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October 30, 2026

They Saw Multinational Corporate Power Coming in 1974

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , — doctordilday @ 8:36 am

What Two Forgotten Books Got Right About Corporate Power, and What They Missed

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 29
 
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By: Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone | October 28, 2026 / Book Review

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An 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:

  1. a Global Cultural Bazaar of entertainment, television, films, and music;
  2. a Global Shopping Mall of international consumer brands;
  3. a Global Workplace where production moved toward cheaper labor;
  4. 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

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , — doctordilday @ 8:33 am

How powerful banks, international regulators, and AI are reshaping economic freedom.

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 29
 
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Analysis and Policy Recommendations

By: Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone | Washington, DC | October 27, 2026

Audio Version:

LISTEN NOW · 29:25

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.

Help Us Spread the Word

The issues raised in this essay affect everyone who values economic freedom, national sovereignty, and the right to conduct business without political interference. Yet these are conversations that too rarely reach the wider public.

Please help us change that.

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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

International Monetary Fund. 2026. “Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves, Second Quarter 2026.” September 30. https://data.imf.org/news/imf%20data%20brief%20september%2030

JPMorgan Chase. 2026. “Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Release.” Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0000019617/000162828026065582/a3q26erfexhibit991narrative.htm

Mashange, Gerald. 2024. “An Explanation of the Changes in the Number of Commercial Banks and Branches Across the US.” farmdoc daily 14 (170). https://ideas.repec.org/a/ags/illufd/358436.html

Smith, Adam. 1776. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Book I, chapter 11.

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 Block. 2026. “Housing Bill That Includes a CBDC Ban Passed into Law Without Trump’s Signature.” July. https://www.theblock.co/post/406548/housing-bill-cbdc-ban-passed-into-law-without-trump-signature

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

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Medical Guidelines Are Not Guardrails, They Are The Cage

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , — doctordilday @ 8:22 am

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
 
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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.”


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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.

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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

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Top WA News Stories: Takings Limit, Tacoma Measure 1, $3.2M Court Race

NANCY D CHURCHILL OCT 30
 
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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””
X avatar for @benmaritzbenmaritz@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.”

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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.”
X avatar for @future42orgFuture 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 …Image7:00 PM · Oct 25, 2026 · 703 Views1 Reply · 4 Reposts · 16 Likes

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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.”
X avatar for @larsonforwaJudge 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 …Image7:35 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.”
X avatar for @KIROCharlieCharlie 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 stateX avatar for @KIRONewsradioKIRO Newsradio 97.3 FM🎙 @KIRONewsradioOn Friday, 11 days before the election, Washington’s Public Disclosure Commission announced it will stop enforcing the $7,500 cap on last-minute PAC donations. Ballots are already out. @kirocharlie on why a decision this big shouldn’t land quietly on a Friday.1:16 AM · Oct 28, 2026 · 7.99K Views26 Replies · 62 Reposts · 248 Likes
  • 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”
X avatar for @bkheywoodBrian Heywood – That Damn Mormon@bkheywoodThis is going to shock you. I mean no one saw this coming… Oh Wait 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 What is the purpose of the Beware pack? An…ImageX avatar for @bkheywoodBrian Heywood – That Damn Mormon @bkheywoodWhat the Actual??? WA STATE CORRUPTION WARNING TLDR Who do you think seems more corrupt? 1) The public unions trying to buy Washington’s Supreme Court races? Or 2) The PDC, which suddenly changed the rules 12 days before the election so those unions can spend even more?Image9:17 PM · Oct 28, 2026 · 14.5K Views31 Replies · 213 Reposts · 588 Likes

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Friday Funnies: Orange Man Bad:

Filed under: Uncategorized — doctordilday @ 7:41 am

The Campaign Continues

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 30
 
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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.













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October 29, 2026

Brazil: When Democracy Becomes a Weapon

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , — doctordilday @ 8:45 am

Political prosecutions, censorship, and allegations of U.S. interference.

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 28
 
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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.

Screenshot from Mike Benz X account in 2024

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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Hobbs Said 15. Feds Found 405? | The Roundup, Wed Oct 28

Filed under: Uncategorized — doctordilday @ 8:38 am

Top WA News Stories: Hobbs Said 15, Kitsap’s Power Revolt, Kill the Income Tax?

NANCY D CHURCHILL OCT 28
 
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Story One: Hobbs Said 15. The Feds Found 405.

Synopsis: Can a signature on a ballot envelope replace a citizenship check?

Secretary of State Steve Hobbs has said Washington found only 15 cases of noncitizen voting between 1982 and 2025. On Monday, federal prosecutors said they identified 405 alleged noncitizens who cast more than 1,500 ballots, and asked Hobbs to set those ballots aside until citizenship is confirmed, with a second list expected before Election Day.

Hobbs pushes back, saying the timing casts unfounded suspicion on the results, that one record on the list dates to 1994, and that every voter already attests to eligibility by signing the declaration on the ballot return envelope.

Prosecutors say the state has fought to keep the full voter rolls from federal investigators, and Sen. Rand Paul says states that stonewall are asking voters to take their word that elections are secure.

From the Bookmarks:

