Article 43
Thursday, November 18, 2021
NWO - Union Lockouts During Covid
Q. How does the PRO ACT fit in with the two issues below going on now?
A. It may do something to STOP employers from LOCKING OUT or replacing striking workers.
“Kellogg’s turn toward using scabs to break strike. This will test whether a resurgent labor movement will win or be repressed. Will labor’s allies help? Deep stresses are rising to challenge and change US capitalism.”
- Richard Wolff 11/18/2021
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Kelloggs reportedly hiring to replace workers on strike after a failed negotiation
EcconoTimes
November 15, 2021
Kellogg’s, the American food manufacturing company headquartered in Battle Creek, Michigan, is allegedly hiring new workers that will replace those who are on strike. They are still protesting after the negotiations between the union and the management failed.
At this point, no additional negotiation meeting has been set between Kellogg’s and the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union. While the strike is ongoing, the company is said to be actively hiring so it can immediately replace at least 1,400 plant workers who have not returned to work yet and still protesting.
ACCORDING TO FOX BUSINESS, because of the ongoing protest over contract deals, the company said late last week that it has resorted to “tapping our global manufacturing network and expertise” and currently hiring to fill in roles at Kellogg’s four factories located in Battle Creek, Michigan; Memphis, Tennessee; Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Omaha, Nebraska.
While the new hiring begins, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union workers are still on the picket lines. Some of the employees receiving hourly pay and salaried ones have also begun to work and restarted the productions at the affected plants.
The union members have been on strike since early October and Kellogg’s was forced to continue operations at its facilities by depending on “other sources” to avoid any disruptions with the supply.
At any rate, Kellogg’s has sued the striking workers at its cereal plant in Omaha. In the lawsuit that was filed last week against the union, the company accused the striking union members of intimidating workers at the Omaha, Nebraska facility who are not part of the union. The company added that the workers also blocked vehicles from coming in and out of the factory.
With the actions, Kellogg’s said in the suit that the company is suffering and will continue to suffer irreparable damages. Moreover, the cereal maker is asking the court for an immediate order of prohibiting the conduct described.
“We sought a temporary restraining order to help ensure the safety of all individuals in the vicinity of the plant, including the picketers themselves,” Kris Bahner, Kellogg’s spokeswoman, told Business insider. “As Kellogg continues to conduct business at the plant, we are concerned about dangerous and unlawful behavior, such as blocking plant access, threatening violence against individuals entering the plant, and damaging property, to name a few.”
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Massachusetts nurses strike faces collapse due to unions isolation of their struggle
By Ben Oliver
World Socialist Web Site
Novermber 15, 2021
Roughly 600 nurses are still on strike in Worcester, Massachusetts, as they fight to defend their working conditions and the safety of their patients at Saint Vincent Hospital. A full year into the pandemic, on March 8, 2021, they forced the hand of their union, the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA), to call an open-ended strike. It is now the longest nurses strike in Massachusetts history. Despite nurses’ commitment and sacrifice, their struggle is in danger of collapse due to the role of the unions and their subservience to Democratic Party politicians.
With the fiduciary duty to maximize returns of its private stakeholders, executives expect this move to render double-digit returns within three years, as Tenet seeks to derive more profit from less capital intensive, lower cost-of-care settings. Offsetting these purchases is Tenet’s divestiture from inpatient care. In June 2021, four months into the nurses’ strike, it announced the $1.1 billion sale of five hospitals in Florida to Steward Healthcare.
According to a December 2020 article in the Dallas Morning News, while then CEO Ron Rittenmeyer claimed that CARES Act money was not used in Tenets December purchase, the $2.5 billion Tenet received protected investors from pandemic losses, as did deep spending cuts and furloughs of 10 percent of Tenet’s workforce.
With Tenet making fundamental changes to its business model and Saint Vincent management weighing the possibility of making service cuts permanent, even the MNAs Marlena Pellegrino cannot maintain the same hollow confidence that once inspired the insipid slogan “one day longer, one day stronger” pathetically echoed by union bureaucrats and Democratic politicians at a June rally marking the strike’s 100th day.
