Click here to access article by Dr. Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, a retired psychiatrist and political refugee from Seattle and now living in New Zealand, posted on her website The Most Revolutionary Act.
Prior to World War I politicians and businesses used facts and information to win votes or to persuade people to buy their products. When Woodrow Wilson hired him to run his Committee for Public Information to produce pro-World War I propaganda, Bernays incorporated Sigmund Freud’s theory that human behavior was based on unconscious instinctual drives. By appealing to these unconscious and irrational feelings, he succeeded in selling World War I to a profoundly isolationist American public.
It (the science of thought control) all started with the astounding success of a campaign launched during WWI to turn Americans from strong opposition to the war into supporters of US participation. American bankers had a huge investment riding on the success of the Allies in WWI, and they started worrying about outcome of the war and having their loans repaid. So, what to do? Well, what they did was to launch a vigorous pro-war campaign.
The campaign went into high gear building on the sensationalism of the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania, a British luxury passenger ship, by German U-Boats because it was known by the Germans to be carrying munitions to Europe, but for some strange reason it was unknown to US passengers. Obviously, it was known to the British and should have been known to US agents.
Click here to access article by Rob Urie from CounterPunch.
...the Israeli pilots bombing Gaza today do so from safe distances and can tell themselves that they are bombing ‘targets’ rather than human beings. Left unsaid is that killing and maiming a civilian population to affect a political outcome is the definition of terrorism. This is the ‘practical’ purpose of the Israeli ‘human shield’ charge against Hamas— to shift culpability for terrorist violence onto its (Israel’s) victims.
Click here to access article by Jeff Spross from ClimateProgress.
That’s the word from a new study by researchers at NASA and the University of California, who used satellite data to do a first-ever quantifiable measure of how much groundwater people in the American west and southwest have used up in the current spate of droughts.
Click here to access article by Mouwafak Chourbagui from CairoScene. [parody]
With his tongue firmly in his cheek, Mouwafak Chourbagui speaks to the owner of a new business that promises human rights in exchange for services, essentially breaking the glass ceiling of basic freedoms...
Click here if you wish to access the posting on 2012 The Awakening.
Click here to access article by Max Blumenthal from AlterNet.
What liberals like Blumenthal and the disciplined NBC journalists fail to understand is that mainstream media is an organ of a ruling class in a class structured society. This media belongs to the ruling One Percent (owners of the economy and directors of their Empire) whose interests are often in opposition to the 99 Percent class of workers.
Chris Hayes and others in mainstream media know this and quietly submit their on-air behavior to the dictates of their bosses. Perhaps Blumenthal knows this, but he, too, avoids mentioning the basic reality of this country in order to keep his job or avoid repercussions. Instead, it is much safer to wring one's hands at the awful behavior of NBC.
These two journalists were not the first to go up against the One Percent's media and feel their wrath. Others include Ray Bonner, Gary Webb, Octavia Nasr, Helen Thomas, Eason Jordan, Peter Arnett, Phil Donahue, Ashleigh Banfield, Bill Maher, Ward Churchill, and Van Jones. How many fired, disciplined, and ruined careers of journalists does it take to understand this reality?
The solution, of course, is that we in the 99 Percent must take responsibility for establishing our own media as they appear to be doing in Spain, and to recruit and support truth-tellers such as the above journalists who are currently working for peanuts in current alternative media such as Boiling Frogs Post or The Greanville Post.
Click here to access article by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux from The Intercept.
The “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place entire “categories” of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to “nominate” people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as “fragmentary information.”
I can't help but wonder if this report wasn't deliberately leaked to frighten dissidents into more passive and ineffective means of resistance to the actions of the ruling class's government. Usually when they are genuinely concerned about a leak, there is an uproar, an investigation, and harassment of all those connected with the leaked report.
