Protesters rallied in Philadelphia at a Pennsylvania court on Oct. 26, demanding the release of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. Protesters inside the court supported his lawyers, Judith Ritter and Samuel Spital. 

The lawyers argued that six boxes, discovered in a storage room in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office in December 2018, and disclosed to his lawyers the following month, contained evidence that their client’s conviction was tainted. The discovery of this fresh “undisclosed evidence” provides the basis for a retrial. 

The evidence buried in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office since the original trial in 1982 documented that key witnesses were receiving promises of money for their testimony and evidence of favorable treatment in pending criminal cases. The lawyers also documented the abhorrent and unconstitutional practice of striking Black jurors during Mumia’s original trial.

In the Common Pleas Court, Judge Lucretia Clemons proposed an order denying Mumia Abu-Jamal’s constitutional claims of jury bias and suppressed evidence. Clemons adopted the prosecution’s position that the defense had the opportunity to receive these notes by merely asking the district attorney for the files in prior court proceedings. This is a deliberate misreading of the record because Mumia’s defense did not know about the evidence until December 2018. The DA had not previously revealed the presence of the documents to his lawyers.

In Judge Lucretia Clemons’s oral statements from the bench, she adopted the Philadelphia District Attorney’s positions meant to preserve Mumia’s conviction. These arguments prevent the defense from putting on the record evidence of discrimination because the PCRA (Post Conviction Relief Act) allows the dismissal of critical evidence through procedural rules such as time bar, due diligence, waiver, and previously litigated, all to avoid a judicial review of the merits. 

Mumia’s lawyers have 20 days to reply, and the prosecution was given ten additional days to respond before the court’s order dismissing Mumia’s request for a new trial becomes final and appealable.

All out on Dec. 16

The new court date for Mumia’s case is Dec. 16. The Oct. 26 protests for Mumia took place from coast to coast, in Mexico City and abroad. Speakers at the rally on Oct. 26 said it was urgent now for supporters to spread the word and build a powerful response for the Dec. 16 court date. Demands for Mumia’s freedom in the courtroom and on the street will bring to light the conduct of the court and DA.  

Undisclosed evidence

Mumia was a young award-winning Black Panther journalist at the time of his incarceration. He was framed for the death of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner on Dec. 9, 1981. At age 68, he has spent 42 years in prison, now struggling with life-threatening health problems.

At around 4 a.m. on Dec. 9, 1981, Mumia’s younger brother, William Cook, was stopped in his car by the Philadelphia police. Mumia, then working as a taxi driver, coincidentally passed them and came to his brother’s assistance. Shots were fired. Mumia was shot in the stomach, and Faulkner was killed.  

Mumia Abu-Jamal was put on trial in 1982, found guilty, and sentenced to death. Outrageous flaws and inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case were revealed. His case came to represent the blatant racist injustice in the U.S. courts and prisons. The case generated an international movement. Protests grew in cities around the world. In the Port of Oakland, members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers union shut down the port to save his life. After years of appeals and delays, Mumia was finally moved off death row in 2011. Since then, he has been held on life without parole.

Worldwide concern over his prolonged imprisonment led Amnesty International to investigate the case in 2000. They concluded that “numerous aspects of this case clearly failed to meet minimum international standards.”

The Oct. 26 court petition was prompted by six filing boxes marked with Mumia’s name found in a storage room in the Philadelphia district attorney’s office in December 2018. The most egregious parts of the evidence in the boxes presented to the judge were the following:

— A handwritten letter sent from the state’s star witness at trial, Robert Chobert, to the prosecutor, Joseph McGill. “I have been calling you to find out about the money own [sic] to me,” Chobert writes. “Do you need me to sign anything. How long will it take to get it.”

Chobert was one of only two witnesses at the trial who claimed to have seen Abu-Jamal shoot the police officer. No other evidence directly connected Mumia to the killing.

Mumia’s lawyers argue that the letter indicates that Chobert “understood there to be some prior agreement or understanding between himself and the prosecution, such that the prosecution ‘owed’ him money for his testimony.”

— The second witness who testified she had seen Mumia shoot Faulkner was Cynthia White, a prostitute with 38 previous arrests on her record. She was in prison in Massachusetts at the time of the trial and had five current criminal cases pending against her.

