NYTimes | But
what, exactly, does it mean for the federal government to “guarantee to
every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government”?
As James Madison explains it in Federalist No. 43,
it means that “In a confederacy founded on republican principles, and
composed of republican members, the superintending government ought
clearly to possess authority to defend the system against aristocratic
or monarchial innovations.”
He goes
on: “The more intimate the nature of such a Union may be, the greater
interest have the members in the political institutions of each other;
and the greater right to insist that the forms of government under which
the compact was entered into, should be substantially maintained.”
Of
course, there’s no real chance in the modern era that any state will
become a “monarchy” or “aristocracy” in the 18th-century sense. So why
does the Guarantee Clause matter, and what does it mean? How does one
determine whether a state has maintained a “republican form of
government”?
Ordinarily we would turn
to the Supreme Court for an answer to a question of this sort. But here,
the court has deferred to Congress. InLuther v. Borden in 1849 —a
suit that concerned the authority of a Rhode Island government that
still operated under its original royal charter and which rested on the
Guarantee Clause — Chief Justice Roger Taney (later of Dred Scott
infamy) declared:
Under
this article of the Constitution, it rests with Congress to decide what
government is the established one in a State. For as the United States
guarantee to each State a republican government, Congress must
necessarily decide what government is established in the State before it
can determine whether it is republican or not.
Taney’s ruling held strong, a little more than 60 years later, in Pacific States Telephone and Telegraph Co. v. Oregon,
when the court rebuffed a claim that the Guarantee Clause rendered
direct referendums unconstitutional by stating that it was beyond the
scope of the power of the Supreme Court to enforce the guarantee of a
republican government. “That question,” wrote Chief Justice Edward White
in his majority opinion, “has long since been determined by this court
conformably to the practice of the government from the beginning to be
political in character, and therefore not cognizable by the judicial
power, but solely committed by the Constitution to the judgment of
Congress.”
This remains the court’s view. But it’s not the only view. In his famous dissent
in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Justice John Marshall Harlan cited the
Guarantee Clause in his brief against Louisiana’s Jim Crow segregation
law. If allowed to stand, he wrote,
there
would remain a power in the States, by sinister legislation, to
interfere with the blessings of freedom; to regulate civil rights common
to all citizens, upon the basis of race; and to place in a condition of
legal inferiority a large body of American citizens, now constituting a
part of the political community, called the people of the United
States, for whom and by whom, through representatives, our government is
administrated. Such a system is inconsistent with the guarantee given
by the Constitution to each State of a republican form of government,
and may be stricken down by congressional action, or by the courts in
the discharge of their solemn duty to maintain the supreme law of the
land, anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary
notwithstanding.
In this
vision of the Guarantee Clause, the touchstone for “a republican form of
government” is political equality, and when a state imposes political inequality beyond a certain point, Congress or the federal courts step in to restore the balance.
In a 2010 article
for the Stanford Law Review, Jacob M. Heller called this a “death by a
thousand cuts” approach to enforcement, one where lawmakers and courts
understand that “anything that impedes on the state’s republican form is
one step closer to eventual unraveling of a state’s republican form of
government.”
To put it into words, the problem we have is corruption in the
government contracting world, aided by immense amounts of useless
overpaid make work. In 2011, an antitrust attorney did a report on how
we overpay for government contracting. In service of ‘shrinking
government,’ policymakers chose to set up a system where instead of
hiring an engineer as a government employee for, say, $120,000 a year,
they paid a consulting firm like Booz Allen $500,000 a year for a
similar engineer. The resulting system is both more expensive and more
bureaucratic.
Here’s one example I grabbed from a public government contracting
schedule. The rate negotiated by the government’s General Services
Administration for Boston Consulting Group is $33,063.75/week to get a
single relatively junior contractor.
But it is a bit too easy. The Boston Consulting Group may be charging
$33,063.75 per week for the services of a single kind-of-bright
conformist straight out of business school. But that kid, he isn’t
getting paid $1.7M a year. He’s probably “only” paid 10% of that. From
that take, his managers and their managers, their assistants and his,
not to mention of course the firm’s shareholders, are all getting a
piece of that sweet government slop. And all those guys and gals, they
are living in places like Arlington, VA, and some of them have families
and mortgages on houses they indebted themselves perhaps millions of
dollars to inhabit.
There are people at the top of the American food chain who are stupid
rich, for whom questions of making ends meet and financial security are
laughably distant. People like that, they are easy to deal with. If it
was “us” (whoever the fuck we are) versus only them, politics would be
easy. We’d have taxed the billionaires to pay their fair share a long
time ago.
But most of the people towards the top of the American food chain are
not stupid rich, but stupidly rich. They “make” sums of money that by
any fair reckoning, obviously in a global context but even in an
American context, are huge. But they plow that affluence into bidding
wars on incredibly (if artificially) scarce social goods. Nobody “needs”
to live in Arlington (or my own San Francisco). No one’s kid “has” to
go to private school (or for the more woke among us, notionally public
schools rendered exclusive by the cost of nearby housing). If you make
price your first priority in, say, shopping for preschool or daycare,
perhaps you can find something reasonable.
But most of us, if we are no longer free, young, and single, if we
are rich enough to pay the vig you have to pay to be sure your kid’s
preschool will in fact be “safe” and “nurturing”, well, we pay it. If we
haven’t rigged our housing choice so that the local public school is
good enough, we pay up for a private school. If we can afford to be
choosy, if we are really rich, we pay up for the private school that
devotes significant resources to the searches and scholarships that
deliver, in Nikole Hannah-Jones memorable words,
a “carefully curated integration, the kind that allows many white
parents to boast that their children’s public schools look like the
United Nations.” It is extraordinarily expensive to be both comfortable
and some facsimile of virtuous. You’ll never see as many rainbow flags
as you see in Marin County.