Still, it is useful for many people to know the details of what they might expect if they have reasonable suspicion that they are on the government's "watchlist" for terrorism. Also, it's useful for many liberals to know that the ruling class and their government, one which is supposedly "of, by, and for the people", must be afraid of the people--maybe even terrified of the people--to go to such an extent rather than relying on normal police procedures. Referring to the report, the authors write:
It reveals a confounding and convoluted system filled with exceptions to its own rules, and it relies on the elastic concept of “reasonable suspicion” as a standard for determining whether someone is a possible threat. Because the government tracks “suspected terrorists” as well as “known terrorists,” individuals can be watchlisted if they are suspected of being a suspected terrorist, or if they are suspected of associating with people who are suspected of terrorism activity.
Obviously, what they are really afraid of is an organized opposition of the 99 Percent who might use violence against them. Violence is one thing they really understand because they are world's premier practitioners of violence. To take this document at face value, one would have to conclude that the government, especially those who control the government, are the real terrorists because they have a long record of using terrorism against many people in foreign lands in the forms of torture, drone warfare, direct invasions and bombings, etc.
In general, TERRORISM and/or TERRORIST ACTIVITIES are acts that: (a) involve violent acts or acts dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure.... (b) appear intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or affect the conduct of government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking. This includes activities that facilitate or support....
Click here to access article by Michel Chossudovsky from Global Research.
The right-wing supported oligarchic government in Ukraine has collapsed due to the failure of the parliament to approve two key IMF demands. The author discusses what the likely consequences are.
President Poroshenko (left) has intimated that the resignation of the cabinet has paved the way for a process of meaningful political restructuring: “Society wants a full reset of state authorities,” said Mr Poroshenko.
What is implied by Poroshenko’s statement is that the parliamentary process is slated to become defunct inasmuch as Rada is obligated to adopt the legislation demanded by the IMF and the European Union. And if the Rada does not adopt the legislation, the composition of the Parliament will be changed through a process of outright political manipulation.
Click here to access article from Muftah.
As the death count in Gaza crept even closer to 1000 today, it seemed the imprisoned, ghettoized residents of the Strip were more alone than ever. But their Palestinian brothers and sisters in Occupied East Jerusalem and West Bank sent them a strong and clear message tonight: Kill one, kill a million - our resistance will continue. #Palestine demands justice
Also, from Muftah, "Palestine: Is It Resistance or Not?"
I believe is the only meaningful question for understanding and stopping this nightmare and its inevitable recurrence: “Do Palestinians have a justifiable reason to resist Israel or not?”
It is the most basic of questions, but it is astonishingly unaddressed by the official discourse. Confronting this question would finally frame the arguments and narratives faithfully enough to make progress possible, and encourage a discourse that is not hijacked by unproductive, nonsensical, and defaming perspectives.
Click here to access article by Mickey Z. from World News Trust.
It doesn’t make me a supporter of Hamas if I point out how imbalanced the media coverage is and has been. It doesn’t make me a hater of Israel when I remind you of what’s not being said.
So, in the interest of provoking a more informed discussion, I’d like to share some of the crucial but neglected fact. Simply put, I feel it’s impossible to have a useful debate on the conflicts if you haven’t factored in the following realities:
He then lists a number of realities conveniently missing from Zionist influenced media.
Click here to access article by Andrew Gavin Marshall from AlterNet.
Although Marshall's headline suggests that he sees the Empire's aggressive pursuit of "free trade agreements" as a way to promote their agenda of global dominance, he doesn't supply much information in this article as to how a US-European trade agreement would promote their global dominance. Instead, he supplies a lot of views from trans-Atlantic ruling class figures and think tanks to justify and promote such an agreement while narrowly focusing on corporations and the benefits they would enjoy to the detriment of ordinary people.
Corporations are undertaking unprecedented drives for the accumulation of profit and power, promoting agendas and projects which re-shape the world in their image, treating governments as toys, the environment as an enemy, and impoverishing populations around the world. We are witnessing a transnational social engineering project, driven by large corporations, aimed at facilitating economic, financial, political and social consolidation into their hands.
Welcome to the era of Cosmopolitical Corporate Consolidation and Colonization.