Among the documents in the boxes were letters from the DA’s office to prosecutors involved in the five pending criminal cases against White. Mumia’s lawyers argue that the letters “reveal a concerted effort by Mr. McGill and several Philadelphia DA unit chiefs to bring Ms. White back from Massachusetts, secure an early trial date in order to expedite her release, and ultimately allow her cases to be dismissed for lack of prosecution.”

Such favorable treatment, they said, was designed to make “life easier for her in exchange for her testimony against Abu-Jamal.”

— The issue of jury selection most clearly reveals the racism of the court. It is an issue that dominates the U.S. system of injustice. In Mumia’s case, it couldn’t be more obvious. In the boxes were the handwritten notes that the prosecutor, Joseph McGill, kept as he filtered out possible jurors for the trial during jury selection.

The notes show that the prosecutor placed a large letter “B” next to any prospective juror who was black. During jury selection, McGill struck 15 people from the pool – 10 were Black.

The prosecutor blocked 71% of all potential Black jurors from sitting on the final jury. It is a violation of federal law to strike potential members from the jury on the grounds of race. His reasons for seating some white jurors and not seating nonwhite jurors were not on the record; they were in his notes.

‘Voice of the Voiceless’

Mumia joined the Black liberation movement when he was a teen, in the late 1960s, after he came across the Black Panther party’s newspaper. “A sister gave me a copy of the Black Panther newspaper, and I was dazzled. I made up my mind to become one of them,” he told the Guardian in 2018.

“As part of his work with the Panthers, he was one of the first to visit the house in Chicago in December 1969, shortly after one of the movement’s leaders, Fred Hampton, was shot and killed by police as he was sleeping in bed. ‘We saw the bullet holes, which raked the walls. We saw the mattress swollen with Fred’s blood. I was 15,’ he told the Guardian.”

Young Mumia was soon a leading Black journalist in Philadelphia. He was a prominent supporter of the Black liberation group MOVE. His courageous reports on the police persecution of MOVE are now historical. It is not a long stretch to imagine why his case has been so viciously targeted by the Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police over the years. 

The widow of Philadelphia Police officer Daniel Faulkner became a spokesperson for FOP’s campaign against Mumia. Read the “Open Letter to Maureen Faulkner” from Julia Wright.

During his years in prison, Mumia Abu-Jamal has been outspoken on the side of other political prisoners like Leonard Peltier. He often realizes the needs of his oppressed sisters and brothers in and out of prison by writing and broadcasting their truths. Mumia has come to be known for speaking for “the voiceless.” When he was dangerously ill with hepatitis, he insisted that all the ill prisoners be treated with the life-saving medication they were denied before he was. You can listen to his brilliant commentaries and podcasts at PrisonRadio.org.

“Mumia Abu-Jamal is a broadcast journalist and internationally recognized author. Mr. Abu-Jamal is serving a life sentence at SCI Mahanoy in Pennsylvania. He is the author of 13 books, holds a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature, and is currently working on the requirements to complete a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California Santa Cruz,” Prison Radio, Oct 27, 2022.

The ultra-right-wing governor of the department of Santa Cruz, Luis Fernando Camacho, and his separatist clique have been maintaining an elitist and bosses’ strike against the government of Bolivia since October 21, which has already cost one life and economic losses of tens of millions of dollars. Camacho and the leaders of the Civic Committee for Santa Cruz demand that the population and housing census, postponed for technical reasons for a year later, be brought forward to 2023 with the consensus of all the governors and only the opinion against the governor of Santa Cruz.

It is worth remembering that Camacho is one of the most reactionary, racist, pro-imperialist, and patriarchal politicians of the Altiplano country and one of the most prominent subjects in the organization of the coup against Evo Morales in 2019, initiated with a strike very similar to the current one, which dragged important sectors of the middle classes of Bolivia. But today the conditions are not the same as then, the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) gained experience and consciousness and it comes from a great electoral victory in which it defeated the right-wing coup with more than 55% of the votes while maintaining its combat morale is high.

On the other hand, the Santa Cruz demand on the census has not materialized in other departments. The strike does however have the capacity to damage the regional and national economy due to the extraordinary economic and commercial importance of Santa Cruz. The census is important, among other reasons, because it has to do by law with the allocation of resources by the national government and the number of representatives in the Chamber of Deputies, where Santa Cruz could increase by three seats, although at least one would be for MAS, the second political force in the department. But it is not understood that postponing it, for technically well-argued reasons, is a cause to create a national political conflict, with serious economic consequences, at a time when the economy is recovering well from the effects of the pandemic, the disastrous economic management of the coup perpetrators and the international crisis.