In response to CEO Jackson’s calls for a poll of striking nurses to determine their willingness to return to work, Pellegrino refused, saying, “They just need to offer us our jobs back, and then they will see whos coming back. I think they will see that many Saint Vincent nurses are coming back.”
In reply to a Reddit post by a nursing student concerned about conditions in their hospital and the prospect of a union-led strike, one worker responded:
Google “St. Vincents nurses strike, Worcester Massachusetts.” Those nurses have been striking for over 8 months. They have had nothing good come out of it. They are all taking travel contracts to work at local hospitals in the area, while the hospital is offering well below par care with the newly hired travelers ...
A recent headline on wgbh.org of Boston, quoting Pelligrino, read: “‘There actually is no shame in this corporation’” says St. Vincent’s nurse on strike.” When the Democratic congressional delegation from Massachusetts recently penned a letter to Tenets CEO Saum Sutaria, decrying its ғviolation of the ԓlong accepted standards of doing business between capitalists and the labor bureaucracy, Sutaria was able to respond in similar style, replying that ԓbringing in permanent replacement nurses, while certainly not our first choice, was a necessary step to ensure continuity of care and to preserve access to the most critical services for our community.
In the Saint Vincent strike, there is no end to empty rhetoric because it is in the interest of the Democratic Party and the MNA apparatus to conceal the objective dimensions of the class struggle and derail the mass opposition of nurses. They are rewarded with salaries that secure them membership in the upper middle class.
Stifled by the MNA, and isolated from other health care workersԒ struggles, the Saint Vincent nurses strike is headed for what one academic commentator called a natural death,Ӕ with enough nurses being forced to cross or abandon the picket for jobs elsewhere.
The agreement reached between the MNA and Tenet in August, which was scuttled due to Tenets refusal to give nurses their jobs back, included concessions on nursesҒ central demand: a staffing ratio of four nurses to every patient on medical-surgical floors. That agreement was reached five months into the strike. Since then, Tenet has continued to hire permanent replacements, offering thousands of dollars in bonuses. Meanwhile, the striking nurses have run out of unemployment insurance and receive nothing from the coffers of their union.
Under siege and abandoned, save for fake shows of solidarity, charity, appeals to the capitalist state in the form of pending Unfair Labor Practices complaints, and the odd scolding letter from labor bureaucrats and politicians to Tenet, the nurses of Saint Vincent Hospital have been left with nowhere to turn, except to their allies in the working class, both national and international.
The first step to building this movement is for nurses and health care workers - along with teachers, autoworkers, meatpackers, Amazon workers and others - to form RANK-AND-FILE COMMITTEES to take direct control of their struggles and to join the INTERNATIONAL WORKERS ALLIANCE OF RANK-AND-FILE COMMITTEES.
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Saturday, November 06, 2021
Democracy Hollowed Out Part 40 - Tyranny and The Dictator
Minnesota nurses say that negative reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine are underreported as hospitals discourage their staff from recording them. Another nurse also said she got a concerning email from her hospital instructing her not to report whether or not new cases of the virus are occurring in patients who have been vaccinated. These reports that the COVID shot may be more dangerous than the public is led to believe came by way of a town hall hosted by Rep. Erik Mortensen.
- Minnesota Nurses Say Vaccine Injuries Likely Underreported, Alpha News, August 30, 2021
October 5, 2021 NICHD recently awarded five institutions one-year supplemental grants totaling $1.67 million to explore potential links between COVID-19 vaccination and MENSTRUAL CHANGES. Some people have reported changes in their menstruation after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, including changes in duration, flow, and accompanying symptoms such as pain.
- COVID-19 Vaccines and the Menstrual Cycle, NIH
“We have come to learn… that corporations are continuously using the government to push something that’s profitable for them, whether or not it’s healthy, or safe ,or good for us. So, being suspicious about government mandates is perfectly reasonable. Ditto, being suspicious about Big Pharma drug companies...”