  • Jason Rantz on Seattle Red: “Steve Hobbs said Washington caught 15 non-citizens voting in 45 years. The feds just found 405, and they cast more than 1,500 ballots.”
X avatar for @jasonrantzJason Rantz on Seattle Red@jasonrantzSteve Hobbs said Washington caught 15 non-citizens voting in 45 years. The feds just found 405, and they cast more than 1,500 ballots. seattlered.com/legal/neil-flo…Image4:15 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 9.67K Views43 Replies · 214 Reposts · 665 Likes
  • Ari Hoffman: “WA Sec of State Steve Hobbs claimed he only found 15 cases of voter fraud from 1982-2026. US Attorney Neil Floyd found 405 this year. Hobbs said, \”Every voter attests to their eligibility by signing the declaration on the ballot.\”“
X avatar for @thehoffatherAri Hoffman@thehoffatherWA Sec of State Steve Hobbs claimed he only found 15 cases of voter fraud from 1982-2026 US Attorney Neil Floyd found 405 this year Hobbs said, “Every voter attests to their eligibility by signing the declaration on the ballot” So, no ID; just sign that it’s youImage2:00 AM · Oct 28, 2026 · 4.78K Views8 Replies · 36 Reposts · 152 Likes
  • Lynnwood Times: “DOJ demands Washington set aside ballots from 405 suspected noncitizens who cast 1,500 votes, with a second list expected before Election Day. Secretary of State Steve Hobbs pushes back as deadline approaches.”
X avatar for @LynnwoodTimesLynnwood Times@LynnwoodTimes🚨 #BreakingNews DOJ demands Washington set aside ballots from 405 suspected noncitizens who cast 1,500 votes, with a second list expected before Election Day. Secretary of State Steve Hobbs pushes back as deadline approaches. lynnwoodtimes.com/2026/10/27/non… @CivilRights @secstatewalynnwoodtimes.comDOJ gives Hobbs 24 hours to isolate 405 suspected noncitizen ballots or face legal action, second list coming – Lynnwood TimesDOJ gives Hobbs 24 hours to isolate 405 suspected noncitizen ballots or face legal action, second list coming - Lynnwood Times10:11 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 2.46K Views19 Replies · 20 Reposts · 89 Likes
  • Joe Oltmann: “Fifteen cases in forty-five years… that is the number Steve Hobbs and his office have been selling Washington voters all year, and today the Acting U.S. Attorney stood up in Seattle and said his office found 405 non-citizens who voted, many of them more than once, over 1,500 ballots illegally cast.”
X avatar for @JoeoltmannJoe Oltmann@JoeoltmannFifteen cases in forty-five years… that is the number Steve Hobbs and his office have been selling Washington voters all year, and today the Acting U.S. Attorney stood up in Seattle and said his office found 405 non-citizens who voted, many of them more than once, over 1,500…ImageX avatar for @thehoffatherAri Hoffman @thehoffatherBREAKING: Dept. of Justice identifies 405 non-citizens voting in Washington state election, potentially thousands more US Attorney Neil Floyd announced today: “The state of Washington does not have the capacity or the will to check if non-citizens are voting…Through our11:58 PM · Oct 26, 2026 · 17.4K Views55 Replies · 564 Reposts · 1.21K Likes
  • Rand Paul: “Only citizens should vote in American elections. Every ballot cast by a noncitizen cancels out the vote of a lawful American. Washington state should hand over its voter rolls and let investigators do their jobs.”
X avatar for @RandPaulRand Paul@RandPaulOnly citizens should vote in American elections. Every ballot cast by a noncitizen cancels out the vote of a lawful American. Washington state should hand over its voter rolls and let investigators do their jobs. States that stonewall federal investigators are asking voters to…X avatar for @KatieDaviscourtKatie Daviscourt 📸 @KatieDaviscourtBreaking: First Assistant US DOJ Attorneys for Washington state, Neil Floyd and Pete Serrano, announce that investigators have found over 400 cases of noncitizens voting in state and federal elections. The DOJ prosecutors claim that WA state is refusing to cooperate and hand7:00 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 89.7K Views323 Replies · 1.12K Reposts · 5.1K Likes

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Story Two: Kitsap’s Power Revolt

Synopsis: Would you dump your power company if rates kept climbing?

Kitsap voters are deciding whether their Public Utility District should take over electricity from Puget Sound Energy, after years of rising bills tied to the state’s clean-energy mandates.

Kevin Wallace, sharing an editorial by Josh Farley, says if PSE’s pending rate request is approved, electricity rates will jump 80% from 2024 to 2029, driven mainly by the 2019 Clean Energy Transformation Act, and that Kitsap now has an off-ramp if the Legislature will not fix the law.

Tonya Stadlman notes that this spring Washington gas hit over $5.70 a gallon, versus $5.15 in Oregon and $4.41 in Idaho, with Olympia’s gas tax and Climate Commitment Act stacked on top. Brian Hansford says Washington spending rose about 127% while keeping up with inflation and population would have meant about 64%. Supporters of common sense say there is no climate crisis to justify “going green.”

From the Bookmarks:

  • Kevin Wallace on LinkedIn: “Great editorial by Josh Farley about the drama playing out in Kitsap County, where the voters may decide to kick out PSE and take over their electricity system as a public utility district. If PSE’s pending rate request is approved, PSE electricity rates will increase 80% in five years, from 2024-2029. PSE ratepayers’ woes are primarily due to an irresponsible 2019 law called CETA.”
  • Tonya Stadlman: “Same president in Oregon. Same president in Idaho. So why does Washington pay more? Gas. This spring, same oil crisis: Washington: over $5.70. Oregon: $5.15. Idaho: $4.41.”
    Ed. Note: It’s Clean Energy Compliance: PSE states that the Clean Energy Transformation Act (CETA) and the Climate Commitment Act are the biggest cost drivers. It’s NOT “Trump” as claimed by Rep. DelBene.
X avatar for @TonyaStadlmanTonya Stadlman 🇺🇸✝️🥇@TonyaStadlmanSame president in Oregon. Same president in Idaho. So why does Washington pay more? Gas. This spring, same oil crisis: Washington: over $5.70. Oregon: $5.15. Idaho: $4.41. Olympia’s gas tax: 56.5 cents a gallon. Third highest in America. Goes up automatically every year.…X avatar for @RepDelBeneRep. Suzan DelBene @RepDelBeneGroceries, gas, health care, & housing costs have all gone up since Trump took office. It’s estimated the president’s disastrous policies & reckless war with Iran have forced WA families to pay an additional $5,300.Image4:22 AM · Oct 27, 2026 · 2.68K Views11 Replies · 58 Reposts · 224 Likes
  • Brian Hansford: “Washington’s spending grew twice as fast as inflation and population combined, and now takes a larger share of the economy than it did ten years ago. Keeping up with both inflation and population growth would have meant about +64%. Spending rose +127%, roughly double that.”
X avatar for @remarkmarketingBrian Hansford@remarkmarketingWashington’s spending grew twice as fast as inflation and population combined, and now takes a larger share of the economy than it did ten years ago. Keeping up with both inflation and population growth would have meant about +64%. Spending rose +127%, roughly double that, so …Image3:39 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 2.57K Views7 Replies · 25 Reposts · 85 Likes

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Story Three: Will Voters Kill the Income Tax?

Synopsis: Will Washingtonians repeal the new income tax before it hits?

Initiative 645 asks voters to strike the 9.9% tax on income over $1 million that lawmakers passed this year. Ari Hoffman reports a new poll showing support for repeal is rising, with opponents calling it an income tax designed to expand to working and fixed-income families. Rep. Jim Walsh calls the Ferguson-Pedersen income tax a negative turning point after years of policies that he says made the state harder for employers. Steve Gordon says Washington is not just uncompetitive but “inhospitable” for business, and Let’s Go Washington urges a Yes vote so lawmakers do not get a chance to break their promise.

