable rates — will suffer directly. Renters will also suffer as landlords pass on the increase to them, exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis and putting homeownership even further beyond reach.

The latest rate rise comes just days after university loans automatically increased by 7.1 percent. Despite the fact that nominal wage growth is only 3.7 percent — dramatically below inflation — Lowe insisted that “we have to make sure that higher inflation doesn’t translate into higher wages for everybody.”

Perhaps the only positive aspect of the current debate over inflation is that there is a debate at all. Despite the best efforts of big business and the financial press, questions are quietly emerging about exactly who is to blame for rising prices, who should be disciplined to contain them, and how.

“For Some Households”

Lowe admitted that raising interest rates hurts working people. “The use of this tool comes with complications,” he conceded, noting that

Its effects are felt unevenly across the community, with rising interest rates causing significant financial pressure for some households. But this unevenness is not a reason to avoid using the tool that we have.

By Lowe’s phrasing, “financial pressure” sounds almost incidental. In fact this is precisely the point of the tool. The idea is that high costs will scare borrowers, who will limit their spending. Unemployment will increase; by the RBA’s own estimates one hundred thousand people will be thrown out of work. This will reduce employees’ bargaining power and put a downward pressure on wages.

And most crucially — although it’s almost always left unsaid — all of this is then supposed to persuade businesses to stop choosing to raise prices so quickly.

If punishing workers in order to gently make a suggestion to employers seems a harsh way of getting something done, you couldn’t tell from the business response. The financial press used Lowe’s announcement to further attack a recent decision by the Fair Work Commission to raise award rates by 5.75 percent, even though in real terms, this is a wage cut.

A Wage-Price Spiral by Any Other Name . . .

Peak employer bodies have in part blamed supply-chain issues like the war in Ukraine and COVID-19 for rising costs and prices. What they usually fail to mention, however, is that they have already recouped many of the costs associated with these problems from the taxpayer through various federally funded subsidies.

This isn’t the only way that employers have manipulated the narrative to maximize profitability. Business groups also maintain that lifting minimum and award wages forces them “to make decisions around passing these costs on, so in the end it ends up with consumers who will pay the bill.” In other words, they claim that higher wages lead to higher prices, leading to a “wage-price spiral.”

This is deliberately misleading. Most Australian workers have experienced real wage cuts because they haven’t been pushing for — or receiving — wage rises even close to inflation. Business groups just imply that workers could demand wage increases in line with inflation, claiming that this possibility underpins employers’ choice to raise prices. Unable to point to any actual wage-price spiral, they have invented a hypothetical one. They also blame rising unit-labor costs as a culprit driving inflation. This refers to productivity, a loaded term implying that employees must continuously work harder than previously for the same wages. If they don’t, businesses insist that they are forced to raise prices to avoid any squeeze on profit margins.

However, businesses’ “our hands are tied” account has not gone totally unchallenged. While still limited in reach, rival explanations for inflation have appeared that propose different, less austerity-driven cures. Like similar debates elsewhere, the emergence of alternative, more egalitarian narratives has stirred up a hornet’s nest of orthodox economists.

For example, the OECD world economic outlook — published the same day as Lowe’s speech — suggested that the oligopolistic nature of the Australian economy is driving inflation. If a few big companies dominate the market, they can raise prices however much and whenever they like. As the former chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) put it, “nothing that they’re doing breaks the law; there’s no law against excessive pricing.”

In other words, inflation is caused by corporate price gouging. This explanation isn’t just more accurate — it also fits with ordinary Australians’ experience of Woolworths and Coles raising grocery prices arbitrarily, or the big four banks refusing to pass on rate rises to deposit products.

The Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work has suggested a complementary explanation that’s even more incendiary, arguing that profits are the major cause of the current inflation. In the Centre for Future Work’s account, we’re not in a wage-price spiral, but a profit-price spiral. It’s the result of Australian companies raising prices across the board as they seek — and post — record profits, far beyond any increase in costs they’ve experienced.

The Narrow Road of Political Feasibility

Confronted with claims that an oligopolistic economy and a profit-price spiral are to blame, orthodox economists have responded tellingly. While acknowledging that oligopolies make inflation more likely, the RBA and business lobby have categorically rejected the notion that profiteering is a cause of inflation. Some at the RBA criticized the Centre for Future Work’s methodology. Other economists simply dismissed the question as silly.