The point of this is not that you should have sympathy for the
Arlingtonians (or San Franciscans). Fuck ’em (er, us). But you are
missing something important, as a matter of politics if nothing else, if
you don’t get that the people who are your predators financially are,
in their turn, someone else’s prey. Part of why the legalized corruption
that is the vast bulk of the (dollar-weighted) US economy is so
immovable is that the people whose lobbyists have cornered markets to
ensure they stay overpaid are desperately frightened of not being
overpaid, because if they were not overpaid they would become unable to
make all the absurd overpayments that are now required to live what
people of my generation (and race, and class) understood to be an
ordinary life. It’s turtles all the way down, each one collecting a toll
and wondering how it’s gonna pay the next diapsid.
Perhaps the most straightforward examples of all this, much more
sympathetic than Boston Consulting Group swindlers, are doctors. It’s
well and good to rail against health insurance companies and big pharma,
and really, fuck ’em so hard they disappear into perpetual orgasm and
we never have to encounter them again. But we know that healthcare in
the US is exorbitantly expensive compared to anywhere else, and we also
know, even if it is not shouted as loudly in political stump speeches,
that a big part of this is that doctors are paid roughly twice as much in America as they are paid elsewhere in the developed world.
But what would it mean, really, to cut US doctors’ salaries in half?
In theory, if you are the most imperceptive sort of economist, it means
they could live as well as doctors do in Europe, which is not so bad. US
doctors are paid twice as much in what is imaginatively described as
“real terms”, so they should be able to purchase the same goods and
services with their income as their European peers do. Where’s the
problem?
But economists’ “real terms” do not measure the realest terms at all,
the social relations in which the dance of our production and
consumption is embedded. If you cut doctors’ salaries in half tomorrow,
they would have to sell their mortgaged, absurdly expensive homes. At
half their present salary, doctors would no longer be able to afford to
live amongst “peer” professions like lawyers, management consultants,
middling corporate executives, and the employees of surveillance
monopolists. Doctors would fall precipitously from the social class,
embedded in geography and consumption habits, to which many of them even
now cling only precariously. More calamitously, they would lose the
capacity to produce or reproduce membership in that social class for
their children, often the most expensive amenity American professionals
seek to purchase.
Doctors in France don’t have this problem because they live in a
society less stratified than the one that we are unfortunate to inhabit.
In societies in which the lives and prospects of the rich and less rich
are not so divergent, people can afford to be a bit less rich. After
all, even in the United States, the problem is not scarcity in a
straightforward economic sense. We can build, to a first approximation,
as much great housing as we want. The skills required to care for and
educate kids are reproducible. They could be elastically and
economically supplied. The scarcity of a slot at Harvard (and that
slot’s many antecedents, all the way back to birth) has little to do
with some ingrained incapacity to educate wonderful teachers.
The solution to the problem of “positional goods”, which are inherently zero-sum and inelastically supplied, is supposedto be the infinite multiplicity of social dimensions over which we can measure our positions (ht Arjun Narayan). The most famous exposition of this view is perhaps David Brooks’ from On Paradise Drive:
“Know thyself,” the Greek philosopher advised. But of course this is
nonsense. In the world of self-reinforcing clique communities, the
people who are truly happy live by the maxim “Overrate thyself.” They
live in a community that reinforces their values every day. The
anthropology professor can stride through life knowing she was
unanimously elected chairwoman of her crunchy suburb’s
sustainable-growth study seminar. She wears the locally approved status
symbols: the Tibet-motif dangly earrings, the Andrea Dworkin-inspired
hairstyle, the peasant blouse, and the public-broadcasting tote bag…
Meanwhile, sitting in the next seat of the coach section on some
Southwest Airlines flight, there might be a midlevel executive from a
postwar suburb who’s similarly rich in self-esteem. But he lives in a
different clique, so he is validated and reinforced according to
entirely different criteria and by entirely different institutions… [H]e
has been named Payroll Person of the Year by the West Coast Regional
Payroll Professional Association. He is interested in College Football
and tassels. His loafers have tassels. His golf bags have tassels. If he
could put tassels around the Oklahoma football vanity license plate on
his Cadillac Escalade, his life would be complete.
It’s hard to know, from this excerpt, which of these two is richer,
the anthropology professor or the payroll guy. Both crouch together in
the eternal middle class of unreserved coach seating on a Southwest
Airlines flight. And in that skyward netherworld, On Paradise Flight,
Brooks would be right. When there are not objective correlates of
anyone’s definition of positional status, each of us can choose
whichever measure of position flatters us most. We need agree only that
is it gauche to try to impose our values on others for us all to live as
happiest and best, quietly pitying our inferiors even as we cheerfully
pass along a bag of pretzels.
But what it means to live in a stratified society, precisely what it means to live in a stratified society, is that there are
objective correlates to position along dimensions that individuals and
communities cannot themselves choose. There are positional dimensions
whose importance is a social fact, not arbitrary, but real as social facts are, by virtue of their consequences.
In such a society, positional goods with desirable correlates,
inherently scarce and inelastically supplied, become extremely valuable.
In some societies, those goods may be rationed by custom, or by
heredity, by caste or race. But to the degree that a society is
“liberal” and capitalist, they will be price-rationed, as they largely
(but incompletely) are in our American society.
Tablet | The
elevation of “domestic terror” to America’s No. 1 national security
concern has less to do with social reality on the margins than it does
with bureaucrats and experts at the center of American power. The latter
are looking for a new enemy to justify the counterterrorism budgets
that are endangered by the American drawdown from the Middle East, and
their professional exigencies correspond with the Biden White House’s
political program.