From the Bookmarks:

  • Ari Hoffman: “WA income tax repeal support jumps in new poll. \”These numbers show Washingtonians aren’t fooled. They know this is an income tax designed to be expanded to working and fixed-income families, and that it will capture every person, pension, and nonprofit.\”“
X avatar for @thehoffatherAri Hoffman@thehoffatherWA income tax repeal support jumps in new poll “These numbers show Washingtonians aren’t fooled. They know this is an income tax designed to be expanded to working and fixed-income families, and that it will capture every person, pension, and nonprofit” kvi.com/2026/10/26/was…Image1:00 AM · Oct 27, 2026 · 7.7K Views21 Replies · 141 Reposts · 664 Likes
  • Jim Walsh: “Gravity. The Ferguson-Pedersen state income tax scheme is a negative inflection point. The culmination of years of disastrous economic policies peddled by WA Democrats.”
X avatar for @JimWalshLD19Jim Walsh@JimWalshLD19Gravity. The Ferguson-Pedersen state income tax scheme is a negative inflection point. The culmination of years of disastrous economic policies peddled by WA Democrats. And justified by @seattletimes .X avatar for @joewallinJoe Wallin @joewallinOlympia cooked the golden goose. Microsoft just offered buyouts to roughly a quarter of its workforce — about 60,000 people — as it tries to shrink head count without another round of layoffs. Meanwhile Olympia keeps raising taxes. And Washington employers are looking for the8:10 PM · Oct 26, 2026 · 6.75K Views16 Replies · 73 Reposts · 334 Likes
  • Steve Gordon: “Sobering graphic. WA isn’t just \”uncompetitive.\” It’s \”inhospitable\” for business. The income tax is just the last log on an already blazing inferno.”
X avatar for @stevemgordon67Steve Gordon@stevemgordon67Sobering graphic. WA isn’t just “uncompetitive.” It’s “inhospitable” for business. The income tax is just the last log on an already blazing inferno.X avatar for @gregorykennedyGregory Kennedy @gregorykennedyWell, anyway, good morning. ☀️ https://t.co/eZhZZ45LfDImage2:42 PM · Oct 26, 2026 · 1.32K Views1 Reply · 12 Reposts · 55 Likes
  • From Mountain States Policy Center:
  • Let’s Go Washington: “Don’t give lawmakers the chance to break their promise. Vote YES on I-645 and repeal their income tax!”
X avatar for @letsgowaLet’s Go Washington@letsgowaDon’t give lawmakers the chance to break their promise. Vote YES on I-645 and repeal their income tax!X avatar for @PNWConservativePNW Conservative @PNWConservative🚨Washington Voters Repeal the Income Tax VOTE YES ON IP26-645 to REPEAL THE INCOME TAX ❌WA Democrats are already trying to REDUCE the threshold to $250,000 for families. ❌Repealing the tax does NOT decrease funding for anything. It doesn’t go into effect until 2028.Image2:12 AM · Oct 28, 2026 · 700 Views15 Reposts · 70 Likes

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$240,000 a Seat? | The Roundup, Thu Oct 29

Filed under: Uncategorized — doctordilday @ 8:30 am

Top WA News Stories: $240,000 a Seat, 405 Ballots Update, Protect Girls’ Sports?

NANCY D CHURCHILL OCT 29
 
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Story One: $240,000 a Seat?

Synopsis: Why does one new high school seat cost nearly three times as much as another?

In the Sammamish area, the Issaquah School District is building a high school for about 700 students at roughly $168 million, or about $240,000 per seat, while Pasco opened Sageview High School for 2,000 students at about $185 million, or about $93,000 per seat.

Seattle Public Schools enrollment has fallen from 50,187 to 48,957, yet the district’s 2026–27 plan still includes a $1.34 billion operating budget and more than $557 million in capital spending, and statewide public-school enrollment is nearly 39,000 below 2018–19 levels.

Meanwhile, Jill Jackson writes in ParentMap that a new federal scholarship tax credit could bring tutoring and other aid to Washington students without raising state taxes, but Gov. Bob Ferguson must opt the state in by Dec. 31. (Ed. Note. Follow the link in the parent map article to ask him to opt in to the program.)

Critics of the status quo say Washington may have a spending problem more than a funding problem, and PNW Conservative notes that after the McCleary funding surge, math proficiency for high school sophomores still sits near 31%.

From the Bookmarks:

  • Keith McCall on LinkedIn: “$240,000 per student for 700 students versus $93,000 per student for 2,000 students. Why? … In the Sammamish area, the Issaquah School District is building a high school for 700 students at a projected cost of $168 million. Across the Cascades, Pasco opened Sageview High School in August 2025, a nearly 300,000-square-foot facility designed for 2,000 students, at a total project cost of approximately $185 million. … Washington doesn’t necessarily have a school funding problem. We may have a school spending problem.”
  • Keith McCall on LinkedIn: “Public-school enrollment has fallen from 50,187 students in 2021–22 to 48,957 in 2025–26. Yet Seattle Public Schools has a $1.34 billion operating budget and more than $557 million in capital spending planned for 2026–27. Across Washington, public-school enrollment is nearly 39,000 students below 2018–19 levels. … Are we building schools where the children are, or where they used to be?”
  • Washington Student Success Coalition on LinkedIn: “What if Washington could help all of these students without raising taxes or taking money from the state budget? Next year, a new federal program offers exactly that. But to participate, Gov. Ferguson must opt Washington in by Dec. 31. More than 30 governors have already signed up — including Democratic governors from New York and Colorado.”
  • PNW Conservative: “The state now spends roughly $8.5 billion more per year on public schools than it did before the McCleary decision—representing a 60% increase in the state’s biennial education budget. … High school math proficiency in Washington plummeted into the low 20% range following the extended school closures and has stagnated completely, sitting at a dismal 31% proficiency rate.”
X avatar for @PNWConservativePNW Conservative@PNWConservativeThe McCleary Myth: In 2012, the Washington State Supreme Court issued the landmark McCleary v. State of Washington ruling. The court declared that the state was failing its “paramount duty” to appropriately fund K-12 public education. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle …Image3:42 AM · Oct 23, 2026 · 1.96K Views3 Replies · 12 Reposts · 48 Likes

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Story Two: 405 Illegal Voters. Still No Citizenship Check?