For example, according to Richard Holden, a University of New South Wales economics professor, “it doesn’t really matter where the price increases are coming from. Monetary policy has still got to go on.” “A doctor doesn’t care where you got a disease,” agreed Peter Tulip, a former senior RBA researcher. “The medicine prescription is going to be the same anyway.”

It appears that to the prescription-happy Dr Tulip, it’s irrelevant whether or not we’ve got the disease at all — all that matters is that we take his medicine. Business and governments have been prescribing the same thing regardless of what’s happening in the economy. When inflation hovered below 2 percent for the second half of the 2010s, they admonished Australian workers that wage growth was irresponsible, and urged productivity increases. Now we’re facing high inflation, and the advice is identical. There is no suggestion to business that excessive price hikes are irresponsible, or that these need to be accompanied by some action or other that benefits the wider economy.

In fact there are many possible “prescriptions” that the authorities could consider. Windfall taxes, oligopoly-power reduction, price controls, and direct government investment could all potentially be used to help drive down inflation. None of these suggestions are revolutionary in the slightest.

The common refrain asserts that these measures are not politically tenable. But to whom? When the government imposed price caps and expanded direct public investment in the energy sector to control inflation, businesses’ grumbling acceptance was telling. It demonstrated that business will only tolerate government intervention if it can clearly see the longer-term benefits for itself — and barely even then.

For now, the RBA and the treasury have correctly wagered that it is more politically feasible to hurt workers than employers. In part, this is because workers are largely unorganized. And even if they were, every industrial tool workers have at their disposal to tilt the situation in their favor — like striking — is functionally illegal. Employers, by contrast, face few equivalent political or economic constraints; they have carte blanche to retaliate against governments they are unhappy with. And they will continue to use this freedom to transfer Australian wealth upward.

In an interview with British network Sky News, Prime Minister Netanyahu appeared to scold the anchor after he was grilled on construction in Judea and Samaria,saying, “it’s our ancestral homeland and country.”

“The figures show that 7000 housing units were advanced by your government;” the interviewer stated. “Secretary of State Blinken has stated that it is these physical settlements that are the obstacle to peace, and they contravene international law.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu replied: “I think that’s not true at all, and I also don’t think they contravene international law, because there’s never been an international decision that Jews cannot live in Judea, that’s where we come from.”

“Article 49 of the Geneva convention states that the occupying power cannot build on the land,” said the interviewer.

“The article forbids population transfer. Building is only forbidden in occupied territory; you call it occupied, we call it disputed, but it’s part of our ancestral homeland. We’ve only been there for some 3000 years. King David established our capital in Jerusalem. We are not the Belgians in the Congo or the Dutch in Indonesia. For God’s sake, it’s the land of Israel, it’s our country.”

“The Palestinians are here, and we’re not going to push them out, and we’re here, and the Palestinians are not going to push us out. The problem, though has been that the Palestinians have been hijacked by leadership that does not want a state next to Israel, they want a state without Israel.”

“The idea that if a Jew buys land privately it is a criminal act is absurd. If I were to tell you that Jews cannot buy land anywhere else in the world you would be outraged.”

“A million Arabs live in israel, and I say that they should have all the same civil rights as Jews. We are going to have to find the political arrangement to do so, but we are going to have to live next to each other. The idea that their land must be Judenrein, Jew-free – I think that conception is the obstacle to peace.”

The post WATCH: Netanyahu to Sky News: ‘For God’s sake, it’s our country!’ appeared first on World Israel News.

Adam Devine and his wife, Chloe Bridges, were enjoying a warm night on their balcony in the Hollywood Hills when a familiar sound pierced the silence: the sound of gunfire.

The couple had been watching a large gathering take place at a nearby home in the 7800 block of Fareholm Drive. But as the festivities died down, so did the peace. An argument broke out, and a guest in attendance was shot, leaving one unfortunate victim dead.

Kimberly Block, who lives next to the Fareholm Drive home, suspects that the tenant might have been hosting a poker game and had a large social media following.

Block stated that a valet had notified one of the guests that an individual was waiting outside of the party who wanted to communicate with them. The guest subsequently departed from the gathering and stepped outdoors, where a dispute occurred, and the guest was shot.