Hoffman told his Zoom audience about the Atomwaffen Division, defined
by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “terroristic neo-Nazi
organization.” I can find no evidence that Atomwaffen or any other
neo-Nazi group was involved in the Capitol Hill riots on Jan. 6. After
the Zoom meeting, I wrote Hoffman’s office to ask if they had found
evidence I had missed. Neither he nor his office responded to questions
from Tablet.
Hoffman
noted that far-right ideologues preach “accelerationism,” a doctrine
that urges its adherents to encourage and foment chaos to hasten the
inevitable collapse of the existing system. But in less than a year, the
political party that runs the system has pushed middle-class America to
the brink of despair, with rising gas and food prices, ballooning
inflation, open borders, a supply chain crisis, and experimental medical
treatment mandates that have hollowed out heath care facilities and
fire and police departments, and may impair the combat readiness of the
U.S. armed forces.
Hoffman’s
attempt to blame Trump supporters for the mess created by the country’s
ruling class is an aspect of an information operation designed to
deflect blame for elite decision-making onto a domestic opponent that
does in fact seek to remove them from power by legal means: through the
vote. And that’s partly what the effort to paint Trump supporters as
domestic terrorists is about—to delegitimize the legitimate opposition
in the in lead-up to the 2022 midterms.
“Domestic
terror” is the establishment’s campaign platform. Sure, gas is almost
$5 a gallon, heating oil prices are worse than in the 1970s, and grandma
may need a fourth booster shot of a vaccine whose protective properties
seem a lot less important to policymakers than the money that
pharmaceutical companies—now the single biggest lobbying group in
Washington—are receiving from the federal government. But what will your
neighbors think if you vote for domestic terrorists? And why should
domestic terrorists be permitted to incite domestic terror among their
domestic terrorist base by advertising or posting on Facebook?
As with every information operation that political operatives, intelligence officials,
and the media have run the last several years, the goal is not simply
to smear opponents, but also to obtain from the federal government
political and legal instruments to wield against them. The hysterical
media coverage of Jan. 6 first gave rise to a congressional committee
designed to target Jan. 6 protesters, and GOP officials, as domestic
terrorists. The next step, it seems, is anti-domestic terror
legislation.
Hoffman has explained
in interviews since Jan. 6 why he backs domestic terror statutes: “It
would require the federal government to gather data and statistical
information on terrorist incidents in the United States,” he said in
April. In other words, it would create work for contractors,
consultants, and analysts who research terror-related issues, like …
Bruce Hoffman.
Further,
in an appeal to the progressive left, Hoffman contends that domestic
terror laws would make America more just because they would “bring
greater equity to sentencing.” What he means is that Muslim supporters
of designated foreign terror groups already get long prison terms—so
white people involved in “domestic terror,” however that’s defined,
should also get long prison terms.
The
reason there is no federal statute on the books for domestic terrorism
is glaringly obvious: A politicized justice system would use it to
attack its political adversaries, as the Biden administration is
currently doing by defining the Jan. 6 riots as an “insurrection.”
Insurrection sounds serious, it’s in the Constitution, so it’s used to
frame Trump supporters, even though no one has been charged with it. The
push behind a domestic terror statute is to turn the deplorables into
untouchables.
Bruce
Hoffman’s role in all this is to keep the Jewish community in line
behind the party and Biden, who the majority of American Jews voted for
in 2020. And they can help sell the operation, too, for few can speak
more poignantly about the age-old dangers of white power violence than
the Jews.
The
terrible irony of course is that Hoffman is seeking to align the
American Jewish community with spy services that are using a conspiracy
theory to persecute their enemies on behalf of a ruling party
increasingly comfortable with using state power and censorship to
enforce its will. This runs counter to the country’s central
principle—that citizens have rights that must be protected against the
majority and the powerful. By desecrating civil rights, this new
dispensation does not seem likely to create a polity in which Jews
themselves would avoid persecution for very long.
The pathological elite of this country are in process of narratizing themselves through a controlled population decline. All institutions of public health seemingly accepting this top-down narrative.
Mckinsey was the major force
multiplier of the opioid crisis, and it is because of that fact that when I read this piece on the panicdemic, I'm drawn to conclude that the plan is simply to kill off people. Whether opioid addiction or viral contagion, the plan is simply to kill off unprofitable population.
After all, it was McKinsey who advised the Sacklers how to
make more money than god selling opioids legally. (coincidentally, this program coincided with the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan from whence tons of opium were exported back to the U.S.) The result
was deaths of addiction and despair all across the country, by
prescription.
McKinsey gives out the usual one size fits all advice to
everyone, streamline your business, make sales
triple, socialize your costs, demand tax exemptions… I can
even remember – less than 10 years ago – walking into same-day surgery
and seeing big stickers on the floor both advertising opiod pain killers
and advising to take them with caution. Laughable because when you are
in serious pain post surgery, you are inclined
to pop that stuff like candy. And then ask for more. I wonder if
McKinsey advised Pharma to install advertisements in hospitals.
truthout | “This library is full of losers,” an HR person said to me as I signed
my letter of resignation from my public library job. “A bunch of losers
who just take, take, take. Good for you for moving up in the world.” I
was truly shocked by her disdain for my coworkers.
The HR person approved of my resignation because I was leaving an
assistant position to take a professional one at another library,
joining the ranks of other degreed librarians after graduating from
library school. But her comment dripped with scorn toward all the people
who simply showed up to work each day, collecting their modest
paychecks and serving the public. Indeed, her comment reflected a more
widespread attitude that I’ve found among administrators (members of the
professional managerial class) within the public sector: Many are
capitalist groupies who see unionized employees working for the
government as leeches. This anti-worker sentiment within the
administrative ranks of many public libraries has made it easier for one
of the most nefarious grifts in the U.S. economic system to take hold:
the public-private partnership, a Reagan-era arrangement in which
private industry “partners” with the public sector, claiming to be able
to deliver more for less in service to the public.