The government of La Paz, from the very beginning, set the position of maintaining the dialogue with the government of Santa Cruz, but it did not do more than initiate the talk between María Nela Prada Tejada, Minister of the Presidency, and Camacho, when the latter decided to leave the table and abandon it, furious because his demands were not being met. The national government even agreed to consider the possibility of advancing the census if the Santa Cruz government technicians could demonstrate that it could be anticipated. More than a strike, it is a road blockade and mandatory closure of businesses and establishments which has hardly any popular support.

The MAS called a Great People’s Council on October 23, which was attended by hundreds of thousands of Santa Cruz inhabitants, who rejected the measure of force. Many of them not only disagree politically with the measure, but it affects them economically, as is the case of the workers of the informal economy and the agricultural producers of the region. Those summoned pronounced themselves in this way: “before the announcement of an indefinite strike by the Civic Committee pro Santa Cruz, the Great National Council in Defense of Democracy and the Economy developed on October 21, 2022, at the foot of the monument of Chiriguano, in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, with the participation of the people of Santa Cruz, workers, indigenous nations, natives, workers, peasants, intercultural organizations, economic and productive sectors of the countryside and the city, women’s organizations, trade unionists, transporters, students, university students, cooperatives, micro, small and medium entrepreneurs, artisans, artists, seniors, people with disabilities, youth and organized civil society; with the firm democratic conviction and within the framework of respect for the norms that govern the Plurinational State of Bolivia, the sectors of society demand that the intentions to destabilize the national government, which has democratically won the national elections of October 2020 with more than 55 percent, led by Lucho Arce and David Choquehuanca, be stopped”.

The United States and the Latin American oligarchies have resigned themselves to the existence of social transformation processes in Latin America and the Caribbean. Much less when at the head of them are successful, sovereign, and combative governments such as those presided over by Luis Arce and David Choquehuanca. That is why although the coup and all the maneuvers of the OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro to keep the dictator Jeanine Añez in government was defeated, and despite the fact that the MAS and its candidates Arce and Choquehuanca were legitimized with an overwhelming vote, the northern empire will continue to do everything possible to stifle the process of change in Bolivia.

Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US

On Monday, Oct. 24, at noon Twitter users noticed a modification to the tagging policy. The social media platform began tagging a group of public media outlets as “affiliated with the Cuban government” and the tag would in turn appear on messages sent or shared from any individual account that linked to those publications’ websites. On Tuesday, Facebook shut down a score of profiles of supposed supporters of the Cuban Revolution but left hundreds that publish manuals for homemade bombs, call to burn police stations, announce armed expeditions, disclose private data for political assassination, threaten and insult generally from accounts abroad.

As if waging an online video game war, the U.S. platforms have decided this week to direct their laser sight into Cuba’s quadrant to mark and silence the “characters” of an enemy that has no way to defend itself.

Some might argue that it’s honorable to be labeled as a publicly funded government media outlet, and it certainly is. But Twitter does not intend to glorify Granma, Cubadebate, Radio Habana Cuba, Juventud Rebelde, and others, but to reduce the dissemination of their messages.

Without prior notice and in a beastly manner, the transnational has extended its control policies to the Caribbean, the rush to erase uncomfortable voices, the hypocritical correction of its community standards, and, once again, it exercises censorship on a global scale, simply by tweaking its algorithms and without the procedures that would allow justifying such decisions.  To top it all, it considers private media to be impartial and more genuine than their publicly funded counterparts, so that on planet Twitter anything that smacks of private interest is off-label. In this biased view, users have no right to judge content on its merits.

But the biggest absurdity of all is that it is a U.S. government-linked corporation like Twitter that labels others as “media affiliated” with a state. It’s not hard to find evidence that the platform has worked in increasing intimacy with the White House ever since U.S. politicians began pressuring tech companies to regulate content. In a 2011 legal filing easy to find online, Twitter agreed with the Federal Trade Commission to “implement, monitor and adjust its security measures” under government observation and has since turned over thousands of users’ data to government agencies.

Forbes magazine reported in August that the U.S. tops the list of governments demanding data be handed over to tech platforms, with nearly two million user accounts handed over since 2013.  In the election that brought Biden to the White House, Twitter was one of many Silicon Valley corporations that worked directly with U.S. government agencies to determine what content should be removed in order to “secure” the election contest.

