November 2, 2026
November 1, 2026
The Mandate, Results, and Freedom
Defending the Mandate versus the call for More Government Control
| NANCY D CHURCHILL OCT 31 |  |
A reader on Substack recently claimed that President Donald Trump abuses power and acts like an authoritarian. The reader thought Trump’s record is mostly failure and corruption rather than real achievement. Finally, this reader argued that social programs are good and should be expanded.
You may have faced similar arguments from those you know currently under the “strong delusion” of the progressive left.
I disagree completely.
Trump has a mandate from the majority of the American people in the most recent presidential election. You may not agree with the agenda, but many of us did not agree with the Obama and Biden agenda, and the country still survived. Claims of failure and authoritarian rule do not match the results.
Trump Is No Authoritarian
Trump is not acting like an authoritarian. He faces courts, Congress, media, and elections. He left office on schedule in 2021 after a riot that he did not order. A banner at the Justice Department (which bothered my reader) is theater , not a regime. Real authoritarians do not leave power when the calendar says so.
His second-term record includes clear results.
Illegal southern border crossings dropped about 95 percent (1). Fiscal year 2026 had the lowest numbers in decades and zero releases into the country. Millions have left, and net migration turned negative in 2025. That is enforcement of the law.
Violent crime victimization fell 25 percent from 2024 to 2025 (2). Murder and other serious crimes also dropped sharply. Safer streets protect families, property, and freedom.
Manufacturing has expanded for several months. Factory construction jobs are up, and more manufacturing jobs have been added. American industry is coming home.
The economy has kept growing at about 2 percent a year. Unemployment is near 4.2 percent. The stock market has risen. Job growth has been slower, and prices have not fully come down, but the economy has not collapsed.
True, healthcare has not been fixed yet. Why? Because Obamacare is still the law. Because we are a republic, the president cannot overturn bad legislation by himself. He needs Congress.
That is why it matters to elect Republicans who will support the Trump agenda. Some efficiency efforts produced mixed results. Those shortcomings pale beside the problems caused by previous Democrat-led administrations. They do not erase the border, crime, and manufacturing numbers.
The Real Threat Is Big Government
Government is not the best way to provide social good. It is a monopoly of force run by ordinary people with ordinary flaws. Give them the power to decide the common good and force others to pay for it, and those flaws do not disappear. They get larger budgets and better job security.
Pride. Government assumes it knows what people need better than they do. One-size programs from the capital dismiss local knowledge, family judgment, and voluntary charity. Public service becomes a claim of moral superiority. Who gave distant officials the right to decide for every family?
Greed. Social programs create concentrated pots of money that contractors, agencies, and political allies compete for. The result is cronyism and waste. Private providers must persuade customers. Government extracts through taxes. Greed simply changes its method of collection.
Lust. Control over other people’s money, housing, healthcare, and education is a form of power. Officials can enjoy the status of being the ones who “care” while remaining insulated from the daily costs. Good intentions do not purify that desire for control.
Envy. Large social programs often treat success itself as the problem. Differences in income become evidence of injustice that must be corrected. Envy supplies the energy for redistribution and discourages the production that pays for any real social good.
Gluttony. Programs expand. Benefits grow, eligibility widens, and agencies protect their budgets. Once a constituency is created, restraint is treated as cruelty. There is no natural limit like a household budget or a private charity that must raise its own funds.
Wrath. Those who question the size or results of programs are portrayed as callous or malicious. Opponents become obstacles to justice. This framing justifies stronger enforcement, higher taxes, and less tolerance for alternatives. Wrath replaces argument. Struggle circles replace real dialogue.
Sloth. Dependence is easier than self-reliance for some recipients, and it is easier for administrators than measuring real outcomes. When government is the primary provider, individuals and communities have weaker incentives to solve problems themselves or innovate. Sloth appears on both sides.
Small Government is good Government
Government still has a role, but a much smaller and more hyperlocal role. It can enforce contracts, protect against force and fraud, and supply a few true public goods. Fire and police departments, for example. Beyond that, families, churches, neighbors, and free enterprise do the real work of care and progress.
Treating government as the best or default provider of social good ignores how human nature works once power and other people’s money are involved. Sooner or later, we always run out of “other people’s money.”
We see that dynamic in Washington state government today. Record revenue is not enough to meet the grandiose goals of our one-party rulers. They still reach for more taxes and more control. The same vices private actors must manage under competition are amplified behind the authority of the state.
A Better Way Forward
Smaller government. Local government. Enabling people to achieve their highest personal goals while taking the smallest possible share of their hard-earned labor. That is good government. And that, I believe, is the heart of the Trump and MAGA agenda.
We know what works because we have seen it. Secure borders. Safer streets. Growing factories. Limited government. These protect family, faith, property, and freedom.
Vote for candidates who support that agenda. Support judicial candidates who rely on the constitution’s plain text. Vote “YES” on the initiatives on this ballot. Demand local control. Build self-reliance in your community. Teach the next generation that government is a tool, not a parent.
Small actions, taken together, grow into something great. Make sure to cast your vote by Tuesday, November 3. Our children and grandchildren deserve a freer, stronger America.
Nancy Churchill is a writer and educator in rural eastern Washington State, and the chair of the Ferry County Republican Party. She may be reached at DangerousRhetoric@pm.me. The opinions expressed in Dangerous Rhetoric are her own. Dangerous Rhetoric is available on Substack, X, and occasionally Rumble.
SOURCES:
(1) Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, DHS announces lowest fiscal year border crossings in American history, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, October 16, 2026, https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/under-president-trump-and-secretary-mullin-dhs-announces-lowest
(2) National Crime Victimization Survey Shows Violent Crime Plummeted in 2025, U.S. Department of Justice, October 26, 2026, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/national-crime-victimization-survey-shows-violent-crime-plummeted-2025
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Hobbs: No Citizenship Check | The Roundup, Sat Oct 31
Top WA News Stories: No Citizenship Check, $11K Groceries, Camas Girls’ Sports
| NANCY D CHURCHILL OCT 31 | |
Get the Washington news the Seattle papers skip, free every day.
Story One: Hobbs Admits: No Citizenship Check?
Synopsis: Can Washington keep clean voter rolls if it never checks citizenship?
Secretary of State Steve Hobbs told KOMO News the state has no system that can tell if a registered voter is a noncitizen. He said people are asked at the Department of Licensing, and that is the main check. He also said it is not unusual for noncitizens to end up on the rolls, and that the state has never claimed there are none.
Federal prosecutors say they flagged 405 suspected noncitizen voters who cast about 1,500 votes over time. They asked Hobbs to set those people’s current ballots aside until citizenship is confirmed. Hobbs refused. He called the federal list a “dumpster fire” and said some names are citizens or are old. He says every voter already attests to citizenship when signing the ballot return envelope.
Acting U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd says Washington is sending ballots to people it cannot screen for citizenship. Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall, standing with Gov. Bob Ferguson, said the state is a “vote ID state” and that voters attest they are citizens. Washington does not require photo ID to vote. Critics want proof of citizenship at registration. Hobbs says proven noncitizen voting is rare—about 15 cases since 1982—and that removing voters without individualized proof would break the law.
From the Bookmarks:
- Katie Daviscourt: “UPDATE: Acting US Attorney Neil Floyd releases a statement: At his press today conference Secretary Hobbs said, ‘It is not unusual for noncitizens to be on the rolls… we have never said there are none on there.’ He also said, ‘We don’t have a system that can identify if someone is actually a non-citizen.’”
Katie Daviscourt 📸@KatieDaviscourtUPDATE: Acting US Attorney Neil Floyd releases a statement: “At his press today conference Secretary Hobbs said, ‘It is not unusual for noncitizens to be on the rolls… we have never said there are none on there.’ He also said, ‘We don’t have a system that can identify if…- Jim Walsh: “WA Secretary of State Steve Hobbs ‘admits the state has NO MECHANISM FOR CHECKING VOTER REGISTRATION AGAINST CITIZENSHIP.’ As some of us have been saying for years. We need to require proof of citizenship when people register to vote in WA.”
Jim Walsh@JimWalshLD19WA Secretary of State Steve Hobbs “admits the state has NO MECHANISM FOR CHECKING VOTER REGISTRATION AGAINST CITIZENSHIP.” As some of us have been saying for years. We need to require proof of citizenship when people register to vote in WA.
Jeremy Harris @JeremyHarrisTVUPDATE: I was able to ask @secstatewa about the claims of noncitizens on Washington voter rolls. He insists it’s not a widespread issue but also admits the state has no mechanism for checking voter registration against citizenship. Live report at 6 @komonews https://t.co/I1q2EcNgqL12:41 AM · Oct 30, 2026 · 8.11K Views109 Replies · 303 Reposts · 902 Likes- Ari Hoffman: “During a presser, Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall is asked about Sec. of State Steve Hobbs admitting there are non-citizens on the voter rolls. She falsely claimed, ‘We are a voter ID state.’ Voter ID is not required in Washington”
Ari Hoffman@thehoffatherDOES SHE REALLY BELIEVE THIS? During a presser, Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall is asked about Sec. of State Steve Hobbs admitting there are non-citizens on the voter rolls. She falsely claimed, “We are a voter ID state.” Voter ID is not required in Washington She then …
8:32 PM · Oct 30, 2026 · 18.3K Views135 Replies · 204 Reposts · 685 Likes- Josh Johnson: “Straight from the horse’s mouth… WA does not check citizenship status of voters. Glad this argument can be laid to rest.”
Josh Johnson@n3rdyhickStraight from the horse’s mouth… WA does not check citizenship status of voters. Glad this argument can be laid to rest. Hobbs has already moved on to stage 2 of Dem denial, “it’s happening but it’s rare”. Next up, “it is happening quite a bit but it’s actually a good
1:59 AM · Oct 31, 2026 · 2.08K Views11 Replies · 26 Reposts · 119 Likes- KOMO News: “Should Washington require proof of citizenship to register to vote?”
KOMO News@komonewsShould Washington require proof of citizenship to register to vote?:komonews.comShould Washington require proof of citizenship to register to vote?
12:07 AM · Oct 31, 2026 · 26.9K Views660 Replies · 30 Reposts · 718 LikesLeave a comment on Story One:
Hobbs Admits: No Citizenship Check?
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Story Two: Groceries Cost $11,000 a Year?
Synopsis: Why do Washington families pay more at the checkout than almost anyone else?
A ConsumerAffairs grocery study, covered by Charlie Harger, says the average Washington household spent about $11,347 on groceries last year. The U.S. average was about $8,019. That is a gap of more than $3,300. Per person, Washington spent about $4,612—the highest in the country, and about 44% above the national figure. The household bill also rose about $430 from 2024 to 2025, the biggest one-year jump of any state.
Groceries took about 11.4% of Washington’s median household income, tying Maine for a top burden rank. Seattle-area grocery prices rose about 4.5% over a year, versus about 1.8% nationwide, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures Harger cites.
Critics point to high land, labor, diesel, and energy costs, plus state carbon and road taxes.
From the Bookmarks:
- S.A. Dupres: “Harger: No state spends more per person on groceries than Washington State It’s more than $11,000 a year”
S.A. Dupres@Susan_DupresWashington State HIGHEST MINIMUM WAGE + CLIMATE COMMITMENT ACT Food – A Luxury Item in the Evergreen State Harger: No state spends more per person on groceries than Washington State It’s more than $11,000 a year *** NOTE: Don’t be so greedy. Just stop eating and pay your …
4:11 PM · Oct 29, 2026 · 1.84K Views12 Replies · 29 Reposts · 53 Likes- Steve Gordon: “The biggest thing that drives grocery prices is supply chain cost. Diesel, energy, land, congestion, & labor costs. WA is high on all fronts, but especially fuel/energy due to policy. Carbon tax. Road tax. All decisions by the legislature to make WA suffer.”
Steve Gordon@stevemgordon67The biggest thing that drives grocery prices is supply chain cost. Diesel, energy, land, congestion, & labor costs. WA is high on all fronts, but especially fuel/energy due to policy. Carbon tax. Road tax. All decisions by the legislature to make WA suffer. @KIROCharlie .
KIRO Newsradio 97.3 FM🎙 @KIRONewsradioNo state spends more per person on groceries than Washington. The average household here spent $11,347 last year. A $3,300 above the national average. The bill grew $430 in one year, the biggest jump of any state. @KIROCharlie says Olympia should put a household price tag on1:28 PM · Oct 30, 2026 · 659 Views1 Reply · 16 Reposts · 44 Likes- Joe Wallin on LinkedIn: “Washington doesn’t do small taxes. It does starter taxes. Paid family leave launched in 2019 at 0.4% of your wages. On Jan 1 it hits 1.2%, triple the start and the legal cap.”
- Andy Stevens: “Now why would a King County based manufacturing plant shift everything to Spokane and Tennessee?”
Andy Stevens 🇺🇸@mrandystevensNow why would a King County based manufacturing plant shift everything to Spokane and Tennessee?
Puget Sound Business Journal @PSBJA major Woodinville employer is leaving town. The manufacturer plans to close its steel fabrication plant, cutting 103 jobs as it shifts operations to Spokane and Tennessee. https://t.co/zYxmVmy5S73:42 PM · Oct 30, 2026 · 20K Views18 Replies · 24 Reposts · 276 LikesLeave a comment on Story Two: Groceries Cost $11,000 a Year?
Story Three: Camas and I-638?
Synopsis: Should a boy who finished near the back of a boys’ race place near the front once he runs as a girl?
At Camas High School, a transgender runner finished 76th in a boys’ junior-varsity race, then soon placed second in a girls’ JV race and later won a girls’ varsity race.
Teammates and rivals have walked off in protest. Some parents say girls should not share locker rooms or podiums with biological males. The Camas School District says it follows WIAA rules and state law that let students compete consistent with gender identity.
Initiative 638 is on the November 3 ballot. It would bar biologically male students from girls-only K-12 sports and require a health-care provider to verify biological sex for those events.
Supporters say the Camas results show why the measure is needed. Opponents say the rules would invade student privacy and exclude transgender girls.
Let’s Go Washington and Brian Heywood also say someone vandalized Yes-on-638 signs in Bellevue and that they filed a police report and offered a reward.
From the Bookmarks:
- Amy E. Sousa: “The boy in Camas, WA who went from being 79th to 2nd by moving from the boys team to the girls team did NOTHING to change his natural male advantage.”
Amy E. Sousa, MA Depth Psychology@KnownHereticTO BE CLEAR: The boy in Camas, WA who went from being 79th to 2nd by moving from the boys team to the girls team did NOTHING to change his natural male advantage. BUT EVEN IF HE HAD: MALE ADVANTAGE IS IRREVERSIBLE! 1. There are 5 different stages of male testosterone …
9:22 PM · Oct 30, 2026 · 3.42K Views14 Replies · 74 Reposts · 282 Likes- Zach Abraham: “This has nothing to do with Trump or MAGA. This is about parents wanting their daughters to be able to dress in a locker room without seeing male genitalia and to compete against their peers. That’s it. Sorta like title 9”
Zach Abraham@KYRRadioThis has nothing to do with Trump or MAGA. This is about parents wanting their daughters to be able to dress in a locker room without seeing male genitalia and to compete against their peers. That’s it. Sorta like title 9
206 Athletics @206HoopsWA voters, don’t forget the state MAGA party wants you to vote YES to ban the “trans delusion” from competing in youth sports as they are… MAGA would never be motivated by discrimination against “others.” They truly care about girl’s sports & “women’s rights.” Lol.
2:52 AM · Oct 31, 2026 · 1.6K Views6 Replies · 9 Reposts · 101 Likes- Let’s Go Washington: “BREAKING: We’re offering a reward for the identification and conviction of this person responsible for vandalizing our signs in Bellevue. We have filed a police report as well.”
Let’s Go Washington@letsgowaBREAKING: We’re offering a reward for the identification and conviction of this person responsible for vandalizing our signs in Bellevue. We have filed a police report as well. See more details below.
7:32 PM · Oct 30, 2026 · 14K Views30 Replies · 160 Reposts · 493 Likes- Brian Heywood: “Practitioner of No Hate We Have you on Video!!! We have filed a police report. We will be offering a reward for your arrest and conviction.”
Brian Heywood – That Damn Mormon@bkheywoodPractitioner of No Hate We Have you on Video!!! We have filed a police report. We will be offering a reward for your arrest and conviction. It is a Misdemeanor and a fine of up to $1000 for every sign you have stolen, removed, or defaced. Your fine could be in the 5 figure …
12:18 PM · Oct 30, 2026 · 3.09K Views7 Replies · 65 Reposts · 222 LikesLeave a comment on Story Three: Camas and I-638?