- Understanding Anti-Vaxxer Suspicion of Government Mandates & Corporations - Richard D Woff, Sept, 14, 2021
U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) held a panel discussion with doctors and medical researchers who have treated COVID-19 vaccine injuries and are researching the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, patients who have experienced adverse events due to the COVID-19 vaccine, and vaccine mandates. The senator spoke to his advocacy for early treatment, the importance of Americans health care freedom and recognizing natural immunity, the impacts of mandates on the American workforce and the economy, and the lack of transparency from federal health agencies in response to his COVID-19 oversight requests.
- Roundtable on Vaccine Mandates, Nov 2, 2021
“Man is born free but everywhere is in chains.”
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
But as a simulation of the normalization of fascism - the pleasure of membership, the creeping thrill of exclusion, and the comfort of discipline and rules - the experiment was unquestionably a success. It vividly illustrated the chilling conclusion theorist Hannah Arendt came to at the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann: that “most members of the SS were neither perverted nor sadistic,” but rather, “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”
- This 1967 classroom experiment proved how easy it was for Americans to become Nazis---
Majority of US workers to fall under vaccine mandate on Jan. 4
Workers outside health care, federal government to be given the option to test.
By Anne Flaherty
ABC News
November 4, 2021
Nearly 100 million U.S. workers will be required to get the COVID vaccine by Jan. 4, with some workers allowed to test weekly instead, under sweeping federal rules released Thursday by the BIDEN administration that identifies COVID-19 as an occupational hazard.
The regulations are aimed at health care workers and businesses with 100 or more employees, covering two-thirds of the nation’s workforce. Businesses that don’t comply could be fined $14,000 per infraction, and hospitals could lose access to Medicare and Medicaid dollars.
It’s part of President JOE BIDEN’S aggressive new plan to try quell a pandemic that’s overshadowed his presidency and hobbled the economy. At the same time, the Jan. 4 date is a nod to industry groups that insisted the administration wait until after the holidays to impose mandates in the midst of a worker shortage.
“This is good for the economy,” a senior administration official told reporters late Wednesday on the rationale for the plan.
Since taking office, the Biden administration had avoided imposing nationwide vaccine mandates, focusing instead on incentives for businesses and individuals. But with the arrival of the delta variant, a surge in pediatric cases and pockets of the country remaining hesitant to get a shot, Biden’s COVID strategy shifted in recent weeks.
“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us,” Biden said of unvaccinated Americans on Sept. 9 when announcing his plan to draft the rule.
Biden’s plan also gives federal contractors an extra month to comply, sliding a previous Dec. 8 deadline set by the administration. Federal workers are still required to be vaccinated by Nov. 22.
Like health care workers, federal contractors and federal workers arent given the option to test instead of getting vaccinated. In other businesses, employees could be given the option to test weekly and would be required to wear a mask in the workplace.
When asked whether the worker shortage was a factor in the decision, administration officials said the primary focus was on making compliance easier for workers and aligning deadlines across the private sector.
Once divided on how to address the pandemic, Republican governors have united against the plan, insisting it represents dangerous federal overreach and would cripple business owners already dealing with worker shortages.
“Rest assured, we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian,” tweeted the South Carolina GOP Gov. Henry McMaster last September following Biden’s announcement.
Supporters counter that many large businesses have already embraced vaccine mandates to both entice employees who want a safe workplace and end a pandemic that has hobbled the economy. They argue too that whenever employers have enacted mandates, the vast majority of workers comply.
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The Road to Fascism: Paved with Vaccine Mandates and Corporate Collusion
By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute
November 16, 2021
We are moving fast down the road to fascism.
This COVID-19 pandemic has shifted us into high gear.
The heavy-handed collusion between the Techno-Corporate State and the U.S. government over vaccine mandates is merely the latest manifestation of the extent to which fascist forces are working to overthrow our constitutional republic and nullify the rights of the individual.