Whenever Twitter reports that it has purged thousands of accounts suspected of inauthentic behavior and acting at the direction of foreign governments, it will never be accounts from NATO countries or other friends of the U.S. government, and it doesn’t take much imagination to explain the cause. The favorite sanctioned ones are Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba, of course.

On May 12, 2020, the platform blocked 526 profiles managed from the island. It did not explain its decision to the users who saw their accounts abruptly canceled, but the next day, on May 13, Michael Kozak, then Acting Assistant Secretary for Western Hemisphere Affairs, told the press that the State Department had identified “more than four dozen Cuban accounts” that violated Twitter’s policies – announced by the government agency, not the super and “independent” private company.

Almost simultaneously, The Miami Herald published statements from another official on the progress of relations with Twitter: “We have an ongoing dialogue with technology companies and are working with them to share our thoughts on attempts by state and non-state actors to leverage their platforms to spread disinformation and propaganda,” said Lea Gabrielle, director of the Global Engagement Center (GEC), also at the State Department.

Facebook’s track record as a U.S. government-affiliated media outlet is even darker and quite well-known. I cite as a sample the scandal starting in 2021 by the then White House spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, who told reporters that the executive compiled lists of people who publish on that platform “problematic” content so that Facebook “can remove them”.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald, of The Intercept, reacted angrily: “Union of corporate and state power, one of the classic hallmarks of fascism”.  Greenwald was talking about Facebook, but this could be a great label to hang on Twitter as well.

Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – US

First published May 31, 2022

AUSTIN, TEXAS – Elon Musk’s proposed takeover of Twitter has ruffled many feathers among professional commentators. “Musk is the wrong leader for Twitter’s vital mission,” read one Bloomberg headline. The network also insisted, “Nothing in the Tesla CEO’s track record suggests he will be a careful steward of an important media property.” “Elon Musk is the last person who should take over Twitter,” wrote Max Boot in The Washington Post, explaining that “[h]e seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.” The irony of outlets owned by Michael Bloomberg and Jeff Bezos warning of the dangers of permitting a billionaire oligarch to control our media was barely commented upon.

Added to this, a host of celebrities publicly left the social media platform in protest against the proposed $44 billion purchase. This only seemed to confirm to many free-speech-minded individuals that the South African billionaire was a renegade outsider on a mission to save the internet from authoritarian elite control (despite the fact that he is borrowing money from the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia in order to do so).

Musk has deliberately cultivated this image of himself: a real-life Tony Stark figure who thinks for himself and is not part of the established order. But behind this carefully constructed façade, Musk is intimately connected to the U.S. national security state, serving as one of its most important business partners. Elon, in short, is no threat to the powerful, entrenched elite: he is one of them.

TO UKRAINE, WITH LOVE

Musk, whose estimated $230 billion fortune is more than twice the gross domestic product of Ukraine, has garnered a great deal of positive publicity for donating thousands of Starlink terminals to the country, helping its people come back online after fighting downed the internet in much of the country. Starlink is an internet service allowing those with terminals to connect to one of over 2,400 small satellites in low Earth orbit. Many of these satellites were launched by Musk’s SpaceX technologies company.

However, it soon transpired that there is far more than meets the eye with Musk’s extraordinary “donation.” In fact, the U.S. government quietly paid SpaceX top dollar to send their inventory to the warzone. USAID – a government anti-insurgency agency that has regularly functioned as a regime-change organization – is known to have put up the cash to purchase and deliver at least 1,330 of the terminals.

Starlink is not a mass-market solution. Each terminal – which is, in effect, a tiny, portable satellite dish – has a markedly limited range, and is useful only in hyper-local situations. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, estimated that the 10,000 Starlink terminals were allowing around 150,000 people to stay online.

Such a small number of people using the devices raises eyebrows. Who is important enough to be given such a device? Surely only high-value individuals such as spies or military operatives. That the Starlinks are serving a military purpose is now beyond clear. Indeed, in a matter of weeks, Starlink has become a cornerstone of the Ukrainian military, allowing it to continue to target Russian forces via drones and other high-tech machinery dependent on an internet connection. One official told The Times of London that he “must” use Starlink to target enemy forces via thermal imaging.

“Starlink is what changed the war in Ukraine’s favor. Russia went out of its way to blow up all our comms. Now they can’t. Starlink works under Katyusha fire, under artillery fire. It even works in Mariupol,” one Ukrainian soldier told journalist David Patrikarakos.