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Court Battle Brews Over DOJ List of Alleged Noncitizen Voters in Washington State
Elias lawsuit alleges the DOJ’s list includes citizens and inactive voters, while the administration says the findings are only the “tip of the iceberg”
| BILL BRUCH NOV 1 |  |
On October 30, 2026, OneAmerica Votes; Latino Community Fund of Washington State; and United Food and Commercial Workers International Union filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Federal District Court for the Western District of Washington.
The groups represented by Leftist Elias Law Group LLP named defendants, President Donald Trump, the DOJ, Attorney General Todd Blanche, the Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Acting U.S. Attorney Charles Neil Floyd (Western District of Washington), and First Assistant U.S. Attorney Pete Serrano (Eastern District of Washington).
Plaintiffs argue the DOJ list was assembled by imperfect matching of federal immigration records against incomplete public voter lists and includes U.S. citizens and inactive or unregistered individuals. The complaint seeks a declaration that the efforts are unlawful, an injunction blocking implementation, and notice of any further lists.
October 26 in Seattle, federal prosecutors announced they identified 405 potential non-citizens registered to vote in WA state who, with a high level of confidence, have collectively cast more than 1,500 illegal ballots across multiple elections spanning decades. Some of these individuals have voted more than two dozen times, some as recently as in the August 2026 primary election. Under U.S. law, it is illegal to knowingly and willfully vote unlawfully, and federal law specifically prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections (18 U.S.C. § 611).
Floyd, Serrano, and Acting Special Agent in Charge for Homeland Security Investigations April Miller said the findings emerged from cross-checking known non-citizens against available registration and voting records after the state declined to provide full unredacted voter rolls.
In the Oct. 26 letter to SoS Hobbs, the Justice Department asked the state to set aside the 405 ballots cast in the upcoming midterm election until it can verify citizenship for the individual registrants. The letter notes some are or were non-citizens and may have subsequently naturalized, and says, through these efforts, specific individuals were identified, who, with high confidence, should NOT be registered to vote under Washington law RCW 29A.08.370.
Floyd and Serrano said the investigation started after Hobbs refused the Trump administration’s request for Washington’s full voter rolls. On Sept. 8, 2025, the DOJ sent a letter to WA State SoS Steve Hobbs, requesting a “complete” copy of the state’s voter registration database within 14 days. To no one’s surprise, on Sept. 23, 2025, Hobbs refused to comply, leading to a DOJ lawsuit.
DOJ prosecutors compared people they already knew to be non-citizens against registration and voting records they pieced together without the state’s help, including registration names traced to Washington’s motor voter system, which signs residents up to vote when they get a driver’s license.
Floyd said allowing noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes, and the administration believes each of these individuals was sent a vote-by-mail ballot from the State of Washington to participate in the current November 2026 federal election.
“This is not the full number of non-citizens who have been voting in Washington. This is only the tip of the iceberg. With a small sample that we have collected so far, we are confident that we are looking at thousands of non-citizens who have been voting in Washington,” said Floyd.
OF NOTE: With all the attention and media coverage on the story, Hobbs has been forced to admit the state has NO MECHANISM FOR CHECKING VOTER REGISTRATION AGAINST CITIZENSHIP– saying the state has no way to confirm whether people are U.S. citizens when registering them to vote. “People attest” means a signature on a ballot envelope. That’s the honor system…
“We don’t have a system that can identify whether someone is an actual noncitizen,” Hobbs said during an Oct. 29 press conference. Hobbs also saidthat “it’s not unusual for noncitizens to actually be on voter rolls” and that “we never said that there are none on there.” So glad we can all agree this is very clear now. Hobbs has moved on to Stage 2 of Dem Denial; it’s happening, but it’s rare – Stage 3 is, “it’s happening, but not enough to swing any elections…
Hobbs also claimed that documented noncitizen voting in WA is extremely rare (15 cases from 1982–2025). However, as reported by Brandi Kruse Oct. 28, an immigration attorney disagrees with how often WA state says non-citizens vote. The attorney says he’s handled 15 cases just in the last couple of weeks!
On Oct. 29, Serrano slammed the SoS and placed full blame on Hobbs’ refusal to segregate non-citizen ballots and Hobbs’ “bad timing” excuse, saying, “Let me be clear. The timing of this is because we are doing the homework of the state.”
With election day on Nov. 3 and millions of ballots already being processed during WA’s universal mail-voting season, the lawsuit is expected to move quickly. Plaintiffs’ claims of irreparable harm from mid-election disruption could lead to motions for temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions.
Additional DOJ lists or enforcement steps may trigger further filings or the judicial notice requirements sought in the complaint. County canvassing boards must certify results by Nov. 24, and the SoS has until Dec. 3 to certify the statewide general election results.
Bill Bruch
Bill Bruch is the WA State GOP Election Integrity Committee Chairman (6th year), WAGOP Executive Board Member (6th year), Skagit County GOP Chairman (10th year), RNC Election Integrity Committee WA State Chairman, Citizen Journalist, Business Owner, 2020 WA State House Representative Candidate, Former Council Member, and WA State 2016 and 2024 RNC National Convention Delegate
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November 2026 Election Integrity Update
Educate. Advocate. Mitigate. Activate!
| BILL BRUCH NOV 1 | |
The links below from the past month highlight a range of ongoing election issues, including numerous newly reported arrests connected to election and voter fraud; they offer only a limited glimpse of the problems brought to light by the consistent efforts of thousands of people working to uncover and correct them.
Sincere appreciation goes to everyone who has devoted time and energy to this vital effort—substantial progress has been made, yet much work remains to secure and restore the integrity of elections. For daily updates and source materials, please visit the SCRP website 2025/26 Election Integrity pageand the archived 2020–2024 Election Integrity page.
ELECTION INTEGRITY: The EU Wants to Control What Americans See Online Before We Vote
Natalie Winters: I uncovered a midterm playbook labeled “CONFIDENTIAL” from a left-wing group run by Obama White House lawyers. Legal battles. Coordinated censorship. Mass mobilization. A progressive network is promoting it to state lawmakers—and its plans extend through the counting and certification of your votes.
Inside the Left’s Election Backchannel—and the Talking Points It Didn’t Want Public
Brazil’s Latest Manipulated Selection: This is an illegitimate Marxist globalist government
Brazil Election Rigged and STOLEN! More Impossible Results / VIDEO
The most blatant election fraud in history! Bolsonaro received zero votes in 106 polling stations where Lula garnered 14,860, according to an analysis by the Paris Group published by Folha. Moreover, in 3,042 polling stations, Flávio reached a maximum of just 10 votes, while Lula arrived at 400,000. Polling experts consider that “statistically, it’s impossible.”
Brazil’s President of the Electoral Court Says “There Was Absolutely NO RULE That Allowed Voting to Continue” – Brazil’s election was kept open an additional two hours in some districts by an illegal order from corrupt President Lula’s former attorney
Brazil Count Frozen – Outcome Under Fire
Justice Department Charges 28 Foreign Nationals in California for Election Crimes
AG Todd Blanche Video: “Since the 60s, the Department of Justice has monitored elections. Every single election has been monitored”
HSI and FBI Arrest Ten Non-citizens for Voter Fraud in NC
Judge blocks DHS voter fraud operations in 9 states
Judge blocks most DHS field operations focused on voter fraud
Who counts as an ‘overseas voter’? Pentagon rewrites the answer ahead of election
Mark Cook on “touchscreen voting systems”
MIKE BENZ VIDEO: IS THE END OF USAID TIED TO THE RISE OF RIGHT-WING PARTIES
This woman has no computer or Internet, but made 15,000 donations totaling $150,000
Democracy is on the ballot: Voters in 20 states to decide on key election rules
Supreme Court’s SAVE database ruling won’t disenfranchise voters
Voter Roll Battles and The Urgent Need for Election Security
Voter Rolls — Public Records or State Secrets?
ELECTION INTEGRITY NETWORK (EIN): EIN Releases Updated Edition of the Model Election Laws Handbook, Adding Citizenship Census, Voter List, and Security Provisions / Order
EIN: Vulnerable Voters Project. Protect the person. Protect their choice! Learn the safeguards. Download the Protecting Vulnerable Voters Toolkit: electionintegritynetwork.org/campaigns/protecting-vulnerable-voters / Connect with your state coalition: electionintegritynetwork.org/state-organizations
Andrew Paquette, PhD: Going Rouge – The election fraud we see today is from the past
States flag thousands of ineligible voters, but only a few cases are prosecuted
DOJ investigating Democrat plot to rig the Alaska Senate election. Peltola’s campaign aides directed staffers to “find as many people named Dan Sullivan in Alaska as you can” to recruit a fake candidate with the same name as her opponent. Democrats did this solely to trick voters and dilute the vote
Democrats Tried to Rig the Ballot
Stephen Miller: DECOY Dan Sullivan in Alaska “It’s a PROFOUND CRIMINAL ACT AND CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY to disenfranchise the voters and citizens of Alaska”
Peltola May Face Prison Over Fake Sullivan Scheme, and Chuck Todd Accidentally Proved It
DOJ insists it just wants Alaska ballots preserved and isn’t seeking to change votes
RNC’s Election Integrity Communications Director: Alaska Decoy Threatens Election Integrity
Ranked-Choice Voting Is a Failed Experiment. Alaska Can End It This November
ARIZONA: Arizona Democrats Caught Registering Non-Citizens to Vote
DOJ Sues California After Flagging 20,000 ‘Likely Noncitizens’ Registered to Vote
DOJ Orders Criminal Probes of California Officials on Voting
Per Lawsuit, Nearly 30% of Non-Citizens in California Voter Rolls Are Voting in Elections
Californians to consider voter ID measure on Nov. 3 ballot
CA manipulative language on the voter ID ballot initiative
AGAIN IN 2026: Postal workers can’t resist dumping ballots from GOP-majority districts
DOJ demands California review list of suspected noncitizens who are on voter rolls
DHS “NUKES” LA’s Election Experts and Provides Evidence Voters in Their Sample Were Illegal Voters
The 2020 Election Steal Was Built Before COVID
No Verification, No Chain of Custody: The Gaps in CA’s Voter Rolls and UOCAVA Ballots
LA County Used Voter Records to Challenge DHS List — Then USCIS Checked Immigration Records
Records Show California’s Laws Enable Non-Citizens to Vote in US Elections
DeSantis launches national election group to export Florida’s voting rules across U.S.
DOJ warns of people posing as election monitors at South Florida early voting sites
Georgia State Election Board asks Justice Department to investigate voting machines
VIDEO: GA Election Board Asking DOJ To Investigate Voting Machines
RNC Forces Georgia County to Scrap Illegal Ballot Collection Program
VIDEO: Democrats are now admitting that Trump’s battleground state rally tour is WORKING in states like Georgia: “There are RECORD-BREAKING early voting numbers here”
ILLINOIS: House panel demands answers from Illinois county over suspended early voting, ballot errors
IOWA: Public Interest Legal Foundation Identifies Duplicate Voter Registrations in Iowa
LOUISIANA: ‘Human error’ switches status of 67,000 Louisiana voters to inactive
Election Complaint: 1000s of Potentially Deceased Voters Still on Maine’s Voter Rolls
NGOs drop elderly Somalis off at town hall; translator meets them at the door -NGOs + translator escort them to the chamber; translator physically “helps” them vote -NGO coordinator threatens press who document the process / POST
VIDEO: Reports show NGO “translators” illegally guiding non-English voters and marking ballots
Voter Fraud Never Happens? Michigan Nursing Home Residents Beg To Differ…
New PILF Report Reveals Spoiled Ballot Confusion, Observer Imbalance in 2026 Primary
Huge Win for GOP As Judge Slams Brakes on Michigan’s Plan to Purge Election Records
MINNESOTA: James O’Keefe is pushing back after being charged with felonies in Minnesota over his team’s undercover operation at Minneapolis polling places. He calls it a “landmark First Amendment case” and says his team received training on what they could legally say and do inside polling locations. His new video includes footage he identifies as that training
Cam Higby: “I showed how Minnesota allows cheating in elections. Now they want to TAKE MY RIGHT TO VOTE AWAY. This is lawfare. They want to scare all independent journalists who may challenge them. This is FASCISM.”
State Official Tells Minnesota Somalis They Can Show Up to Vote Without Proof of Citizenship
NEBRASKA: Nebraska’s top election official forwards suspicious mail to FBI
Zark Files: Nebraska: not too horrible, but not the best either…
NEVADA: A Judge in Nevada May Put an End to Election Theft and Save America
Justice Department charges foreign national with voting illegally in Nevada election
Department of Justice charges fifth foreigner with voting illegally in Nevada
Nevada Supreme Court Refuses to Rule on the Voters’ Right to Verify Their Vote is Counted
Nevada refuses to help feds find noncitizen voters
NEW HAMPSHIRE: RNC Fights Democrats’ Last-Minute Push to Gut Voter ID Protections
US Supreme Court ruling restores NH law blocking use of student IDs at polls
Federal judge upholds New Hampshire student voter ID restrictions
NEW YORK: Simultaneously active clones in NY
When a “duplicate” is also a “clone”
Election Complaint: 20,420 New York Voter Registration Records Flagged for Errors
PILF HAVA Complaint: Thousands of Duplicate, Triplicate Voter Registrations in North Carolina
10 Noncitizens Arrested for Illegal Voting in North Carolina
RNC Fights Democrat Attempt to Eliminate North Carolina’s Absentee Ballot Safeguards
RNC Defeats Eleventh-Hour Democrat Attack on North Carolina Ballot Safeguards
North Carolina ballot rejection rate up to 6% with time to fix errors running out
Three charged for illegally voting in New Hanover County, officials say
OHIO: Ohio’s voter ID debate is about more than today’s law
PENNSYLVANIA: PA officials catch ballot application forgery scheme
Republicans are moving to PA from New York – GOP refugees bringing their votes to PA
SOUTH DAKOTA: Authorities intercept mysterious envelope at SD Capitol
TEXAS: Several convicted felons arrested for voting illegally in Texas
PILF Alerts Authorities to 3,500 Defective Voter Registrations in South Texas
VIRGINIA: The Governor of Virginia restored the right to vote of a felon who’s been dead for 10 years
WASHINGTON: Federal Prosecutors say 405 Non-citizens on WA State Voter Rolls: 1,500+ Ballots Illegally Cast
‘Tip of the Iceberg’: Feds Allege 405 Migrants Voted 1,500 Times / Article
WA State Official Admits No System To Identify Whether Voters Are Noncitizens
VIDEO: WA Sec. of State Hobbs says WA does not check citizenship status of voters
Trump administration sued over federal efforts to set aside WA ballots
Court Battle Brews Over DOJ List of Alleged Noncitizen Voters in Washington State
First U.S. Attorney Pete Serrano of WA’s Eastern District slammed SoS Steve Hobbs’ “bad timing” excuse, saying, “Let me be clear. The timing of this is because we are doing the homework of the state”
Brandi Kruse: An immigration attorney says Washington state is lying about how often non-citizens are voting. Secretary of State Steve Hobbs claims there have only been 15 such cases since 1982. The attorney says he’s dealt with 15 cases just in the last couple of weeks!
Bill Bruch on Election Integrity, Local Elections and Practical Ways to Help
Kittitas County, WA Election Officials Identify Three Voter Fraud Cases from 2024 Election
More Examples of how a Universal Vote-by-Mail State Allows for Voter Fraud
2026 General Election Ballots found tossed on a Burien roadside days after King County mailed them
USPS bins with election ballots discovered in dumpsters at Seattle’s Golden Gardens
92 Ballots Found in a Seattle Dumpster
THE DEMOCRACY FILES / ILLEGITIMACY PLAYBOOK VIDEO: Danielle Reiff of DRG: 3 “democratic emergency” scenarios. Election meltdown – which includes a widespread public loss of trust in election results · Insurrection Act deployed against protesters · An attempt to delay seating of legitimately elected officials post-election. If the federal government becomes illegitimate, then a cross-partisan system of transitional governance: Obama and Bush as potential transitional leaders. WA SoS Hobbs replies to Reiff that he has had the exact same conversation with German and Japanese officials regarding how to deal with AfD and right-wing nationalist parties
SCOTUS Calls for WA State Voting Map Review – Leftist court-drawn gerrymandered maps face new review under Callais
2026 Ten-Point Forecast: WA-3 (U.S. House – Decisive)
Alaska’s Fake Decoy Dan Sullivan’s son works for Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez. Did one of those DOJ subpoenas land on her desk?