In early November 2021, the Biden Administration DREW ITS LINE IN THE SANE FOR MORE THAN 100 MILLION AMERICAN WORKERS: get vaccinated against COVID-19 (by Nov. 22 for federal workers, and Jan. 4 for federal contractors and companies with more than 100 employees) or else.
Or else what?
For many individuals with sincere objections to the vaccine, either based on their religious beliefs or some other medical or philosophical concern, NON-COMPLIANCE WITH WORKPLACE VACCINE MANDATES WILL MEN LOOSING THEIR JOBS AND THE POSSIBILITY OF NO UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS.
One survey conducted by the Society for Human Resource Management estimated that 28% OF EMPLOYED AMERICANS WOULDN’T GET A COVID VACCINE EVEN IF IT MEANT LOOSING THEIR JOBS.
Although OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) is requiring that employees be paid for the time it takes to get vaccinated and recover from any side effects, those who refuse to get vaccinated but keep their jobs will have to test negative for COVID weekly and COULD BE MADE TO SHOULDER THE COSTS OF THOSE WEEKLY TESTS. Healthcare workers are NOT BEING GIVEN AN OPTION FOR TESTING: its the vaccine or nothing.
To give the government’s arm-twisting some added strength, companies that violate the workplace mandate rules ”CAN FACE FINES OF UP TO $13,653 PER VIOLATION FOR SERIOUS VIOLATIONS and 10 times that for willful or repeated violations.”
In other words, as Katrina Trinko writes for USA Today, “the government is turning employers - who are not paid by, nor work for, the government - into ”AN ARMY OF VACCINE ENFORCERS.”
You know who won’t suffer any harm as a result of these vaccine mandates? The Corporate State (MANUFACTURERS, DISTRIBUTORS, AND HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS), which were given a blanket “get out of jail” card to insulate them from liability for any injuries or death caused by the vaccines.
While this vaccine mandate is being presented as a targetedӔ mandate as opposed to a national mandate that impacts the entire population, it effectively leaves those with sincere objections to the COVID vaccine with very little options beyond total compliance or unemployment.
This has long since ceased to be a debate over how best to protect the populace at large against an unknown pandemic. Rather, it has become a massively intrusive, coercive and authoritarian assault on the right of individual sovereignty over ones life, self and private property.
As such, these COVID-19 mandates have become the new battleground in the government’s tug-of-war over bodily autonomy and individual sovereignty.
Already, the legal challenges to these vaccine mandates are piling up before the courts. Before long, DIVIDED CIRCUIT COURT RULINGS will make their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will be asked to decide whether these mandates constitute government overreach or a natural extension of the governments so-called emergency powers.
With every new court ruling that empowers corporations and the government to use heavy-handed tactics to bring about vaccine compliance, with every new workplace mandate that forces employees to choose between their right to bodily autonomy and economic livelihood, and with every new piece of legislation that insulates corporations and the government from being HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR VACCINE INJURIES AND DEATHS, our property interest in our bodies is diminished.
At a minimum, our right to individual sovereignty over our lives and our bodies is being usurped by power-hungry authoritarians; greedy, self-serving corporations; egotistical Nanny Staters who think they know whats best for the rest of the populace; and a short-sighted but well-meaning populace which fails to understand the long-term ramifications of trading their essential freedoms for temporary promises of safety and security.
We are more vulnerable now than ever before.
This debate over bodily autonomy, which covers broad territory ranging from forced vaccinations, abortion and euthanasia to forced blood draws, biometric surveillance and basic healthcare, has far-reaching ramifications for who gets to decide what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials.
On a daily basis, Americans are already being made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are - our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.) - in order to clear the nearly insurmountable hurdle that increasingly defines life in the United States: we are now guilty until proven innocent.
This merely pushes us one step further down that road towards a total control society in which the government in collusion with Corporate America gets to decide who is worthyӔ of being allowed to take part in society.
