I have a column today in the Hill on the indictment of former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann by Special Counsel John Durham.
The indictment fills in a great number of gaps on one of the Russian collusion allegations pushed by the Clinton campaign: Alpha bank.
Sussman and others reportedly pushed the implausible claim that the Russian bank served as a conduit for communications between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
The indictment removes the identity of key actors like a “Tech Executive” who used his connections with an Internet company to help the Clinton campaign (and said he was promised a top cyber security position in the widely anticipated Clinton Administration).
Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer wrote an article for Slate that seems to track the account of the indictment and, as such, raises questions over his role as a conduit for the Clinton campaign’s effort to spread the false story.
The indictment discusses how Fusion GPS pushed for the publication of the story, telling Foer that it was “time to hurry” on the story:
“The Investigative Firm Employee’s email stated, ‘time to hurry’ suggesting that Reporter-2 should hurry to publish an article regarding the Russian Bank-1 allegations. In response, Reporter-2 emailed to the Investigative Firm Employee a draft article regarding the Russian Bank-1 allegations, along with the cover message: ‘Here’s the first 2500 words.’”
The indictment states Reporter-2 published the article “on or about the following day, October, 31, 2016.”
That is when Slate published a piece written by Foer headlined, “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?” The story then was pushed by the Clinton campaign.
Foer has not addressed this close coordination with Fusion, including the showing of an advanced copy of his article. He later stated the following in the Atlantic:
“Every article is an exercise in cost-benefit analysis; each act of publication entails a risk of getting it wrong, and sometimes events force journalists to assume greater risk than they would in other circumstances. Before I published the server story, I asked myself a fairly corny question: How would I sleep the next week if Donald Trump were elected president, knowing that I had sat on a potentially important piece of information? In the end, Trump was elected president, and I still slept badly.”
The cost behind this article is getting it wrong but relying too greatly on a biased source without independent research. Foer states that he was more concerned with missing a chance on the story only to have Trump elected. We have been discussing the rise of advocacy journalism and the rejection of objectivity in journalism schools.
In this case, Foer allegedly coordinated with investigators paid by the Clinton campaign to publish a story that had little or no basis.
Even the researchers quoted in the indictment objected that the theory was unsupported and could bring public ridicule. Yet, the campaign continued to push the story and Foer ran it after allegedly sending an advance copy of his article to Fusion.
Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 807; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(2)(J), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)
If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 808; July 24, 1956, ch. 678, § 1, 70 Stat. 623; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(N), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2148.)
(1) advises, counsels, urges, or in any manner causes or attempts to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States; or
(2) distributes or attempts to distribute any written or printed matter which advises, counsels, or urges insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty by any member of the military or naval forces of the United States—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction.
Book Reveals Gen Milley Secretly Sabotaged Trump, Called China, Sparking Talk Of Treason
BY TYLER DURDENTUESDAY, SEP 14, 2021 – 01:15 PM
Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley – who just facilitated the transfer of billions of dollars of US military hardware to America’s enemies during the botched Afghanistan pullout – engaged in a ‘top-secret’ mission to undermine President Trump’s ability to order military strikes or launch nuclear weapons following the Jan.6 Capitol riot, according to a new book by Bob Woodword and the Washington Post‘s Robert Costa.
Milley’s treasonous effort allegedly stemmed out of fears that Trump could ‘go rogue,’ according to CNN.
“You never know what a president’s trigger point is,” said Milley – who just separated an entire family of Afghan civilians from their mortal coils in a haphazard drone strike.
Milley took extraordinary action,and called a secret meeting in his Pentagon office on January 8 to review the process for military action, including launching nuclear weapons. Speaking to senior military officials in charge of the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon’s war room, Milley instructed them not to take orders from anyone unless he was involved. -CNN
“No matter what you are told, you do the procedure. You do the process. And I’m part of that procedure,” said Milley, unconstitutionally, before going around the room and ‘looking each officer in the eye, asking them to verbally confirm they understood.’
“Milley considered it an oath,” wrote the authors.
The amazing thing is how Milley apparently bragged about violating his oath and stepping outside the chain of command to thwart his superior
The book also claims that Trump signed a military order after he lost the 2020 election to pull the US military out of Afghanistan by January 15, 2021 – days before he left the White House. The memo, drafted by ‘two Trump loyalists,’ was reportedly nullified, “but Milley could not forget that Trump had done an end run around his top military advisers,” and “felt no absolute certainty that the military could control or trust Trump and believed it was his job as the senior military officer to think the unthinkable and take any and all necessary precautions” according to the book.