Thus, he seems to miss the fact that global corporations are the engines of the US-led Empire's financial elites who are the key drivers behind the quest for global dominance. As globalists, of course they want to exploit cheap labor wherever they can find it, and want to reduce social costs to a minimum in their home countries. But what is missing is the reality of this capitalist gang's pursuit of global dominance to counter any opposition both domestically and internationally, especially competition from the rising economies of the BRIC countries which have shown far too much independence.
As capitalist gangs come up against finite resource limits of the planet, the competition for resources and markets is becoming much more intense and dangerous. Hence, we are witnessing regional wars waged by powerful Empire sub-players such as Saudi Arabian led GCC and Israel to secure dominance in the Middle East along with the US Empire's subversion of Ukraine in opposition to Russia. Because Marshall's focus on corporations is too narrow, he misses the wider global geopolitical contest that is driving the Empire's quest for global dominance.
Click here to access article by Pete Dolack from Systemic Disorder.
Using Richard Smith's longer article, Dolack explores the deceptions that lie behind the ruling class's campaign to delude the public into believing that they can "have their cake and eat it, too". It's called "green capitalism".
Trapped in an idealist mirage that capitalism can be “tamed” or “repurposed,” green capitalists, through seeking individual solutions to structural and systemic problems, not only miss the forest for the trees but leave the economic structure responsible untouched.
Click here to access article from the Associated Press via The Guardian.
Our planet continues to heat up while global capitalist ruling classes, who are addicted to power and wealth, continue to supply their profit engines with fossil fuels. Thus, we as a human race continue our march to catastrophic climate destabilization.
Click here to access article by David Sheen from Muftah.
Sheen, a reporter for a liberal Israeli publication, provides more evidence in addition to what Jerome Roos reported in his recent article that, indeed, many Israelis are becoming dehumanized by their government's campaign of brutalization of Palestinians.
As Israel’s latest assault on Gaza enters its third week, the destructive force unleashed upon the Strip has taken a massive toll, leaving over 650 Palestinians dead, over 4,200 wounded – mostly civilians – and over a hundred thousand homeless. As Gaza is pummeled, the level of anti-Palestinian racist incitement from top Israeli political, religious and cultural figures continues to ring at peak pitch, and has taken on a dangerous misogynistic tone.
Click here to access article by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online.
The "policy" of the Empire of Chaos is clear, and multi-pronged; diversify the "pivot to Asia" by establishing a beachhead in Ukraine to sabotage trade between Europe and Russia; expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to Ukraine; break the Russia-China strategic partnership; prevent by all means the trade/economic integration of Eurasia, from the Russia-Germany partnership to the New Silk Roads converging from China to the Ruhr; keep Europe under US hegemony.
I thoroughly agree with his reference to a thesis advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein:
In this piece (in Spanish) Wallerstein argues that the Empire of Chaos simply can't accept its geopolitical decadence - and that's why it has become so dangerous. Restoring its hegemony in the world-system has become the supreme obsession; and that's where the whole "policy" that is an essential background to the MH17 tragedy reveals Ukraine as the definitive do or die battleground.
Click here to access article by Tyler Durden from Zero Hedge.
Durden has followed mainstream media in China to find their reaction to the current tragedy of the Malaysian Airline MH17.
China appears to have crossed the line, siding very clearly with Russia as they conclude, "It is yet another example of the power of Western opinion as a political tool."
Click here to access article by James Petras posted on Boiling Frogs Post.
The US Empire, like previous ones, depends on a host of alliances and axes of power to sustain it and compensate for military, political and economic limitations in resources and personnel. With regard to the main region of direct US involvement, the Middle East, Washington has embraced three sets of alliances with partners who have played a paradoxical role in both sustaining and eroding the US Empire.
He analyzes the cost/benefits of each alliance to reach this conclusion about two of the most important:
The US political leadership, beholden to unconditional supporters of Israel, has committed the most damaging policies in US history. First and foremost, these elite-educated policymakers have degraded the entire economic dimensions of empire by pursuing a relentless military agenda – destroying oil producers, raising world prices, sowing instability and by bleeding the US Treasury of trillions of dollars – with few returns.
