September 2 marks the 1839 birth of American economist and reformer Henry George. George is most famous for his 1879 treatise, Progress and Poverty, but made many other contributions, including advocacy of the secret ballot and his able economic policy polemic Protection or Free Trade (1886).
Years ago, Gibson’s Bakery won a judgment of $38 million against Oberlin College because of the Ohio school’s role in harassing the bakery and defaming it as “racist” after a 2016 shoplifting incident.
The shopkeeper of the family-donuts, racist, college bakery, Allyn Gibson, caught students trying to steal wine. They attacked him. They were black.
For whatever reasons, students on campus chugged into uproar mode, accusing the bakery of racism as if it prefers to be robbed only by persons of pallor.
The shoplifters eventually pled guilty and acknowledged that the bakery is not racist.
The students’ irrationality was bad enough. Then Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo chimed in, working with protesters to defame the bakery. The school canceled its contract with Gibson’s and would claim in legal filings that the bakery’s “archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests.”
In 2017, the bakery sued Oberlin and won.
Oberlin has been appealing. Now it has lost in the Ohio Supreme Court, which refused to hear the appeal.
Only the U.S. Supreme Court can save Oberlin now. But according to the Legal Insurrection blog, the chances that it will even consider the case are slim.
Is $38 million the right award? Perhaps Oberlin should pay Gibson’s $50 million. Or a cool billion.
But Oberlin deserves to be punished just as Gibson’s deserves to be compensated.
May this finally happen.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Propaganda is of no use to the politician unless he has something to say which the public, consciously or unconsciously, wants to hear.
Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928).
Slovakia celebrates a Constitution Day on September 1, for the Constitution passed by the Slovak National Council on September 1, 1992.
The Slovaks place their rights provision early in their document, like most American states, and not as amendments, as in the Constitution of the United States of America.
That information has, apparently, been a state secret.
Until now.
For years, a watchdog group called OpenTheBooks.com has been working to discover and disclose government spending in the United States. Its efforts were enabled by 2006 legislation sponsored by Senators Tom Coburn and Barack Obama to establish a website, USASpending.gov, that details federal expenditures. Until his death in 2020, Coburn was the honorary chairman of OpenTheBooks.com.
The group reports that in 2021, it filed some 47,000 Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain data on some $12 trillion of government spending. So they’ve been busy.
California is now the fiftieth state whose spending is being made public in detail.
The state had long resisted requests for info about its spending. State controller Betty Yee said that it was impossible to comply with such requests because California has no central database of government payments. Compiling the data would be too darn hard.
The auditors at OpenTheBooks.com performed the chore instead, filing requests for public records with each of 469 state-government entities.
According to founder and CEO Adam Andrzejewski, “It was a historic knockdown, drag-out dogfight that lasted a decade and spanned the last two California controllers. Since 2005, the state invested $1.1 billion in accounting software, yet still couldn’t publish a complete record of state spending.”
Various budgetary items will doubtless prove controversial — now that they are publicly known.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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As you’d expect, this whole structure of decision making answers basically to the transnational corporations, international banks, etc. It’s also an effective blow against democracy. All these structures raise decision making to the executive level, leaving what’s called a “democratic deficit” — parliaments and populations with less influence.
Noam Chomsky, “The New Global Economy,” How the World Works (2013).
Not only that, but the general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.
On August 31, 1870, educator Maria Montessori was born.
August 31 serves as Independence Day for Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, and Trinidad and Tobago.
What this usually means is that those of a skeptical mind challenge the confidence of the pro-vax mantra — “safe and effective” ad nauseam — and, when they find stats that run counter to this official position, they publicize those stats. Then, major media outfits make a few carping criticisms of the new studies and quickly proceed to assuredly re-state as fact the original and now more-dubious propaganda.
Meanwhile, social media censors dissidents. And when more studies come out casting grave doubt on either the safety or the efficacy of the new drugs, those receive little public attention.
How Alex Berenson was treated is a good example of the methods of the orthodoxy. Take Wikipedia’s judgment: “During the coronavirus pandemic, Berenson appeared frequently in American right-wing media, spreading false claims about COVID-19 and its vaccines,” the article confidently runs. “He spent much of the pandemic arguing that its seriousness was overblown; once COVID-19 vaccines were rolled out, he made false claims about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.”
False claims! In olden times — why, it seems like just a few years ago — a major news and history resource would not baldly call some contentious matter “false” or “true.” It would state the claims and then let the counter-claims carry their own weight.
In the case of “the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines,” though, it has become clear: their efficacy wanes, diminishing quicker with each dose, leaving the unvaccinated with proportionally fewer infection and spreading events than the “boosted.”
And as excess deaths and inexplicable demises increase around the world we are “not allowed” to state this in many public forums.
No way to run a health crisis.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.
Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928).
On August 30, 1918, Fanny Yefimovna Kaplan shot and seriously injured Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. Though certainly justifiable on some primary level — evil killers with power probably deserve to be killed in turn — this assassination attempt, like most such, had disastrous consequences, prompting the mass arrests and executions known as the Red Terror.
August 30, 1999, saw East Timor’s referendum vote for independence from Indonesia succeed.