Milley’s actions against a sitting president have sparked outrage and calls for his ouster.
California Republicans Shocked To Discover They’ve ‘Already Voted’ In Recall Election
BY TYLER DURDENMONDAY, SEP 13, 2021 – 12:50 PM
Residents of San Fernando Valley, California were shocked after showing up to vote in the state’s gubernatorial recall election, only to be told by polling station workers that they had already voted.
88-year-old Estelle Bender, a Republican, said she wasn’t the only person who was told incorrectly that they had already voted.
“The man next to me was arguing the same thing,” said Bender, who was given a provisional ballot that she filled out and then “left really angry.”
“I’d still like to know how I voted,” Bender told KTLA.
In response to the reports, the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder said “The voters who experienced this issue were offered and provided a provisional ballot – the failsafe option to ensure no one is turned away from voting. Provisional ballots are regular ballots and once the eligibility of the voter is verified, they are processed and counted.”
This is just the latest in a string of odd happening surrounding the California recall election between Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) and top Republican contender, Larry Elder. As Twitter user @libsoftiktok notes:
“Extreme Cover-Up” – Scientists Who Penned Lancet Letter To Bat Down Lab Theory Have Links To China
BY TYLER DURDENSUNDAY, SEP 12, 2021 – 01:00 PM
An investigation by The Daily Telegraph reveals that all but one scientist who wrote a letter in The Lancet medical journal dismissing even the slightest possibility COVID-19 originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, have ties to Chinese researchers. This stunning revelation suggests that 26 of the 27 scientists listed in the letter might of had a conflict of interest. Peter Daszak fist-bumps fellow Covid-19 origins investigator in Wuhan, China
The letter, published in March of last year, sought to quash any debate among the scientific community or the media over the origins of the virus – until international intelligence findings in 2021 brought the matter back to the spotlight.
The man who orchestrated the article is Dr. Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit which was armed with millions in NIH funding to work with Wuhan scientists to experiment with coronaviruses and ‘gain of function‘ research. Last week, a FOIA email release by The Intercept revealed that EcoHealth Alliance was absolutely engaged in gain-of-function research to make chimeric SARS-based coronaviruses, which they confirmed could infect human cells.
Daszak – a noted friend and colleague of Fauci – was also tapped to head up The Lancet’s UN backed commission to investigate the origins of the coronavirus that caused a global pandemic, according to Summit News.
The British scientist was picked despite the fact that he was intimately associated with the Wuhan lab, had repeatedly dismissed the lab leak hypothesis a ‘dangerous conspiracy theory’, and created a pressure campaign via a letter published by The Lancet to force the scientific community into avoiding looking into the lab as a potential source of the outbreak.
Daszak was also the lead investigator for the World Health Organisation investigation that determined within 3 hours of visiting the Wuhan lab in February 2021 that there was no leak purely based on the word of researchers there.
Daszak was later employed as an ‘expert fact checker’ by Facebook when it was monitoring and removing ‘misinformation’ about the origins of COVID on its platform, much of which was credible scientific research. Facebook has since reversed the policy of banning any posts containing information suggesting COVID-19 was “man-made”.
Besides Daszak, 25 other scientists listed in the letter have connections with either the lab or Chinese researchers. Below, the Daily Mail takes The Telegraph’s investigation and dives deeper into those who wrote the letter. A few examples (truncated, emphasis ours):
Dr Jeremy Farrar
Tropical medicine expert and SAGE adviser & The Wellcome Trust, London
The newspaper also found that three of the signatories were from Britain’s Wellcome Trust, which has also previously funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Signatory Sir Jeremy Farrar, a member of the UK’s Sage and the director of the Trust, has in the past published work with George Gao, the head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, whom he has described as ‘an old friend’.
Dr Gao, who studied at Oxford University, is a former research assistant at the Wellcome Trust. Mr Daszak has claimed Dr Gao supported his nomination to the National Academy of Sciences, according to The Telegraph.
The Chinese scientist also has connections to Shi Zhengli, the scientist who has become known as ‘batwoman‘ on account of her research into bat coronaviruses in Wuhan. Her team discovered a virus in 2013 which is the closest ever previously found to Sars-Cov-2 – the virus that causes Covid-19.
Two other signatories – Dr Josie Golding and Professor Mike Turner – are known to have current or past connections with the Wellcome Trust. Professor Linda Saif
Microbiology expert, The Ohio State University
Microbiology expert Professor Linda Saif, another signatory, spoke at a workshop in Wuhan in May 2017 along with Dr Shi and Dr Gao. The workshop was partly organised by the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
The level of security in Chinese labs was among the topics discussed at the workshop, while Professor Saif’s talk covered animal coronaviruses.
