alexberenson | From Singapore to the Netherlands to Iceland to Vermont. And coming soon to the entire northern half of the United States.
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This is not how it was supposed to go.
Deaths hitting new highs in Singapore (85% of the population fully vaccinated - NOT adults, the entire population):
A new lockdown in the Netherlands (70% fully vaccinated)
And in Iceland (76% fully vaccinated):
As Vermont - the most vaccinated American state (71% fully vaccinated) smashes highs for cases:
taibbi | Compared with how often you heard pundits rage about the “insurrection,” how regularly did you hear that billionaire wealth has risen 70% or $2.1 trillion since the pandemic began? How much did you hear about last year’s accelerated payments to defense contractors, who immediately poured the “rescue” cash into a buyback orgy, or about the record underwriting revenues for banks in 2020, or the “embarrassment of profits” for health carriers in the same year, or the huge rises in revenue for pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, all during a period of massive net job losses? The economic news at the top hasn’t just been good, it’s been record-setting good, during a time of severe cultural crisis.
Twenty or thirty years ago, the Big Lie was usually a patriotic fairy tale designed to cast America in a glow of beneficence. Nurtured in think-tanks, stumped by politicians, and amplified by Hollywood producers and media talking heads, these whoppers were everywhere: America would have won in Vietnam if not for the media, poverty didn’t exist (or at least, wasn’t shown on television), only the Soviets cuddled with dictators or toppled legitimate governments, etc. The concept wasn’t hard to understand: leaders were promoting unifying myths to keep the population satiated, dumb, and focused on their primary roles as workers and shoppers.
All sense of noblesse oblige is gone. The logic of our kleptocratic economy has gone beyond even the “Greed is Good” mantra of the fictional Gordon Gekko, who preached that pure self-interest would make America more efficient, better-run, less corrupt. Even on Wall Street, nobody believes that anymore. America is a sinking ship, and its CEO class is trying to salvage the wreck in advance, extracting every last dime before Battlefield Earth breaks out.
NC | My read at this point is that we are in a pre-civil war situation, with conservative and libertarians just itching to get on with killing the liberals (just like sothorons were itching, by spring of 1860, for a war to begin killing Yankees). This is the true context in which to view the Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha. The drift into a second civil war should properly be understood as the end result of the past 90 years organizing by rich reactionaries against the New Deal, and their attempt to restore the preponderance of power to capital versus labor. For all the short termism of a financialized economy, the rich reactionaries have had a stunning lomg game in mind, and the most impactful part is probably going to be the creation and propagation of “law and economics” and the (anti)Federalist Society seizure of control of the judiciary.
The drift into a second civil war is also the context in which to view the “left’s” demands for censorship, which Taibbi, Greenwald, and a few others have assailed repeatedly and, imho, unwisely. We must build the cultural capacity to limit the free speech of the rich, in much the same way the there are cultural limits on speech by military officers. It bears repeating that the ascendancy of the reactionaries, who are now poised to deploy the authoritarians they have cultivated within the population, has been a 90 year project. At various points, severe penalties and a cultural disapprobation of free speech would have avoided the present drive to war. For example, G. Gordon Liddy and Oliver North should never have been allowed to become stars of right-wing TV and talk radio.
And, a subject of the British crown, Rupert Murdoch, should never have been allowed to have control of major American media. The case of Murdoch points to the real vulnerability we face: there is no understanding of what a republic is, and how a republic must be defended. Hence, Madison writing about “aristocratic or monarchial innovations” sounds very strange to us today. But Ganesh Sitaraman, in his excellent book, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens our Republic (2017), points out that Americans were culturally hostile and suspicious of aristocracy and monarchy up until World War Two and the Cold War, when the new foe to be guarded against became fascism, then communism.
This lack of republican culture allows Gitlin, Isaac, and Kristol, in their “An Open Letter in Defense of Democracy,” to purvey a series of frauds on public opinion. They write, ““Liberal democracy depends on free and fair elections, respect for the rights of others, the rule of law, a commitment to truth and tolerance in our public discourse.” This is certainly not untrue, but what they omit is crucial. First, this is supposed to be a republic, not a democracy. While a republic should have a democratic form of government, a republic is different because a regard for the General Welfare must be balanced against individual freedoms. There used to be a consideration of public virtue, in which citizens were expected to abandon their self-interests when they conflicted with the public good. For example, citizens should be expected to wear masks and embrace vaccine requirements in a pandemic, and any refusal or disobedience should be properly seen as an assault on the republic.
Second, in a republic, there is a positive requirement to do good. The exemplar of this is Benjamin Franklin, and the various organizations he helped create: a fire company, a library, a hospital, the American Philosophical Association, and so on. All of these resulted in the network that fought the Revolutionary War, then attempted to codify republicanism in the Constitution. But the compromise with slavery was a fatal flaw.
President John Quincy Adams, in his first annual message to Congress, summarized this positive requirement to do good:
The great object of the institution of civil government is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact, and no government, in what ever form constituted, can accomplish the lawful ends of its institution but in proportion as it improves the condition of those over whom it is established. Roads and canals, by multiplying and facilitating the communications and intercourse between distant regions and multitudes of men, are among the most important means of improvement. But moral, political, intellectual improvement are duties assigned by the Author of Our Existence to social no less than to individual man.
Law journal articles on the Guarantee Clause:
Bonfield, Arthur E., “The Guarantee Clause of Article IV, Section 4: A
Study in Constitutional Desuetude”, [On the Constitutional guarantee of
the federal government that each state shall have a republican form of
government]
46 Minnesota Law Review 513 (May, 1961)
https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mlr/863/
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217205534.pdf
Erwin Chemerinsky, Why Cases Under the Guarantee Clause Should Be Justiciable,
65 University of Colorado Law Review 849-880 (1994)
https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/787/
The Yale Law Journal
Vol. 97, No. 8, Jul., 1988
Symposium: The Republican Civic Tradition
[12 articles on republicanism]
https://www.jstor.org/stable/i232687
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. In Luther 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.”
interfluidity | I was reading Matt Stoller’s newsletter this morning:
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.
I’m certainly with Matt on general disgust at the gorging of the trough by the contactor-consultancy complex, and have long favored rebalancing government employment away from contractors, back towards directly employed civil servants. So, yay. That’s the correct position, and it’s an easy one to take, so I take it.
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 supposed to 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.
That certainly sounds like McKinsey.
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.
Researchers aren’t certain why the messenger RNA vaccines, one from Pfizer Inc. PFE -2.07% and partner BioNTech SE BNTX -5.83% and the other from Moderna Inc., MRNA -3.40% are likely causing the inflammatory heart conditions myocarditis and pericarditis in a small number of cases.
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.
The source, who asked not to be identified, said Newsom’s symptoms were similar to those associated with Guillain–Barré syndrome (GBS), a known side effect of many vaccines.
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.)
One obvious reason run screaming from the room if anybody proposes Gottlieb’s idea is this episode. From Scientific American, “How the CIA’s Fake Vaccination Campaign Endangers Us All“:
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."
The Wall Street Journal reports that the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit said it would quickly consider whether to issue an injunction against the vaccine and testing requirements, ordering the Biden administration to file initial legal papers by late Monday afternoon.
A number of trade groups have issued warnings about the mandate, saying that it would exacerbate supply chain bottlenecks and staffing shortages nationwide.
americanconservative | ong after the current administration passes from the scene, President Joseph R. Biden and Secretary of State Ant...