Synopsis: If federal investigators flag 405 alleged noncitizen voters, should those ballots be held until citizenship is confirmed?

ICE says federal investigators identified over 400 suspected noncitizensregistered to vote in Washington, with an estimated 1,500 ballots cast across multiple elections. Just the News reports Republican leaders calling the 400 cases “just the tip of the iceberg,” while Brandi Kruse shares an immigration attorney’s claim that Secretary of State Steve Hobbs’s figure of only 15 noncitizen-voting cases since 1982 is understated, saying the attorney has handled 15 cases in the last couple of weeks alone.

Ari Hoffman reports that Hobbs has refused a U.S. Attorney request to set those ballots aside, and that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Western Washington says Acting U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd and First Assistant Pete Serrano are reviewing Hobbs’s letter before deciding next steps; Hobbs has called the federal list deeply flawed and said officials cannot lawfully refuse ballots without individualized proof.

Kristen Mag notes that Washington does not require ID or proof of eligibility to receive a ballot, and that Hobbs has said ballots are presumed eligible unless proof of ineligibility is shown.

From the Bookmarks:

  • U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: “OVER 400 SUSPECTED NONCITIZENS REGISTERED TO VOTE IN WASHINGTON STATE! Federal investigators identified over 400 suspected noncitizens registered to vote in Washington, with an estimated 1,500 ballots cast across multiple elections.”
X avatar for @ICEgovU.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement@ICEgovOVER 400 SUSPECTED NONCITIZENS REGISTERED TO VOTE IN WASHINGTON STATE! Federal investigators identified over 400 suspected noncitizens registered to vote in Washington, with an estimated 1,500 ballots cast across multiple elections. @HSI_HQ and our federal partners are…8:08 PM · Oct 28, 2026 · 24.6K Views137 Replies · 511 Reposts · 1.51K Likes
  • Just the News: “400 suspected noncitizen voters in Washington state just tip of the iceberg, GOP chair says”
X avatar for @JustTheNewsJust the News@JustTheNews400 suspected noncitizen voters in Washington state just tip of the iceberg, GOP chair saysjustthenews.com400 suspected noncitizen voters in Washington state just tip of the iceberg, GOP chair says400 suspected noncitizen voters in Washington state just tip of the iceberg, GOP chair says10:05 AM · Oct 28, 2026 · 3.82K Views1 Reply · 12 Reposts · 41 Likes
  • Brandi Kruse: “HUGE. An immigration attorney says Washington state is lying about how often non-citizens are voting. Secretary of State Steve Hobbs claims there has only been 15 such cases since 1982. The attorney says he’s dealt with 15 cases just in the last couple weeks.”
X avatar for @BrandiKruseBrandi Kruse@BrandiKruseHUGE. An immigration attorney says Washington state is lying about how often non-citizens are voting. Secretary of State Steve Hobbs claims there has only been 15 such cases since 1982. The attorney says he’s dealt with 15 cases just in the last couple weeks.Image1:31 AM · Oct 29, 2026 · 18.3K Views70 Replies · 388 Reposts · 1.35K Likes
  • Ari Hoffman: “BREAKING: ”We have received the letter from Secretary of State Hobbs. Acting U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd and First Assistant Attorney Pete Serrano of the Eastern District of Washington will take some time to review it and decide next steps.” – US Attorney’s Office for Western Washington”
X avatar for @thehoffatherAri Hoffman@thehoffatherBREAKING: “We have received the letter from Secretary of State Hobbs. Acting U.S. Attorney Neil Floyd and First Assistant Attorney Pete Serrano of the Eastern District of Washington will take some time to review it and decide next steps.” – US Attorney’s Office for WesternX avatar for @thehoffatherAri Hoffman @thehoffatherBREAKING: Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs is refusing to honor the request of US Attorneys Neil Floyd and Peter Serrano that the ballots of 405 non-citizens who previously voted illegally be set aside for further review for the upcoming election Previously, HobbsImage11:42 PM · Oct 28, 2026 · 1.86K Views5 Replies · 10 Reposts · 60 Likes
  • Kristen Mag: “In WA state we don’t have to show ID or any proof of eligibility to receive a ballot and vote. In fact our Secretary of State even admits here that all ballots are presumed eligible unless proof of INELIGIBILITY is shown.”
X avatar for @kristenmagKristen Mag@kristenmagIn WA state we don’t have to show ID or any proof of eligibility to receive a ballot and vote. In fact our Secretary of State even admits here that all ballots are presumed eligible unless proof of INELIGIBILITY is shown. This is so backwards.X avatar for @thehoffatherAri Hoffman @thehoffatherBREAKING: Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs is refusing to honor the request of US Attorneys Neil Floyd and Peter Serrano that the ballots of 405 non-citizens who previously voted illegally be set aside for further review for the upcoming election Previously, HobbsImage11:46 PM · Oct 28, 2026 · 1.29K Views10 Replies · 21 Reposts · 124 Likes

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Story Three: Will Voters Protect Girls’ Sports?

Synopsis: Should biological males compete in girls’ school sports?

Initiative 638 asks Washington voters to require sex verification for female-only K-12 athletics and to keep biologically male students off girls’ teams.

Laura Ingraham highlights Brandi Kruse’s account of being ejected from a Portland Thorns match for wearing an XX-XY Athletics shirt supporting girls’ sports, with Kruse saying three days later she still had no explanation.

Carleen Johnson notes that voters will weigh in next week with Let’s Go Washington’s I-638, and DIAG WA frames the issue as opposition to boys in girls’ sports and locker rooms, not an obsession with transgender people.

A Washington pediatrician’s commentary, shared by Sue Lani Madsen, answers what the pediatrician calls outrageous claims from I-638 opponents, and Conspiracookie says Seattle reactions to an XX-XY Athletics hoodie left her with a good feeling that 638 will pass.