Son of Alaska’s ‘Decoy’ Dan Sullivan works for WA State Dem CD 3 Rep
WASHINGTON DC: Judicial Watch – 578 noncitizens voted in the Washington, DC, June 16, 2026, primary and special election
Supreme Court Sides With Republicans, Stops Democrat Attack on Political Speech
Bill Bruch
Bill Bruch is the WA State GOP Election Integrity Committee Chairman (6th year), WAGOP Executive Board Member (6th year), Skagit County GOP Chairman (10th year), RNC Election Integrity Committee WA State Chairman, Citizen Journalist, Business Owner, 2020 WA State House Representative Candidate, Former Council Member, and WA State 2016 and 2024 RNC National Convention Delegate
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October 30, 2026
They Saw Multinational Corporate Power Coming in 1974
What Two Forgotten Books Got Right About Corporate Power, and What They Missed
| DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 29 |  |
By: Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone | October 28, 2026 / Book Review
Audio Version:
LISTEN NOW · 31:18An Old Textbook
In the early 1980s, Robert was taking political science courses when he encountered Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations,published in 1974 by Richard Barnet and Ronald Müller. Its opening sentence made an extraordinary claim:
“The men who run the global corporations are the first in history with the organization, technology, money, and ideology to make a credible try at managing the world as an integrated unit.”
Our copy has long since disappeared from the library, but the connections that the book wove regarding globalism stayed with us. In our previous essay,we examined how financial interests have driven the push toward a single global market, one in which money, goods, and corporations can move across borders with as little interference as possible. Our thinking about these issues began with books like this one and conversations we had in our twenties.
Barnet and Müller saw the outlines of today’s global economy more than fifty years ago. In 1994, Barnet returned to the subject with John Cavanagh in Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order. Both books deserve another look, not because their authors were right about everything, but because they understood something that political leaders have spent decades overlooking: multinational corporations were becoming powerful enough to reshape governments, economies, and entire societies.
We remember Robert discussing the New World Order publicly in early 2022, drawing on books he had read as a political science student decades earlier. By then, even raising the subject invited accusations of conspiracy thinking. The hostility has hardly disappeared.
In September 2025, Democratic minority staff of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee issued a report declaring, “Dr. Malone’s conspiracy views extend beyond vaccines.” The report went on to accuse him of promoting theories about a secret, totalitarian world government called the New World Order, citing our 2024 book, PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order, and quoting Robert’s criticism of the administrative and deep state as evidence.
Yet the underlying questions about multinational corporate power, international governance, and national sovereignty have been debated seriously for more than fifty years, including by prominent intellectuals on the political left. Apparently, discussing these issues was legitimate when progressive scholars raised them in 1974, but became grounds for accusations of conspiracy thinking when Robert revisited related questions decades later.
The report makes no effort to distinguish the documented growth of international corporate and institutional power from its allegation that Robert believes in a secret world government. That distinction matters, and dismissing the entire subject through political labeling does nothing to answer the questions Barnet and Müller raised half a century ago.
Richard Barnet knew Washington from the inside. He joined the Kennedy administration’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in 1961, working under John J. McCloy, and left two years later, disillusioned with how government decisions were made. In 1963, he and Marcus Raskin founded the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive Washington think tank. Ronald Müller was an economist at American University, while John Cavanagh, Barnet’s later coauthor, was an Institute fellow who eventually became its director. Barnet died in 2004.
These were men of the political left, and their proposed solutions generally involved more public oversight, community ownership, and government intervention. Our own thinking has moved in a different direction, influenced by Austrian economics, natural law, and subsidiarity, the principle that decisions should be made as close as possible to the people affected by them.
We disagree with many of Barnet’s proposed remedies, but his diagnosis is harder to dismiss. He and his coauthors saw the same concentration of economic power, the same erosion of local independence, and the same escape from public accountability that free-market critics are warning about today. Yet fifty years later, Democratic staff of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee used Robert’s examination of related issues to portray him as a conspiracy theorist.
The irony is difficult to miss. Ideas that progressive intellectuals once debated openly are now being used to discredit people like Robert, who question the growing concentration of corporate and international power. Where critics from opposite political traditions once recognized the same problem, Democratic Senators and their staff now invoke accusations of conspiracy thinking to attack those raising similar questions. Why are some of today’s Democrats so eager to dismiss ideas their own intellectual predecessors considered important enough to write entire books about?
What the Book “Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations” Argued
Barnet and Müller compared multinational corporations with history’s great empire builders. Alexander, Napoleon, Hitler, and the British Empire had attempted to organize vast territories through military and political conquest. Global corporations were building a new kind of empire, using money, technology, trade, and centralized planning rather than military conquest. Over the following fifty years, they would succeed in extending their influence across national economies and governments worldwide.
A corporation operating in dozens of countries decides where to manufacture its products, where to borrow money, where to hire workers, and where to report its profits. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, General Electric could pay workers in Singapore just 30 cents an hour to assemble components, compared with $3.40 an hour for American workers in Ashland, Massachusetts. These were wages of that era, not today’s rates, and represented an elevenfold difference in labor costs. Between 1957 and 1967, GE had already established 61 overseas plants, demonstrating how multinational corporations were taking advantage of enormous international wage disparities.
The authors called the executives making these decisions the “World Managers,” and some were remarkably candid about their ambitions. IBM executive Jacques Maisonrouge described the world as
“one economic unit” and declared that “the world’s political structures are completely obsolete.”
Dow Chemical chairman Carl Gerstacker went further. In remarks prepared for a 1972 White House conference, he wrote,
“I have long dreamed of buying an island owned by no nation.” Such a corporate headquarters would be “beholden to no nation or society,” and Dow, he suggested, “could even pay any natives handsomely to move elsewhere.”
Gerstacker removed those passages before delivering his speech, but told the authors he was serious. He had reportedly already declined an offer involving the Minerva atoll near Fiji.
What makes Global Reach particularly interesting is that its authors did not predict the disappearance of national governments. They predicted something more subtle: multinational corporations did not need to eliminate the nation-state. They needed to change what governments did. Governments would protect the movement of capital and goods, provide infrastructure, maintain a suitable workforce, and manage the social consequences of corporate decisions. When economic disruption produced unrest, governments would be expected to contain it. Corporations would make the economic decisions, while governments would create the conditions for those decisions to succeed. Today, this is often described as the pursuit of “frictionless global commerce,” in which national borders, regulations, and local interests are treated as obstacles to corporate efficiency and profitability.
The Business of Moving Money
One of the book’s strongest arguments concerned transfer pricing. When one subsidiary of a multinational company sells goods or services to another subsidiary, the parent company has considerable influence over the internal price. By manipulating those prices, corporations can shift reported profits from higher-tax countries into lower-tax jurisdictions. Governments lose tax revenue, while smaller domestic competitors lack the same opportunities. A former Treasury official told the authors, “Prices in an economic sense do not exist. The price charged is strictly a matter of relative power.”
Even the Internal Revenue Service struggled to enforce fair pricing between corporate subsidiaries, while developing countries faced an even greater disadvantage. One Latin American regulator had enough staff to examine only about 400 of 9,000 pending technology contracts. The authors also described how global corporations could dominate credit markets, as international banks preferred lending to subsidiaries of Ford or Pfizer rather than local laundries, farms, and manufacturers.
During Argentina’s 1971 credit squeeze, domestic companies reduced borrowing by 42 percent while multinational companies increased theirs by 20 percent. When Salvador Allende took office in Chile, New York banks reduced the country’s short-term credit from $220 million to $35 million.
The consequences were predictable. Large international firms could survive financial conditions that crippled smaller competitors. Barnet and Müller estimated that fewer than a thousand individuals made the principal decisions at the world’s 200 largest industrial companies and 20 largest banks. “These individuals,” they wrote, “are the planners for our society.” Their concern was not simply that corporations had become wealthy, but that economic decisions affecting millions of people were being concentrated in remarkably few hands.
The book attracted criticism. Harvard economist Raymond Vernon challenged the authors’ arguments in Foreign Policy, and Commentary published a skeptical review. Nevertheless, Global Reach became one of the earliest widely read warnings about the political consequences of globalization.
Global Dreams: Twenty Years Later
In early 1994, just weeks after NAFTA took effect, Barnet and John Cavanagh published Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order. Their opening observation was striking:
“The world is getting smaller, as people like to say, but it is not coming together.” Global economic integration, they argued, was “stimulating political and social disintegration.”
They described four interconnected systems through which multinational corporations were reshaping the world:
- a Global Cultural Bazaar of entertainment, television, films, and music;
- a Global Shopping Mall of international consumer brands;
- a Global Workplace where production moved toward cheaper labor;
- and a Global Financial Network through which money crossed borders with little effective oversight.
The authors estimated that the world’s 300 largest corporations controlled roughly a quarter of global productive assets. They profiled Sony, Bertelsmann, Philip Morris, Ford, and Citicorp, showing how these companies were building businesses that operated across national boundaries. Their cultural observations were particularly revealing.
While American automobile, television, and machine-tool manufacturers were losing ground, American entertainment and branded consumer products were spreading everywhere. In 1989, packaged cultural products generated an American trade surplus of approximately $8 billion, surpassed only by food and aerospace. Add McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Levi’s, and Marlboro, and the authors concluded that
“the American dream is the nation’s number-one export.”
America was exporting its culture even as it was losing its factories.
The financial system concerned them even more. They compared international currency trading to a chain of gambling casinos, estimating that no more than 10 percent of currency transactions were directly connected to trade in goods and services. In September 1992, speculative pressure forced Britain and Italy out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and drove currency adjustments elsewhere in Europe. The authors also cited a Public Citizen investigation finding that 108 of 111 members of three important American trade-advisory committees represented corporations or industry organizations. The people helping write the rules of international commerce were overwhelmingly drawn from the institutions that stood to benefit.
What They Got Right
Fifty years later, much of what these authors predicted has happened. Financial power became even more concentrated, although the institutions exercising that power have changed. In 1971, bank trust departments held 22 percent of the voting shares of publicly traded American corporations. Today, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street collectively manage tens of trillions of dollars and exercise substantial voting influence over major American companies. These firms do not personally own all the assets they manage; much of that money belongs to pension funds, retirement savers, and other investors. But asset managers usually exercise proxy voting authority and influence corporate governance on behalf of those clients. Meanwhile, private equity, sovereign wealth funds, and other nonbank financial institutions have become major forces in corporate ownership and investment.
The global workplace also arrived much as predicted. Global Reachdescribed Zenith laying off 7,000 workers after moving production to Taiwan. Bulova’s president offered an almost perfect summary of the emerging system: “We are able to beat foreign competition because we are the foreign competition.” After China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, American manufacturing communities experienced another wave of disruption.
Economists have attributed roughly two million or more American job losses during the 1999–2011 period to increased Chinese import competition, depending on the study and employment measure. The effects were visible in furniture towns such as Martinsville and Bassett, Virginia, and textile communities throughout the Carolinas. Factories closed, jobs disappeared, and local tax bases shrank. For the multinational corporation, production had become more efficient. For the communities left behind, the economic and social costs were enormous.
International tax avoidance became another major political issue, but the proposed solution introduced a new problem. In 2021, more than 130 jurisdictions endorsed an OECD-backed agreement establishing a 15 percent global minimum corporate tax for large multinational companies. Although the taxes would be collected by national governments rather than an international treasury, the agreement created a framework for coordinating national tax policy and limiting competition between countries.
In January 2026, the Trump administration secured an agreement exempting U.S.-headquartered companies from its principal cross-border tax provisions. The larger question remains: should preventing multinational tax avoidance require governments to surrender some of their independence over taxation? Once again, a problem created by globalization was being used to justify another layer of international governance. Another self-licking ice cream cone.
The authors also recognized the danger of government rescuing institutions considered too important to fail. In 1971, Congress authorized a $250 million federal loan guarantee for Lockheed after the company’s bankers sought government assistance. They called it “bankers’ socialism.” In 2008, Washington used vastly larger interventions to stabilize the banking system, raising the same uncomfortable question: why should private institutions keep the profits from risky decisions while taxpayers absorb the losses when those decisions threaten the broader economy?
Finally, the political backlash arrived. Brexit in 2016, Donald Trump’s electoral victories, and renewed challenges to international institutions all reflected, to varying degrees, public resistance to political and economic decisions made far from the communities affected by them. The authors were right that economic integration could generate political fragmentation rather than global harmony.
What They Missed
The nation-state did not disappear. China demonstrated that a powerful government could direct major corporations rather than merely accommodate them, while Western governments showed that they could exclude Russian and Iranian institutions from important parts of the international financial system.
In 2026, Washington completed its withdrawal from the World Health Organization, announced its withdrawal or cessation of participation in 66 international organizations and entities, and declined to extend the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement during its scheduled review. These demonstrate that national governments still possess considerable power when their leaders choose to exercise it. Unfortunately, all of these executive decisions can be overturned on inauguration day, January, 2029.
Globalized Corporatism
Corporate executives, financial institutions, industry associations, and government officials increasingly participate in overlapping systems of international policymaking. Banking standards are developed through institutions centered in Basel, while trade agreements and regulatory arrangements are negotiated through organizations based in Geneva.
Perhaps the clearest illustration is the World Economic Forum (WEF), founded by Klaus Schwab in 1971, just three years before Global Reach was published. The WEF openly describes its mission as promoting public-private cooperation, bringing together multinational corporate executives, heads of government, international organizations, and other influential figures to develop common priorities. Although the WEF has no authority to enact laws, its meetings and ongoing partnerships provide opportunities to shape policy agendas outside ordinary democratic processes. It is remarkably close to the world Barnet and Müller described, one in which corporate and political leaders increasingly work together to determine the direction of national and international economic policy.
Large corporations can afford the lawyers, lobbyists, compliance departments, and technical experts needed to influence complex international rules. Small businesses generally cannot, which is one reason regulatory complexity can strengthen the very companies it is supposedly intended to restrain. Corporatism, by its very nature, restrains and impedes competition and a free-market economy.
We have described this convergence of corporate and political influence as globalized corporatism. It does not require a secret conspiracy. It can emerge when powerful institutions find that their interests overlap and cooperate to advance them.
The Global Power They Could Not Have Imagined
There was another development Barnet and Müller could scarcely have anticipated in 1974. Multinational corporations would eventually control not only the movement of goods, capital, and employment, but much of the infrastructure through which people communicate, obtain information, and conduct business.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and other technology giants introduced an entirely new dimension of corporate power. Their influence extends beyond ordinary market competition into digital communications, cloud computing, advertising, and the distribution of information. Decisions made inside these companies can affect what billions of people see, read, purchase, and discuss. Their automated algorithms determine what gets seen and not seen.
When governments pressure or collaborate with technology companies to influence public discourse, the distinction between private corporate decisions and government action becomes increasingly important. The COVID-19 period exposed just how consequential those relationships could become, particularly when government officials and digital platforms worked together on content moderation and public-health messaging.
Barnet and Müller worried about corporate executives making economic decisions beyond the effective reach of national governments. They could not have foreseen a world in which a handful of private companies would also exercise enormous influence over the infrastructure of public debate. The underlying problem, however, remained the same: concentrated power in institutions that ordinary citizens have little practical ability to hold accountable.
Corporate power also gained important constitutional protections. The consequential modern development came in 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that corporations and labor unions could spend unlimited amounts independently to influence federal elections, treating such expenditures as protected political speech. The ruling did not permit unlimited direct contributions to candidates, but it removed major restrictions on corporate-funded political advocacy. The result raises a question Barnet and Müller would have recognized immediately: when corporations command financial resources far beyond those of ordinary citizens, what happens to political equality when their money receives constitutional protection as free speech?
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Where Their Solutions Fell Short
Barnet and Müller called for “countervailing power,” arguing that “the heart of the problem is excessive power.” Their proposals included requiring greater corporate financial disclosure, limiting interlocking directorates between banks and industrial companies, and separating banking from other commercial activities. Congress eventually moved in another direction. The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 removed important barriers separating commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance activities, allowing these businesses to operate within the same financial holding companies.
The authors were also suspicious of proposals to create powerful international institutions to oversee multinational corporations. IBM’s Maisonrouge favored an international counterpart to multinational businesses, while former State Department official George Ball proposed international chartering for corporations operating beyond national boundaries.