Adam Devine shared his experience on the “This Is Important” improv podcast.

The shooter remains at large and drove off in an unknown vehicle after the incident.

Adam Devine is well known American Actor known for his roles in Pitch Perfect and Workaholics, as well as many other films and shows.

As Toronto grapples with skyrocketing housing costs, tenant unions across the city are uniting against major corporate landlords in a massive rent strike. The strike is vitalizing the fight for housing justice in one of the world’s most expensive cities.

Toronto tenants on strike at 33 King Street, June 1, 2023. (Twitter / YSW Tenant Union)

Tenants throughout Toronto are currently leading a rent strike against some of the country’s largest corporate landlords in one of the world’s least affordable cities.

The long overdue rent strike involves tenants across Toronto in multiple buildings — 70 Thorncliffe Park, 33 King Street, 77 Spencer Avenue, and 109 Indian Road. Together, they are fighting back against their corporate landlords’ “above-guideline rent increases” (AGIs).

Although Ontario’s rent control typically limits rent increases to 2 to 3 percent per year, AGIs enable landlords to raise rents significantly beyond these regular limits, ostensibly to account for expenses related to repairs and retrofits. In reality, however, they offer an easy way to evade rent controls and bolster landlord profits.

The latest round of AGIs are the last straw for many tenants. As CBC News notes: “Rent strikes in Canada are on the increase” — especially in Toronto — and they have been for at least half a decade.

Reached for comment, Chiara Padovani, cochair of the York South-Weston Tenant Union, told Jacobin that “Tenants are fed up with paying more for less and seeing their rent increase three times above rent control.”

Protests At 77 Spencer Avenue and 109 Indian Road

In Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood, Akelius Investments tried to push a 5.5 percent rent increase onto its tenants. This increase is more than double a normal rent increase of 2.5 percent. The increase was justified as necessary for “balcony repairs.”

Tenants responded by descending onto the company’s office and demanding an end to the rent hikes.

As resident Annie Gibson told CBC News: “They’re applying [to the Landlord and Tenant Board (LTB)] for balcony repairs. A lot of the people who live in the building don’t have balconies and we’re expected to pay for it any ways because it’s considered a capital expense.”

Worse, as Parkdale Community Legal Clinic legal case worker Candace Nguyen notes, “They haven’t been maintaining the apartments and they use capital expenditures on things like lobbies, useless things that don’t help the tenants, while they have real issues like mice and cockroaches and real maintenance requests that have just been ignored time and time again.”

While the company has little to show for its balcony repairs in the unit, its profit margin is massive. According to its 2022 annual report, across Canada, Akelius owns 8,834 units and enjoy a capitalization rate of 4.13 percent and a net operating income of over 48 percent.

Rent Strike at 33 King

Among all buildings in Toronto, 33 King, which is owned by Dream Unlimited, received six applications for AGIs from 2012–22. “I’m afraid I might become homeless,” one tenant told CBC News.

AGI applications require the landlord to inform tenants of the plan to increase the rent beyond the legal limit, pending approval by the provincial LTB. In 2018, the tenants fought a 6 percent increase and successfully negotiated a settlement that resulted in the removal of the AGI, with a promise to reimburse those who had already paid the 6 percent. But, in reality, it hasn’t been that simple.

“The landlord never paid them back,” Padovani says. “The landlord said the reason they didn’t pay anyone back is because they have all these other applications that they are expecting will get approved so they don’t owe anybody any money.”

During the recent AGI process, despite tenants being legally permitted to keep paying the current rate, the union claims that Dream Unlimited sent eviction letters as a form of intimidation to those who exercised this right. Under pressure from the union, the company apologized, but its push to hike rents continues.

“The building is not a new building, the landlord is using the AGI to evade rent control. The owner has a history of doing this, they’ve applied for it at every single opportunity, back-to-back, over the last ten years,” Padovani says. “The current landlord inherited all the past applications and even according to Dream’s own financial statements, 50 percent of its revenue is profit.”

These rent hikes have not gone to improving the conditions of the building, tenants say.

Shelley, a long-term tenant, told Jacobin, “We’ve had floors with a bedbug epidemic, to cockroaches, to ants. What’s frustrating is being told they’re going to take care of it and then they don’t.”

