Tag: deep state

Stop the Work Stoppers

Labor Department, gig economy, freelancing

Republican Representative Kevin Kiley of California has introduced H.J. Resolution 116 to block “the rule submitted by the Department of the Labor relating to ‘Employee or Independent Contractor Classification Under the Fair Labor Standards Act.’ ”

116 is a legislative attempt to thwart legislation by regulators.

Labor’s rule is modeled on the AB5 Act passed in California several years ago. Catering to unions, AB5’s idea was to kill the livelihoods of many gig workers or freelancers by making it much harder for companies and independent contractors to deal with each other.

The new rule, too, aims to kill competition with unions and expand the pool of employees who can be unionized.

AB5 caused a firestorm, leading to citizen initiatives, court battles, and victories and setbacks for besieged employers and freelancers. There’s been some backtracking of AB5, in part because sponsoring lawmakers realized that it hurt even favored constituencies. But California is still a land mine for would-be freelancers.

The Labor Department is trying to impose AB5-style reclassification on the national level now that national lawmakers have failed to pass legislation to do it.

These days, the many dictators in our government often regard legislative means of passing legislation as an option only of first resort. If that fails, well, stick it to the people some other way.

So Kiley — and, hopefully, an effective congressional majority — must pass a law saying no, regulators, you may not pass this law in the guise of a regulation.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags bureaucracy, deep state, freelancing, gig economy, labor regulation

Internet controversy media and media people social media

NPR’s Wide Stance

When the term “the Deep State” entered our vocabulary, establishmentarians and insiders were annoyed. They argued the term was meaningless or vague or designated something that did not exist.

The rest of us accepted the term to identify the parts of the administrative state — coupled with the military-industrial complex’s corporations — that keep big secrets and act mostly independently of our democratic-republican institutions, including those who work behind the scenes to effect policy and mold public opinion.

The Deep State is all-too-real.

Now that National Public Radio has been dubbed “state-affiliated media” by Elon Musk’s Twitter, it may be time to add a new term to our lexicon: the Wide State.

“It was unclear why Twitter made the move,” writes David Bauder of the AP. “Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, quoted a definition of state-affiliated media in the company’s guidelines as ‘outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.’”

When NPR objected on Twitter, Musk tweeted back: “Seems accurate.”

But, but, but, they sputter: only 1 percent of NPR’s budget is from the federal government, and the organization has a well-established editorial independence!

Well, as the power of the Deep State has shown, directorial independence does not really constitute a non-state nature.

It’s obvious that many “private” institutions do exert immense political and governmental power: corporations through regulatory capture; news media through rank partisanship; all organizations that express eagerness to (and have demonstrated repeated instances of) collaborating with partisans in power.

These constitute the Wide State.

Of which NPR is a part.

Besides, if NPR lives “only” with a single percentage-point subsidy, why not cut the umbilical cord and prove its independence?

And get Twitter to change the label.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags deep state, government, NPR, regulatory capture

national politics & policies social media

Electoral Fraud, Google-Style

Post author By Redactor
Post date April 25, 2022
No Comments on Electoral Fraud, Google-Style

“There exist many sneaky ways to get other people to do what you want, voluntarily — effectively blurring the line between legitimate persuasion and fraud.”

I wrote that in a Common Sense squib entitled “The Online Manipulation of Democracy,” in which I discussed the work of Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California. That was over four years ago. Since then, his research has carried forward, focusing on how “the biggest tech companies influence human behavior, and conducting extensive monitoring projects of bias in these companies’ products, with a particular focus on Google.”

I’m quoting from an article by Masooma Haq and Jan Jekielek, from page A4 of the latest issue of The Epoch Times. In that article, and in an online interview published April 7, we are told how vast this power is — capable of flipping close elections around the world — and how difficult the influencing is to identify.

And that’s not just because Big Tech outfits like Google are sneaky.

Ephemeral events on our screens, like “a flashing newsfeed, a search result, or a suggested video are the ideal form of manipulation,” Epstein argues, “because they aren’t recorded and are hard to document.”

He insists they “affect us, they disappear, they’re stored nowhere, and they’re gone.”

Think about what that means: we don’t know we’re being manipulated, and “authorities can’t go back in time to see what people were being shown,” explains Epstein.

But it’s worse: Google, like many “free” online service companies, started out as a Deep State project.