However, it is not only the empire’s alliance with Israel which is driving the empire to crisis. The Saudi-US axis has given immense power to the most retrograde satraps and barbaric armed insurgents running amok in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. An empire, associated with the most parasitic Arab ‘rentiers’ who send their own fanatical offspring to self-immolate for a head-beheading new world order has scarce resonance in the modern world.
An empire, organized around axes of evil and directed by political leaders loyal to satraps, has no material or moral foundations to justify its existence.
Click here to access article by Mouin Rabbani from the London Review of Books.
Its massive assaults on the Gaza Strip in 2008-9 (Operation Cast Lead) and 2012 (Operation Pillar of Defence), as well as countless individual attacks between and since, were in this context exercises in what the Israeli military called ‘mowing the lawn’: weakening Hamas and enhancing Israel’s powers of deterrence. As the 2009 Goldstone Report and other investigations have demonstrated, often in excruciating detail, the grass consists overwhelmingly of non-combatant Palestinian civilians, indiscriminately targeted by Israel’s precision weaponry.
Rabbani provides an excellent description of the run-up of events that preceded the latest Israeli invasion of Gaza, and explains a lot about Zionist policies to prevent any Palestinian state from being negotiated and their genocidal practices against Palestinians living in Gaza.
In 2004, a year before Israel’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, Dov Weissglass, éminence grise [a powerful advisor who operates "behind the scenes"] to Ariel Sharon, explained the initiative’s purpose to an interviewer from Haaretz:
The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process … And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with … a [US] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress … The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.
In 2006 Weissglass was just as frank about Israel’s policy towards Gaza’s 1.8 million inhabitants: ‘The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.’ He was not speaking metaphorically....
Click here to access article by Jerome Roos from Reflections on a Revolution.
When a small group of brave Israeli pro-peace activists staged a protest against the assault on Gaza in Tel Aviv this weekend, they were pelted with rocks, beaten with sticks, and chased down the street by a 2.000-strong mob of warmongering, flag-waving nationalists — some of them actually wearing neo-Nazi T-shirts. An exasperated Israeli friend described to me the “hatred in the eyes” of her fellow countrymen and relayed the ominous atmosphere inside Israel: “It’s crazy and scary here. All you see and hear is the far-right. 90% of the people in Israel are pro-war. The reasons vary but they are the majority.”
Click here to access article by Dean Baker from Real-World Economics Review Blog.
The brief article provides an obvious explanation as to why they did: the rewards and punishments in a capitalist dominated society induced banksters to commit crimes--as they will continue to do in the future.
Citigroup’s settlement will not change the tradeoffs from what
Citigroup’s top management saw in 2006. As a result, in the future
bankers are likely to make the same decisions that they did in 2006.
Click here to access article by Vladislav Gulevich at The Greanville Post.
Gulevich, a Ukrainian journalist who covered the violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government and subsequently fled the country, has reviewed a report by Amnesty International and found it to be grossly biased, not based on the reality of his experience. My own reading of the report suggests to me that not only is the report biased, but it reads like a report from a Western propaganda agency.
Click here to access article by Abrahm Lustgarten from ProPublica.
The misleading headline does not indicate that there is evidence that fracking has already contaminated aquifers. Such evidence must exist to motivate the regulatory agency to take such action, and it would be useful to know the details of the evidence from the 100 aquifers that were exempted by law
from environmental protection. There are so many hedged statements in this report which suggests to me that there is an attempt at a coverup.
The problem is that at least 100 of the state's aquifers were presumed to be useless for drinking and farming because the water was either of poor quality, or too deep underground to easily access. Years ago, the state exempted them from environmental protection and allowed the oil and gas industry to intentionally pollute them. But not all aquifers are exempted, and the system amounts to a patchwork of protected and unprotected water resources deep underground. Now, according to the cease and desist orders issued by the state, it appears that at least seven injection wells are likely pumping waste into fresh water aquifers protected by the law, and not other aquifers sacrificed by the state long ago.
Click here to access article by Caleb Maupin from New Eastern Outlook.