Right now, COVID-19 vaccines are the magic ticket for gaining access to the privilegesӔ of communal life. Having already conditioned the population to the idea that being part of society is a privilege and not a right, such access could easily be predicated on social credit scores, the worthiness of ones political views, or the extent to which one is willing to comply with the governmentҒs dictates, no matter what they might be.
The government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.
When all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do - our very lives - depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle, we should all be leery and afraid.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, nothing good can come from totalitarian tactic - sno matter how benevolent they appear - that are used to make us cower, fear and comply with the governments dictates.
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Why There is a Civic and Moral Duty to Oppose Tyrannical Bureaucracies
By Barry Brownstein
American Institute for Economic Research
November 20, 2021
The searing Russian novel LIFE AND TE by Vasily Grossman is one of the greatest examinations of totalitarianism ever written. Based on his experiences under Stalin, Grossman depicts how humanity withers under tyranny. Grossman’s book is not a dystopian novel, yet few books better teach how force is used to control a population by not only restricting liberty but also exploiting weaknesses in human nature.
Along a flank of the Stalingrad front, two colonels talk about the terrible impact of bureaucrats and bureaucracy. One colonel tells this story:
There was an infantry detachment that had been surrounded. The men had nothing to eat. A squadron was ordered to drop them some food by parachute. And then the quartermaster refused to issue the food. He said he needed a signature on the delivery slip and how could the men down below sign for what had been dropped by parachute? And he wouldn’t budge. Finally he received an order from above.
The other colonel says, “Bureaucracy can be much more terrifying than that.” He then shares this story:
Remember the order: ‘Not one step back’? There was one place where the Germans were mowing our men down by the hundred. All we needed to do was withdraw over the brow of the hill. Strategically, it would have made no difference - and we’d have saved our men and equipment. But the orders were “Not one step back.” And so the men perished and their equipment was destroyed.
The conversation continues, and then Grossman has one colonel deliver the punchline: “What’s really terrifying is when you realize that bureaucracy isn’t simply a growth on the body of the State. If it were only that, it could be cut off. No, bureaucracy is the very essence of the State.”
The forces making bureaucracy arbitrary, capricious, and impervious to reason - “the very essence of the State+ - are the same in America as they were in Grossman’s Soviet Union. We all have OUR STORIES of bureaucratic indifference; and now during Covid, indifference has become cruel. Just ask the relatives of former Governor CUOMO’S NURSING HOME VICTIMS or the former “health angels” who gained natural immunity and now FACE TERMINATION for refusing the vaccine mandate.
In his book BUREAUCRACY, Ludwig von Mises explains, “The ultimate basis of an all-around bureaucratic system is violence.” As for the bureaucrats making the rules, Mises observes, “He who is unfit to serve his fellow citizens wants to rule them.”
Today, has Grossmans World War II “not one step back” become “if it saves one life?”
Egyppius is a pseudonymous critic of Covid policies. HE RECENTLY EXPLORED how the “not one step back” mindset has shaped Covid policy:
All containment policies, since March 2020, flow from two fundamental premises, that together form a Pandemic Doctrine: 1) All pandemic infections are regrettable and to be prevented. 2) It is possible to control pandemics via social or medical technology. Before 2020, nobody anywhere believed either of these things - not despite, but because of long experience with semi-regular pandemic influenza outbreaks.
Egyppius explores the motives of the “autonomous undirected actions of a million nameless, faceless bureaucrats, which nobody can any longer control:”
Everything since then, has been the autonomous force of the Pandemic Doctrine and its terrible demands. As containment policies have failed, one after the other, they have left a vortex of disconfirmed expectancy in their wake, turning early political and bureaucratic advocates of containment into truly deranged zealots. The policies themselves, though they are articles of faith, have little or no real-world effect, and this has had curious consequences. It became important for all countries to do as many useless things as possible, and more or less the same useless things as everyone else. Bureaucracies that rejected a specific measure risked being blamed for whatever happened next. And without controls, the failure of containment could be rewritten always and forever as success: Imagine how many more deaths we would have had, if we never locked down.