Against the backdrop of landlord neglect, after weeks of making phone calls and knocking on doors, Padovani explains that the union managed to garner support from over half of the building’s tenants, resulting in their current rent strike.

“We have to be adamant. This is where we raise our families. This is our home,” Shelley said.

Rent Strike Across Thorncliffe Park

Since May 1, PSP Investments and Starlight Investments have faced a rent strike from hundreds of tenants at 71, 75, and 79 Thorncliffe Park Drive, who have refused to pay rent in opposition to an application seeking to raise their rents by about 5 percent. Previously, the building’s owner sought a rent increase of 4.2 per cent in 2022. If these increases are approved by the LTB, it will mean a monthly increase of almost 10 percent in two years. Worse, most of the tenants will also owe “back rent,” due to the increases.

“Tenants are working together to fight the massive rent increases and defend their homes from those seeking to profit from displacement,” a website dedicated to PSP displaced tenants said.

Like the other landlords on the list, Starlight has enjoyed massive profits alongside rent hikes and a general deterioration of its housing stock. In fact, in 2012, Starlight changed its name, following a string of negative media reports decrying the horrendous living conditions in its buildings.

In March 2022, the Thorncliffe Park residents delivered a stack of over fifty repair requests they said were ignored — sometimes for years. These included, according to the National Observer, leaking bathroom ceilings, mold, malfunctioning stoves, and garbage chutes that overflowed with waste.

“Everything is leaking and it smells very bad,” one tenant wrote. “We’re very tired of opening many maintenance requests but not getting anything in response.”

In 2019, Starlight’s CEO said, “We think there is a definite housing shortage, or almost a crisis level in Canada . . . and the good news for investors is there is no easy solution in sight.” In a 2021 presentation, Starlight told its investors its value proposition is based on “high growth” in rents as well as “deteriorating home ownership affordability.

“They try to build their money from our weakness,” one tenant told the National Observer. “This community is just looking for the end of the month to cover food and everything and that’s it.”

Paying More for Less

Canada’s landlords, like all landlords, make their profits by increasing their revenue and cutting their costs. In plain language that means cutting services and repair funds and gouging their tenants for every last dollar of rent. Alongside horrendous living conditions — with pests, mold, and the like — this means a drive for regular churns and regular evictions. The results are visible at the national level.

This is why Toronto, like nearly every other major Canadian city, has seen homelessness rise to crisis levels — with tent cities in nearly every park. It’s why food bank use is exploding. And it’s why, increasingly, ordinary workers are poor, hungry, homeless, and living in squalid conditions. This is not despite landlord profits; it is the source of landlord profits.

A recent survey by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation titled The Lived Experience of Evictions in Canada found that a majority of the respondents were evicted by their landlords so that the property could be flipped, sold, or renovated and rented at a higher cost.

In the process, the report found: “Most participants described a range of different negative landlord behaviours, including non-responsiveness and harassment, and a third of participants reported some sort of negative or potentially illegal landlord actions during the eviction process itself.”

After eviction, the study found that most of the tenants were, unsurprisingly, far worse off. Overall, the participants paid higher prices for smaller, lower-quality homes after their eviction.

As the study concludes: “Being evicted once puts you in the position of instability and increases your chance of having more housing instability after that.”

Extend the Fight

These strikes are of enormous importance if they can bring powerful landlords to heel. They show the power of ordinary people to fight back.

Supporting and expanding these rent strikes is crucial to challenging the dominance of property owners in the city. Reclaiming housing from those who prioritize profits over people is essential for securing the necessary homes that ordinary individuals require for their well-being. This approach is the key to transforming the prevailing stress, fear, and instability experienced by countless renters into lasting stability.

The small town of Trussville, Alabama, has proven that its tight-knit community is larger than the size of the town itself. After a falling tree struck star baseball player Grayson Pope during a storm, the community was quick to rally around him and his family.

On June 6th, Pope was enjoying a day on the golf course with his team when the storm suddenly started. In a single moment, his life changed dramatically – a tree fell and crashed directly onto the golf cart, knocking Pope unconscious in an unexpected “freak accident,” as reported by the Trussville Tribune.