This New York based political analyst and activist provides an excellent review of the varying uses and methods of US war propaganda since WWII.
...the victims of US aggression all vary in their ideological outlook, religion, history, and circumstances. As has always been the case, regimes are targeted not for ideological reasons, but because they stand for independence from economic domination by Wall Street and London.
The US ruling class started seriously using propaganda, which they called "public relations, in the
1920s to serve their interests following their dramatic and surprising
success in using propaganda to turn public opinion from strongly opposing US entry into WWI to supporting it.
Click here to access article by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times Online.
Because we have all witnessed the immediate condemnation of Russia and "pro-Russian separatists" in Ukraine following the downing of the Malaysian passenger airplane, Escobar's ridicule of these absurd propaganda efforts is very welcome as an antidote to such ideological germ warfare. He also provides an additional piece of very interesting information:
And then there's the curiouser and curiouser story of Carlos, the Spanish air traffic controller working at Kiev's tower, who was following MH17 in real time. For some Carlos is legit - not a cipher; for others, he's never even worked in Ukraine. Anyway he tweeted like mad. His account - not accidentally - has been shut down, and he has disappeared; his friends are now desperately looking for him. I managed to read all his tweets in Spanish when the account was still online - and now copies and an English translation are available.
Click here to access article from Muftah.
The Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement is a peaceful, civil disobedience initiative started by Palestinian civil society in 2005, in response to a paralyzed peace process and continued Israeli violations of human rights and humanitarian law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Among other things, BDS includes academic and cultural boycotts, as well as divestment from companies supporting or profiting from the Occupation. Through BDS, regular individuals around the world have a concrete means to express opposition and outrage against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Now more than ever, supporting BDS is critical.
Click here to access article by Don Fitz from Climate & Capitalism.
The controversy over extractivism in Latin America has become a lot hotter. Though social justice and environmental activists have sought a partnership for years, this could become a wedge issue. The debate is core to our conceptualization of what type of society we are working to build and how we plan to get there. [my emphasis]
Fitz summarizes the contending arguments from pro-extractivism advocates and anti-extractivism advocates, following which he concludes:
The two sides often talk past each other while paying scant attention to fundamental issues of their opponents. And there are multiple problems which are insufficiently addressed by either side. Anti-extractivists often write of horrible effects of extractivism without delving deeply into the question “How can Latin America lift people out of poverty?” This weakness is flaunted by virtually every one of their critics.
Pro-extractivists write well of the need to reduce poverty while paying little more than lip service to the objection that extraction is destroying humanity-of-the-future. The “pro-” side also tends to downplay “externalities” such as destruction of community and damage to health. Instead, authors imply that the quality of life would be better if people could buy more things, without taking into account increases in asthma, cancer and water-borne illnesses.
Click here to access this book review by Joe Romm from Climate Progress.
How would a historian in 2393 write about this century if we continue self-destructively ignoring climate science — and as a result modern civilization as we know it had collapsed 300 years earlier?
That’s the question answered by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their excellent and unique new entry in the emerging Climate-Fiction genre, “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From The Future.”
An ironic quote from the book:
To the historian studying this tragic period of human history, the most astounding fact is that the victims knew what was happening and why. Indeed, they chronicled it in detail precisely because they knew that fossil fuel combustion was to blame. Historical analysis also shows that Western civilization had the technological know-how and capability to effect an orderly transition to renewable energy, yet the available technologies were not implemented in time.
The reason for this developing tragedy is simply that capitalist ruling class's were thoroughly addicted to the power and wealth supplied to them by their system and their highly advanced technology that enabled this class to thoroughly colonize most minds of their subjects with their ideology and complete submission to their authority. With such power they have made the extinction of the human race nearly inevitable. Although in reality this history as yet to play out, it appears to me that the planet's 99 Percent will not be able to successfully challenge their rule before catastrophic climate destabilization sets in.
Click here to access article by Ilan Pappe from The Electronic Intifada.