The Global Virome Project
Two more signatories on The Lancet letter are in the leadership team of the Global Virome Project – an organisations whose goal is to detect and identify 99 percent or more of potential zoonotic viral threats.
Mr Daszak is the treasurer of the Global Virome Project, while Dr Gao helped launch it, with EcoHealth Alliance as one of its partners.
The Global Virome Project took over from the Predict project, which discovered more than 1,000 unique viruses in animals and humans.
But according to The Telegraph, the Predict project was also found to have part-funded contentious work by Wuhan researchers on bat coronaviruses, which were altered to see if they could infect humans.
The funds for the research were provided by the EcoHealth Alliance.
Professor John Mackenzie
Tropical infectious diseases expert, Curtin University, Perth, Australia
Tropical infectious disease expert Professor John Mackenzie who works out of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, was another of the signatories.
The investigation has found that he did not disclose that he was still listed as a committee member of the the Scientific Advisory Committee of Centre for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan institute.
Professor Kanta Subbarao
Virology expert, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Professor Kanta Subbarao, another signatory from the University of Melbourne, spoke at a conference on emerging diseases in Wuhan in 2016 which was part-organised by the the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Prof. Subbarao was still chief of the US-based National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAD) Emerging Respiratory Viruses Section.
Five more of the letter’s signatories have all been found by the investigation to have published articles with Professor Ralph Baric.
Professor Prof Ralph Baric
While Prof Baric was omitted from the list of signatories, he was collaborating with Shi Zhengli and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, researching genetically manipulated coronaviruses to see if they could be made to infect humans.
Earlier this year, Republicans in the US argued that the virus was possibly genetically modified, and cite an interview with Baric in which he said it was possible to engineer a virus, ‘without leaving a trace.’
Baric was initially asked to add his name to the letter by Mr Daszak, with emails between the pair recently coming to light ahead of The Lancet letter’s publication, showing that the pair decided to mask their association with the Wuhan institute to avoid looking ‘self-serving’.
Mr Daszak told Prof Baric that he would publish the letter in such a way that it doesn’t ‘link it back to our collaboration so we maximise an independent voice’.
Professor Peter Palese
Microbiology expert, Icahn School of Medicine, New York
A number of those who signed the letter have since changed their stance with some calling for a full inquiry into the origins of Covid-19.
Speaking to the MailOnline in June, Professor Peter Palese – a microbiology expert from Icahn School of Medicine, New York, said: ‘I believe a thorough investigation about the origin of the Covid-19 virus is needed.
‘A lot of disturbing information has surfaced since the Lancet letter I signed, so I want to see answers covering all questions.’
Asked how he was originally approached to sign the letter and what new information had come to light specifically, Professor Palese declined to comment.
Angus Dalgleish, professor of oncology at St Georges, University of London, and Norwegian scientist Birger Sorensen, who worked hard to publish work showing a strong link between the lab and virus outbreak, said this new revelation proves there was an “extreme cover-up.”
Dalgleish and Sorensen said The Telegraph’s investigation “is the first to show beyond reasonable doubt that our entire area of virus research has been contaminated politically. We bear the scars to show it.”
Molecular biologist Prof Richard Ebright, of Rutgers University, another scientist who attempted to uncover the truth behind the origins of the pandemic, said:
“For the June addendum, the Lancet invited the 27 authors of the letter to re-evaluate their competing interests.
“Incredibly, only Daszak appears to have done so. Conflicts of interest were not reported for any of the other 26 signers of the letter – not even those with obviously material undisclosed conflicts such as EcoHealth employees and Predict contractors.
“The standard remedy for fraudulent statements in scientific publications is retraction. It is unclear why retraction was not pursued.”
To sum up, the letter identified anyone as a ‘conspiracy theorist’ for even mentioning the possibility the virus originated from a lab that was penned by scientists who had some sort of conflict of interest with Chinese researchers and or the lab. Could this be evidence of an extensive cover-up by the scientific community of an accidental release of the virus from a lab?
Even America’s top virologist, Anthony Fauci, has had to admit the virus might have come from a lab.
ore than three months before Covid-19 officially ‘broke out’ in Wuhan, China, the Wuhan Institute of Virology mysteriously took its bat and rodent pathogen database offline – suddenly making over 22,000 specimens unavailable.