From the Bookmarks:

  • Laura Ingraham: “STAND WITH GIRLS, GET EJECTED. @BrandiKruse: ”It’s been three days… and [there’s been] no explanation. I said, ‘We didn’t do anything wrong.’ And she says, ‘You know what you did.’”
X avatar for @IngrahamAngleLaura Ingraham@IngrahamAngle🚨 STAND WITH GIRLS, GET EJECTED @BrandiKruse : “It’s been three days… and [there’s been] no explanation.” “I said, ‘We didn’t do anything wrong.’ And she says, ‘You know what you did.’” “I said, ‘I have no idea what I did.’”Image12:33 AM · Oct 27, 2026 · 85.8K Views89 Replies · 1.02K Reposts · 3.93K Likes
  • Carleen Johnson: “BrandiKruse has heard nothing from Portland Thorns, security or the stadium after being strong armed out from match last Friday for wearing xx_xyathletics shirt. Voters will have say on this issue next week with @letsgowa I-638.”
X avatar for @CarleenJohn1970Carleen Johnson@CarleenJohn1970. @BrandiKruse has heard nothing from Portland Thorns, security or the stadium after being strong armed out from match last Friday for wearing @xx_xyathletics shirt. Voters will have say on this issue next week with @letsgowa I-638.Image11:40 PM · Oct 28, 2026 · 638 Views3 Replies · 12 Reposts · 50 Likes
  • DIAG WA: “Washington DIAG supporter: ”I’m not”obsessed with transgender people”, I just don’t want boys in girls’ sports and locker rooms.”
X avatar for @DIAGWashingtonDIAG WA@DIAGWashingtonWashington DIAG supporter: “I’m not “obsessed with transgender people”, I just don’t want boys in girls’ sports and locker rooms.”11:51 PM · Oct 28, 2026 · 298 Views18 Likes
  • Let’s Go Washington: “It’s time to turn in that ballot! Vote YES on I-001! Vote YES on I-638! Vote YES on I-645!”
X avatar for @letsgowaLet’s Go Washington@letsgowaIt’s time to turn in that ballot! Vote YES on I-001! Vote YES on I-638! Vote YES on I-645! Then find a drop box location here: sos.wa.gov/elections/vote…Image8:19 PM · Oct 28, 2026 · 571 Views1 Reply · 22 Reposts · 59 Likes
  • Conspiracookie: “Protect Women’s Spaces!! I spent my morning running around Seattle advocating to protect women’s spaces. My XX-XY Athletics hoodie got lots of compliments today in Seattle! … I have a GOOD feeling 638 will pass in WA State!”
X avatar for @ConspiracookieConspiracookie@Conspiracookie📣 Protect Women’s Spaces!! I spent my morning running around Seattle advocating to protect women’s spaces. My XX-XY Athletics hoodie got lots of compliments today in Seattle! Not all leftists turn into rabid tyrants when they see the logo— some have plenty of common sense. …Image9:40 PM · Oct 26, 2026 · 4.59K Views23 Replies · 49 Reposts · 282 Likes
  • Sue Lani Madsen on LinkedIn: “From a Washington state pediatrician who once considered an opportunity to practice at an LA gender clinic. The truth behind the outrageous claims from the opposition to I-638. The hyperbole from the left has been ridiculous.”

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We can change the Supreme Court… but you must VOTE!

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October 28, 2026

Democrats Tried to Rig the Ballot

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , — doctordilday @ 6:19 pm

The Media Blamed Trump.

DR. ROBERT W. MALONE OCT 28
 
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For the past week, Americans have been treated to another familiar media spectacle. Donald Trump was supposedly threatening democracy. His Justice Department was interfering with an election. Republicans were preparing to reject the will of the voters before a single ballot had been counted.

The controversy centers on Alaska’s U.S. Senate race, where Democratic operatives recruited a second candidate named same as the first, Dan Sullivan, to confuse voters into selecting him instead of the Republican incumbent. Trump’s Justice Department sued to delay certification if the incumbent narrowly loses, triggering headlines accusing the administration of attempting to overturn an election before the votes were even cast.

The headlines were breathless, the accusations predictable, and the villain was, as always, Donald Trump.

Then, on October 28, the New York Times published an investigation that turned the narrative upside down.

Democratic operatives associated with the Senate candidate Mary Peltola had spent months recruiting spoiler candidates, specifically looking for citizens with the name Dan Sullivan. then, in fact, they found such a man named Dan Sullivan, to run against Republican incumbent Senator Dan Sullivan.

The apparent strategy was breathtakingly cynical: Find someone with the Republican senator’s name, put him on the ballot, and hope enough voters accidentally select the wrong man to influence the election.

The New York Times investigation puts Mary Peltola’s personal knowledge squarely under scrutiny. Her former campaign manager reportedly acknowledged that Peltola knew about the effort to recruit spoiler candidates, while documented communications link senior campaign aides and national Democratic officials to the operation. These are not allegations that can be brushed aside with another campaign denial. If Peltola knew that operatives were deliberately recruiting candidates to confuse voters, the public deserves to know whether she approved, encouraged, or helped conceal the scheme. Constitutional qualifications for Senate office may limit the grounds for disqualification, but they provide no immunity from investigation or prosecution for violations of election law. The next step should be a thorough examination of the communications, financing, and decisions behind this operation, including Peltola’s own role.

And these are the people who lecture America about protecting democracy.

Consider how the mainstream press framed the controversy just days earlier. ABC News declared, “Trump told DOJ to sue to block Alaska Senate results if Republican narrowly loses.” The Washington Post announced, “DOJ seeks to block Alaska Senate result if Republican incumbent narrowly loses.” Reuters characterized the lawsuit as an attempt to block the possible election of a Democrat. Roll Call reduced the entire controversy to “DOJ sues to prevent Sullivan loss in Alaska.”

Notice the framing. Trump was the aggressor. His Justice Department was the threat. The underlying allegations of deliberate voter deception were relegated to secondary details, if they received attention at all.

Readers were encouraged to believe this was another attempt by Trump to overturn an election because he disliked the likely outcome. There was just one inconvenient problem.

The election-integrity concerns were not invented by Trump. And the alleged manipulation began long before his Justice Department intervened.

According to the October 28 New York Times investigation by Kellen Browning, the effort began in summer 2025, when a staffer associated with Peltola’s political operation was reportedly instructed to identify people throughout Alaska named Dan Sullivan.

The investigation, based on interviews, text messages, and other documentation, described involvement by Peltola campaign aides and individuals connected to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. The operation reportedly extended beyond recruiting a namesake candidate to finding other potential spoilers who might siphon votes from the Republican incumbent.

This was not simply an independent candidate who happened to share a common name. The reporting describes a coordinated effort to exploit that coincidence for political advantage.