SAN FRANCISCO BUREAUCRATS DEMAND that 5-year-old children be vaccinated in order to be admitted to indoor places. Will parents of tall 4-year-old children have to carry birth certificates to prove that their child isn’t five? SCHOOL BUREAUCRATS DEMAND special needs children with breathing issues be placed in plexiglass cubicles.
On a Federal level, OSHA BUREAUCRATS ISSUE RULES that contain a new cadre of inspectors empowered to level $13,600 per worker fines for those firms violating vaccine mandates; mandates that DO NOTHING TO CONTROL THE SPREAD OF COVID.
As essential services continue to deteriorate and shelves continue to empty, will bureaucrats change their guidelines? Egyppius predicts the Covid totalitarian toothpaste “will never go back in the tube.”
Faced with this illiberal onslaught from politicians and bureaucrats, it seems there is little we can do but weep in despair. After all, you might reason, what can one person do? Mises is clear: such a defeatist mindset forfeits your civic duties.
Bureaucracy was written in 1944, and of course, Mises had nothing to say about the Covid bureaucracy. However, his advice on opposing the socialist bureaucracy is applicable today.
Lesson 1: Oppose bureaucrats with vigor but avoid name-calling.
Mises explored the propaganda trickӔ of those promoting socialism in Western countries. Promoters of socialism extol the blessings which socialism has in store for mankindӅ [but] they have never attempted to prove their fallacious dogmas or still less to refute the objections raised by the economists. Instead, they ԓcall their adversaries names and cast suspicion upon their motives.Ŕ
Today, politicians and bureaucrats use the same strategy to besmirch opponents of failed Covid policies. Has anything changed since Mises observed, The average citizen cannot see through these stratagems?Ӕ
If you are swayed by propaganda that encourages us vs them name-calling, you are being manipulated to turn towards the darkest corners of your mind.
Lesson 2: Encourage others to broaden their reading and listening beyond the orthodoxy.
To combat socialism, Mises recommended economic studies as a civic duty. One does not have to become an economist to see through propaganda. Mises explains,
Only a man conversant with the main problems of economics is in a position to form an independent opinion on the problems involved. All the others are merely repeating what they have picked up by the way. They are an easy prey to demagogic swindlers and idiotic quacks. Their gullibility is the most serious menace to the preservation of democracy and to Western civilization.
Mises clarified, “The aim of the popularization of economic studies is not to make every man an economist. The idea is to equip the citizen for his civic functions in community life."It is hopeless,” Mises warned,” to stop the trend toward bureaucratization by the mere expression of indignation and by a nostalgic glorification of the good old times.”
Applying this lesson today, you don’t have to be a physician or epidemiologist to become conversant with basic Covid issues. Official propaganda might claim this is a PANDEMIC OF THE UNVACCINATED, that natural immunity doesn’t exist, and your 5-year-old child urgently needs a Covid vaccination, but you can look at the evidence for yourself.
Lesson 3: Oppose all censorship
“Propaganda,” Mises alerts us, “is one of the worst evils of bureaucracy.” Propaganda is full of lies, fallacies, and superstitions.” Mises adds these prescient words: “The liars must be afraid of truth and are therefore driven to suppress its pronouncement.” Lenin and Hitler knew very well why they abolished freedom of thought, speech, and the press, and why they closed the frontiers of their countries to any import of ideas from abroad.
No matter where you stand on a Covid issue, freedom and scientific progress depend on your opposition to the censorship of opposing views. Censors in America are not driven by better motivations than Stalin, Hitler, or Mao. Censors want to abolish critical thinking and pave the way for the imposition, without opposition, of any program they deem necessary.