Barnet and Müller feared that such arrangements would legitimize corporate power without providing meaningful accountability. The United Nations established its Centre on Transnational Corporations in 1974 and pursued an international code of conduct, but the code was never adopted, and the Centre was absorbed into the UN Conference on Trade and Development in 1993.
The difficulty with creating global institutions to control global corporations is that the largest corporations are often best positioned to influence those institutions. Friedrich Hayek’s work on dispersed knowledge helps explain the danger. Central planners cannot possess the local knowledge needed to make sound decisions for everyone, whether those planners work in government ministries or corporate headquarters. Replacing private global planning with public global planning does not necessarily restore economic freedom or accountability. It may simply create another powerful institution operating beyond the reach of ordinary citizens.
Yet Barnet himself pointed toward a better answer. In a 1976 interview, he advocated giving communities greater control over their resources and developing technologies suited to local needs. That thinking comes surprisingly close to subsidiarity. Local communities should have meaningful authority over their own affairs, but decentralization must also protect property rights, voluntary exchange, and competition. Otherwise, local political power can become just another means of protecting favored interests. The objective is not to replace one form of concentrated power with another, but to prevent economic and political power from becoming so concentrated that individuals, independent businesses, and communities lose their ability to make meaningful choices.
When Yesterday’s Warnings Become Today’s Conspiracy Theories.
Barnet and Müller wrote before the personal computer, the World Trade Organization, global investment giants, and the rise of digital platforms. Yet they understood something fundamental about the direction of the modern economy. Corporate planning was moving beyond national borders, profits could be shifted to favorable jurisdictions, and production could move wherever costs were lowest. Governments could be pressured to accommodate corporate priorities, while local communities were left to manage the consequences.
Globalized corporatism: their greatest insight was not that multinational corporations would become enormous. It was that corporations did not need to abolish national governments to gain power over them. They could reshape what those governments did, turning public policy toward the needs of global commerce rather than the interests of the people those governments were elected to represent.
Seen in this context, the rise of the America First movement is hardly surprising. Its central argument is that American economic and trade policies should serve American citizens, workers, and businesses, rather than the demands of a global economic system. Bringing manufacturing home, protecting strategically important industries, securing supply chains, and restoring national control over trade and immigration are all expressions of that philosophy. Whether particular policies achieve those goals is a separate question, but the underlying challenge to decades of globalization is unmistakable. The nation-state is not supposed to exist primarily to serve multinational corporations.
Barnet and Müller’s proposed remedies were less convincing. Concentrated economic power cannot necessarily be restrained by creating an even larger concentration of political power above it. But their central warning has survived fifty years of history. The question is no longer whether multinational corporations can influence governments, shape economies, and move important decisions beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. They plainly can. The question is whether sovereign governments, independent businesses, and local communities can reclaim meaningful control over decisions that affect their lives.
And this brings us back to the extraordinary irony of Robert being branded a conspiracy theorist for discussing the New World Order. Fifty years ago, progressive intellectuals wrote entire books documenting the growing influence of multinational corporations over national governments. Today, Democratic Senators and staff invoke the language of conspiracy theories to discredit Robert for examining related questions. The distinction between documented corporate influence and claims of a secret world government deserves serious examination, not political name-calling. What changed? The concentration of corporate power certainly did not disappear. It grew enormously. Yet some of the very liberal political institutions that once championed scrutiny of concentrated corporate power now seem more interested in discrediting those who question it than in confronting the problem itself.
Restoring meaningful accountability will require competition, rebuilding American manufacturing and productive capacity, protecting property rights, demanding transparency, and returning decisions to the people and institutions closest to their consequences. Above all, it requires remembering that governments are accountable first to their own citizens, not to international financial institutions or multinational corporate interests and certainly not the World Economic Forum. The problem Barnet and Müller identified was excessive concentration of power. Fifty years later, that concentration has grown enormously, and the answer cannot be to concentrate still more power in the name of correcting it.
Both books are available to borrow through the Internet Archive’s lending library for readers who want to examine the original arguments and draw their own conclusions. Psywar is still available through Amazon and most other book sellers.
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References
Acemoglu, Daron, David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, and Brendan Price. 2016. “Import Competition and the Great US Employment Sag of the 2000s.” Journal of Labor Economics 34 (S1): S141 to S198.
American Society of International Law. 2026. “United States Announces Withdrawal from 66 International Organizations.” https://www.asil.org/ILIB/united-states-announces-withdrawal-66-international-organizations
Barnet, Richard J., and John Cavanagh. 1994. Global Dreams: Imperial Corporations and the New World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster. https://archive.org/details/globaldreamsimpe00barn_0
Barnet, Richard J., and Ronald E. Müller. 1974. Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations. New York: Simon and Schuster. https://archive.org/details/globalreachpower00barn
Bebchuk, Lucian, and Scott Hirst. 2019. “The Specter of the Giant Three.” Boston University Law Review 99: 721 to 741. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3401620
BlackRock. 2026. “BlackRock Reports Third Quarter 2026 Results.” Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.2, October 14. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0002012383/000119312526420979/blk-ex99_2.htm
Commentary. n.d. Review of Global Reach, by Richard J. Barnet and Ronald E. Müller. https://www.commentary.org/articles/martin-mayer-2/global-reach-by-richard-j-barnet-and-ronald-e-muller/
Encyclopedia.com. “Barnet, Richard J(ackson) 1929-2004.” https://encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/barnet-richard-jackson-1929-2004
Hayek, F. A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review 35 (4): 519 to 530.
OECD. 2021. “Statement on a Two-Pillar Solution to Address the Tax Challenges Arising from the Digitalisation of the Economy.” October 8.
Sojourners. 1976. “Interview: Richard Barnet on Multinational Corporations.” February. https://sojo.net/magazine/february-1976/interview-richard-barnet-multinational-corporations
State Street. 2026. “State Street Reports Third Quarter 2026 Results.” Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.2. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000093751/000009375126000592/exhibit992-3q26earningsrel.htm
The Mammoth Times. 2026. “Vanguard’s $11.6 Trillion Evolution: The 2026 ETF Playbook for the Modern Investor.” February 13. https://business.mammothtimes.com/mammothtimes/article/marketminute-2026-2-13-vanguards-116-trillion-evolution-the-2026-etf-playbook-for-the-modern-investor
TWAIL Review. n.d. “Launching the Archive of the UN Centre for Transnational Corporations: The Struggle to Put People before Profit.” https://twailr.com/launching-the-archive-of-the-un-centre-for-transnational-corporations-the-struggle-to-put-people-before-profit/
Vernon, Raymond. 1971. Sovereignty at Bay: The Multinational Spread of U.S. Enterprises. New York: Basic Books.
WAMC. 1994. “Author John Cavanagh.” Fresh Air program listing, February 16. https://www.wamc.org/1994-02-16/author-john-cavanagh-pronounced-cav-an-ah
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The Financial Takeover of Globalism
How powerful banks, international regulators, and AI are reshaping economic freedom.
| DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 29 | |
Analysis and Policy Recommendations
By: Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone | Washington, DC | October 27, 2026
Audio Version:
For decades, Americans have watched economic power move away from their communities and increasingly into the hands of enormous multinational corporations, global banks, and international institutions. Small banks disappear, local businesses struggle under growing regulatory burdens, and decisions affecting American livelihoods are increasingly shaped by organizations that American voters never elected and cannot remove.
How did we get here? And who benefits?
Much of the debate about globalism focuses on ideology, politics, or the ambitions of international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. But there is another explanation that deserves far more attention: Globalism is, first and foremost, an economic project, and some of its most powerful beneficiaries are the world’s largest financial institutions.
Global banks, investment firms, and multinational corporations benefit when money, investments, and goods can move across national borders with minimal interference. Different national laws, banking regulations, and financial standards create costs and complications. Making those rules more uniform makes international business easier, faster, and often more profitable. It also gives the largest institutions advantages that smaller competitors cannot easily match.
Over the past fifty years, an international network of central bankers, financial regulators, and powerful commercial interests has steadily developed common financial standards. Much of this work takes place outside the ordinary democratic process. These standards are subsequently adopted and enforced by national regulators, including those in the United States, often without a direct vote by elected legislators. Congress may have little involvement in developing the rules that ultimately govern American banks and businesses.
The question is whether this system was built primarily to protect financial stability and facilitate trade, or whether it has also become a mechanism for concentrating economic power, weakening national sovereignty, and protecting the interests of the institutions that helped shape it.
To understand how this happened, we need to go back to 1974, when the collapse of a relatively obscure German bank helped set in motion a transformation of international finance.
A Bank Closes Early
Bankhaus Herstatt was a private currency-trading bank in Cologne. On June 26, 1974, German regulators shut it down at about 3:30 in the afternoon. Earlier that day, banks around the world had paid Herstatt in Deutsche marks, expecting US dollars in return through its account at Chase Manhattan in New York. When Germany closed the bank, it was only 10:30 in the morning in New York, and Chase stopped all dollar payments from Herstatt’s account. Banks that had paid in German marks never received their dollars.
Within months, central bankers from the major industrial nations met in Basel, Switzerland, and formed what became the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. They concluded that differences in rules and business hours across borders create risk and cost. Over the next fifty years, their answer was to make banking rules the same everywhere.
Why Global Corporations Want One Set of Rules
Consider a round baler manufactured by John Deere in Iowa and sold to a farmer in Canada, Mexico, or Germany. Each international sale involves different currencies, banking systems, regulations, and legal requirements. These differences create additional costs, delays, and complications. Economists call these obstacles transactional friction.
For multinational corporations and international banks, reducing that friction is enormously valuable. The fewer differences between national financial systems, the easier it becomes to move money, finance investments, and conduct business across borders. International regulators call the process of making financial rules more consistent harmonization.
On the surface, this sounds reasonable. International trade becomes easier, financial transactions become more predictable, and businesses can operate more efficiently.
But there is another side to the story.
The largest multinational corporations and financial institutions have the resources to influence the development of international standards and absorb the costs of complying with them. Smaller banks and domestic businesses generally have far less influence and fewer resources. When complex international rules become the standard for everyone, compliance costs can disproportionately burden smaller competitors. In some markets, regulatory requirements and the costs of accessing international financial infrastructure can effectively exclude smaller institutions from transactions that remain accessible to their larger competitors.
This is how regulatory capture can operate on an international scale.The world’s largest financial institutions have the money, personnel, and political access to influence the rules governing their own industry. Regulations presented as necessary for financial stability, consumer protection, or international cooperation can also become barriers to competition. When compliance is prohibitively expensive or complicated, established corporations gain protection from smaller competitors, while entrepreneurs and innovative businesses may be prevented from entering the market altogether.
The central danger of regulatory capture is that government authority, intended to protect the public, can instead protect powerful corporations from competition. When this occurs internationally, the same regulatory barriers can spread across dozens of countries, making them even harder to challenge or escape. The question is whether these rules genuinely protect the public or primarily serve the institutions with the resources and influence to shape them.
How the U.S. Dollar Became the Center of Global Finance
The modern international financial system was built around the American dollar. Under the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, other major currencies were tied to the dollar, while the dollar itself was convertible into gold. When President Richard Nixon ended this in 1971, the dollar remained the world’s dominant currency for international trade, investment, and financial transactions.
That dominance was reinforced by the widespread use of dollars to price oil and other commodities, and by the development of international banking networks. In 1973, major banks established SWIFT, a Belgium-based cooperative that standardized how financial institutions communicate payment instructions across national borders. Although SWIFT does not actually transfer money, it became an essential part of international banking.
During the financial crises of 2008 and 2020, the Federal Reserve went even further, providing dollars to foreign central banks through arrangements known as currency swap lines. These arrangements helped foreign banks meet their dollar obligations and prevented disruptions from spreading through international financial markets. Congress did not separately approve each of these arrangements, although the Federal Reserve operates under authority established by federal law.
Together, these developments helped create a financial system in which the American dollar became indispensable to international commerce. This arrangement has delivered enormous benefits to the United States. Global demand for dollars and U.S. Treasury securities helps finance American government borrowing, supports the dollar’s purchasing power, and gives American businesses and consumers advantages that citizens of many other nations do not enjoy. The dollar’s position as the world’s primary reserve currency is one of America’s greatest economic and strategic assets.
Make no mistake: The United States and its citizens benefit substantially from this arrangement. Preserving the dollar’s international dominance is a legitimate national interest, and weakening it would carry serious economic consequences.
But there is an important distinction between maintaining American financial leadership and allowing an increasingly concentrated network of international financial institutions to shape the rules governing the global economy. The benefits of dollar dominance do not automatically justify every regulatory structure built around it, nor do they mean that the interests of multinational banks always coincide with those of American citizens, small businesses, or independent community banks.
The question is not whether America should surrender its financial advantages. It is whether those advantages serve the American people broadly, or do they increasingly serve the interests of the largest financial institutions operating across national borders.
Who Writes the Rules for American Banks?
Most Americans assume the rules governing American banks are written in Washington. But some of the most influential banking standards originate in Basel, Switzerland, at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), an institution owned by central banks.
Founded in 1930, the BIS survived a controversial history involving financial dealings with Nazi Germany. Delegates at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference voted to liquidate it, but the institution survived. Today, it hosts the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, where central bankers and regulators develop international banking standards.
These standards determine, among other things, how much capital banks must maintain to protect against losses. The first Basel Accord was adopted in 1988, followed by Basel II in 2004 and Basel III after the 2008 financial crisis.
Here is the critical point: These agreements are not treaties, and the Senate never votes to ratify them. Instead, American representatives from the Federal Reserve, FDIC, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency help develop international banking standards in Basel. These same federal agencies can then incorporate those standards into binding U.S. regulations under authority delegated by Congress, without Congress separately voting to approve the international agreements.
Similar international standard-setting systems influence anti-money-laundering policies and financial reporting.
Although American regulators retain the legal authority to accept, modify, or reject these standards, the process raises a fundamental question: Why should international committees have such substantial influence over American banking regulations without direct congressional approval of the standards they develop?
Who Benefits?
International banking regulations impose costs that fall disproportionately on smaller institutions. A bank must employ compliance officers, lawyers, and risk specialists whether it holds $3 trillion in assets or $300 million. Large banks spread these expenses across enormous operations. Community banks serving farmers, small businesses, and rural communities cannot.
In 1984, America had 14,483 FDIC-insured commercial banks. By 2023, only 4,027 remained, a decline of 72 percent. Mergers, interstate banking reforms, and financial crises contributed to this consolidation. Regulatory compliance costs also favor larger institutions, although international standards alone cannot explain the decline.
Meanwhile, the largest financial institutions exercise extraordinary economic influence. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street collectively managed more than $33 trillion in assets in 2026. These firms manage investments on behalf of clients, but their enormous scale gives them substantial influence through shareholder voting, corporate engagement, and participation in financial policy discussions.
They operate alongside international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and Financial Stability Board. These organizations have different responsibilities, but collectively they influence financial regulation, lending conditions, and economic policies across national borders.
The IMF and World Bank can require borrowing countries to adopt economic reforms as conditions of financial assistance. International banking committees establish standards that national regulators may subsequently implement. Meanwhile, major financial corporations have the resources, expertise, and political access to influence the development of these policies.
The result is a system in which public regulatory authority and concentrated private financial power increasingly intersect. The largest institutions can influence the rules, absorb the costs of compliance, and benefit from international markets that smaller competitors struggle to enter.
This is what we mean by globalized corporatism: a relationship between governments, international institutions, and major corporations in which economic rules have come to increasingly favor established financial interests over independent competitors.
The warning is not new. In their 1974 book Global Reach, Richard Barnet and Ronald Müller argued that multinational corporations were acquiring the ability to operate beyond the effective control of individual national governments. Fifty years later, the scale of global financial institutions makes their warning particularly relevant.
When One Rule Fails Everywhere at Once
When international regulators get the rules wrong, the consequences can spread across the entire financial system. In 1988, the first Basel Accord established common international banking capital standards, including a zero risk weight for certain government bonds issued by industrialized countries, including Greece. This meant banks generally needed no capital to cover the credit risk of those bonds. European regulations continued to give favorable treatment to government debt, encouraging banks to treat investments that carried real financial risks as exceptionally safe.
When Greece’s debt crisis erupted in 2010, European banks faced substantial exposure to sovereign debt, contributing to a broader financial crisis.
Before the 2008 financial collapse, American banking regulations gave favorable capital treatment to highly rated mortgage-backed securities, including those issued or guaranteed by government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Banks were encouraged to hold securities that appeared safer than they actually were. When the housing market collapsed, losses spread across major financial institutions.