The reference to Mariupol alludes to the infamous Nazi group, the Azov Battalion, who have also reportedly been using Musk’s technology. Even in a subterranean cavern beneath Mariupol’s steelworks, Azov fighters were able to access the internet and communicate with the outside world, even doing video interviews from underground. In 2015, Congress attempted to add a provision to U.S. military aid to Ukraine stipulating that no support could go to Azov owing to their political ideology. That amendment was later removed at the behest of the Pentagon.

Dave Tremper, Director of Electronic Warfare at the Pentagon, sang SpaceX’s praises. “How they did that [keeping Ukrainian forces online] was eye-watering to me,” he said, adding that in the future the U.S. military “needs to be able to have that agility.”

ROCKETMAN

Such a statement is bound to get the attention of SpaceX chiefs, who have long profited from their lucrative relationship with the U.S. military. SpaceX relies largely on government contracts, there being almost no civilian demand for many of its products, especially its rocket launches.

Musk’s company has been awarded billions of dollars in contracts to launch spy satellites for espionage, drone warfare and other military uses. For example, in 2018, SpaceX was chosen to blast a $500 million Lockheed Martin GPS system into orbit. While Air Force spokesmen played up the civilian benefits of the launch, such as increased accuracy for GPS devices, it is clear that these devices play a key role in global surveillance and ongoing drone wars. SpaceX has also won contracts with the Air Force to deliver its command satellite into orbit, with the Space Development Agency to send tracking devices into space, and with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to launch its spy satellites. These satellites are used by all of the “big five” surveillance agencies, including the CIA and the NSA.

Thus, in today’s world, where so much intelligence gathering and target acquisition is done via satellite technology, SpaceX has become every bit as important to the U.S. war machine as more well-known companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Without Musk’s company, the U.S. would not be able to carry out such an invasive program of spying and drone warfare around the world. Indeed, China is growing increasingly wary of this power, and is being advised to develop anti-satellite technologies to counter SpaceX’s all-seeing eye. Yet Musk himself continues to benefit from a general perception that he is not part of the system.

From its origins in 2002, SpaceX has always been extremely close to the national security state, particularly the CIA. Perhaps the most crucial link is Mike Griffin, who, at the time, was the president and COO of In-Q-Tel, a CIA-funded venture capital firm that seeks to nurture and sponsor new companies that will work with the CIA and other security services, equipping them with cutting edge technology. The “Q” in its name is a reference to “Q” from the James Bond series – a creative inventor who supplies the spy with the latest in futuristic tech.

Griffin was with Musk virtually from day one, accompanying him to Russia in February 2002, where they attempted to purchase cut-price intercontinental ballistic missiles to start Musk’s business. Musk felt that he could substantially undercut opponents by using second-hand material and off-the-shelf components for launches. The attempt failed, but the trip cemented a lasting partnership between the pair, with Griffin going to war for Musk, consistently backing him as a potential “Henry Ford” of the rocket industry. Three years later, Griffin would become head of NASA and later would hold a senior post at the Department of Defense.

While at NASA, Griffin brought Musk in for meetings and secured SpaceX’s big break. In 2006, NASA awarded the company a $396 million rocket development contract – a remarkable “gamble” in Griffin’s words, especially as it had never launched a rocket before. As National Geographic put it, SpaceX, “never would have gotten to where it is today without NASA.” And Griffin was essential to this development. Still, by 2008, SpaceX was again in dire straits, with Musk unable to make payroll. The company was saved by an unexpected $1.6 billion NASA contract for commercial cargo services. Thus, from its earliest days, SpaceX was nurtured by government agencies that saw the company as a potentially important source of technology.

NUKING MARS & BACKING COUPS

Like Henry Ford, Musk went into the automobile business, purchasing Tesla Motors in 2004. And also like Henry Ford, he has shared some rather controversial opinions. In 2019, for instance, he suggested that vaporizing Mars’ ice caps via a series of nuclear explosions could warm the planet sufficiently to support human life. If this was done, it would arguably not even be his worst crime against space. During a 2018 publicity stunt, he blasted a Tesla into outer space using a SpaceX rocket. However, he did not sterilize the vehicle before doing so, meaning it was covered in earthly bacteria – microorganisms that will likely be fatal to any alien life they encounter. In essence, the car is a biological weapon that could end life on any planet it encounters.