Lesson 4: Oppose rule by elites
If Covid bureaucrats have run wild, “gullible citizenry” is to blame: “The plain citizens are mistaken in complaining that the bureaucrats have arrogated powers; they themselves and their mandatories have abandoned their sovereignty. Their ignorance of fundamental problems of economics has made the professional specialists supreme. Mises warned against rule by elite “experts:”
But democracy becomes impracticable if the eminent citizens, the intellectual leaders of the community, are not in a position to form their own opinion on the basic social, economic, and political principles of policies. If the citizens are under the intellectual hegemony of the bureaucratic professionals, society breaks up into two castes: the ruling professionals, the Brahmins, and the gullible citizenry. Then despotism emerges, whatever the wording of constitutions and laws may be.
Mises ends his book with this instruction:
How can people determine their own affairs if they are too indifferent to gain through their own thinking an independent judgment on fundamental political and economic problems? Democracy is not a good that people can enjoy without trouble. It is, on the contrary, a treasure that must be daily defended and conquered anew by strenuous effort.
Watching CNN or Fox and then repeating “They say” is not the strenuous effort Mises suggested. Mises would warn against dismissing brave voices diligently questioning the orthodoxy. ENTREPRENEUR STEVE KIRSCH is just one example of a courageous voice who some would dismiss as not being a trained health professional. You can come to a different conclusion.
If we have a civic duty to learn about immunity, pandemics, and health, we also have an equally important moral duty.
Lesson 5: We have a moral duty to see the humanity in others
Recently I was speaking to a physician friend whose politics are progressive but who sees himself as holding liberal values. I mentioned how disturbed I was about the ongoing demonization by bureaucrats and politicians of those who have chosen not to be vaccinated. The physician said this is indeed regrettable, but he chastised me: “I must understand the context, those doing the demonization are trying to save lives.” Although this doctor himself had suffered a significant vaccine injury from the 2009 H1N1 VACCINE, he then recited the bureaucratic propaganda for current vaccine policies. To keep his standing in the medical community, he carefully weighs the dangers to his career of stepping too far away from the official narrative. He cares about patients, yet the ties of his medical tribe compromise his judgment.
If you say I must feed my family, I cannot oppose mandates; no one will fault you. If you say, I have no time to study the issue and make my own judgment, you can still take a moral stand against coercing and demonizing others. You can stand for the humanity in each person and eschew tribal hatreds. There is no need to harass others BY COOPERATING WITH PETTY BUREAUCRATS.
In his best-known work, I and Thou, the Vienna-born philosopher Martin Buber observed two fundamental ways of seeing the world: “I-Thou” or “I-It.” Through the “I-It” lens, others are seen as less than us, either as objects who help us or obstacles that get in our way. Tribalism, at its core, looks at the world through “I-It” eyes.
In the great Russian novel, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Dostoevsky tells of Fyodor Pavlovitch, who desires to “revenge himself on everyone for his own unseemliness.” Pavlovitch remembers being asked, “Why do you hate so and so, so much?” Pavlovitch had responded, “Ill tell you. He has done me no harm. But I played him a dirty trick, and ever since I have hated him.”
Today, those we once called angels, health care professionals, airline employees, first responders, grocery store cashiers who served us while others worked at home over Zoom are having dirty tricksӔ played against them. If they refuse mandates, they are fired.
It is human nature to experience dissonance when we behave poorly. Notice a moment when you catch yourself seeing the world through “I-It” eyes, when you have failed to see the humanity in another. In the next moment you may notice there is an itch you need to scratch. The itch is a felt need to justify your “I-It” thinking. You may relieve the itch by cheering at a propagandistic pronouncement portraying the unvaccinated as a threat to you. Phew, you may think, Im not really a bad person; I’m just defending myself against those who would harm me. In justifying “I-It” thinking, moral duty is abandoned.
We are now at a crossroads. How will we resolve our dissonance when we fail to see the humanity in others? One path is to scratch the need to feel innocent and virtuous. As Dostoevsky explained, we tend to become outraged at those we have harmed.
The other path is to resolve our dissonance by looking at our actions without justifying our actions. In that space, clarity and moral courage arise. Our civic and moral duty requires us to resist all inhumane demonizers professing that there is only one true way and that they are the keepers of that way.