Just the name makes me sick — the slick, corporate double-speak of it and the way partnership
implies that these arrangements aren’t an insidious attack on public
institutions. Perhaps the most nauseating of these assaults on the
commons is one that has been silently infiltrating one of our most
cherished public spaces: public libraries.
Library Systems and Services (LS&S) is a for-profit, private
company that has been quietly infiltrating public libraries since 1997
when it successfully negotiated a contract to privatize the county
library system in Riverside County, California. In the ‘90s and through
the first decade of the 2000s, LS&S operated using a business model
that will be familiar to anyone who follows local government issues in
the U.S.: a private company descends on a municipal or county government
that is in financially poor shape, and offers to take over (or
“outsource”) management of a public service, like a library, for a
fraction of the cost. This business model changed slightly, and
alarmingly, about a decade ago.
In 2010, LS&S made headlines
by securing contracts to privatize public libraries in affluent,
economically healthy municipalities, rather than in struggling,
economically marginalized communities. Flexing into a new type of
market, the sky is apparently the limit for LS&S, which according to
its own website has shockingly morphed into “the 3rd largest library
system in the United States.”
thehill | Annually, millions of passengers travel by plane to see family for
Thanksgiving; in 2019, 26 million travelers and crew passed through U.S.
airport screening in the 11-day period around the holiday. This year,
waves of Americans could see their flights canceled or delayed because
of a severe lack of workers within the Transportation Security
Administration (TSA). In June the agency warned
of serious staffing shortages at nearly 150 of the nation’s airports.
The situation was so bad that TSA office employees were asked to
volunteer at airports for up to 45 days.
Given these existing issues, the timing of President Biden’s
Nov. 22 vaccine mandate for federal employees — just three days before
Thanksgiving — could not be worse. As of October, only about 60 percent
of TSA workers were vaccinated. If employees call in sick or organize a
walkout days before the holiday, it would create a nationwide travel
nightmare for potentially hundreds of thousands of people, leading to
massive delays and waves of flights being canceled. President Biden
could get stuck with a Reagan-air traffic controllers situation.
It
is not just the TSA that is impacted by staffing shortages — airlines
face similar challenges. The past few months have seen airlines such as
Southwest and American cancel thousands of flights because of a shortage
of workers; the latter is attempting to make due with just
three-quarters of its pre-pandemic staff. The coming vaccine mandate for
large private companies will make existing staffing issues that much
more acute at a time when the airlines have no spare capacity, and it
could spark a flood of resignations and layoffs. While most large
airline workforces are mostly vaccinated — United reports more than 90
percent — even losing a small fraction of employees during the busiest
travel period of the year would be disastrous. How many pilots will
simply cash in their retirements instead of dealing with a sweeping
federal mandate? How many mechanics or support staff will call in for a
week or just quit?
Those who travel by car to see family this
Thanksgiving will face burdens, as well. The cost of fuel is nearing an
all-time high, impeding the ability for average families to drive long
distances to see their loved ones. The increasing price of fuel (crude
oil is anticipated at $120 next year) also leads to higher plane ticket costs and will drive up the price of most consumer goods and food. Plus, heating the family home will be much pricier.
Americans already are being pushed to the brink with inflated costs across the board. Food prices are at their highest point since the 1970s and global food prices increased 3 percent during just the month of October. Simultaneously, a worsening fertilizer shortage
because of supply chain disruptions threatens to spike food costs even
more. Prices are inflating across the board — a whole turkey doubled in price over the past two years. The New York Times said that 2021 could be the costliest Thanksgiving in history.
thedebrief |The Gillibrand Amendment is the latest
in a series of efforts in Washington to enact provisions for more
coordination in government regarding UAP investigations. The Debrief reported on legislation presented in early September,
authored by Congressman Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), which had been the first
to call for the establishment of an office within government solely for
the study of UAP. That language was not challenged when the House
passed its version of the National Defense Authorization Act (H.R. 4350)
on September 23. However, the provisions proposed in the Gillibrand
Amendment go much further than the House’s Gallego provision in spelling
out broad authorities and resources for the proposed new
UAP-investigatory enterprise.
Douglas Dean Johnson, a volunteer researcher with the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU)
who was the first to report on the introduction of the Gillibrand
Amendment, and who posted a detailed analysis of the proposal at his blog on Friday,
said the Gillibrand Amendment “would go considerably further than the
Gallego provision already approved by the House, or the much narrower
provisions proposed by the House and Senate intelligence committees, to
require the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community to
create new institutional arrangements and devote substantial resources
to investigating and analyzing UAP, and to draw on UAP-related expertise
from outside the government.”
The Debrief spoke with
Johnson, who characterized the proposed amendment, if it passes, as
being “very expansive in the mandates that it would impose on the
Executive Branch with respect to unidentified aerial phenomena.”
Among the many proposals outlined
within the Gillibrand Amendment is a requirement for line organizations
“to rapidly respond to, and conduct field investigations of, incidents
involving unidentified aerial phenomena under the direction of the
Office.”
The proposal states that such
organizations will operate within both the DOD and the intelligence
community, and will “possess appropriate expertise, authorities,
accesses, data, systems, platforms, and capabilities” for such rapid
response investigations.
The line organizations are to be
tasked with “scientific, technical, and operational analysis of data
gathered by field investigations,” and are to include the “testing of
materials, medical studies, and development of theoretical models to
better understand and explain unidentified aerial phenomena.”
“It would require that the Secretary
of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence set up permanent
structures at quite a high level,” Johnson told The Debrief. “Not
just an office with some paper shufflers, but actual apparatus where
this UAP office would have command authority, so to speak. The ability
to instantly tap into designated existing military assets to do rapid
field investigations where UAP encounters are reported.”