And the alleged scheme required no ballot stuffing, hacked machines, or falsified vote totals. It required an ordinary voter to enter a polling place, recognize the name Dan Sullivan, and mistakenly select the wrong candidate.

The ballot would be counted accurately. The voter, however, would have supported someone he never intended to elect.

Alaska election officials had already raised concerns about the second Sullivan’s candidacy. His actual middle initial is J., yet he initially sought to appear on the ballot as “Dan S. Sullivan,” matching the Republican incumbent’s name and middle initial. His campaign presentation raised additional concerns about deliberately misleading voters. The Alaska Supreme Court ultimately allowed him to remain on the ballot, but that ruling did not resolve who recruited him, who financed his campaign, or whether the apparent attempt to confuse voters was part of a coordinated political operation.

The Justice Department subsequently filed suit seeking to delay certification under certain circumstances if the Republican incumbent narrowly loses. Whether federal law authorizes that remedy remains for the courts to decide.

But the Times investigation gives the underlying allegations a significance the early headlines largely obscured.

For years, Democratic politicians and their media allies have proclaimed themselves the guardians of election integrity. They have condemned voter suppression, warned about electoral interference, and insisted that democracy depends on public confidence in the voting process.

Yet in Alaska, political operatives associated with a major Democratic Senate campaign and the candidate herself pursued a corrupt scheme that sought to trick voters into making mistakes when voting.

The reported involvement of individuals connected to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee makes this more than a local political stunt. It raises questions about the national party apparatus, campaign financing, and the extent of coordination behind the effort.

The New York Times has already identified some of the people behind this operation. Peltola’s former campaign manager, Elisa Rios, said Peltola was “definitely aware” of the scheme, although not personally directing it. Senior campaign aides exchanged messages with Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee officials, including campaign director Andrew Piatt, about strategies to siphon conservative votes. Democratic operative Jerid Kurtz reportedly traveled through Alaska under an assumed name to recruit potential spoiler candidates.

The question is no longer simply whether Democratic operatives participated. The documented communications establish their involvement in planning ballot strategies. What remains unresolved is who authorized the namesake recruitment, who financed it, and whether senior officials approved the operation.

These questions demand answers, not another carefully crafted press statement.

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The liberal mainstream media fell down again

On October 23, the dominant storyline was that Trump was attempting to block an election result. Five days later, the New York Times reported that Democratic operatives had been working behind the scenes to influence the ballot itself.

Credit belongs to Browning and the Times for publishing the investigation. But the contrast with the earlier coverage is revealing.

The press was quick to present Trump’s intervention as a threat to democracy. It was considerably less eager to make the alleged Democratic manipulation the centerpiece of the story.

How many Americans saw the alarming headlines about Trump but never understood the voter-confusion allegations behind the lawsuit? How many were left believing the controversy was simply another Republican attempt to reject an election? How many missed the below-the-fold headlines of Democrat involvement in this corrupt scheme?

And will the same outlets now devote comparable attention to the reported Democratic operation?

This is where the media’s credibility is on trial. Journalism is supposed to investigate abuses of power, not merely amplify accusations against whichever political figure its editors find most objectionable.

The election has not yet occurred. No one knows whether voters will actually be confused, and no court has established that the reported recruitment operation violated federal election law. In fact, it may be impossible to ever tease out the answers.

The issue is straightforward. Political parties should compete for votes by persuading citizens, not by exploiting mistakes in candidate identification. The people who claim to be saving democracy should not be engineering ways to confuse the voters they claim to protect.

And the journalists who spent the week portraying Trump as the threat to Alaska’s election owe their readers the rest of the story.

Because the real scandal alleged here is not that someone challenged an election procedure. It is that political operatives reportedly tried to turn voter confusion into an electoral weapon. And much of the national press seemed more interested in attacking the man who objected than examining the operation itself.

But in the end, voters will be confused – to what extent is impossible to gauge. Which is why the DoJ is correct.

If the Republican candidate loses, the election must not be certified. Frankly, Peltola is unfit to serve as a US Senator.

Enough with the cheating.

Independent journalism doesn’t survive on good intentions. It survives because readers are willing to support it.

While corporate media outlets shape headlines, protect favored narratives, and too often leave critical facts buried, we work to follow the evidence, ask uncomfortable questions, and hold powerful institutions accountable, regardless of political affiliation. We don’t have billionaire benefactors underwriting our work. We have you.

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Chlorine Dioxide

Filed under: Uncategorized — doctordilday @ 5:36 pm

Get the book: https://waronchlorinedioxide.com

Behind France’s School Blockades and ‘Yellow Vest’ Riots, a Far-Left Network Years in the Making

Filed under: Uncategorized — doctordilday @ 8:50 am

Benjamin Cauchy, a 2018 Yellow Vest leader, told The Epoch Times the movement has been ‘completely hijacked by the far-left.’

Behind France’s School Blockades and ‘Yellow Vest’ Riots, a Far-Left Network Years in the Making
French riot police walk past burning objects in a street amid clashes with protesters in Paris on Oct. 17, 2026. Abdul Saboor/Reuters

Etienne Fauchaire

Etienne Fauchaire

10/27/2026

PARIS–Five weeks have passed since students in the Paris suburbs blockaded a high school to protest overcrowding and staff shortages. Within a month, they joined forces with the Yellow Vests, and rioting led to nearly 8,000 arrests.

On Oct. 17, at least 3,000 shops were looted or damaged, according to French Commerce Minister Serge Papin. The movement’s next round of protests followed on Oct. 24, with 70,000 police officers deployed across the country.

Statements from trade unions, social media posts, and the far-left, as well as foreign flags and slogans seen and heard at the protests, show that the movement was backed and promoted by a range of left and far-left actors, including LFI lawmakers, Trotskyist groups, and activists linked to political Islam.

Since Oct. 1, the French government has blamed France Unbowed (LFI), a hard-left party led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, for the upheaval, calling it “a maneuver organized by LFI and its ultra-left proxies.” Mélenchon, LFI’s presidential candidate and a former deputy of the National Assembly, once belonged to the International Communist Organization (OCI) and has voiced support for socialist regimes, including those of China, Cuba, and Venezuela.

LFI denies this accusation. Manuel Bompard, LFI’s national coordinator, called on the government “not to descend into conspiracy theories.”

‘A Movement Manufactured From Scratch’

The first student blockade, regarded as the starting point of the high school movement, took place on Sept. 17 at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, southeast of Paris, after teachers protested staff shortages.