In his seminal work, HUMAN ACTION, Mises wrote, A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society.Ӕ
In the spirit of Mises, I offer this: A society that embraces coerced medical choices has chosen a path away from social cooperation and towards the disintegration of society.
About the Author:
Barry Brownstein is professor emeritus of economics and leadership at the University of Baltimore.
He is the author of The Inner-Work of Leadership, and his essays have appeared in publications such as the Foundation for Economic Education and Intellectual Takeout.
To receive Barry’s essays in your inbox, visit MINDSHIFTS
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Tyranny Ahead
By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
Global Research
February 09, 2022
The most dangerous form of tyranny has raised its head simultaneously in Canada and the United States. The exercise of civil liberty is being criminalized. In Canada the city government of Ottawa with the aid of the US FBI and US Department of Homeland Security is criminalizing the truckers peaceful protest as ғa threat to democracy and is identifying organizers and participants for arrests and charges. Simultaneously, the US Department of Homeland Security has declared a domestic terrorism threat in the United States. Truth and all dissent from the official Covid narrative and Russian narrative have been labeled ԓfalse and misleading, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. These alleged threats are ԓamplified by foreign and domestic threat actors. See THIS.
What is the point of a peaceful protest when authorities and media lie and brand it violent and a threat to democracy? What has happened in Canada is that the elite now know who the Canadians are who will stand up for freedom. They have identified themselves, and being peaceful they will be easily taken down.
In the US, free speech is now classified as a threat to democracy. A recent DHS announcement associates all dissent from official narratives with ԓideological beliefs and personal grievances that pose an ongoing threat to the nation. Such ԓthreat actors are seeking to ԓsow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions. The ruling elite are very disturbed that the Covid and Russian narratives are losing public support and is desperate to stop the exposure of these two official lies.
Like Joseph Stalin, the US DHS is creating with its own disinformation a legal framework for prosecuting or confining to indefinite detention any and every person who confronts official lies with truth. Included in the misinformation that sows discord and undermines public trust in government are allegations of electoral fraud. The DHS adds to the massive file of dangerous speech the airline companies’ warnings about 5G cellular technology. The establishment is going to use force to protect its lies.
The DHS has no legislative power to criminalize civil liberty, but is nevertheless doing so. The courts would probably block some or all of the attempted prosecutions. But remember, the George W. Bush regime claimed the right to hold American citizens indefinitely without presenting evidence to a court. The American people made fearful by an alleged “terrorist threat” went along with this and other infringements of our constitutional protections. The day the PATRIOT Act passed marked Americas turn toward tyranny.
In the early days of Nazi Germany before the Nazis had set up their own court system, Nazi prosecutions were often dismissed by German courts. However, as soon as the released person walked out of the court, the Gestapo again arrested him and subjected him to indefinite detention in a concentration camp. This, I fear, will be the fate of all dissenters from the lies ensconced as official narratives throughout the ғfree West.
Notice that no one in the Ottawa government and no one in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation respects freedom. Unless people from all over Canada pour into Ottawa in support of the truckers, thereby creating a cause too large to be suppressed, the truckers will suffer the fate of the ԓTrump insurrectionists. If the Ottawa government survives the truckersԒ protest, it will no longer be possible to hold government accountable. Voting Trudeau out will achieve nothing as his replacement will be the same servant of the ruling elite serving secret agendas. By the end of this year we should know whether accountable government is any longer possible in the free West.Ӕ
Here Is Steve Kirschs List of the real Covid Disinformation Spreaders
President Joe Biden
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky
NIAID Director Anthony Fauci,
US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy
Bill Gates
FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock
COVID-19 Guidelines Chairman Cliff Lane
Tom Shimabukuro (CDC vaccine expert)
John Su (CDC, VAERS expert)
Steven A. Anderson (FDA), the top vaccine safety official at the FDA
Gavin Newsom, Governor of California
Dr. Richard Pan, California State Senator
YouTube
Medium
Nextdoor
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