We shouldn’t be shocked to find that sneaky, evasive, ephemeral manipulation techniques have been pioneered by . . . tax-funded spies.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Big Tech, deep state, Google, persuasion, propaganda

international affairs national politics & policies

In Deep with Biden

On Election Day, “the Empire hopes to strike back,” writes Daniel McCarthy for The Spectator. “Joe Biden personifies the foreign policy of endless war that Democrats and neoconservatives pursued for 25 years, from the end of the Cold War until the election of Donald Trump in 2016.”

McCarthy argues that “Biden’s overall record is one of foreign policy interventionism,” but Biden’s Senate voting record is iffy-fifty: Biden “voted for the Iraq War, but he also voted against the 2007 surge.” He voted for the 1999 Serbian war, which destabilized relations with Russia, allowing the rise of Putin. But Biden voted against 1991’s Persian Gulf adventure which set the stage for post-Cold War American megalomania.

Nevertheless, McCarthy argues that “Joe Biden is an archetypal liberal interventionist of the post-Cold War variety. He understands war in the same terms as domestic policy: as an occasion to expand the power wielded by experts in Washington, whose moral and rational qualifications are beyond question — no matter how disastrous the consequences of their policies.”

Such a plausible case. War is certainly government “activism.”

McCarthy has spotted a real problem in “progressive liberalism,” and understands the “peer pressure” that so oppressively rules in the corridors of power. But he misses — perhaps merely for reasons of space — the sheer institutional power of the Deep State. It holds the secrets, it controls vast amounts of money, its immensity overpowers rational thought.

It is the government we cannot get to; it is the government that tried to “get” Trump.

Perhaps our “right to petition the government” can skip Congress and go right to the source, the Deep State.

Which really wants Biden to win.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags deep state, foreign policy, Joe Biden, war

crime and punishment

Lying to Liars

Peter Strzok,Licensed to Lie, CIA, deep state,

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hands out its awards, the presenters say, “And the Oscar goes to . . .”

We should hand out an award for lying in government — and name it after President Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper. On March 12, 2013, Clapper lied to Congress about NSA collection of data on U.S. citizens.

Clapper roams free, while Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn ran afoul of lying to the FBI, in his bizarre case. Flynn seemed merely to misremember, yet being caught in a flub was enough to leverage a plea deal.

Now The Epoch Times adds a wrinkle to the story. “The prosecutors handling the case of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn said they mixed up notes from the FBI interview that served as a basis for making Flynn plead guilty to lying to the FBI,” we read in the November 7-13 paper edition. The jumbled notes in question were those of the infamous Peter Strzok and his assistant.

“It’s now impossible to take [the DOJ’s and FBI’s] word for anything,” says Sidney Powell, Flynn’s lawyer.

A former prosecutor herself, Ms. Powell has written a relevant book, Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.

In her motion for Flynn, she argues that a formal FBI summary of the Flynn interview contains information not in the notes, yet it formed the basis for the prosecution.*

On November 5, prosecutors apologized for their error, which they admit “caused some confusion.”

In a just world, their flub would be called a lie and they’d face major consequences.

As it is, the Clapper goes to them.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* It gets worse, if murkier, with apparent editing of the notes to implicate Flynn and the allegation that Clapper himself directed a reporter to “take the kill shot.”

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Tags CIA, deep state, Licensed to Lie, Peter Strzok

Accountability government transparency national politics & policies too much government

Long Gone Rogue

Chuck Schumer, Rachel Maddow, deep state, Donald Trump

Back in the 1990s, we used to talk about “rogue agencies” of the U.S. Government. And for good reason: the Branch Davidian massacre and the Ruby Ridge fiasco were hard to forget.

After 9/11/2001, however, we cut the agencies some slack. Why? Their incompetence and our hope.

But it became obvious from the NSA’s illegal metadata collection program, as revealed by Edward Snowden, the core agencies of the military-industrial complex do not like playing by rules that the American people have a say in.

How bad is it?

On New Year’s Day this year, Sen. Chuck Schumer was talking to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow about their favorite conspiracy theory. Maddow, as we all know, had gone Full Nutter on this “collusion”/“corruption” story, and Democratic politicians (along with nearly the whole of the mainstream news media) ran with the story for two years. Then, the Mueller report is “no collusion.”

But on that first Tuesday of 2019, Ms. Maddow was talking about Trump’s tweets which she characterized as “taunting” the CIA and other agencies obsessed with the “Russian hacking” angle of the brouhaha. And Schumer’s response?

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

We should take this as a signal. It is like making prison rape jokes. It says something about the situation: prison rape or Deep State machinations. And about the speaker: leveraging a rogue element as a threat.

No wonder many now think the Russiagate/Mueller investigation was a “Deep State Coup” attempt.

A republic with rogue agencies is hardly a republic at all.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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