The previous day, the local LFI chapter had announced its support for the protest.

LFI lawmakers Louis Boyard and Clémence Guetté attended the blockade on the first day. A week later, on Sept. 28, Bally Bagayoko, the LFI mayor of Saint-Denis, joined protesting students at Lycée Paul-Éluard, which had become another focal point of the movement in the heavily immigrant suburb north of Paris.

Asked the following day about clashes outside the schools, Bagayoko said that violence could be “legitimate” but that “whenever it can be avoided, that’s better.” The Paris police prefect subsequently referred his remarks to prosecutors over possible incitement to commit an offense.

Mélenchon also intervened on Sept. 28, accusing the government on social media platform X of having “ordered repression” against “harmless” students, with an “obvious racist aftertaste.” He urged LFI activists to place themselves between students and police.

The president of the Union Syndicale Lycéenne (USL), a left-wing high school students’ union, called for a nationwide mobilization on Sept. 26. On Oct. 1, the French Interior Ministry reported disruptions at 1,027 of France’s approximately 3,700 high schools.

The USL’s president, Ryad Rani, 19, has longstanding ties to LFI. At age 14, he interned for LFI lawmaker David Guiraud, who is now the mayor of Roubaix. He later ran on an LFI-backed slate in March’s municipal elections and appeared alongside Boyard on a panel at the party’s most recent summer conference.

The USL and its university counterpart, the Union Etudiante (Student Union), jointly issued the calls to blockade high schools and universities on Oct. 1 and to join a nationwide youth demonstration on Oct. 6.

“This movement began at the end,” Olivier Vial, director of the Center for University Studies and Research, a think tank that studies emerging forms of radicalism, told The Epoch Times.

In a typical French student movement, he said, violence by a radical hardcore group is the final stage, reached once the majority of pupils have obtained satisfaction and gone home.

“Apart from Paul-Éluard, there was first the far left and the violence, and only afterwards did the unions come with their demands. What we are dealing with is a movement manufactured from scratch,” Vial said.

Noah, 21, a film student who identifies with the antifascist movement, told The Epoch Times during a protest on Oct. 13 that he was taking to the streets because of anger over the rising cost of higher education and the lack of government support for students, a shortfall that he said leaves him no choice but to work alongside his studies.

He also said he tolerated ideas from those who were on the center-right as long as they did not support the National Rally.

Several grievances brought Jean, a 21-year-old student, to the protest, he told The Epoch Times on Oct. 24. Pointing to the lack of funding for public education, he accused French President Emmanuel Macron of favoring the ultra-rich by refusing to tax them, arguing that greater wealth redistribution would help those in need, particularly in suburbs with large immigrant populations who he said are less privileged.

The best way to achieve this was to vote for LFI, he said.

LFI’s Radical Hinterland

Among the groups active in the blockades was Permanent Revolution, a Trotskyist organization that emerged from a 2021 split within the New Anticapitalist Party.

Its student wing, Le Poing Levé (the Raised Fist), called for a “black week” of school blockades beginning on Oct. 5. On Oct. 11, the group’s spokesman, Anasse Kazib, launched his 2027 presidential campaign in Saint-Denis, an event the organization described as taking place “under the sign of the high school revolt.”

“Their weight is significant, because they are probably the ones with the greatest momentum today,” Vial said of the radical groups. “LFI is in reality the soft center of this radical galaxy, surrounded by movements with even more extreme positions.”

French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told lawmakers on Oct. 20 that there was indeed a “connecting link” between LFI and certain radical organizations. Without naming him, Nuñez referred to LFI lawmaker Raphaël Arnault, a cofounder of the Young Guard, an antifascist group dissolved by the government in 2025 over its involvement in violence.

Yellow Vests Without the Yellow Vests

The call for nationwide demonstrations on Oct. 17 originated outside the student movement, drawing on the legacy of the Yellow Vest protests of 2018. An anonymous young TikTok creator known as “v2.95” first proposed the date in a video posted Sept. 7, TF1 reported.

Left-wing parties quickly rallied behind the call. On Sept. 11, Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel urged a mobilization on the scale of the 2018 protests. Mathilde Panot, LFI’s parliamentary leader, also endorsed the initiative, while the CGT and Solidaires labor unions, along with student unions, subsequently joined the call.

“Not only have the Yellow Vests, or rather what is left of them, been co-opted and swallowed up by the far left, but the Oct. 17 demonstrations were organized and instigated by that same far left from start to finish,” Benjamin Cauchy, a prominent figure in the early days of the 2018 Yellow Vest movement, told The Epoch Times.

Cauchy said the French left had initially been hostile to the Yellow Vests, a spontaneous movement made up of entrepreneurs, shop owners, and private-sector employees.

“But after several weeks, seeing that the movement was lasting, the opportunistic far left infiltrated it and then took it over from late December 2018 onward,” Cauchy said, noting that this led to demobilization.

“We wanted lower taxes so we could live off our work; the far left was demanding more welfare benefits.”

The Islamists and Foreign Amplifiers

Another group involved in online promotion of the protests is the far-left RED Youth.

In 2025, the group was among the founding associations of Generation EDR alongside the USL, the Young Guard, and Muslim Students of France. In May 2025, a French government report on the Muslim Brotherhood named Muslim Students of France as among those part of the federation, which it described as the organization’s branch in France.

Among the online posts promoting the protests, one by Franco-Iranian influencer Shahin Hazamy drew millions of views on Instagram.

External actors multiplied during the unrest.

On Oct. 7, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot summoned the Iranian ambassador to France to denounce what he described as a “disinformation campaign” by the Iranian authorities surrounding the student protests.

Al Jazeera France, the French-language arm of the Qatar-funded news network, also endorsed the protests, claiming that French police had used violence against pupils and that high schoolers were being subjected to “repression.”

In the United States, BreakThrough News has also celebrated the unrest and told its hundreds of thousands of followers that high schoolers had suffered police violence.

Rep. Jason Smith (R-Mo.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, alleged in May that BreakThrough News belongs to a U.S.-based network of nonprofits funded by Neville Roy Singham and linked to the Chinese Communist Party. Smith’s committee has been investigating the media outlet over its financial ties to Singham.

BreakThrough News, for its part, has denounced what it calls “persecution,” saying the scrutiny is “fueled by opposition to BreakThrough’s editorial stances and viewpoints, which he calls ‘anti-American’.”