Economist Friedrich Hayek warned about the underlying problem in 1945. Economic knowledge is dispersed among millions of individuals who understand local circumstances that distant planners cannot fully appreciate. When centralized regulators impose the same flawed assumptions across an entire financial system, individual mistakes can become systemic crises.
Artificial intelligence could dramatically accelerate this problem. As banks, investment firms, and regulators increasingly use AI to assess risk, approve loans, monitor transactions, and enforce compliance, financial decisions will become more standardized across national borders. Institutions relying on similar algorithms, shared data, and dominant technology providers may begin making the same decisions, identifying the same risks, and excluding the same customers.
What once required decades of international regulatory coordination could increasingly be reinforced through shared technology and automated decision-making. Smaller institutions may become dependent on systems controlled by a handful of powerful financial and technology corporations. When widely adopted AI models make the same mistakes, the consequences could spread rapidly across international markets.
AI also offers opportunities to reduce compliance costs and help smaller banks compete. But those benefits could be undermined if control over the underlying technology becomes concentrated.
The danger with artificial intelligence is that financial globalization, regulatory capture, and centralized technological control will reinforce one another, concentrating economic power in fewer hands while making the entire financial system more vulnerable to shared mistakes.
When Access to Banking Becomes a Tool of Control
The international financial system does more than facilitate commerce. It also gives governments and financial institutions considerable power over who can participate.
In 2012, the international banking network SWIFT disconnected sanctioned Iranian banks under European Union restrictions. In 2022, major Russian banks were similarly excluded following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These actions demonstrated how access to international financial services can be restricted as an instrument of foreign policy.
But similar concerns arise when financial institutions deny services to lawful businesses and individuals because of their political views, religious beliefs, or perceived reputational risks.
In July 2023, JPMorgan Chase closed business accounts associated with Dr. Joseph Mercola, a prominent critic of COVID-19 vaccination, along with personal accounts belonging to several executives and family members. The bank did not publicly provide a detailed explanation.
That same summer, Britain’s Coutts bank closed politician Nigel Farage’s accounts. Internal documents revealed that his political views had been considered incompatible with the bank’s “values.”
Canada provided another example of government-directed financial restrictions. In February 2022, during the trucker protests against COVID-19 mandates, the government invoked the Emergencies Act, allowing financial institutions to freeze accounts associated with the protests without first obtaining individual court orders. Approximately 200 accounts were frozen. In one instance, we met a farmer who told us that his assets were frozen because he had donated to the trucker movement by hosting a pig roast for the truckers and their families!
In August 2025, President Trump issued an executive order directing federal regulators to address politically motivated debanking and remove reputation risk as a basis for certain supervisory actions.
The emergence of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) raises additional questions about financial privacy and government authority. Depending on their design, CBDCs could give governments greater visibility into financial transactions and potentially expand their ability to restrict payments. In July 2026, legislation prohibited the Federal Reserve from issuing a CBDC through 2030.
The central concern is that access to banking is increasingly essential to participation in modern economic life. When governments or dominant financial institutions can restrict that access without adequate transparency, due process, or meaningful avenues of appeal, financial infrastructure can become an instrument of political and economic control.
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Artificial intelligence could transform financial censorship into something far more powerful, systematic, and difficult to challenge. Banks already use automated systems to monitor transactions and assess risk. As these systems become more sophisticated, individuals and businesses could be flagged, denied services, or financially excluded based on opaque algorithms, with little human oversight and no meaningful opportunity to appeal.
China’s social credit system offers a warning. Through government blacklists, surveillance, and restrictions on economic activity, Chinese authorities have demonstrated how financial access and personal behavior can become interconnected. A Western version would not necessarily require an official social credit score. It could emerge through interconnected banking databases, digital identity systems, automated compliance requirements, and AI algorithms that determine who is considered an acceptable participant in the economy.
The European Union provides another warning. Under its Digital Services Act, regulators can impose fines of up to 6 percent of a company’s worldwide annual revenue. In December 2025, the European Commission fined Elon Musk’s X €120 million for alleged transparency violations, while pursuing broader investigations involving content moderation. Critics warn that such financial penalties can pressure companies to restrict lawful speech rather than risk regulatory punishment. Now consider the potential consequences if comparable enforcement pressures become intertwined with AI-driven financial surveillance, digital identity systems, and a digital euro. The power to regulate speech and the power to restrict financial participation could become mutually reinforcing instruments of control.
The greatest danger is that this system could operate above national governments, without any elected official issuing an order. As international banks, payment networks, and technology companies adopt shared algorithms and compliance standards, a person or business classified as politically controversial or a reputational risk could face exclusion across multiple institutions and countries. No court finding, legislative vote, or direct government intervention would necessarily be required. Financial censorship could become embedded in the infrastructure of global commerce itself, enforced automatically by institutions and algorithms that ordinary citizens cannot inspect, challenge, or hold accountable. Challenging the (petro)dollar’s global dominance
America’s ability to restrict access to dollar-based financial networks has encouraged countries such as China and Russia to develop alternatives. The same financial infrastructure that gives the United States considerable international influence also creates incentives for other nations to reduce their dependence on it.
In 2021, the Bank for International Settlements helped launch Project mBridge, working with central banks in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates to develop a system for settling international payments directly in digital currencies, without relying on the dollar. The BIS withdrew in October 2024, while Russia and other BRICS nations continued exploring alternative payment networks.
Meanwhile, the dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has declined from approximately 71 percent in 2000 to 56.7 percent in mid-2026. Although the dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve currency, its declining share illustrates a gradual diversification of international reserves.
The irony is that the financial system built around American economic dominance may be encouraging rival powers to construct competing systems. If these alternatives expand, the United States could eventually lose some of the economic advantages and geopolitical influence that come from the dollar’s central role in global finance.
The Benefits of International Financial Cooperation
International financial cooperation has produced genuine benefits. Since 2002, new international settlement systems have substantially reduced the risk that one bank will pay for a currency transaction without receiving the money it is owed, the very problem that brought down confidence in international banking after the Herstatt failure in 1974.
Stronger bank capital requirements introduced after the 2008 financial crisis also helped major financial institutions withstand the economic disruption of the 2020 pandemic without repeating the widespread bank rescues of 2008.
These accomplishments matter. International financial cooperation can strengthen economic stability, protect depositors, and benefit American businesses and consumers. The problem arises when cooperation becomes centralized control, which in turn enables monopolies/oligopolies, as when regulations intended to protect the financial system also protect its largest institutions from competition.
The Real Danger of Globalized Financial Power
For over fifty years, governments, central bankers, international regulators, and the world’s largest financial institutions have constructed a system that increasingly concentrates economic power beyond the reach of national voters. Much of it began with legitimate objectives, and America has benefited enormously from the dollar’s global dominance. But the interests of the American people and those of multinational financial corporations are not always the same.
What began as international financial cooperation has also created opportunities for regulatory capture on a global scale. Rules intended to protect financial stability can instead protect established corporations from competition, making it increasingly difficult for smaller banks, independent businesses, and entrepreneurs to survive, much less challenge the institutions already in power.
Artificial intelligence raises the stakes dramatically. The prospect of a Western social credit system, enforced through interconnected financial networks and automated algorithms, threatens to move economic control beyond the reach of elected governments. No grand conspiracy or single central authority would be necessary. Regulatory capture, shared technology, and aligned financial interests could produce a system of economic exclusion that operates across national borders, without meaningful democratic accountability.
The answer is not to abandon international cooperation or surrender America’s financial advantages. Congress must reclaim oversight of international banking standards, protect competition, establish enforceable safeguards against unjustified debanking, and prevent unaccountable AI-driven financial exclusion.
America should defend the dollar, preserve its financial leadership, and welcome international commerce. But it must never confuse the interests of global financial corporations with the interests of the American people.
A free society cannot remain free if access to banking, commerce, and economic opportunity ultimately depends on the approval of institutions and algorithms that no citizen can hold accountable.
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References
Baker McKenzie. 2026. “The Digital Dollar Freeze: Housing Bill Codifies the U.S. Anti-CBDC Stance.” June 24. https://blockchain.bakermckenzie.com/2026/06/24/the-digital-dollar-freeze-housing-bill-codifies-the-u-s-anti-cbdc-stance/
Bank for International Settlements. 2013. “Treatment of Sovereign Risk in the Basel Capital Framework.” BIS Quarterly Review, December. https://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt1312v.htm
Bank for International Settlements. 2026. “Uncovering FX Settlement Risk: New Measures from the 2025 BIS Triennial Survey.” BIS Quarterly Review, June. https://www.bis.org/publications/uncovering-fx-settlement-risk-new-measures-2025-bis-triennial-survey
Barnet, Richard J., and Ronald E. Müller. 1974. Global Reach: The Power of the Multinational Corporations. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Bebchuk, Lucian, and Scott Hirst. 2019. “The Specter of the Giant Three.” Boston University Law Review 99: 721 to 741. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3401620
BlackRock. 2026. “BlackRock Reports Third Quarter 2026 Results.” Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.2, October 14. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0002012383/000119312526420979/blk-ex99_2.htm
Canadian Press. 2022. “Financial Institutions Say Emergencies Act Needs More Clarity, Less Onus on Banks.” November 17. https://infonews.ca/?p=225885
CNBC. 2023. “A CEO Quits and the BBC Apologizes to Trump-Ally Nigel Farage. A Banking Scandal Erupts in Britain.” July 26. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/26/nigel-farage-coutts-saga-natwest-ceo-alison-rose-resigns-after-media-storm.html
Cointelegraph. 2024. “BIS Exits Project mBridge amid Sanctions Concerns.” https://cointelegraph.com/news/bis-exits-project-mbridge-amid-sanctions-concerns
Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. 2009. “Financial Market Utilities and the Challenge of Just-in-Time Liquidity.” Policy Discussion Paper 2009-4. https://www.chicagofed.org/~/media/publications/policy-discussion-papers/2009/pdp2009-4-pdf.pdf
Florida Department of Financial Services. 2023. “CFO Jimmy Patronis: We Need Answers on Why a Florida Business Was Debanked.” https://myfloridacfo.com/news/pressreleases/press-release-details/2023/09/26/cfo-jimmy-patronis-we-need-answers-on-why-a-florida-business-was-debanked
Global News. 2022. “Unlikely Most Freedom Convoy Donors Would Have Assets Frozen, Officials Say.” https://globalnews.ca/news/8638430/unlikely-most-freedom-convoy-donors-assets-frozen/amp/
Hayek, F. A. 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review 35 (4): 519 to 530.
Holland & Knight. 2025. “Executive Order Briefing: Guaranteeing Fair Banking for All Americans.” August 13. https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/08/executive-order-briefing-guaranteeing-fair-banking-for-all-americans
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Medical Guidelines Are Not Guardrails, They Are The Cage
How the companies that pay for the trials end up writing the rules your doctor must follow, from the Xigris scandal to ivermectin, and why getting caught never stops them.
| PIERRE KORY, MD, MPA OCT 29 |  |
Excerpted from The Silent Aquifer, Act V: The Evidence.
In a book about humanity’s largely unrecognized and fast-unfolding crisis in producing enough food and drinking water, a chapter on how modern medical evidence is manufactured and applied may seem a strange editorial choice. The reason is contrast: I wanted to set the folly, and the fraud, behind the evidence bases that guide medical decisions next to the evidence base for Themarox in agriculture, the mineral extract I propose as a potential solution to that crisis.
I spent a year assembling that evidence, including a trip to the other side of the world, and it is one of the more improbable bodies of evidence ever gathered behind a single claim. It includes four preclinical and clinical studies from two Soviet-era research institutes, one undated and apparently missing its authors. It includes two short-run, long out-of-print Japanese agronomy books, one of them (Rock-Water) assembled partly from notes taken while Shimanishi lectured in China. It includes exactly one peer-reviewed paper, one UN-funded controlled trial on damaged coastal farmland in Korea, two studies run by distributors who sell the product, a set of studies that Shimanishi-kaken commissioned from outside laboratories, and a stunningly compelling photo album in which growers documented the responses seen in the plants, bushes, flowers, cactuses, and crops that they treated with Rock-Water.
I could not make this sound less like a modern trial program if I tried. That is why I devoted two chapters to what modern trial programs are really like. This is the 2nd.
In my last post, “Insufficient Evidence,” I detailed how Pharma created medicine’s evidence hierarchy to systematically value only the most expensive studies while dismissing equally valid study designs that practicing physicians can produce cheaply.
Although I did not include this in the last post, for those who haven’t read it, I cannot encapsulate the core thesis behind it any better than using, as an example, a chapter I titled “The Big Six” from “The War on Ivermectin.” I showed how the Pharma-controlled institutions of society, namely the journals, the agencies, the professional societies, and above all the media, in a coordinated fashion, were able to dismiss and denigrate the entirety of the massive evidence for ivermectin using only six (later seven) highly manipulated “rigorous” RCT’s published in the top journals in the world. Hyper-focusing on only those trials, “they” got the entire world, including the vast majority of physicians, to ignore the actual evidence:
I hoped that book would allow History to record such an astonishing and deadly feat. Unless it becomes required reading in medical school curricula at some point in the future, alas, I fear it will not.
Now the question is: how much control does the company paying for a trial have over what the rest of us eventually read?
Far more than I understood during most of my academic career.
Industry Manipulation of RCTs
If only the most expensive trials count as actionable evidence, then whoever pays for those trials holds enormous power over what medicine believes. How that power is used has been documented in exhaustive detail by people who watched it from the inside.
Three consecutive editors-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine — Arnold Relman, Jerome Kassirer, and Marcia Angell, who between them ran the journal from 1977 to 2000 — have each said publicly that the profession has been bought. Relman told the BMJ:
‘The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.’15
Richard Horton, the longtime editor-in-chief of The Lancet, has written,
“Medical journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry.”16
Four prominent physicians, Ben Goldacre, Peter Gøtzsche, Malcolm Kendrick, and Marcia Angell, have each written book-length critiques of the machinery that produces medical evidence.¹⁷⁻²⁰ In different voices and with different examples, they document the same recurring practices that steer a published result: selective publication, outcome switching, favorable comparators, statistical framing, cherry-picked subgroups, and the suppression or marginalization of inconvenient findings. And they show these practices are structural, not isolated.
It was that exact list of tactics deployed in the “Big Six” ivermectin trials that finally woke this 20-year clinician and researcher up to what was really going on in medicine.
Yet I had already lived through one massive fraud, early in my career. When I began my fellowship in pulmonary and critical care medicine, American ICU patients with septic shock were being infused with a drug called Xigris, to a degree nearly identical to the patients infused with Remdesivir in Covid.
The Xigris Affair
Having written the books “The War on Ivermectin” and “The War on Chlorine Dioxide,” I consider myself deeply versed in the dark arts of Pharmaganda, the sophisticated tactics that industry deploys from its well-worn Disinformation Playbook. Even so, after everything I have seen, I am still astonished when I took a look back at the sophistication, power, and coordination behind the approval and promotion of Xigris from a quarter century ago.
In short: Eli Lilly promoted an expensive and ineffective drug that caused bleeding, on the strength of one unusually favorable and heavily manipulated trial. It then helped finance the influential guidelines recommending its use, until confirmatory trials finally showed no survival benefit and ended its reign.
Xigris (drotrecogin alfa, activated) was recombinant activated protein C. It was meant to counter the inflammation and microvascular clotting of severe sepsis, but the same anticoagulant action that made it work also made patients bleed.
A Dramatic First Trial
Lilly’s PROWESS trial enrolled 1,690 patients and was stopped early for benefit. Reported 28-day mortality:
- Xigris 24.7% vs placebo 30.8%, an absolute reduction of 6.1 percentage points
- Serious bleeding 3.5% vs 2.0%
That implied one life saved for every 16 patients treated, which would be an extraordinary result in sepsis.
But regulators and intensivists had reasons to be uneasy:
- The finding rested on a single pivotal trial.
- The trial was stopped early, which tends to exaggerate treatment effects.
- Eligibility criteria were changed after about 720 patients had enrolled.
- The manufacturing process and drug lots changed mid-trial.
- The benefit was not uniform and appeared mainly after those changes.
- The eventual “high-risk” indication leaned heavily on subgroup analyses.
- The drug caused clinically important bleeding.
The FDA advisory committee split 10–10. The FDA approved Xigris anyway in November 2001, for adults with severe sepsis at high risk of death, and required further studies.