Pope was immediately rushed to the hospital for examination and testing. By the night of June 7th, he had undergone multiple CT scans and MRIs, showing that he had experienced brain swelling and microhemorrhages on his brain and brain stem. Doctors say he is slowly starting to respond to pain but is not responding to verbal commands.

In a single evening, around 150 people showed up at a local church to pray for Pope’s accelerating recovery, and the next day an even larger group came together in a public park to pray and sing songs of support.

His family has felt immensely encouraged by the demonstration of care, which they describe as a source of strength as he continues his healing journey.

Emma, Pope’s older sister, shared a post on social media regarding his latest medical update. She explained that an MRI scan revealed further trauma on his brain and that there is “no surgery that can fix it.” Emma asked for prayers and a miracle, as Pope was in need of one at this time.

Pope’s Neurologist has stated that Pope will take an MRI in one week to asses where he is at. The strong and united display of support for Pope’s recovery speaks to the power of community in a small-town setting.

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The post “Independent” Ukrainian “Kill List” Actually Run by Kiev, Backed by Washington appeared first on Global Research.

The state of democratic rights for journalists in some of the world’s leading Western powers is becoming increasingly worrisome.

A group protests in front of the British embassy in Paris to demand the release of French publishing employee Ernest Moret after he was taken into custody in London. (Telmo Pinto / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

On May 17, journalist Kit Klarenberg was arriving at Luton Airport on a visit to his home country of the United Kingdom when a group of British counterterrorism officers detained him and interrogated him for five hours. With the threat of arrest hanging over him if he didn’t comply, the officers fingerprinted him and took his DNA while seizing all of his electronic devices and forcing him to unlock them. They returned the devices after a week but held on to one of his SD cards.

Klarenberg has written copious articles critical of the British government’s foreign and national security policies for a variety of left-wing outlets: Electronic Intifada, MintPress News, the Cradle. But the British officers were interested in one outlet in particular: the Grayzone. According to Klarenberg’s account of the detention for that outlet, the officers questioned him about his pay from the news website, his contact with its editor, Max Blumenthal, and any hypothetical links between the Grayzone and the Russian government.

Over the last year, Klarenberg has written several major stories highly embarrassing for the British government based on leaked documents. One series of stories showed the plans of British intellectual Paul Mason — who has, since Keir Starmer’s right-wing takeover of UK Labour, positioned himself as the leading nominally leftist supporter of the Labour head — to collaborate with the UK government and UK intelligence contractors as part of an “information war” campaign against the British left. Another revealed an April 2022 proposal to British intelligence to help Ukrainian forces destroy the Kerch Bridge in Crimea, which Ukraine successfully suicide-bombed last October. Still another exposed British involvement in training Ukrainian soldiers for other attacks on the disputed territory.

Given this, it’s not hard to see how Klarenberg ended up in the British government’s crosshairs.

Klarenberg was reportedly detained under Schedule 3, Section 4 of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Act, a controversial law criticized by human rights groups and the UN that was passed by the ruling Conservative government in 2019, ostensibly in response to the Skipral poisoning two years earlier. The law gives British law enforcement wide latitude to detain and harass individuals deemed to be taking part in a “hostile activity” on behalf of or in the interests of a foreign government.

In practice, this could mean almost anything. The law defines “hostile activity” as something that could threaten national security, threaten the British economy with implications for its national security, or is simply a “serious crime.” This applies whether or not the accused actually knows they’re carrying out a “hostile activity” — and even whether or not the foreign government whose bidding they’re supposedly doing is aware they’re doing it.

The harassment Klarenberg received at the British border seems to vindicate the warnings of the bill’s critics. But it would be a mistake to view this episode as being just about one particularly Orwellian British law. It’s part of a wider recent pattern in Western countries of government attacks on press freedoms and dissident speech.

Silencing Political Dissent

This past April, Ernest Moret, an employee of the left-wing French publishing house Éditions la Fabrique, underwent a similar ordeal, also in the UK. Detained in his case under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, Moret was questioned for six hours over his involvement in the protests against French president Emmanuel Macron’s deeply unpopular pension cuts, with officers asking him decidedly non-terrorism-related questions about his thoughts on the French retirement age, Macron, and COVID-19, and even asking him to name “anti-government” authors who had written for the publisher.