Johnson adds that the proposed office
would also have “the authority, and indeed the mandate from Congress to
do science studies to analyze anomalous aspects of these encounters, and
to try and come up with theoretical models to explain some of the
things that are being observed.”
GQ |What’s the consensus around how these things fly?
Right now one of the leading theories out there is that someone has
figured out a way to manipulate space-time and, in essence, master the
idea of antigravity.
So if you see a UAP moving left to right, it’s not “flying” left to right, it’s bending that space towards it?
Correct.
Current hypothesis is that it creates a bubble around it and that
bubble is insulating itself from the space-time that all of us
experience. And so, therefore, the way it experiences space-time within
the bubble is fundamentally different from outside the bubble.
How many presidents have been briefed on the issue and do you know who engaged the most?
I
know, as a matter of fact, three presidents have been briefed at some
point, but I’m not going to disclose who they were and what was
discussed. That’s not up for me to talk about.
In cultural depictions of UFOs, who do you think has got the closest to reality?
I would have to say Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
I just recently saw it for the first time and I was shocked at some of
the performance characteristics and how they depicted the UAPs, because
that is exactly how they’ve been described in some, up until recently,
very classified US documents.
What in particular?
The
description of how they do right-angle turns at very fast velocity, the
illumination, the shapes of some of these craft. [Steven] Spielberg
definitely had somebody on the inside that was giving him information,
for sure. I mean there’s a lot of that movie that, if you know what
you’re looking at, is very, very close to real life.
Some suggest that the post-2017 UAP disclosure narrative is
actually just a government disinformation effort or psyops campaign.
What do you say to that?
At
no time since I’ve been involved with AATIP has my government been
involved in an active disinformation campaign, other than initially
denying that it was real. The United States government is not in the
habit of conducting disinformation on American citizens. There was a
time when our government did do that and got caught and so congress
passed laws to make sure that will never happen again.
What can you tell us about what’s coming up in 2022, in terms of new evidence that may come to light or new developments?
I
think we’ll see a lot more participation by the international community
and a lot more transparency. We’re going to begin sharing information a
lot more and I think people may be surprised just how much information
is possessed on this topic by other countries. My only hope is that the
UK will be able to do the same thing. Much for the same reason that the
United States didn’t want to admit that UFOs were real, I suspect the UK
[doesn’t] as well. What I can tell you is during my time in AATIP it
was very apparent to me that there were certain elements within the
royal family that were very interested in this topic. I will not
elaborate any more than that. And I hope that those voices within the
royal family can be heard, because it is an important topic, perhaps one
of the greatest topics that affects all of mankind, all of humanity.
And I think if we’re smart, this will be a topic that will help unify us
and not divide us.
jonathanturley | The latest indictment by Special Counsel John Durham has created a
stir in Washington as the investigation into the Russian collusion
scandal exposed new connections to the Clinton campaign. The indictment
of Igor Danchenko
exposes additional close advisers to Hillary Clinton who allegedly
pushed discredited and salacious allegations in the Steele dossier.
However, one of the most interesting new elements was the role of a
liberal think tank, the Brookings Institution, in the alleged effort to
create a false scandal of collusion. Indeed, Brookings appears so often
in accounts related to the Russian collusion scandal that it could be
Washington’s alternative to the Kevin Bacon parlor game. It appears that many of these figures are within six degrees of Brookings.
The fact is that Washington remains a small town for the ruling elite
where degrees of separation can be quite small as figures move in and
out of government. Moreover, think tanks are often the parking lots for
party loyalists as they wait (and work) for new Administrations. The
Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation play a similar role for
conservative figures.
However, even in Washington’s inbred environment, the layers of
connections to Brookings is remarkable in the Durham indictments and
accounts of the effort to create a Russian collusion scandal. The effort
was hardly a secret before anyone knew the name of the former British
spy Christopher Steele. On July 28, former CIA Director John Brennan
briefed then President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s alleged “plan” to tie
Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her
use of a private email server.” Notes from the meeting state the plan to
invent a collusion narrative was “allegedly approved by Hillary Clinton
a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald
Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian
security service.” That was three days before the Russian investigation
was initiated.
Durham is detailing how this plan was carried out and many of those
referenced are within not six but two degrees of separation from
Brookings.
Brookings played a large role in pushing the Russian collusion
narrative, hiring a variety of experts who then populated media outlets
like MSNBC and CNN stating confidently that Trump was clearly
incriminated in a series of dubious criminal acts. While no such crimes
were ever charged, let alone prosecuted, Brookings maintained a deep
bench of enabling experts like Susan Hennessey (now a national security adviser in the Biden Administration), Ben Wittes (who defended James Comey in his leaking of FBI memos) and Norm Eisen (who then become counsel in the Trump impeachment
effort). This included the Brookings site, LawFare, which ran a steady
stream of columns on how Trump could be charged for crimes ranging from
obstruction to bribery.
However, that type of media cross-pollination is common. What is most
surprising is how the indictment seems to map out roads that keep
leading back to Brookings.
The latest indicted figure, Danchenko, worked at Brookings.
He proved to be the key unnamed source for Christopher Steele and later
admitted to the FBI that the information attributed to him was not just
“unsubstantiated” but, after being reworked by Steele, was
unrecognizable from the original gossip or speculation.
wsj | As U.S. health authorities expand use of the leading Covid-19 vaccines, researchers investigating heart-related risks
linked to the shots are exploring several emerging theories, including
one centered on the spike protein made in response to vaccination.
Some theories center on the type of spike protein
that a person makes in response to the mRNA vaccines. The mRNA itself
or other components of the vaccines, researchers say, could also be
setting off certain inflammatory responses in some people.
One new theory under examination: improper injections of the
vaccine directly into a vein, which sends the vaccine to heart muscle.