A four-day course cost about $6,800 in 2001 dollars. That was an enormous expense for an ICU drug at the time, and not far from the $3,120 commercial insurers paid for a five-day course of Remdesivir.
The Scandal
Sales disappointed. Hospitals were wary of the evidence, the price, and the bleeding (imagine that: caution prevailed). So Lilly mounted an unusually sophisticated campaign. According to a widely cited 2006 New England Journal of Medicine exposé by NIH critical-care physicians:
- Lilly hired a PR firm, Belsito & Company, to raise awareness of severe sepsis and Xigris.
- Lilly gave a reported $1.8 million grant to a task force on “Values, Ethics and Rationing in Critical Care” (VERICC).
- That campaign recast limited access to Xigris as an ethical rationing problem, so hospitals unwilling to pay could be portrayed as denying patients lifesaving treatment.
- Lilly funded the “Surviving Sepsis Campaign.” Its goal was good, IMO. Sepsis is among the most common causes of death, doctors vary widely in how quickly they recognize it, and early treatment is literally the difference between life and death. Great idea, crap motives. Lilly supplied more than 90 percent of the funding for the groups that wrote the original Surviving Sepsis guidelines.
- Many guideline authors had financial ties to Lilly.
- Shocker: the guidelines recommended Xigris, turning a commercially important drug into “evidence-based” standard practice.
The striking feature was the convergence of marketing, medical ethics, professional-society guidelines, quality-improvement “bundles,” and potential hospital performance measures. That last item was a weaker forerunner of the much more powerful “government reimbursement incentives” later used to promote the use of Remdesivir in Covid. Either way, Xigris showed that a commercial message could thus reach physicians disguised as independent professional consensus.
Meanwhile, the follow-up trials kept coming back negative: no benefit, more bleeding. In 2011, after PROWESS-SHOCK found no survival benefit, Lilly withdrew Xigris worldwide. Analysts had once forecast $1 billion in annual sales; by its last full year, the drug was selling about $100 million.
Then and Now
One detail shows how far professional capture has advanced since then. In the early 2000s, the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) declined to endorse the Surviving Sepsis guidelines, citing concerns about the development process, the evidence grading, and industry sponsorship. Ah, the good old days, when doctors took a professional and ethical stand. Twenty years later, during COVID, the same IDSA proved as captured as any other medical society in the world. It enthusiastically endorsed Remdesivir and the vaccines while specifically recommending against early treatment with repurposed drugs, especially ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
My take: Lilly took a fragile result from a stopped-early, mid-course-amended, company-sponsored trial, turned it into an approved blockbuster candidate, and then amplified it through a company-financed guideline and ethics campaign before anyone had confirmed it worked.
What makes Xigris infamous is not that a drug was eventually proved ineffective; medicine reverses itself all the time. It is that the company selling the drug financed much of the machinery that defined it as recommended, even ethically obligatory, care, while the evidence was still contested and patients were bleeding. It remains one of the clearest cases for why manufacturers should never fund or organize the guidelines, treatment bundles, educational campaigns, or performance metrics that govern their own products.
Fun fact: although Xigris was used everywhere in academic ICUs during my first five years in critical care, I never once gave it to a patient. My mentor, Paul Mayo, called bullshit from the start. He told me that drugs targeting the same pathways had been tested and had failed for decades, and that this was marketing, not medicine. He refused to use it. So did I.
Industry Manipulation of RCT’s
A 2005 NEJM survey found that 80% of academic medical centers would accept contracts giving sponsors ownership of the trial data, and 50% would allow sponsors to ghostwrite the resulting studies.21 82% of institutions reported conflicts with sponsors even after contracts were signed; in one case, a company withheld final payment because it disliked the results. Contracts were typically kept secret. 69% of administrators said funding pressure often forced them to accept terms they considered unethical.
A 2005 report estimated that publishing a favorable paper could be worth up to £200 million to a pharmaceutical company, with a share of that value flowing to doctors who promote the company’s products.22 When the BMJ ran a 2003 cover depicting doctors as pigs at a banquet served by drug reps, companies reportedly threatened to withdraw £75,000 in advertising.23 24 The Annals of Internal Medicine lost an estimated $1–1.5 million in advertising after publishing a study critical of industry advertising.25
As I documented in my book The War on Ivermectin, when the pharmaceutical industry wants to bury evidence of efficacy for an inexpensive, off-patent medication, it is highly adept at designing trials to fail before they begin.26 Enroll patients who are too healthy or enroll them too late. Set the dose too low to work. Cut the treatment course too short to have an effect. Change the endpoint mid-trial.
These aren’t hypotheticals; major universities worldwide used them against ivermectin during Covid. Because ivermectin’s effect was so large, the standard tricks often weren’t enough; the trials kept coming back positive anyway, so the tactics grew even more brazen. Tony Fauci’s NIH-funded ACTIV-6 trial changed its primary endpoint well into the trial’s conduct—“sus,” to say the least, and, in my view, clear scientific misconduct.27
The original secondary endpoint of clinical progression at fourteen days was highly statistically significant, so they changed it to 28 days, where it lost statistical significance. It gets even worse. 5 months after the trial ended, the heavily NIH-funded principal investigator from Duke, Dr. Susanna Naggie, gave a presentation at the NIH, where one of her slides still showed the highly statistically significant difference at seven and fourteen days. Yet, when the study was formally published less than three months later, the exact same findings “missed” statistical significance by a hair.28 Shucks.
The Oxford University PRINCIPLE trial went even further. When investigators found a highly statistically significant improvement in time to recovery—two full days—they invented a previously undescribed (and unintelligible) statistical metric they called “the Probability of Clinical Meaningfulness,” which they used to support the conclusion written in the study abstract: “Ivermectin is unlikely to provide a clinically meaningful improvement in recovery.”29 So kudos to them: they did not lie, because in the new statistical world they had just created, a two full days faster recovery was indeed, “not clinically meaningful” as per their definition. But it meant that, at that point in my career as a physician, I was forced to accept a new definition of recovery, a “clinically meaningful” one, or the old one—whatever that was. They didn’t stop there either. The very next sentence of the abstract’s interpretation was something I had never seen before in a study abstract: a research-policy recommendation: “Further trials of ivermectin for SARS-CoV-2 infection in vaccinated community populations appear unwarranted.” You don’t say.
And don’t even get me started on the McMaster University TOGETHER trial.30 First, their study began by treating Covid-19 patients with a single dose of ivermectin. Yep, a single dose. After about a month, they realized this approach wouldn’t “prove” anything, so they changed the protocol to a three-day course, even though no other antiviral is used for less than five days. The shenanigans they continued to pull only got worse from there, numbering in the dozens; I have extensively detailed them elsewhere.31–33 But get this, that trial won the “David Sackett Trial of the Year Award” from the Society for Clinical Trials.34 An award named after the father of Evidence-Based Medicine. I wish I were making this up.
Conversely, when RCTs are conducted to demonstrate efficacy for a profitable, patented pipeline product, they will run the numbers on 34 post hoc subgroup analyses until something crosses the significance threshold, and publish that slice as if it were the plan all along.
Once a trial is running, the machinery continues. Stop early when interim results happen to look favorable, locking in a statistical fluctuation before it regresses. Carry the last recorded measurement forward for every dropout, and since patients who drop out are often the ones being harmed, their last good number gets averaged into the final result. Recode adverse events: Merck reclassified deaths, Eli Lilly recoded suicide attempts as overdose, a child in the Pfizer Covid vaccine trial was left permanently disabled, yet investigators entered her injury as functional abdominal pain.
Then publish. Repeatedly. A single olanzapine trial was published 143 times, sometimes with different author lists. Place the favorable abstract in a high-impact journal whose editors, in half the cases surveyed, had taken payments from pharmaceutical companies (by the way, you don’t have to take money from Pharma to know that rejecting a study they want published will not bode well for your tenure as editor). Ghostwrite the paper, attach a credentialed name, and retain the data so no one can check. One internal Pfizer document stated that their studies “belong to Pfizer” and exist “to support marketing.”
If you appreciate the late nights and deep dives into medical rabbit holes that I do, your paid support keeps me going.
When Belief Becomes Law
Everything to this point has been about belief. What counts as knowledge, what counts as proof, which evidence is permitted through the gate and which is turned away at it. That is an epistemological problem, and if it stopped there, it would be a quarrel among academics, conducted in journals, with nothing at stake but reputations.
It does not stop there.
Between the evidence hierarchy and the patient in the bed sits a document, and that document is where the whole apparatus finally touches a human being. It is called a clinical practice guideline, and its logic is simple enough to fit on a card. For condition X, begin with treatment A. If A fails, move to B. Avoid C. Anyone hospitalized with Covid in recent years knows them all too well.
Who writes them? In Covid, it was the government that wrote the treatment guidelines, yet historically the private specialty societies write the overwhelming majority: the American Heart Association, the American College of Cardiology, the American Diabetes Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and their counterparts in every field. These are private membership organizations. They hold no statutory authority of any kind. And their recommendations govern the practice of American medicine, along with much of the medicine practiced in the many countries that adopt American guidelines more or less wholesale.
Technically, they are recommendations. In practice, they are the rules.
Here is why. A guideline determines what an insurer will reimburse. It determines what the hospital protocol says and what the electronic medical record prompts the physician to order. It determines what residents are taught to treat with first. And — this is the part that does the real work — it is used in malpractice litigation as a proxy for the standard of care.
That last one hurts the most. Take it from me, I have spent hundreds of hours, pro bono, in the past 6 years serving as an expert witness for doctors across the country and world whose licenses were being threatened for treating Covid patients with ivermectin, an act that regulators deemed, “outside the standard of care.” I can recall helping win only one case, that of the Canadian physician Dr. Charles Hoffe, which I wrote about in this prior post.
I want to be clear about the mechanism, because it is the hinge of this entire chapter. The evidence hierarchy decides what may be believed. The guideline converts that belief into the standard of care. The standard of care determines what a physician can safely do. Which means that the hierarchy does not merely decide what is true. It decides what is permitted. Dr. Wojak says it more compactly than I can: the guidelines are not the guardrails; they are the cage.
Now recall the word that was used on me, and what it was used to dismiss. Anecdotal — applied to a clinician’s observation of the same cause producing the same consequence, again and again, across hundreds of patients.
But know that roughly half of the recommendations in clinical practice guidelines are based not on high-quality evidence but on the guideline authors’ opinions.1,2
Half. The system that told me my bedside observations were anecdote fills half of its own rulebook with expert opinion — and not opinion standing in for trials that could not be run, but opinion standing in for trials that simply were not. That opinion, once written down and voted through by a committee, becomes the legal standard of care for tens of millions of people.
So expert opinion is permitted to establish medical truth after all. It simply has to be the right experts, seated in the right room, funded by the right people. . That is not an evidence standard. It is a credentialing standard, and the two have almost nothing to do with one another. I ain’t “the right expert,” apparently.
That raises the obvious question: who those experts are.
Of the American physicians who authored clinical practice guidelines in 2020, seventy-four percent received payments from industry. Only thirty-seven percent disclosed them.35 Among guideline chairs — the people who set the agenda, select the panel, and run the room — eighty-two percent had financial conflicts of interest, and not one of them disclosed those conflicts accurately.
Above the panels sit the organizations that appoint them. In 2020, seventy-two percent of the leaders of major American medical associations had financial ties to industry; among the physicians in those leadership roles, eighty percent did.36 Across the ten largest disease areas, payments to those leaders approached $130 million over five years. Not one organization had a leadership free of industry ties. NOT ONE.
Fun fact: I have never in my entire career had a true financial conflict of interest (outside of doing two hours of paid consulting with a GE ultrasound engineer on a super-cool probe he was designing for lung ultrasound, an opportunity I simply could not intellectually resist). This may be the reason why AMD has always told me they find it remarkable that, of all the Covid dissident physicians, I am the only one that has not (yet) been accused of being “controlled opp.”
It gets even worse. The organizations themselves are funded by the same companies whose products their guidelines evaluate. The American Heart Association receives roughly forty million dollars a year from pharmaceutical and device manufacturers.37
The American Diabetes Association receives tens of millions. These bodies write the cardiovascular and diabetes guidelines.38 And when researchers examined the financial relationships of guideline-producing organizations directly, they found that only one percent of guidelines disclosed the producing organization’s own financial relationships.39 Most of those organizations had conflict-of-interest policies. Few had any procedure for enforcing them. The policy existed. The enforcement did not.
The reasonable objection here is that money is not the same thing as influence — that these are serious people, capable of holding a payment in one hand and a recommendation in the other.
That has been tested as well. Guidelines written by panels with financial conflicts were twenty-six percent more likely to recommend the sponsor’s product.40 Industry-funded trials were thirty-four percent more likely to report conclusions favorable to the funder.41
Notice how those two figures sit on top of one another, because the same stacking applies. The biased trials feed the systematic reviews. The systematic reviews feed the guidelines. By the time you can measure a twenty-six percent tilt at the panel, the evidence arriving at that panel has already been tilted upstream, and the panel’s tilt is applied to a body of work that was bent before it got there. Twenty-six percent is not an estimate of industry influence on guidelines. It is the floor.
There is one further bias is built into the guideline system that has nothing to do with any individual’s conflict of interest, which makes it, in some ways, the more serious problem (and one of the most relevant to the MAHA movement), because no disclosure form ever written could catch it.
Guidelines systematically favor drugs over everything that is not a drug. The reason is not scientific. It is structural. A drug has a company behind it — a company that will fund the trials, pay the statisticians, sponsor the conferences, and populate the panel with specialists whose entire careers were built on that class of compound. Diet has no company. Neither does exercise. Neither does sunlight, or sleep, or a mineral, or a glass of well-balanced mineral water. Nobody convenes a panel to write the guideline for something that cannot be sold, and nobody funds the trial that would qualify it for the top of the pyramid. The resulting body of recommendations is not so much wrong as lopsided: exhaustive about every intervention with a sponsor, and close to silent about every intervention without.
If you want to see how early that asymmetry is installed, look at what physicians are taught. Across four years of American medical school, nutrition receives roughly twenty hours of instruction.42
Twenty hours, in total, on the substance every one of our patients puts into their body three times a day, every day, for the whole of their life. My students could recite the mechanism of a dozen antihypertensives. Very few of them could tell you what magnesium does. And don’t even get me started on the importance of drinking water chemistry, or the health importance of its mineral composition. It has only one consensus document: a 2005 WHO review that set minimum levels for calcium, magnesium, bicarbonate, and total dissolved solids. This Substack is also transitioning into that field; over the next few months, I plan to post numerous excerpts, repurposed for Substack, from the 768-page encyclopedia I wrote called, “Earth’s Living Water: Its History, Its Ruin, and The Way Back.” This chapter is one of them.
Not Just a Few Bad Apples
Every industry has its scandals. Wall Street has paid more in total penalties than the drug companies have, and the oil industry has racked up more cases. If the question were only who has paid the most, Pharma would not top the list. The question that matters is a different one: what does a company do after it has been caught, has paid, and has signed a written promise to stop?
Start with the industry as a whole. Public Citizen tracked every federal and state settlement with drug manufacturers from 1991 through 2021: 482 settlements and $62.3 billion in penalties. Companies with two or more federal settlements accounted for 87.5 percent of all federal penalty dollars. Pfizer alone settled 15 separate federal cases, Novartis 12, and GlaxoSmithKline and Bristol Myers Squibb 9 each.64 A study in JAMA of the 26 largest drug companies found that 22 of them were penalized for illegal activity between 2003 and 2016, and that nearly all of those engaged in it for at least four years, a pattern the authors said suggests intent rather than accident.45 You don’t say.