Musk also attracted attention when he appeared to admit that he worked with the U.S. government to overthrow Bolivian President Evo Morales in 2019. Bolivia is home to the world’s largest easy-to-extract lithium reserves, an element crucial in the production of electric-vehicle batteries. Morales had refused to open the country up to foreign corporations eager to exploit Bolivia for profit. Instead, he proposed developing sovereign technology to keep both the jobs and profits inside the country. He was overthrown by a U.S.-backed far-right coup in November 2019. The new government quickly invited Musk for talks. When asked on Twitter point blank whether he was involved in Morales’ ouster, Musk responded, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

The South African has a long history of trolling and making inflammatory statements, so this “confession” might not be as cast-iron as it seems. Nevertheless, any hope of Musk profiting from Bolivia was shot after Morales’ party returned to power in a resounding victory one year later.

WORLD’S RICHEST MAN, FUNDED BY TAXPAYERS

In addition to the billions in government contracts Musk’s companies have secured, they also have received similar numbers in public subsidies and incentives. Chief among these is Tesla, which benefits greatly from complex international rules around electric vehicle production. In a push to reduce carbon emissions, governments around the world have introduced a system of credits for green vehicles, whereby a certain percentage of each manufacturer’s output must be zero-emission vehicles. Tesla only produces electric cars, so easily meets the mark.

However, the system also allows Tesla to sell their excess credits to manufacturers who cannot meet these quotas. In a competitive market where each manufacturer needs to hit certain targets, these credits are worth their weight in gold, and net Tesla billions in profit every year. For example, between 2019 and 2021 alone, Stellantis, which owns the Chrysler, Fiat, Citroen and Peugeot brands, forked out nearly $2.5 billion to acquire Tesla U.S. and European green credits.

This bizarre and self-defeating system goes some way to explaining why Tesla is worth more by market cap than Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, GM, Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, and Volvo put together, despite not being even a top-15 car manufacturer in terms of units sold.

Musk’s company also received significant government backing in its early stages, receiving a $465 million low-interest loan from the Department of Energy in 2010, at a time when Tesla was on the rocks and its future was in doubt.

Like many giant companies, Tesla is able to play states off against each other, each job-hungry location bidding against the others to give the corporation as much free cash and tax incentives as possible. In 2020, for example, Austin gave Tesla more than $60 million in tax breaks to build a truck plant there.

This, however, was small fry in comparison to some of the deals Musk has signed. The State of New York handed Musk over $750 million, including $350 million in cash, in exchange for building a solar plant outside of Buffalo – a plant that Musk was bound to build somewhere in the United States. Meanwhile, Nevada signed an agreement with Tesla to build its Gigafactory near Reno. The included incentives mean that the car manufacturer could rake in nearly $1.3 billion in tax relief and tax credits. Between 2015 and 2018, Musk himself paid less than $70,000 in federal income taxes.

Therefore, while the 50-year-old businessman presents himself as a maverick science genius – an act that has garnered him legions of fans around the world – a closer inspection of his career shows he earned his fortune in a much more orthodox manner. First by being born rich, then by striking it big as a dot-com billionaire, and finally, like so many others, by feeding from the enormous government trough.

Perhaps more seriously though, SpaceX’s close proximity to both the military and the national security state marks it out as a key cog in the machine of U.S. empire, allowing Washington to spy, bomb or coup whoever it wants.

It is for this reason that so much of the hysteria, both positive and negative, over Musk’s ongoing purchase of Twitter is misplaced. Elon Musk is neither going to save nor destroy Twitter because he is not a crusading rebel challenging the establishment: he is an integral part of it.

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

Source: MintPress News

An internationalist warrior from Colombia, a member of the Communist Party of the Donetsk People’s Republic (KPDPR), a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth of the DPR, Alexis Castillo (callsign Alfonso), died under shelling from shrapnel wounds. He fought off the offensive of the Ukrainian Nazis on the village of Peski.

Alexis Castillo was born in Colombia and lived in Spain for a long time. Eight years ago, he came to defend the inhabitants of Donbass from Ukrainian Nazism.

Our deceased comrade was a convinced communist, a decent and modest man. Until the end of his life, he remained faithful to his duty as an internationalist warrior.

In Donetsk, Alexis is survived by his wife and son. We extend our condolences to his family and friends.

Everlasting memory!

Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Donetsk People’s Republic
October 28, 2022

Translated by Melinda Butterfield

Source: Forward