When Moret refused to provide the passwords for his seized electronic devices, he was arrested and held for nearly twenty-four hours, threatened with being banned from traveling to the UK. In this case, the British police never returned his devices.

This wasn’t the first time they’d used this exact law in a dubious way. Nine years ago, British police cited it to detain Glenn Greenwald’s late husband David Miranda while Miranda was carrying data leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that Greenwald was reporting on at the time. In 2017, they invoked it to detain the international director of CAGE, an NGO that advocates, ironically, against repressive “war on terror” policies.

British government officials have likewise been involved in a recent campaign to get the UK shows of former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters canceled. Waters himself, Jacobin’s Chip Gibbons, and Electronic Intafada’s Asa Winstanley explain in detail how breathtakingly cynical and dishonest this effort has been, involving deliberately taking parts of Waters’s decades-old and beloved The Wall show out of context to present them as an endorsement of Nazism to unsuspecting modern viewers unfamiliar with his work. Waters has charged that the campaign is retaliation for his views on foreign policy, namely his criticisms of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians and of Western governments’ role in the war in Ukraine. (Incredibly, the US State Department has now also weighed in, absurdly labeling the show antisemitic.)

This smear campaign began in Germany, where Waters is currently being criminally investigated over his Berlin show. Waters’s critics contend that his dressing up in the style of a Gestapo officer and miming gunning down minorities is possibly antisemitic and runs afoul of the country’s harsh laws against hate speech and the promotion of right-wing extremism — despite the fact that not only is the spectacle quite obviously a condemnation of what it’s depicting, which is why an Israeli tribute band has performed the same show throughout Israel using virtually the same iconography that Waters is being condemned for now, but it’s been a part of the show going back more than forty years.

This is not the only dubious example of Germany’s famously strict laws against certain types of speech being weaponized against political dissent. This year also saw German peace activist Heinrich Bücker receive a criminal order and a fine of €2,000 for a twelve-minute speech he gave in 2022 on the anniversary of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, in which he said that “Germans must never again be involved in any form of war against Russia” and accused the German government of collaborating with Ukrainian fascists. (He later made explicitly clear he wasn’t saying all Ukrainians are fascists, and that he was in favor of negotiations “so that the murder stops.”)

There’s much one could criticize about Bücker’s speech. But one doesn’t have to agree with all or even any of it to see the dubious nature of the central allegation — that he was publicly approving of a crime, specifically a war of aggression — or to understand the chilling effect of prosecuting someone for making what’s essentially a call for peace and strategic empathy, however flawed. Though Bücker successfully appealed the charge, the judge made clear he was only being acquitted because he had delivered his speech to a small audience that already largely agreed with him, leaving the door open to similar prosecutions in the future.

The Taxman

Despite its vastly more permissive constitutional protections for speech and press freedoms, the United States is also seeing a similar trend. Take the deeply strange IRS case against journalist Matt Taibbi, in which an IRS agent made the unusual move of physically visiting his home unannounced on the exact day he was testifying to Congress about his “Twitter Files” reporting.

Taibbi was later informed that his 2018 and 2019 tax returns had been rejected due to potential identity theft — even though Taibbi had documentation showing his 2018 return had been accepted, he hadn’t heard anything about these issues in the years prior, and the IRS owed him a refund. It later turned out that the IRS had opened their case against him on Christmas Eve last year, a Saturday, the very same day that Taibbi had posted a particularly explosive edition of his Twitter Files series.

If the IRS was being weaponized against Taibbi over his reporting, it would hardly be a first: the IRS has been used by Richard Nixon and the FBI in the past to harass the president’s political opponents and left-wing groups and activists, including Martin Luther King Jr.

But this followed several other menacing developments centered around Taibbi’s reporting on government-driven tech censorship. During Taibbi’s testimony to Congress, hostile Democratic lawmakers repeatedly pressured Taibbi and his colleagues to reveal their sources while suggesting they were not real journalists and, by implication, not covered by the First Amendment’s press protections. Later, when Taibbi was falsely accused of having invented the government’s role in pressing for tech censorship, one of his congressional critics threatened him with prosecution for perjury and a possible five years in prison.