Then look at what happens after the promise. When a company settles a federal health care fraud case, it usually signs a Corporate Integrity Agreement with the Inspector General of Health and Human Services: years of monitored good behavior, a kind of corporate probation. Pfizer signed one in 2004, after its Warner-Lambert subsidiary pleaded guilty to the fraudulent promotion of Neurontin. In 2007 another Pfizer subsidiary, Pharmacia & Upjohn, pleaded guilty to paying kickbacks. In 2009 Pfizer was back again, settling charges over the illegal promotion of Bextra and other drugs for $2.3 billion, including what was then the largest criminal fine in American history, with some of the same marketing tactics that had appeared in the Neurontin case. The acting U.S. Attorney said plainly that among the factors his office weighed in setting the penalty was “Pfizer’s recidivism.”65
Peter Gøtzsche found the same pattern across the industry. In 2012 he searched for fraud cases involving each of the ten largest drug companies and found serious crimes committed between 2007 and 2012 by every one of them. He also noted that as of July 2012, nine of the ten were operating under Corporate Integrity Agreements; only Roche was not. He titled the full report with his conclusion: corporate crime in the pharmaceutical industry is “common, serious and repetitive.” Crimes that are widespread and repeated, he argued, suggest they are committed deliberately.66
That is where the organized-crime comparison comes from, and it is more precise than it sounds. In his foreword to Gøtzsche’s book, Richard Smith, the former editor of the BMJ, noted that U.S. law defines racketeering as engaging repeatedly in certain kinds of offenses: extortion, fraud, federal drug offenses, bribery, embezzlement, obstruction of justice, obstruction of law enforcement, witness tampering, and political corruption. Gøtzsche, he wrote, presents detailed evidence that drug companies have committed most of them. Smith judged the comparison “not entirely fanciful.”67 The insiders have said it more bluntly. Peter Rost, a former Pfizer vice president, quoted by Gøtzsche, put it this way: “It is scary how many similarities there are between this industry and the mob.”66
Why would companies keep doing it? Because the arithmetic rewards them. A 2026 study in JAMA Network Open found that in kickback cases, companies paid a median penalty equal to 2.2 percent of the U.S. revenue the drugs earned during the period of the violation.44 Public Citizen set its $62.3 billion against the $1.9 trillion in net income earned by the 35 largest drug companies between 2000 and 2018 alone. And the people who make the decisions almost never pay. The settlements, Public Citizen found, rarely involve admissions of guilt by individuals or companies, and federal prosecutors brought only six cases under the doctrine that allows executives to be convicted without proof of intent between 2000 and 2021.64 A fine that small, paid by shareholders, with no one going to prison, is not a punishment. It is a cost of doing business, and the settlement record shows the companies treat it as one.
So I will not claim that Pharma has paid the most. Wall Street has paid more, and its biggest banks rival the drug companies as repeat offenders. But the two are not the same kind of criminal. When a bank breaks the law, people lose money. When a drug company breaks the law, people lose their health and/or their lives. An FDA scientist estimated that Merck’s Vioxx was linked to between 88,000 and 139,000 excess cases of serious coronary heart disease in the United States.68 GlaxoSmithKline’s 2012 guilty plea included a charge of failing to report safety data on its diabetes drug Avandia to the FDA.69Purdue pleaded guilty to federal crimes over the marketing of OxyContin twice, in 2007 and again in 2020, while the opioid epidemic it helped set off killed Americans by the hundreds of thousands.70 A fraud that empties a pension fund can be repaid. A fraud that hides a drug’s harms cannot.
That is why I call it the most criminal of all industries. Not because it has paid the most, but because its largest companies keep committing the same crimes after being caught, after paying, and after signing written promises to stop, and because the cost of those crimes is counted in bodies. That is the comparison Gøtzsche drew, and it rests on the companies’ own settlement record.
So hold all of that in mind: the stopped-early trials, the switched endpoints, the guideline panels on the payroll, the fines paid as a cost of doing business. Because over the next several posts, I am going to show you a very different kind of evidence.
It was gathered decades ago by Japanese agronomists and growers, Korean and Mexican university researchers, and a Russian institute of restorative medicine, along with the lectures Shimanishi gave in China. They studied Themarox in rice paddies, eel ponds, wastewater lagoons, and laboratory rats. None of them had a billion-dollar product to protect, a guideline panel to capture, or a journal to buy. Most of them were simply curious about what this strange mineral water was doing, and they wrote it down.
By the standards of modern medicine, almost none of it counts. You will soon be asked to judge for yourself what those standards are worth.
From the Shameless Commercialism Department:
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The Stone and Water Series
You can purchase the book series, in whole or in part, from my website ( where all books are personally stamped with my hanko) or from Amazon.
The War on Chlorine Dioxide
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55. Raywat Deonandan. “Resist the Randomized Controlled Trials Fetish: Different Questions Require Different Pyramids of Evidence.” Canadian Medical Education Journal 16, no. 1 (2025). https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/cmej/2025-v16-n1-cmej09965/1117323ar.pdf.
56. Alexander C. Fanaroff, Robert M. Califf, Stephan Windecker, Sidney C. Smith Jr, and Renato D. Lopes. “Levels of Evidence Supporting American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association and European Society of Cardiology Guidelines, 2008–2018.” JAMA 321, no. 11 (2019): 1069–1080. DOI:10.1001/jama.2019.1122.
57. Howard Balshem, Mark Helfand, Holger J. Schünemann, et al. “GRADE Guidelines: 3. Rating the Quality of Evidence.” Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 64, no. 4 (2011): 401–406. DOI:10.1016/j.jclinepi.2010.07.015.
58. Maria Popp, Miriam Stegemann, Maria-Inti Metzendorf, et al. “Ivermectin for Preventing and Treating COVID-19.” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, no. 7 (2021): CD015017. DOI:10.1002/14651858.CD015017.pub2.
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60. Paul Ruich. “The Use of Cause-and-Effect Language in the JAMA Network Journals.” AMA Style Insider, September 19, 2017. https://amastyleinsider.com/2017/09/19/use-cause-effect-language-jama-network-journals.
61. Noah A. Haber, Sarah E. Wieten, Julia M. Rohrer, et al. “Causal and Associational Language in Observational Health Research: A Systematic Evaluation.” American Journal of Epidemiology 191, no. 12 (2022): 2084–2097. DOI:10.1093/aje/kwac137.
62. Andrew Hill and Manya Mirchandani. “The Dangers of Non-Randomized, Observational Studies: Experience from the COVID-19 Epidemic.” Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy 78, no. 2 (2023): 323–327. DOI:10.1093/jac/dkac437.
63. Issa J. Dahabreh and Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo. “Causal Inference About the Effects of Interventions From Observational Studies in Medical Journals.” JAMA 331, no. 21 (2024): 1845–1853. DOI:10.1001/jama.2024.8107.
64. Michael T. Abrams and Sidney M. Wolfe. “Thirty-One Years of Pharmaceutical Industry Criminal and Civil Penalties: 1991 Through 2021.” Public Citizen, May 21, 2024. https://www.citizen.org/article/thirty-one-years-of-pharmaceutical-industry-criminal-and-civil-penalties-1991-2021/.
65. Gardiner Harris. “Pfizer Pays $2.3 Billion to Settle Marketing Case.” New York Times, September 2, 2009. See also U.S. Department of Justice, “Justice Department Announces Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement in Its History,” September 2, 2009.
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68. David J. Graham, David Campen, Rita Hui, et al. “Risk of Acute Myocardial Infarction and Sudden Cardiac Death in Patients Treated with Cyclo-Oxygenase 2 Selective and Non-Selective Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs: Nested Case-Control Study.” Lancet 365, no. 9458 (2005): 475–481. DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(05)17864-7.
69. U.S. Department of Justice. “GlaxoSmithKline to Plead Guilty and Pay $3 Billion to Resolve Fraud Allegations and Failure to Report Safety Data.” Press release, July 2, 2012.
70. U.S. Department of Justice. “Justice Department Announces Global Resolution of Criminal and Civil Investigations with Opioid Manufacturer Purdue Pharma and Civil Settlement with Members of the Sackler Family.” Press release, October 21, 2020. On the 2007 plea by the Purdue Frederick Company: Barry Meier, “In Guilty Plea, OxyContin Maker to Pay $600 Million,” New York Times, May 10, 200
Seattle Hit a Taking Limit? | The Roundup, Fri Oct 30
Top WA News Stories: Takings Limit, Tacoma Measure 1, $3.2M Court Race
| NANCY D CHURCHILL OCT 30 | |
Story One: Seattle Hit a Taking Limit?
Synopsis: How far can Seattle go before rental rules become a taking?
In GRE Downtowner LLC v. City of Seattle, Division One of the Washington Court of Appeals reversed a lower-court dismissal and revived inverse-condemnation claims by the owner of Addison on Fourth, a 254-unit low-income complex near downtown.
GRE bought the building in 2012 for $12.5 million and spent $26.5 million more fixing it up. The owner says Seattle’s growing list of renter rules cut the rent it collected from about 93% to under 45%. It says that added up to nearly $6 million in losses from 2019 to 2023.
The appeals court held that GRE pleaded enough facts for both partial and per se regulatory-takings claims to move forward and sent the case back to King County Superior Court; it did not award compensation.
The Seattle Times reports the city attorney’s office is reviewing whether to appeal, while tenant advocates say the ordinances help balance landlord-tenant power and landlords say the ruling finally draws a constitutional line.
From the Bookmarks:
- Future 42 on Facebook: “Seattle just received an important reminder: the Constitution can limit how much government can impose on property owners. In GRE Downtowner LLC v. City of Seattle, the Washington Court of Appeals revived an inverse-condemnation lawsuit challenging the cumulative impact of Seattle’s rental-housing and eviction ordinances.”
- benmaritz: “Very big ruling today from the appeals court on Seattle’s tenant protections. For the first time a court has basically said there is a limit to how far govt can go before it’s a “taking””
benmaritz@benmaritzVery big ruling today from the appeals court on Seattle’s tenant protections. For the first time a court has basically said there is a limit to how far govt can go before it’s a “taking” courts.wa.gov/opinions/pdf/8… 1/4:16 AM · Oct 27, 2026 · 128K Views16 Replies · 42 Reposts · 639 Likes- Jim Walsh on X: “An important ruling from a WA state appeals court. “Takings” is a critical concept in constitutional property rights. Government agencies cannot take someone’s property or diminish its value by means of unreasonable taxes or regulations. … In this case (out of Seattle, but it has statewide significance), a state appeals court finally said “Enough!” And set some guidelines for when regulations become so unreasonable that they become unconstitutional takings.”
Leave a comment on Story One: Seattle Hit a Taking Limit?
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Story Two: Can Tacoma Afford Measure 1?
Synopsis: Can Tacoma fund a new landlord-licensing and tenant-enforcement system while staring at a budget shortfall?
Safe Homes for All Initiative Measure No. 1 is on the November 3 ballot in Tacoma. It would make landlords get a rental license and pay a fee for each unit. It would also let tenants form unions, and landlords would have to bargain with them. The city would keep a public list of landlords. It could look into complaints and fine landlords at least $500 per violation. The highest fine would be five times the monthly rent.
The measure does not set rents. State law limits cities from doing that.
The City Manager, Hyun Kim, says the program could cost $8 million to $10 million a year. The city already expects a budget gap of about $40 million. Supporters say the cost is closer to $1 million. A local housing group estimates landlords would pay about $190 per unit if fees cover the cost.
The Rental Housing Association of Washington urges a No vote. It says the city can’t handle the cost. Future 42 warns the program would take money from police, fire and other basic services. Common sense economics indicates that increasing costs on landords will simply drive rents higher over time, worsening the affordable housing crisis.
From the Bookmarks:
- Rental Housing Association of Washington on LinkedIn: “The City of Tacoma is not equipped to deal with the extreme cost of Initiative Measure 1. Vote NO on Initiative Measure 1 when you submit your ballot before November 3rd.”
- Future 42: “Vote “No” on the Tacoma Housing Provider Fee and Enforcement Initiative … a sweeping new rental regulation proposal that the City Manager estimates could cost taxpayers and businesses $8 million to $10 million per year, on top of a projected $40 million General Fund budget shortfall for 2027–28.”
Future 42@future42orgVote “No” on the Tacoma Housing Provider Fee and Enforcement Initiative Ballots for the November general election have been mailed and should already be arriving in Tacoma voters’ mailboxes. Among the measures on this year’s ballot is a sweeping new rental regulation proposal …
7:00 PM · Oct 25, 2026 · 703 Views1 Reply · 4 Reposts · 16 LikesLeave a comment on Story Two: Can Tacoma Afford Measure 1?
Story Three: Who’s Buying the Court?
Synopsis: Should late money rewrite a Supreme Court race after ballots are already out?
On Oct. 22, Washington’s Public Disclosure Commission stopped enforcing a limit on last-minute campaign gifts. That limit covered the final 21 days before the election. It capped gifts at $75,000 for statewide campaigns and $7,500 for local ones. The commission said the limit raised constitutional concerns.
Soon after, The Seattle Times reported a $250,000 gift from the SEIU 775 union’s political committee. The money went to a group called Beware the Attack on Our Courts. The group quickly paid for mailers and online ads in one of five Supreme Court races. The ads boost Court of Appeals Judge Ian Birk and attack King County Judge Sean Patrick O’Donnell.
O’Donnell says the group is spending more than a million dollars on misleading ads against him. He also says Google pulled some of the ads because they broke its rules. Google doesn’t allow ads for Washington state candidates. Dave Larson says SEIU also gave $150,000 to the campaign against I-645. He notes that judges running for the court can still take only $2,400 per person.
Karim A. Merchant’s graphic shows more than $3.2 million given in the Supreme Court races.
People who defend the spending say both sides can now raise more, and voters get more information. Critics say the rules changed after ballots were already mailed, and that’s unfair in a race for the state’s highest court.
From the Bookmarks:
- Sean P. O’Donnell on LinkedIn: “An independent expenditure called “Beware the Attack on Our Courts,” funded by the most powerful special interests in judicial elections is spending over a million dollars in deceptive, politicized, advertising attacking me. Today, Google busted it for running state campaigns ads on its platforms.”
- Karim A. Merchant on Facebook: “Campaign contributions exceed $3.2 million dollars 🤯”
- Judge Dave Larson (Ret.): “SEIU has put a total of $400,000 into a two-pronged attack on the income tax and on our Supreme Court candidates. On October 26, SEIU gave $150,000 to the campaign opposing I-645 (the income tax) and $250,000 to the committee attacking your judicial candidates, Beware the Attack on Our Courts. … Instead, the PDC handed Beware the Attack on Our Courts the ability to take an extra $250,000, a windfall granted in violation of state law.”
Judge Dave Larson (Ret.)@larsonforwaThis is a follow-up to our earlier post about the Public Disclosure Commission waiving a state law passed by the legislature, a move that lets special interests take the lid off how much they can spend to mislead you. At the time, we didn’t know who requested that waiver. Now we …
7:35 PM · Oct 28, 2026 · 6.85K Views14 Replies · 49 Reposts · 134 Likes- Charlie Harger, KIRO Newsradio: “It is wild to me that the rules got changed with 11 days to go until the election. Basically, the state PDC just said we are in the fourth quarter at the two minute warning, and suddenly you can play with 30 players instead of 11.”
Charlie Harger, KIRO Newsradio@KIROCharlieIt is wild to me that the rules got changed with 11 days to go until the election. Basically, the state PDC just said we are in the fourth quarter at the two minute warning, and suddenly you can play with 30 players instead of 11. Welcome to a new era of Washington state- Brian Heywood: “After the PDC changed the rules mid election to allow PACs supporting statewide candidates to take unlimited contributions: SEIU just donated $250K to the Beware PAC … An attempt to own the supreme court to ensure the constitutional protection against an income tax gets overturned by a hyper partisan group of judges”
9:17 PM · Oct 28, 2026 · 14.5K Views31 Replies · 213 Reposts · 588 Likes- Viet Q Nguyen: “Hey @seiu775 and plaintiffs trial laywers: another $250K to Beware the Attack on Our Courts, after the PDC lifted contribution limits. You and the plaintiffs’ trial lawyers are funding attacks on Scott Edwards, David Stevens, @odonnell4judge, @larsonforwa and Todd Bloom. Stop trying to buy our Supreme Court.” (Ed. Note: music video in the post 🎶)
Viet Q Nguyen@VietQNguyenHey @seiu775 and plaintiffs trial laywers: another $250K to Beware the Attack on Our Courts, after the PDC lifted contribution limits. You and the plaintiffs’ trial lawyers are funding attacks on Scott Edwards, David Stevens, @odonnell4judge , @larsonforwa and Todd Bloom. Stop …
11:56 PM · Oct 28, 2026 · 450 Views1 Reply · 7 Reposts · 22 Likes
Leave a comment on Story Three: Who’s Buying the Court?
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Friday Funnies: Orange Man Bad:
The Campaign Continues
| DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 30 | |
Halloween, way back a hundred years or so, may have been a lot creepier…
Below: For context – A little comic genius from Ricky Gervais’s Extras(2005), featuring Sir Patrick Stewart playing a hilariously outrageous version of himself. Stewart, best known as the dignified Captain Picard of Star Trek, delivers his absurd movie pitch with a perfectly straight face – well, most of the time.