To find answers, some doctors and scientists are running tests
in lab dishes and examining heart-tissue samples from people who
developed myocarditis or pericarditis after getting vaccinated.
Myocarditis describes inflammation of the heart muscle, while
pericarditis refers to inflammation of the sac surrounding the muscle.
Covid-19 itself can cause both conditions. They have also been
reported in a smaller number of people who got an mRNA vaccine, most
commonly in men under 30 years and adolescent males.
About 877 confirmed cases of myocarditis in vaccinated people
under 30 years have been reported in the U.S., out of 86 million mRNA
vaccine doses administered, according to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention.
wsj | The sprawling federal research agency has led government efforts
studying and battling Covid-19, including funding the development and
testing of vaccines.
Anthony Fauci,
a top NIH scientist, has been a public face of the Biden
administration’s case for wider vaccine mandates, including a federal
one affecting the NIH’s own staff.
But just like at workplaces across the country,
vaccine mandates are sparking controversy at the NIH. The agency’s main
bioethics department has scheduled a Dec. 1 live-streamed roundtable
session over the ethics of mandates. The seminar is one of four
agencywide ethics debates this year, accessible to all of the NIH’s
nearly 20,000 staff, as well as patients and the public, organizers say.
It was set up after a senior infectious-disease researcher at the
institute pushed back against broadening discussion of mandates this
summer and requested an agency ethics review.
“There’s a lot of debate within the NIH about whether [a vaccine mandate] is appropriate,” said
David Wendler,
the senior NIH bioethicist who is in charge of planning the session. “It’s an important, hot topic.”
A federal appeals court on Saturday temporarily blocked Biden administration rules
issued last week by the U.S. Labor Department requiring many private
employers to ensure workers are vaccinated or tested weekly for
Covid-19. The Labor Department’s top legal adviser said the
administration was confident in its authority to issue the mandate and
prepared to defend the rules.
In the NIH-scheduled roundtable next month,
Matthew Memoli,
who runs a clinical studies unit within the NIH’s National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, will make the case against
mandates. Dr. Memoli, 48 years old, opposes mandatory Covid-19
vaccination with currently available shots, and he has declined to be
vaccinated.
“I think the way we are using the vaccines is wrong,” he said. In a
July 30 email to Dr. Fauci and two of his lieutenants, Dr. Memoli called
mandated vaccination “extraordinarily problematic.” He says one of Dr.
Fauci’s colleagues thanked him for his email. Dr. Fauci and a NIAID
spokeswoman declined to comment.
Dr. Memoli said he supports Covid-19 vaccination in high-risk
populations including the elderly and obese. But he argues that with
existing vaccines, blanket vaccination of people at low risk of severe
illness could hamper the development of more-robust immunity gained
across a population from infection.
childrenshealthdefense | A source close to California Gov. Gavin Newsom today told The Defender the governor experienced an adverse reaction to the Moderna COVID vaccine he received Oct. 27.
GBS is a neurological disorder in which the body’s immune system
mistakenly attacks part of its peripheral nervous system — the network
of nerves located outside of the brain and spinal cord — and can range
from a very mild case with brief weakness to paralysis to leaving the
person unable to breathe independently.
The governor has not been seen in public since he was photographed Oct. 27 getting his COVID booster.
On Oct. 29, Newsom’s office issued a statement
referring to unspecified “family obligations” as the reason the
governor canceled his scheduled appearances, including his planned
meetings at the global COP 26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
A local ABC News outlet reported
that when “the surprising announcement was made,” a spokesperson said
Newsom planned to participate virtually in the climate conference.
However, Newsom’s name was removed from the schedule and he did not
participate.
The Defender reached out to Newsom’s office today by phone and email, but the office did not respond before publication.
According to Fox News,
Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, on Sunday tweeted — then quickly
deleted — a message urging people to “stop hating” while her husband
has been out of the public eye since canceling plans, including his
appearances at COP 26.
KHOU | About 4 million federal workers are to be vaccinated by Nov. 22 under
the president's executive order. Some employees, like those at the
White House, are nearly all vaccinated. But the rates are lower at other
federal agencies, particularly those related to law enforcement and
intelligence, according to the agencies and union leaders. And some
resistant workers are digging in, filing lawsuits and protesting what
they say is unfair overreach by the White House.
The upcoming deadline is the first test of Biden's push to compel
people to get vaccinated. Beyond the federal worker rule, another
mandate will take effect in January aimed at around 84 million private
sector workers, according to guidelines put out this past week.
On Saturday, a federal appeals court in Louisiana temporarily halted the vaccine requirement
for businesses with 100 or more workers. The administration says it is
confident that the requirement will withstand legal challenges in part
because its safety rules preempt state laws.
“The president and the administration wouldn’t have put these
requirements in place if they didn’t think that they were appropriate
and necessary,” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said Sunday on ABC’s “This
Week.” “And the administration is certainly prepared to defend them.”
If the mandates are a success, they could make the most serious dent
in new coronavirus cases since the vaccine first became available,
especially with the news this past week that children ages 5-11 can get
the shot making an additional 64 million people eligible. But with two
weeks remaining until the federal worker deadline, some leaders of
unions representing the employees say that convincing the unvaccinated
to change their mind is increasingly challenging.
“I got the vaccine in February, it was my own choice and I thought it
would stop the virus,” said Corey Trammel, a Bureau of Prisons
correctional officer and local union president in Louisiana. “But it
hasn’t. And now I have people resigning because they are tired of the
government overreach on this, they do not want to get the shot. People
just don’t trust the government, and they just don’t trust this
vaccine.”
Federal agencies are warning employees about
the upcoming mandate, offering time off to get the vaccine and
encouraging workers to comply. But they won't be fired if they don't
make the Nov. 22 deadline. They would receive “counseling” and be given
five days to start the vaccination process. They could then be suspended
for 14 days and eventually could be terminated, but that process would
take months.
