Murray Rothbard on the state…
Tag: corruption
‘Misinformation Fingerprints:’ The Pentagon Awarded ‘Fact-Checking’ Org NewsGuard a $750K Contract Last Year
In yet more evidence of the federal government/Deep State’s vested interest in advancing internet censorship (or, as they call it, tackling “misinformation”), the Department of Defense awarded NewsGuard Technologies a $750,000 contract in September of 2021 for the organization’s “misinformation fingerprints” project.
NewsGuard, which has been the subject of extensive Breitbart News reporting, is an establishment-backed project that aims to “rate” news outlets, policing the internet by telling users which news sources can be trusted and which ones cannot.
According to USASpending.gov, the contract was awarded for NewsGuard’s “misinformation fingerprints” project, which it describes as a “a catalogue of known hoaxes, falsehoods and misinformation narratives that are spreading online.”
It is unclear if hoaxes embraced by the establishment, such as the notion that material found on Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation,” are in NewsGuard’s “misinformation fingerprints” database.
NewsGuard’s own co-founder, Steve Brill, spread that false claim, as did advisory board member and notorious political partisan Michael Hayden.
How the White House Correspondents Dinner Broke the Democratic Party
When I was a political reporter in Washington, I used to loathe the White House Correspondents Dinner. I hated how it portrayed Beltway journalism as a game. How it reduced the project of government accountability to performative antagonism practiced daily by reporters in White House press briefings — a performance exposed annually at a dinner where the most powerful people in the world would rub elbows and yuck it up about funny “inside jokes” like George W. Bush’s bungling of the Iraq War and the media’s culpability in helping him do it.
Maybe because I was a reporter at the time, I always considered the dinner’s rottenness from the perspective of the relationship between the media and politicians, lamenting that images from the Washington Hilton of the press mingling with administration officials in black tie undercut the public’s faith in an independent media.
But the further away I’ve gotten from the experience — and the faster our republic has tumbled toward oblivion — the more I’ve considered how the dinner contributed in other, significant ways to the brokenness of our current political moment: The dinner highlights the laughable disconnect between the people in Washington with the power to do something (the dinner attendees) and the rest of us mere mortals (people largely not watching the dinner at home on C-SPAN).
The presidency of Barack Obama transformed the Democratic Party in ways many pundits already have explored ad nauseum, from a revolution in data analytics to Obama’s creation of an entire political infrastructure outside of the Democratic National Committee. Yet, the White House Correspondents Dinner, now that it’s back from its hiatus in the two years we acknowledged the ongoing pandemic as real, is also a reminder of perhaps Obama’s worst contribution to modern politics: the marriage between actual Hollywood and the “Hollywood for ugly people” known as Washington.
Prestigious $30K federal scholarships doled out almost exclusively to progressive students
The 2022 recipients of the prestigious federal Truman Scholarships once again lean heavily toward Democrats and progressives, according to an analysis by The College Fix.
Of the 58 scholarship recipients announced last week, only three have any connection to Republican politics. At the same time, five recipients have connections to Democratic politics, while an additional 35 more list a progressive cause as their primary area of advocacy.
The primary interests of the 35 progressive-leaning students granted the award in 2022 included environmental justice, “menstrual equity,” transgender rights, Latinx political engagement, diversity and inclusion, intersectionality, gun control, and the “gendered impacts of uranium mining.”
One student aims to set up a “safe space” for his school’s “multicultural male students and faculty to receive free food, haircuts, and showcase vulnerability as strength through meaningful conversations.”
Of the remaining awardees, 15 have political leanings that could be considered neutral or non-political.
The highly prestigious $30,000 scholarship is granted each year to a new set of college juniors to help them attend graduate school. The award was established by Congress as a nonpartisan federal program, and recipients must pledge to serve three of their first seven years after graduation in public service. It is granted to “persons who demonstrate outstanding potential for and who plan to pursue a career in public service.”
Wikipedia Removes Entry for Hunter Biden’s Firm “Rosemont Seneca” Because It Risked Becoming a “Magnet for Conspiracy Theories About Hunter Biden”
Wikipedia erased the entry of Rosemont Seneca from its site recently. The online encyclopedia known for its far-left bias, goes soft on Democrats and their allies while it does the opposite with conservative, America-loving sites like TGP.
Newsmax reports:
Wikipedia editors earlier this week removed an entry on Hunter Biden’s investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners because it was “not notable,” archived comments from the Talk Page revealed.
The censoring of information happened Wednesday. The company co-founded by Hunter Biden has been at the heart of controversy lately.
‘Beyond troubling’: Current, former government officials tied to human trafficking probe in Georgia
Two Georgia labor officials whose jobs involved protecting or advocating for farmworkers have links to one of the largest U.S. human trafficking cases ever prosecuted involving foreign agricultural laborers brought here on seasonal visas.
One individual indicted in the case, Brett Donovan Bussey, left government service in 2018. The other, Jorge Gomez, remains on the job and hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing, but officers searched his home in connection with the case and his sister and nephew are among those indicted.
In October, a grand jury indicted Bussey and 23 others for conspiring to engage in forced labor and other related crimes. Federal prosecutors say the defendants required guest farmworkers to pay illegal fees to obtain jobs, withheld their IDs so they could not leave, made them work for little or no pay, housed them in unsanitary conditions and threatened them with deportation and violence.
Two workers died in the heat, according to the indictment. Court records say five workers were kidnapped and one of them was raped.
All defendants who have entered pleas so far have pleaded not guilty in the case, named “Operation Blooming Onion.” Some of the workers harvested onions, the state’s official vegetable.