The Role of Media and Education

No single organization is behind this autumn’s unrest, but many groups have a stake in fueling and sustaining the protests, Vial said.

“The people who want to manipulate and mobilize don’t even need to get their feet wet anymore,” Vial said. “They just need to fuel tensions on social networks and indicate the targets.”

Vial said that many demonstrators have already bought into the idea that far-left violence can be justified.

“For years, a whole political culture originating from the radical left has taken root within universities, the media, and online. This culture is so ingrained now that you don’t even need to give them instructions anymore,” he said.

On Oct. 6 and Oct. 7, the polling institute Ifop conducted a study for the news outlet LCI and found that 47 percent of people younger than 35 agreed that “it is sometimes necessary to resort to a certain degree of violence in order to advance one’s ideas within society.” Among supporters of the radical-left LFI party, that number rose to 64 percent.

Ifop also found that 40 percent of the people surveyed who held advanced diplomas accepted the use of violence, compared with 25 percent for people who did not have a diploma.

“For a very long time, we were told that violence was the language of those who did not have the words to express themselves. We are now finding that this is false. The higher the level of education, the greater the acceptance of political violence,” Vial said.

In the Ifop poll, acceptance for political violence was flat at 33 percent across respondents with a vocational certificate, a high school diploma, or a bachelor’s degree.

“So the question is not whether people are educated, but what they have been educated in,” Vial said.

If You Tax It, You Get Less of It

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , — doctordilday @ 8:45 am

Job creators are leaving. It’s time for voters to take charge.

NANCY D CHURCHILL OCT 28
 
READ IN APP
 

How many taxes are enough? Progressive advocates say Washington needs more progressive taxes. But we already have a progressive federal income tax. The more you earn, the higher your marginal tax rate. So why does Washington State need to add a state income tax on top of everything else?

A Clear Message to Job Creators

Washington Democrats just stacked a 9.9% capital gains tax, a 35% death tax, and a 10% income tax in three years. The message is plain. Job creators are not wanted here. Twenty-six years of one-party rule means the direction will not change. Record revenue has not slowed spending. Democrat politicians keep spending more than they take in, and they act as if no one can stop them.

Look at what Washington already taxes. Retail sales. Use. Property. Business and Occupation. Capital gains. Real estate sales. Estates. Fuel. Alcohol. Tobacco. Cannabis. Insurance. Utilities. Hazardous substances. Leases. Litter. Oil spills. Timber. Vehicles. Solid waste. Even betting on horses. In fiscal year 2025 the state collected roughly $36.1 billion in taxes. That total does not include fees, permits, tolls, regional, county or city taxes.

The Democrat Party claims it wants a fairer tax system. But layering on tax after tax and fee after fee has done the opposite. Washington now ranks as the second-most regressive tax system in the country. The bottom 20 percent of households pay 13.8 percent of their income in state and local taxes. The top 1 percent pay 4.1 percent.

If You Tax It, You Get Less of It

If you tax something, you get less of it. That was the reasoning for supporting sin taxes on alcohol, tobacco and marijuana.

So why would anyone want to tax income? Tax work, and you get less work. Tax payroll and you get fewer jobs. Tax success and you get fewer people willing to start and grow businesses. Tax capital gains and estates, and families keep less of what they have built.

Washington already taxes businesses on gross receipts through the B&O tax, even when a company loses money. Adding a personal income tax does not create fairness. It simply taxes work, small businesses and success one more time. The new 9.9 percent tax on income above $1 million is just another layer.

The real question is simple. Should Washington tax income when it already taxes nearly everything else?

Results, Not Rankings

For two decades Washington grew without a broad-based income tax. People and employers moved here. Tax collections rose. Recent tax increases—the capital gains tax, higher business taxes, and the new 9.9 percent tax on high earners—have lined up with a net loss of higher-earning residents and a sharp drop in tax competitiveness. The state fell from sixth in the 2014 index to 45th in the 2026 index.

Washington lawmakers can argue about who pays what share. They also have to face how much people will actually pay, what the changes do to the economy, and whether Washington remains a place people want to live, invest, and create jobs. After years of rapid spending growth and new tax layers, Washingtonians are finding out that higher taxes and bigger government are not working.

First, eliminate fraud.

Before adding another tax, legislators need to investigate and eliminate fraud and abuse in existing programs. A statewide audit of federal funding found an estimated $37 million in questionable child care payments and $113.3 million in likely improper payments across multiple programs.

The State Auditor’s Office has also documented major misappropriations, including nearly $900,000 stolen through fraudulent credit card use at one state agency. During the pandemic, the Employment Security Departmentpaid roughly $647 million in fraudulent unemployment benefits.

Taxpayers should not face new taxes until officials clean up the waste and fraud already in the system.

I-645 would repeal the new income tax and prohibit future state and local taxes on individual income. Before adding another tax, shouldn’t we examine whether existing revenue is spent effectively?

Time to Choose

Vote Yes on I-645.

Demand that any future tax talk start from one principle: if you tax it, you get less of it.

Support candidates who choose growth over endless spending. Local control and citizen involvement matter. Families keep more of what they earn when government stops stacking taxes without accountability.

Washington does not have to keep heading in the same direction.

Job creators can stay. Families can build. Individual votes become big change when people act together. It’s time for a change in tax policy. Vote to save what makes Washington a place where people want to live and work.

Vote Yes to Repeal the Income Tax.


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) Washington State: How Many Taxes Are Enough?, Keith McCall, LinkedIn, approximately October 2026, https://bit.ly/3Wpzs0Y

(2) Washington State’s new 9.9% cap gains tax, new 35% death tax, and new 10% income tax, Andrew Skotdal, LinkedIn, October 2026, https://bit.ly/4zQ33iu

(3) If you tax something, you get less of it… right?, Mountain States Policy Center, LinkedIn, October 24, 2026, https://bit.ly/4z86YaD

(4) Who Pays? 7th Edition, Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, January 2024, https://bit.ly/3TWR3Nb

(5) Washington’s “regressive” tax debate ignores where people and money are moving, Washington Policy Center, September 8, 2026, https://bit.ly/4jF3ffM

(6) Statewide audit flags $37 million in ‘questionable’ state childcare payments, The Spokesman-Review, April 2, 2026, https://bit.ly/4zVumbt

(7) Washington’s Unemployment Benefit Programs in 2020, Office of the Washington State Auditor, April 13, 2021, https://bit.ly/47GMXvF


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