Thanks for reading Malone News! This post is public so feel free to crosspost it here, share to notes, social media, or via email!
Twice a week, I sit down and pull together comics, memes, video from around the web. Sometimes, I even make up my own memes. We offer analysis, insight and humor.
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October 29, 2026
Brazil: When Democracy Becomes a Weapon
Political prosecutions, censorship, and allegations of U.S. interference.
| DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 28 | |
By Dr. Jill Glasspool Malone and Robert W. Malone
Political Opinion
We have been appalled by the glowing, almost celebratory mainstream media coverage of Lula’s election victory and the treatment of Flávio Bolsonaro, who reportedly fled Brazil amid fears of political persecution. Rather than investigate allegations of censorship, judicial corruption, election interference, and political repression, much of the Western press appears content to celebrate those wielding power. But there are people much closer to events on the ground, and their voices deserve to be heard.
Glenn Greenwald is one of them. Unlike journalists whose principles change with the political winds, Greenwald has consistently challenged abuses of state power, regardless of who benefits. His reporting on the Operation Car Wash scandal exposed prosecutorial misconduct involving Lula’s prosecution. Now he is investigating allegations of similar abuses directed against Lula’s political enemies, particularly through the extraordinary powers exercised by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes.
Mike Benz takes the story directly into Washington. He alleges that the Biden administration coordinated an extraordinary intervention surrounding Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, involving the CIA, State Department, Pentagon, and White House. His account raises questions about American diplomatic pressure, electronic voting machines, and USAID funding allegedly directed toward organizations aligned with Lula and Brazil’s censorship apparatus. Although Benz acknowledges that he cannot prove voting-machine manipulation, his allegations about American involvement demand answers.
The images and statements reproduced below reveal another dimension: international political figures and institutions publicly celebrating Lula, even as serious allegations of judicial overreach and political persecution are happening in real time.
When journalists, activists, and opposition figures flee their country rather than face a judicial system they believe has been weaponized against them, this is no longer ordinary politics. And when American government agencies are accused of helping shape that political environment, Americans have every right to demand a full accounting.
We believe this story is far bigger than Brazil. It concerns the abuse of judicial power, censorship, foreign interference, and the willingness of powerful institutions to defend conduct they would condemn if the political parties were reversed.
Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald writes:
The Brazilian Supreme Court Judge revered by the Brazilian left (and now the American left for seizing Bolsonaro’s passport), Alexandre de Moraes, comes from the extremist “law-and-order” faction of the Brazilian Right as well as its extreme pro-austerity neoliberal pro-banker wing.
Less than a decade ago, when Moraes was nominated to the Supreme Court, the Brazilian left branded him a white supremacist, a fascist and a leader of the right-wing coup government. One of Brazil’s leading left-wing politicians @GuilhermeBoulos explicitly accused Moraes of having committed the worst crime against humanity that exists: “RACIST GENOCIDE,” by deliberately murdering poor black people en masse while he was the Justice Secretary for São Paulo Governor Geraldo Alckmin (who himself spent years being called all the same names by the Brazilian left until Lula picked Alckmin as VP in 2022).
Then — starting in 2019 — Moraes began censoring, imprisoning and persecuting Lula’s enemies and imprisoning his own critics, and was overnight transformed by the large Brazilian media and the left into the Savior of Brazilian Justice and Democracy. Only on the left can one transform from *fascist and genocidal racist* to heroic guardian of justice in less than a decade.
Also, Moraes’ own corruption scandals make everyone else’s seem trivial, yet his passport works just fine and he freely travels the world in great wealth that he and his family received from the corrupt billionaire banker responsible for Brazil’s worst-ever banking collapse…
CRUCIAL FACTS ON THE FLAVIO BOLSONARO MATTER:
It’s not just Flavio Bolsonaro who fled Brazil to escape the tyrannical persecution of Alexandre de Moraes and the pro-Lula wing of the Supreme Court. There are dozens of Brazilian exiles who have done the same: dissident journalists, activists, bloggers, and politicians who all fled to avoid certain prison for political opposition.
In most of these cases, Moraes has demanded the extradition of those who fled and whom he wants to imprison back in Brazil. But Moraes’ extradition requests have been repeatedly denied by multiple countries and institutions on the grounds that these prosecutions are politically motivated or otherwise corrupted. Among those concluing this: Spain, Italy, INTERPOL, and even the US under Biden.
Just today, Italy refused Brazil’s demand to extradite a person named @edutagli, who was once a top aide to Moraes, but then fled to Italy after Moraes accused him of having been my source in a huge leak from Moraes’ office that I obtained for reporting I did with @Folha in 2024. That massive leak enabled us to publish roughly 20 articles proving systemic abuses of power by Moraes against his political enemies: exactly the reason so many Brazilians, including Bolsonaro, know they can’t get a fair trial in Brazil.
Italy today refused to extradite the person accused of being our source on the grounds that the proceedings would be a farce because Moraes — as he so often does — wants to act as the supposed victim, investigator, and judge, and thus his demand falls well outside of Italy’s extradition standards. Again, multiple countries have concluded the same, showing what a farce Brazil’s once-respected judicial system has become under the Lula/Moraes regime.
Moraes has overseen a system of political persecution masquerading as criminal justice that has been recognized as a sham by multiple countries that are not exactly Bolsonaro allies. Nobody in their right mind who is a political enemy of Moraes would remain in Brazil once if it is clear that he intends to imprison you, since he has proven that guilt is a foregone conclusion and he operates with no legal or constitutional limits of any kind.
That is why asylum under international law exists: to protect those who cannot obtain justice in their own country because the justice system has been corrupted and commandeered for political persecution. Many people, such as Julian Assange, have needed that protection (which Lula cheered). Now people need it from Moraes in Brazil. That is sadly one of the main legacies of both Lula and Moraes over the last six years….
One other important note: Moraes himself is engulfed in the worst judicial scandal in Brazil’s history: on that makes most other scandals seem trivial by comparison. His family received roughly $40 million (!!!) from a corrupt billionaire (Daniel Vorcaro) shortly before his bank (Banco Master) collapsed: it was basically a ponzi scheme stealing from depositors and investors.
Moraes repeatedly lied by denying he had contact with Vorcaro. But then messages from Vorcaro’s phone were obtained by the police and leaked. showing that the banker spoke extensively and continuously with Moraes after paying his wife these obscene sums, guaranteeing Moraes and his family generational lavish wealth.
Among those chats: Vorcaro repeateadly asked Moraes about the status of the police investigation against him, and specifically asked Moraes when he should flee the country to avoid justice (he was boarding his private jet to Dubai when the police nabbed him at the last second).
Moraes deleted all of his messages to Vorcaro to prevent investigators from learning what he told the banker about pending police operations or anything else (behavior that Moraes has cited as “obstruction of justice” to justify imprisoning others before trial). So we don’t know what Moraes told the banker about pending police operations of if he tried to help him flee to Dubai to avoid arrest: because Moraes erased his messages.
That’s what makes it extra bizarre — just surreal — that it is now Moraes of all people who is posturing as the judge who wants to ensure that Flavio Bolsonaro is barred from leaving Brazil (even in the absence of criminal charges).
In other words, Moraes waited a whole SEVEN MINUTES before returning to his years-long role as chief persecutor of his political enemies, using blatantly abusive judical authorities to carry this all out: abuses so severe that even his prior allies have begun denouncing it as a grave danger to democracy. Does any of this look or feel or smell like “democracy”?…
If the leading opponents of the government are faced with the choice of either fleeing the country or being imprisoned, does that mean the country is tyrannical and authoritairan?
It all depends on whether we like the ideology of the government or not.
Will Chamberlain @willchamberlain writes:
Flavio Bolsonaro’s passport was cancelled and he was forced to flee the country by Lula, Alexandre De Moraes, and the insane Brazilian regime.
His brother Eduardo has an arrest warrant out for lobbying the US. His father, Jair Bolsonaro is serving 27 years. Victims of political persecution, all of them.
It’s time for the Brazilian left to face the full force of American diplomatic and economic sanctions until they stop acting like a banana republic.
The Trump administration lifted Magnitsky Act sanctions on de Moraes, his wife, and his holding company last December. They should be immediately reimposed.
Further, visa bans should be imposed on every government official who has touched the Bolsonaro investigations – and their families too.
Finally, Section 301 tariffs on Brazilian goods should be quadrupled.
The Brazilian regime should look carefully at what has happened to Venezuela and Cuba, and remember that this hemisphere belongs to the United States of America.
What is the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act?
The Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act gives the U.S. president broad authority to sanction foreign officials implicated in serious human rights abuses or corruption. These sanctions can freeze assets, prohibit financial transactions, restrict access to international banking, and bar entry into the United States, all without requiring a criminal conviction.
In July 2025, the Trump administration imposed Magnitsky sanctions on Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, accusing him of abusing his judicial authority, suppressing free speech, arbitrarily detaining political opponents, and targeting individuals for their political beliefs. In September, the sanctions were extended to his wife, Viviane Barci de Moraes, and the family holding company, Lex Instituto de Estudos Jurídicos, which controlled significant family assets, including real estate.
Yet on December 12, 2025, the Trump administration abruptly removed all three from the sanctions list. The reversal did not come with an announcement that the original accusations were false, that de Moraes had been exonerated, or that his conduct had fundamentally changed.
Instead, it followed a diplomatic rapprochement between Trump and Brazilian President Lula da Silva, including negotiations over punitive U.S. tariffs on Brazilian exports. Lula had personally requested that Trump lift the sanctions. Administration officials also pointed to proposed Brazilian legislation that could reduce sentences for those convicted in connection with the January 2023 unrest, potentially benefiting former President Jair Bolsonaro.
If de Moraes’s actions were sufficiently serious to justify freezing his assets and targeting his family’s financial holdings in July and September, what changed by December? The publicly available record suggests that Washington’s diplomatic priorities shifted, not that the underlying human rights allegations had been disproven. It appears that Magnitsky sanctions were removed as a bargaining chip in a broader geopolitical negotiation.
But now, with de Moraes’s most recent actions, it appears that it is time for Pres. Trump to reapply those sanctions and this time, for good.
So, who is busy congratulating Lula – all the usual players, of course:
The press also celebrated the Lula win, while failing to aggressively investigate allegations of censorship, judicial abuse, and political persecution. Many outlets act as a public relations arm of the very institutions it is supposed to hold accountable.
Major international news outlets, including The Guardian, Reuters, Associated Press, Financial Times, The New York Times, Le Monde, El País, and Portugal’s Público, gave extensive coverage to Lula’s electoral victories. Much of the reporting emphasized his political comeback, celebrations among supporters, and congratulations from international leaders.
The Guardian portrayed his victory as a dramatic return to power, while Reuters and AP prominently reported the enthusiastic response from world leaders.
Some coverage framed Lula’s success as a victory for democracy, with almost no attention to the allegations of censorship, judicial overreach, and political persecution surrounding Brazil’s government.
Biden was complicit in Lula’s rise to power:
Mike Benz argues in the video below that the electronic voting machines have long been recognized as vulnerable to manipulation, pointing out that concerns about election security were once bipartisan and helped justify the creation of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). He highlights connections between voting-machine companies such as Smartmatic, the U.S. State Department, and politically influential figures associated with George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Benz contends that these relationships raise serious questions about the integrity of elections, both in the United States and abroad.
Turning to Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, Benz describes an extraordinary intervention by the Biden administration to ensure that Jair Bolsonaro accepted the election results. He alleges that CIA Director William Burns, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and senior State Department official Victoria Nuland traveled to Brazil to pressure Bolsonaro and Brazilian military officials.
He states that the State Department secretly facilitated the shipment of semiconductor chips from Taiwan to Brazil, working through Supreme Court Justice Luís Roberto Barroso to ensure that electronic voting machines could be manufactured despite Bolsonaro’s objections. Benz references a Financial Times investigation describing a coordinated effort involving the White House, CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council, and State Department.
Benz also alleges that approximately $87 million in USAID funding flowed to Brazilian organizations, unions, media outlets, and judicial initiatives that supported Lula or worked against Bolsonaro. He argues that these activities helped construct a political and censorship apparatus that favored Lula’s rise to power and subsequently facilitated the prosecution and imprisonment of Bolsonaro. Although Benz says he possesses extensive documentary evidence of American involvement in Brazil’s censorship infrastructure, he acknowledges that he does not know precisely how electronic voting machines might have been manipulated. Nevertheless, he maintains that the combination of diplomatic pressure, covert technological assistance, and American funding of politically aligned organizations raises profound questions about U.S. involvement in Bolsonaro’s narrow electoral defeat.
The video:
We reported in 2024 on the censorship cooked up between Lula and Biden after Lula won in 2022.
Wouldn’t it be nice to know just how Biden and Lula worked to censor Americans and Brazilians – to “build resilience to disinformation”?
But the deep state isn’t answering that question…
When the Courts Become Political Weapons, Democracy Is in Danger
The crisis in Brazil goes far beyond the political fortunes of Lula or the Bolsonaro family. At its heart is a much more disturbing question: What happens when the institutions supposedly responsible for protecting democracy become instruments for controlling political opposition, censoring dissent, and determining who is permitted to govern?
Glenn Greenwald’s reporting raises serious questions about the concentration of judicial power in the hands of Alexandre de Moraes. The accounts of journalists, activists, and political figures fleeing Brazil are horrifying. When a judge exercises extraordinary authority over political speech, criminal investigations, and the prosecution of his critics, the public has every reason to demand transparency and accountability.
But Mike Benz introduces another dimension, one that reaches directly into Washington.
Benz alleges that the Biden administration undertook a coordinated effort involving the CIA, State Department, Pentagon, National Security Council, and White House to influence the political environment surrounding Brazil’s 2022 presidential election.
His account includes diplomatic pressure on Brazilian officials, assistance in obtaining semiconductor chips for electronic voting machines, and approximately $87 million in USAID funding that he claims benefited organizations aligned with Lula and the censorship apparatus subsequently used against Bolsonaro’s supporters.
These are extraordinary allegations. Benz acknowledges that he cannot establish that electronic voting machines were manipulated. Nevertheless, the documented diplomatic involvement and his additional claims about funding and institutional coordination raise questions that deserve independent investigation.
Where does legitimate American diplomacy end and foreign election interference begin? And who decides when intervention in another country’s political affairs becomes acceptable?
Consider the contradiction. American officials routinely condemn foreign interference in elections, censorship of political opponents, and the manipulation of democratic institutions. Yet Benz describes an American foreign-policy establishment deeply involved in Brazil’s electoral environment, while Greenwald documents what he regards as the subsequent weaponization of Brazil’s judicial system against political opposition.
Biden’s own White House memo describes how the two countries will work together to censor citizens.
The implications of all of this extend well beyond Brazil. They raise serious questions about whether American diplomatic, intelligence, and foreign-aid institutions have been used to shape political outcomes abroad while presenting those interventions as the defense of democracy.
The Trump administration’s decision to impose Magnitsky sanctions on de Moraes in 2025, only to remove them months later amid diplomatic negotiations, introduces another troubling question. Human rights violations are negotiable when trade agreements and geopolitical relationships are at stake.
A democracy is not defined merely by holding elections. It is defined by whether opposition parties can compete freely, journalists can investigate without intimidation, citizens can criticize their government, and courts administer justice without political favoritism. Judged by this standard, Brazil has failed again to maintain a democracy.
And Americans should recognize the broader implications. The same institutional mechanisms described in Brazil, including government pressure on technology platforms, foreign-aid funding of politically active organizations, intelligence involvement in domestic political affairs, and the expansion of judicial authority, demand far more than scrutiny. They demand full public disclosure, independent investigations, accountability for officials who abused their authority, and an end to the use of American taxpayer dollars and government institutions to manipulate political outcomes, censor dissent, or undermine constitutional freedoms, whether at home or abroad.
We demand a full accounting of American involvement in Brazil’s 2022 election, including the diplomatic communications, election-related assistance, USAID expenditures, and subsequent cooperation on censorship and judicial enforcement. Allegations of electoral manipulation should be investigated through verifiable evidence, not accepted or dismissed according to political allegiance.
The fundamental question is whether governments and powerful institutions are accountable to the people, or whether the people are increasingly expected to submit to decisions made by institutions they can neither meaningfully challenge nor control.
Brazil’s experience raises that question with particular urgency. But the answer matters far beyond Brazil.
A government does not become democratic simply by calling itself democratic. And censorship, political persecution, and foreign interference do not become legitimate simply because those responsible claim they are protecting democracy.
End.
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