IJR | The Biden administration is urging companies to get their employees
vaccinated against COVID-19 despite pending court cases challenging the
rule.
During a Monday press briefing, White House principal deputy press
secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, “We think people should not
wait.”
She continued, “We say do not wait to take actions that will keep
your workplace safe. It is important and critical to do, and waiting to
get more people vaccinated will lead to more outbreaks and sickness.”
Jean-Pierre argued the way to get past the pandemic is “to get people vaccinated.”
She also explained the administration believes “there is precedent
here,” adding, “The Department of Labor has a responsibility to keep
workers safe and the legal authority to do so.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit temporarily halted the mandate over the weekend, as IJR reported.
“Because the petitions give cause to believe there are grave
statutory and constitutional issues with the Mandate, the Mandate is
hereby STAYED pending further action by this court,” the ruling states.
The Biden administration has until Monday at 5 p.m. to respond to the petitioners’ motion for a permanent injunction.
A group of plaintiffs, including Republican Louisiana Attorney
General Jeff Landry, filed a lawsuit challenging the rule Friday.
“In a major win for the liberty of job creators and their employees,
the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit just halted the
Biden Administration’s attempt to force vaccines on businesses with 100
or more workers,” Landry said in a response to the ruling.
NYTimes | A
federal appeals panel on Saturday temporarily blocked a new coronavirus
vaccine mandate for large businesses, in a sign that the Biden
administration may face an uphill battle in its biggest effort yet to
combat the virus among the American work force.
The
stay, issued by a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the Fifth Circuit in Louisiana, doesn’t have an immediate impact. The
first major deadline in the new rule is Dec. 5, when companies with at
least 100 employees must require unvaccinated employees to wear masks
indoors. Businesses have until Jan. 4 to mandate Covid vaccinations or start weekly testing of their workers.
But
Saturday’s move provided momentum for a wide coalition of opponents of
the rule, who have argued that it is unconstitutional. A group of
businesses, religious groups, advocacy organizations and several states,
including Louisiana and Texas, had filed a petition on Friday with the
court, arguing that the administration had overstepped its authority.
It
was unclear whether the stay would be a procedural blip for the Biden
administration or the first step in the unwinding of the mandate.
At
the core of the legal challenge is the question of whether OSHA
exceeded its authority in issuing the rule and whether such a mandate
would need to be passed by Congress. A similar issue was in play when a
Texas court in late 2016 halted an Obama-era Labor Department rule
that would have made millions more Americans eligible for overtime pay.
The Trump administration, which took office the next year, said it
would not defend the overtime rule.
The
suit against the mandate stated that President Biden “set the
legislative policy” of substantially increasing the number of Americans
covered by vaccination requirements, and “then set binding rules
enforced with the threat of large fines.”
“That
is a quintessential legislative act — and one wholly unrelated to the
purpose of OSHA itself, which is protecting workplace safety,” the suit
said. “Nowhere in OSHA’s enabling legislation does Congress confer upon
it the power to end pandemics.”
A separate lawsuit against the new rule was also filed on Friday in the Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis by 11 Republican-led states, among them Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina and Utah.
nakedcapitalism | “We’ll have to involve our instruments of National Security.” This is mere question begging. Surely the intelligence agencies are not the only
state organs capable of prediction and analysis? (To be fair, I can
understand why one might wish to fall back on one of the few
institutions in our sclerotic state that actually does function, rather like calling in the Army to handle nursing home staffing or container jams.)
In its zeal to identify bin Laden or his family, the CIA used a sham
hepatitis B vaccination project to collect DNA in the neighborhood where
he was hiding. The effort apparently failed, but the violation of trust
threatens to set back global public health efforts by decades.
It is hard enough to distribute, for example, polio vaccines to
children in desperately poor, politically unstable regions that are rife
with 10-year-old rumors that the medicine is a Western plot to
sterilize girls—false assertions that have long since been repudiated by
the Nigerian religious leaders who first promoted them. Now along come
numerous credible reports of a vaccination campaign that is part of a
CIA plot—one the U.S. has not denied.
The deadly consequences have already begun. Villagers along the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border chased off legitimate vaccine workers,
accusing them of being spies. Taliban commanders banned polio
vaccinations in parts of Pakistan, specifically citing the bin Laden
ruse as justification. Then, last December, nine vaccine workers were
murdered in Pakistan, eventually prompting the United Nations to
withdraw its vaccination teams. Two months later gunmen killed 10 polio
workers in Nigeria—a sign that the violence against vaccinators may be
spreading.
Such attacks could not come at a worse time. The global polio
campaign has entered what should be its final stages. The number of
cases has dropped from 350,000 in 1988 to 650 in 2011. The disease
spreads naturally in only three countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan and
Nigeria—down from more than 125 countries a quarter of a century ago.
Disrupting or postponing vaccination efforts could fan a resurgence of
polio around the world.
The distrust sowed by the sham campaign in Pakistan could conceivably
postpone polio eradication for 20 years, leading to 100,000 more cases
that might otherwise not have occurred, says Leslie F. Roberts of
Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “Forevermore,
people would say this disease, this crippled child is because the U.S.
was so crazy to get Osama bin Laden,” he argues.
100,000 crippled children because CIA operatives hijacked a public
health effort, good job. Gottlieb is, of course, aware of this episode.
His idea is that if the public health people are “at the table” good
things will happen. Perhaps the Norms Fairy will intervene, I don’t
know. Page 370:
foxnews | A federal court issued Texas
a temporary victory in its lawsuit against the Biden administration’s
coronavirus vaccine mandate issuing a stay on the controversial federal
government regulation in Texas.