Because of the widespread perception that Taibbi is now a right-wing reporter and that the “Twitter Files” are merely a PR stunt for billionaire Elon Musk, all this has been almost exclusively covered by conservative media. But given how damaging the reporting was to the growing national security–tech complex, it’s not a stretch to assume this was official retaliation or even intimidation related to Taibbi’s exposure of little-known government policy.

Recent reporting has added a new wrinkle to this. Back in April, a high-ranking official in the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) — the country’s equivalent to the FBI, which has been targeting left-wing dissidents in Ukraine and has been accused of torture — revealed to former Intercept reporter Lee Fang that it was collaborating with the FBI to pressure tech companies to censor alleged and broadly defined Russian disinformation. This has recently been corroborated by the Grayzone’s Aaron Maté, who obtained documents showing that he and other North American journalists were among the targets of this joint SBU-FBI pressure. Last year, several left-wing press outlets that were critical of US policy toward the Ukraine war had their accounts shuttered by PayPal, hindering their operations.

In fact, the United States fell three places this year in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index, owing in part to what the organization called “a troubling pattern of harassment, intimidation and assault on journalists in the field.”

That has often involved the use of state power to attack journalists for doing their jobs, whether county officials caught on tape discussing killing a father and son reporting team in Oklahoma, reporters arrested by police in both blue and red states for trying to do their jobs, or the two North Carolina reporters arrested and convicted for alleged trespassing while photographing the police evicting a homeless encampment. In the last case, body camera footage showed an officer explicitly urging their arrest “because they’re videotaping” — in other words, because they were reporting.

Left-leaning activists are bearing the brunt of this as both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations have moved the “war on terror” to the domestic sphere. Arguably the most high-profile such case right now is the absurd prosecution of Atlanta’s “Cop City” protesters under domestic terrorism charges, an alarming episode whose most recent development has been the unprecedented raid on and arrest of organizers of a bail fund for protesters.

And both the Biden administration and its UK counterpart continue to collaborate in the torture, imprisonment, and possible prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who this week lost his most recent legal appeal, putting him, in his brother’s words, “dangerously close” to being extradited to the United States to stand trial. According to the Daily Mail, the UK Home Office is already preparing extradition papers for Assange to be extradited as soon as in the next few weeks.

Assange’s treatment — based on the radical authoritarian theory that the US government is entitled to prosecute and jail any journalist on earth who reveals Washington secrets, wherever they are, whatever country they hail from, and even if they have no legal US connection — has already sent a menacing signal worldwide to reporters and publishers. But his prosecution would be a serious escalation on top of this if it’s successful, sharply curtailing US press freedoms to publish and report on government secrets by setting the precedent that news publishers can be criminally prosecuted for doing so — which is exactly why numerous press freedom, human rights, and civil liberties groups, as well as members of Congress and leading Western media outlets, have all demanded the Biden administration drop the case.

A Slippery Slope

Taken together, these stories paint a worrying picture of the state of democratic rights in some of the world’s leading Western powers.

Worse, it’s being enabled by the silence of those who should be checking such behavior. The Biden administration, which has framed both its foreign and domestic policy as a battle between the forces of democracy and authoritarianism, not only has nothing to say about these attacks on civil liberties — it’s deeply complicit in, and one of the leading culprits of, such attacks. In turn, the press outlets and media personalities that soaked up publicity when condemning Donald Trump’s verbal attacks on journalists are far quieter about the government’s material threats to press freedoms now that they’re taking place under a Democratic president.

Meanwhile, many of these cases are specifically related to foreign policy dissent, particularly on the matter of NATO policy toward the Ukraine war, which the US and allied governments have framed as an existential battle for worldwide democracy. Yet as has been clear since last year, the war and NATO countries’ participation in it is tragically having the opposite effect on both Ukrainian and Western societies, leading them to behave in more and more authoritarian ways on the basis of protecting Ukraine’s war effort — measures that, ironically, resemble the Russian government’s own authoritarian behavior.

But this is really a ramping up of trends that date back to at least the start of the war on terror this century, which saw governments, especially those of the UK and the United States, clamp down on civil liberties and basic freedoms on the basis of national security. For all the warnings then of the slippery slope we were on, successive administrations, sometimes from different sides of the political spectrum, have never dismantled these structures but rather added to them. And absent any sort of reckoning and mass action to oppose them, we seem destined to keep sliding faster and faster down until we find out what’s at the bottom.