Data Shows Big Tech Censored Biden Criticism 600+ Times Over 2-Year Cycle
The Media Research Center, a media watchdog group, has identified more than 600 occasions in which Big Tech companies censored criticism of President Joe Biden, dating back to March 2020.
The collected data ran through the MRC’s CensorTrack database, which monitors censorship of prominent political voices by leading Silicon Valley platforms, and covered the 24-month period of March 2020 to March 2022.
The findings revealed that prominent social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter concealed Biden critiques 646 times over the two-year cycle.
NEA Pays Lavish Salaries to Headquarters Officials, but Spends Only 5.4 Percent of Its Revenue Representing Teachers
America’s largest labor union is the National Education Association (NEA), organized in 1906 with a congressional charter “to elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching; and to promote the cause of education in the United States.”
One hundred and sixteen years later, the average individual U.S. teacher salary is $60,909, just below the median household income of $67,521 for the country in 2020, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Inadequate teacher pay has long been a staple of NEA rhetoric and advocacy, as seen in this April 29, 2019, statement by then-NEA President Lily Ekelsen Garcia:
“Across the nation educator pay continues to erode, expanding the large pay gap between what teachers earn and what similarly educated and experienced professionals in other fields earn.
“Educators don’t do this work to get rich, they do this work because they believe in students. But their pay is not commensurate with the dedication and expertise they bring to the profession.”
Given the NEA’s frequently professed concern about low teacher pay, critics wonder why the union spends so little of the $377 million it received mostly in dues paid by 2.9 million members in 2021 on “representational activities”—that is, bargaining for better pay and working conditions for rank-and-file classroom teachers.
According to its latest LM2 report to the Department of Labor, the NEA spent only $32 million, or 8.5 percent of its total dues revenues, on those representational activities.
Calculated as a percentage of NEA total revenues from all sources of $588 million, the $32 million represents only 5.4 percent. The $588 million figure includes the $194 million the NEA received through the sale of “investments and fixed assets.”
Top Democrat Funneled More Than $200,000 In Campaign Cash To Family Members
Democratic South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn has distributed more than $200,000 in campaign funds to entities controlled by his relatives, Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show.
Clyburn, the third-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, has made 15 rental payments to a company controlled by a daughter and son-in-law, and 39 direct payments to another daughter and son-in-law. Clyburn’s grandson also appears to be a salaried employee, and has received twice-monthly payments from the Clyburn campaign since October 2021.
The disbursements were first reported by Fox News.
The Clyburn campaign paid 49 Magnolia Blossom LLC $62,500 in 15 installments from March 2020 to January 2022 for “office rent,” according to FEC filings. 49 Magnolia Blossom LLC was incorporated in 2018, with Clyburn’s son-in-law Walter A. Reed listed as the company’s agent. Walter Reed is married to Clyburn’s daughter Jennifer Clyburn Reed, whom President Joe Biden appointed federal co-chair of the Southeast Crescent Regional Commission. In addition to the funds paid to his LLC, the Clyburn campaign paid $650 to Walter Reed personally for “office maintenance lighting” in May 2021, Fox News noted.
Clyburn Reed also received significant payments from the Clyburn campaign. During her father’s successful 2020 re-election campaign, Clyburn Reed was paid $45,000, which the Clyburn campaign described in filings as a “campaign management fee.”
Walter and Jennifer’s son, Walter A.C. Reed, was employed by the Clyburn campaign as well. Walter A.C. Reed, Rep. Clyburn’s grandson, received $37,500 across eleven payments from the campaign since October 2021.
The Clyburn campaign also paid the congressman’s other daughter and son-in-law, Angela and Cecil Hannibal, a combined $90,762 for various activities dating back to 2010.
Overall, Friends of Jim Clyburn has paid Clyburn’s family members and entities they control $236,412 since 2010.
Banning lawmakers from owning stocks would stymie war profiteering
Yesterday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to the chairs of the Committee on House Administration urging them to advance legislation banning members of Congress from directly owning or trading stocks while in office.
The letter, sent by 19 lawmakers ranging from Mark Pocan (D-WI) to Matt Gaetz (R-FL) outlined three key provisions: preventing family members and children from owning stock, banning exceptions for stock owned prior to entering office, and backing up any legislation with effective enforcement.
Congressional stock trading restrictions would disproportionately impact the national security space; A Sludge 2021 analysis of financial holdings found that “The maximum value of the investments held by federal lawmakers in the ‘Big Five’ contractors — Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — is over $2.6 million, making up nearly 39% of the total stock holdings identified.”
Several members of Congress snapped up new shares of defense company stock just before the invasion of Ukraine. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) bought shares of Lockheed Martin the day before the invasion, while John Rutherford (R-FL) secured valuable Raytheon stock the day of the invasion itself. Between December 1, 2021, and April 13, 2022, the stock price of Lockheed Martin skyrocketed by 42.8 percent while Raytheon increased by over 24 percent, both well out-pacing the S&P 500 which actually decreased in the same time period.
Some of those lawmakers even have an outsized role in creating national security policy itself. A recent Business Insider analysis found that 15 members of the House and Senate Armed Services Committee Congress who own stock in defense giants Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.
Another analysis found that four members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which oversees arms control, had at least four members invested in defense companies. One member of the Committee, Gerry Connolly (D-VA), alone owned $498,000 worth of stock of Leidos — a military contractor that merged with Lockheed Martin in 2016 — as of last year. Leidos’ stock jumped over 27 percent from mid-February to early March.
Hellbound and Down 
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