March 11, 2017

Right-Wing Billionaires Have a Project Going to Rewrite Our Constitution, & They Are Shockingly Clos

Right-Wing Billionaires Have a Project Going to Rewrite Our Constitution, and They Are Shockingly Close to Pulling It Off
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/right-wing-billionaires-have-project-going-rewrite-our-constitution-and-they-are?akid=15289.162216.Jt7SFs&rd=1&src=newsletter1073670&t=2

By Thom Hartmann / AlterNet March 10, 2017

Imagine if the U.S. Constitution barred the EPA and Department of Education from existing. All union protections are dead, there are no more federal workplace safety standards, and even child-labor laws are struck down, along with a national minimum wage.

Imagine that the Constitution makes it illegal for the federal government to protect you from big polluters, big banks and even big food and pharma—all are free to rip you off or poison you all they want, and your only remedy is in state courts and legislatures, because the Constitution prevents Congress from doing anything about any of it. The federal government can't even enforce voting or civil rights laws.

To add injury to insult, the federal government has to shut down Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, because all of these programs (along with food stamps, housing supports and any programs that help the middle class, the less fortunate or disabled) are “beyond the reach” of what the federal government can do.

A few years ago, it would have been a thought experiment; now it's nearly reality. Billionaires and the groups they fund are working to rewrite our Constitution to provide corprations and the rich with more and more protections and benefits, and chop away at anything smelling of “socialism” like Social Security or child labor laws.
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I am so disturbed by this article that it is hard to really post about it.

March 9, 2017

Vampire Webpages Suck Content From Legitimate Progressive News Sites

http://www.alternet.org/media/vampire-webpages-suck-content-legitimate-progressive-news-sites

Vampire Webpages Suck Content From Legitimate Progressive News Sites
A parasitic business model thrives on Facebook.
By Steven Rosenfeld, Ivy Olesen / AlterNet March 6, 2017

Some new media vampires on the internet block are pilfering content from independent journalism websites and deceitfully posting it as their own on Facebook, the premier social media platform.

These Facebook pages and their affiliated websites pose as progressive champions, but their content is largely copied, if not plagiarized, from legitimate news and opinion outlets with real reporters and analysts, not rewrite teams. Their goal appears to be making money by attracting millions of readers as unknowing users click on links or share their memes—photos with slogans—because viewer traffic generates advertising revenues via Google ads.

Anyone who has a Facebook page and pays attention to politics—and shares with a circle of friends—has seen the vampires’ work. Even professionals in media, information technology and progressive politics often share posts and links to affiliated sites such as Occupy Democrats (5.9 million Facebook likes and 1.1 million monthly U.S. viewers on its website, according to Quantcast), The Other 98% (4.5 million Facebook likes; its related The Other 98 Percent Action Fund has 214,000 monthly U.S. viewers) and USUncut (1.5 million Facebook likes and 2.8 million monthly viewers). Indeed, there are hundreds of other pages and sites like these, such as Addicting Info, with 1.2 million Facebook likes, Liberal America with 754,000 Facebook likes, and a new six-week-old Facebook page, Resistance Report, with 144,000 Facebook likes.

[snippage]

To investigate this phenomenon, AlterNet started a free 14-day trial from Spike to track the vampire sites and their audiences. The New York Times magazine wrote about this trend last summer, but missed the plagiarism aspect. Nonetheless, its profile, titled, “Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Intentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine,” with the subhead, “How a strange new class of media outlet has arisen to take over our news feeds,” affirms the basic contours of the online vampire media industry. Surely, you’ve noticed: “A video of Bernie Sanders speaking, overlaid with text, shared from a source you’ve never seen before, viewed 15 million times. An article questions Hillary Clinton’s honesty; a headline questioning Donald Drumpf’s sanity.”

much more at link
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I've been noticing that people are posting from these vampire sites instead of the original journalistic site. Quite possibly these sites need to be blacklisted. We have to fight tooth and nail for investigative journalism and we do not need to "steal" money (from clicks) from them. They need every dime they can get.