The nation of Israel was established in the 20th century after many years of effort by international Zionists who fanatically sought support for their project wherever they could find it. In WWI Zionists appealed to both governments of England and Germany to support their cause of "homeland" (or "nation" depending to whom they were talking). England finally came through, with the aid of American Zionists, in the form of the 1917 Balfour Declaration in order to secure financial support from international Jewry. (See other excellent histories here and here.) Leading up to and during WWII the Nazi regime collaborated with Zionists to support the emigration of European Jews to Palestine (see this, this, and this), and at the end of WWII the victorious capitalist Anglo-American Empire failed to seriously oppose the establishment of the state of Israel because they began to see it as useful as an imperial outpost in the Middle East. And, as they say, the rest is (a) history of apartheid and genocide.
Israel’s present assault on Gaza alas indicates that this policy [incremental genocide] continues unabated. The term is important since it appropriately locates Israel’s barbaric action — then and now — within a wider historical context.
This context should be insisted upon, since the Israeli propaganda machine attempts again and again to narrate its policies as out of context and turns the pretext it found for every new wave of destruction into the main justification for another spree of indiscriminate slaughter in the killing fields of Palestine.
Click here to access article by Richard Wolff from Moyers & Company.
Wolff provides us with a brief history of capitalism as another class system that took over from the earlier class system under feudalism, and shows how the recent phase of globalization under capitalism has only increased the disparity between a tiny class of the rich amidst huge populations of the poor. His analysis leads to an interesting question:
Everywhere, those extremes provoked revolutions against feudalism that eventually yielded that system’s demise. Today’s extremes produced by a globalizing capitalism — Detroit versus San Francisco, Manhattan versus the Bronx, Germany versus Greece, China’s new billionaires versus many millions of poor workers and peasants — where might they be leading us?
It appears to me that we activists and all humans will be spared the work of another major revolution because nature has had enough of our pollution. I am, of course, referring to the impending catastrophes awaiting us due to climate destabilization caused by our excessive burning of fossil fuels before we have a chance to turn things around.
Click here to access article by Peter Hart from Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
This is only one more tiny illustration of how ruling class media carefully hones it news reporting so that their class interests are not harmed. Because the story has been widely reported by a number of independent sources, they have no choice but to cover the incident. Thus, the task then becomes to cover it in a way that reduces any damage that the coverage might cause to their ruling class, and their strategically important Zionist-Israeli section of the capitalist Empire.
NBC news directors were so incensed over one of their reporter's coverage of this same event that they pulled him from the area.
And now we are seeing the grossest forms of propaganda backing the Empire's actions in Ukraine.
The point I wish to stress is that all coverage by all the Empire's leading capitalist media corporations are presented from this class point of view. So then, if you understand that, it is not too much of a stretch to understand that all important institutions of society are likewise guided to serve the same ruling class. You will find the same bias shaping actions in legislation, court proceedings, education, entertainment, etc.
You must understand that you live in a society that has a social-economic class structure which is shaped by a capitalist system, a system which gives overwhelming rights to "owners" of property, and permits property to be owned by individuals that is thoroughly social in nature. What is of major significance is that such rights also bring to these individuals vast amounts of wealth and power. That is precisely why they go to such extreme lengths to control everything in society and beyond that might threaten the extreme wealth and power they enjoy. That is precisely why they engage in all kinds of practices that ultimately destroy economies and whole nations, and wage wars against nations and peoples who interfere with their designs.
Click here to access article by Don Quijones from Wolf Street.
While opposition is gathering against net neutrality and electronic surveillance in the US portion of the Empire, it appears that a major effort to accomplish these objectives is well advanced in the Mexican section. Such nefarious measures have been carefully wrapped in propaganda material that appears to reign in monopolies. Thus, the public has been carefully prepared to view these measures as "reforms". (I think it is a truism that whenever ruling class media presents legislation as a "reform", what they really have in mind are measures that will harm the interests of ordinary people and benefit their class.)
...as El Confidencial warns, the anti-trust measures are effectively a carrot hiding a much larger stick within the large- and fine-print – a stick that could soon be wielded against political and social activists, investigative journalists, high-profile members of the political opposition or any other groups that threaten the status quo.