"Yesterday,
I sued the Biden Admin over its unlawful OSHA vax mandate," Texas’
Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton tweeted Saturday. "WE WON. Just
this morning, citing "grave statutory and constitutional issues," the
5th Circuit stayed the mandate. The fight is not over and I will never
stop resisting this Admin’s unconstitutional overreach!"
Earlier in the week, Paxton sued
the Biden administration over the mandate and argued that the move to
force workers at companies with over 100 employees to be vaccinated or
undergo weekly testing is "flatly unconstitutional."
"Biden’s new
vaccine mandate on private businesses is a breathtaking abuse of
power," Paxton tweeted Friday. "OSHA has only limited power &
specific responsibilities. This latest move goes way outside those
bounds. This ‘standard’ is flatly unconstitutional. I’m asking the Court
to strike it down."
A number of trade groups have issued warnings about the mandate, saying that it would exacerbate supply chain bottlenecks and staffing shortages nationwide.
CTH | The federal government is attempting to set up a federal work authorization standard
for private businesses. Non-compliance means you cannot work, or you
lose your existing job if your employer goes along with the government
demand. THAT alone should alarm everyone.
There is a particularly enraging irony in that Joe Biden’s federal DOJ and Dept of Labor do not enforce
employment eligibility authorization for illegal aliens based on legal
status, while at the same time the Biden Dept. of Labor is putting OSHA
in charge of a federal policy that will enforce vaccination requirements.
All of the federal exemptions essentially undermine the “national
health emergency” argument, because if there really was such a public
health emergency, there would be no exemptions at all. The application
of the executive order undermines the actual cornerstone of the
executive order itself. It cannot withstand scrutiny and hopefully the
court will see through it.
In the interim, as the freedom coalition digs in to mount a patriotic
challenge, the authoritarian attempt of the federal government, the
rebellious alliance is hitting back in unique ways as noted by the
airline pilots, air traffic controllers, firefighters and police. All
groups holding a significant military service record. As noted, last
weekend American Airlines was forced to cancel 1,700 flights due to staffing issues.
The blue-collar effort to bolster the resistance by these groups does
not have to be too massive to have an impact. Remember, almost all of
these leftists and elite minded communists who now operate as Democrats
have no capacity for self-sufficiency. If the working class stops
picking up their trash; stops mowing their lawns, shopping for them,
doing their cleaning and essentially facilitating their lives, this
entire group of scholastic-minded knuckleheads cannot function.
From a commonsense and logistical perspective, regardless of the
federal outlook, there’s no way they can pull it off. We are the quiet,
and according to those who look down their noses – the “invisible”
unwashed masses. However, when it comes to keeping the gears turning, we are the majority.
We keep their shit working and just want to be left alone.
I do not know if the video from the Procter and Gamble workers is an
accurate reflection of how workers for P&G feel. However, I do know
the sentiment conveyed within that video is very accurate. Only a
fool would underestimate the nature of men backed into a corner and
reluctantly forced to accept their new outlook; men and women with
nothing left to lose…
mises | Under the Great Reset governance model, states and favored
corporations form “public-private partnerships” in control of
governance. The configuration yields a corporate-state hybrid largely
unaccountable to the constituents of national governments.
The cozy relationship between multinational corporations and
governments has even aroused the scorn of a few left-leaning critics.
They note that the governance model of the WEF represents at least the
partial privatization of the UN’s Agenda 2030, with the WEF bringing
corporate partners, money, and supposed expertise on the 4-IR to the
table. And the WEF’s governance model extends well beyond the UN,
affecting the constitution and behavior of governments worldwide. This
usurpation has led political scientist Ivan Wecke to call the WEF’s
governmental redesign of the world system “a corporate takeover of
global governance.”8
This is true, but the obverse is also the case. The WEF model also represents thegovernmentalization of private industry.
Under Schwab’s “stakeholder capitalism” and the multistakeholder
governance model, governance is not only increasingly privatized, but
also and more importantly, corporations are deputized as major additions
to governments and intergovernmental bodies. The state is thereby
extended, enhanced, and augmented by the addition of enormous corporate
assets. These include funding directed at “sustainable development” to
the exclusion of the noncompliant, as well as the use of Big Data,
artificial intelligence, and 5G to monitor and control citizens. In the
case of the covid vaccine regime, the state grants Big Pharma monopoly
protection and indemnity from liability in exchange for a vehicle by
which to expand its powers of coercion. As such, corporate stakeholders
become what I have called “governmentalities”—otherwise “private”
organizations wielded as state apparatuses, with no obligation to answer
to pesky constituents.9 Since
these corporations are multinational, the state essentially becomes
global, whether or not a “one-world government” is ever formalized.
In Google Archipelago,
I argued that leftist authoritarianism is the political ideology and
modus operandi of what I call Big Digital, and that Big Digital is the
leading edge of an emerging world system. Big Digital is the
communications, ideological, and technological arm of an emerging
corporate socialism. The Great Reset is the name that has since been
given to the project of establishing this world system.
Just as Klaus Schwab and the WEF hoped, the covid crisis has
accelerated the development of the Great Reset’s corporate-socialist
statism. Developments advancing the Great Reset agenda include the
Federal Reserve’s unrestrained printing of money, the subsequent
inflation, the increasing taxation on everything imaginable, the
increased dependence on the state, the supply chain crisis, the
restrictions and job losses due to vaccine mandates, and the prospect of
personal carbon allowances.10 Altogether,
these and other such policies constitute a coordinated attack on the
majority. Ironically, they also represent the “fairness” aspect of the
Great Reset—if we properly understand fairness to mean leveling the
economic status of the "average American" with those in less
“privileged” regions. And this is one of the functions of woke ideology11—to
make the majority in developed countries feel unworthy of their
“privileged” lifestyles and consumption patterns, which the elite are in
the process of resetting to a reduced and static new normal.
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