Shi ‘Bat Lady’ Zhengli, Wuhan Institute of Virology
This is the same China that ordered virus samples destroyed after a ‘rogue lab’ published the genome for Covid-19 (48 hours after the WIV database was further altered), and deleted more than 300 studiesencompassing “hundreds of pages of information”
We’re reminded of this by biologist and writer Matt Ridley, who said in a Sunday Twitter thread:
…The explanation that Shi Zhengli gave, that there had been hacking attempts, makes no sense.
Why would there be before the pandemic?
And sharing the data with a secure source overseas to protect against it being altered would render hacking futile…
…The fact sheet describing the database was not taken down but it was edited, on or before 30 December, to change the key words, and alter some terms from "wildlife" to "bat and rodent".
The database remains inaccessible to the world to this day. We know it contains unpublished samples and sequences of bat viruses but we have never been told what they are. Shockingly, @peterdaszak has excused this lack of transparency, while other virologists have ignored it…
There has been no call from the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences or western governments for this database to be shared with the world, even though it could be vital to understanding how this pandemic started or how the next one may start. Why not?
he fact sheet describing the database was not taken down but it was edited, on or before 30 December, to change the key words, and alter some terms from “wildlife” to “bat and rodent”. Why?The database remains inaccessible to the world to this day. We know it contains unpublished samples and sequences of bat viruses but we have never been told what they are. Shockingly,@peterdaszak has excused this lack of transparency, while other virologists have ignored it…There has been no call from the Royal Society, the US National Academy of Sciences or western governments for this database to be shared with the world, even though it could be vital to understanding how this pandemic started or how the next one may start. Why not?
And as Paul Graham notes, “Perhaps it would be a useful exercise to try to pinpoint, if Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, exactly which day it did so. Perhaps “reconstructing the crime” would help ascertain whether it happened.”
Perhaps it would be a useful exercise to try to pinpoint, if Covid-19 escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, exactly which day it did so. Perhaps "reconstructing the crime" would help ascertain whether it happened. https://t.co/cHhi33slIL
We aren’t going to hold our breath for any answers from the CCP.
Wuhan and PRC authorities have been asked for raw data that might help reconstruct / reverse trace the origins of SARS2. This was their response: https://t.co/5qbLbNdQl9
Former FDA head and current Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb reacted to further revelations this week regarding the funding of dangerous gain of function research by Anthony Fauci, noting that a previously unknown fact has emerged that lab tampering was undertaken on MERS-like coronaviruses, which are even deadlier than their SARS-like relatives.
Gottlieb noted that documents obtained under the FOIA also show that the viruses were made more deadly to humans in several labs around Wuhan, including a level three biocontainment facility, which has lesser security that the level four labs previously mentioned in relation to the outbreak.
“Whether or not this was gain-of-function is a political and legal discussion,” Gottlieb said in an interview with CNBC.
He added, “The bottom line is they were doing research on viruses in that institute that was making those viruses potentially more dangerous to humans. And handling the viruses in ways that could potentiate their release, particularly by infecting transgenic animals that have fully-humanized immune systems.”
“They were doing things in that lab that could have led to circumstances where a virus that was purposefully evolved in ways that it could be more dangerous to humans could have escaped,” Gottlieb further emphasised.
He continued, “What’s revealed by these documents are two interesting details I previously didn’t know. First, there was experimentation being done on MERS-like coronaviruses, not just SARS-like coronaviruses. Second, they affirmed what we suspected about coronavirus research being done at other institutes around Wuhan… at a level three biocontainment facility.
Watch:
"They were doing things in that lab that could have led to circumstances where a virus that was purposefully evolved in ways that it could be more dangerous to humans could have escaped," says @ScottGottliebMD. pic.twitter.com/KxWmL2ITnI
Gottlieb previously noted that “These kinds of lab leaks happen all the time,” further warning that “in China, the last six known outbreaks of SARS-1 have been out of labs, including the last known outbreak, which was a pretty extensive outbreak that China initially wouldn’t disclose that it came out of lab.”
“It was only disclosed finally by some journalists who were able to trace that outbreak back to a laboratory,” Gottlieb explained back in May.
Watch:
Gottlieb also recently revealed that Fauci briefed world health leaders in the spring of 2020 that a lab leak was a possible cause of the COVID outbreak.
Appearing on CBS News, Gottlieb admitted that Fauci told government health advisors that the virus “looked unusual,” and that scientists he was working with “had suspicions” that it was manipulated.
Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb says he was informed by a senior Trump administration official in spring that Dr. Fauci briefed world health leaders in Europe “that this could have been a potential lab leak…so those discussions were going on.” pic.twitter.com/2OlTg8bMof
For almost 18 months now, the former FDA head has been calling for a robust investigation into China’s cover up of the outbreak:https://www.youtube.com/embed/iEixQwaL6rM
It also recently emerged that there was an outbreak of a DIFFERENT virus from another Chinese bio-facility at around the same time as the COVID outbreak.
Reports also indicate that China is planning on opening scores of bio-facilities over the next five years.
The Financial Times reports that “some Chinese officials have warned about poor security at existing facilities. In 2019 Yuan Zhiming, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s BSL-4 lab, wrote a review of the safety deficiencies in China’s laboratories. ‘Several high-level BSLs have insufficient operational funds for routine yet vital processes,’ Yuan wrote, adding that maintenance costs were ‘generally neglected.’”
The report adds that Yuan warned “Due to the limited resources, some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”
As both Senator Rand Paul and former CIA director and secretary of state Mike Pompeo also warned recently, the Wuhan Institute of Virology is still up and running, and there is evidence pointing to its involvement with the Chinese military in bioweapons research.
The accumulating scientific evidence that points to a potential coronavirus lab leak, as well as China’s record on bio-security, and its constant stonewalling, warrants an adequate independent investigation, which hasn’t happened.
FOIA Release: Fauci Funded Construction Of ‘Chimeric Coronaviruses’ In Wuhan
TYLER DURDENTUESDAY, SEP 07, 2021 – 06:54 AM
When Dr. Anthony Fauci confidently screamed at Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) in July – calling him a liar for accusing him of funding so-called “Gain-of-Function” (GoF) research in Wuhan, China to make coronaviruses more transmissible to humans, the argument ultimately fadeddue to Fauci’s unsupported claim that the research didn’t technically fit the definition of GoF.
Now, thanks to materials (here and here) released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by The Interceptagainst the National Institutes of Health (which were unredacted enough to toss Fauci under the bus), we now know that Fauci-funded EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit headed by Peter Daszak, was absolutely engaged in gain-of-function research to make chimeric SARS-based coronaviruses, which they confirmed could infect human cells.
While evidence of this research has been pointed to in published studies, the FOIA release provides a key piece to the puzzle which sheds new light on what was going on.
“This is a roadmap to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right To Know, a group that has been investigating the origins of Covid-19 (via The Intercept).
And as Rutgers University Board of Governors Chemistry Professor Richard H. Ebright notes, “The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.“
In short, Fauci lied to Congress when he denied funding Gain-of-Function (GoF) research.
Ebright summarized The Intercept‘s reporting in a Monday night Twitter thread:
"NEWLY RELEASED documents provide details of US-funded research on..coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology..The Intercept has obtained more than 900 pages of documents detailing..work of..EcoHealth Alliance..at the Chinese lab.."https://t.co/n3OkFAq3kM
“The trove of documents includes two previously unpublished grant proposals that were funded by the NIAID, as well as project updates relating to the EcoHealth Alliance’s research, which has been scrutinized amid increased interest in the origins of the pandemic.”
The materials show that the 2014 and 2019 NIH grants to EcoHealth with subcontracts to WIV funded gain-of-function research as defined in federal policies in effect in 2014-2017 and potential pandemic pathogen enhancement as defined in federal policies in effect in 2017-present.
(This had been evident previously from published research papers that credited the 2014 grant and from the publicly available summary of the 2019 grant. But this now can be stated definitively from progress reports of the 2014 grant and the full proposal of the 2017 grant.)
The materials confirm the grants supported the construction–in Wuhan–of novel chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses that combined a spike gene from one coronavirus with genetic information from another coronavirus, and confirmed the resulting viruses could infect human cells.
The materials reveal that the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses also could infect mice engineered to display human receptors on cells (“humanized mice”).
The materials further reveal for the first time that one of the resulting novel, laboratory-generated SARS-related coronaviruses–one not been previously disclosed publicly–was more pathogenic to humanized mice than the starting virus from which it was constructed…
…and thus not only was reasonably anticipated to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity, but, indeed, was *demonstrated* to exhibit enhanced pathogenicity.
The materials further reveal that the the grants also supported the construction–in Wuhan–of novel chimeric MERS-related coronaviruses that combined spike genes from one MERS-related coronavirus with genetic information from another MERS-related coronavirus.
The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.
* * *
When asked in the replies where to find specific evidence on GoF research, user @SnupSnus replied:
the same page is also numbered page 11- whoever made all those numberings set us up for lot's of confusion, "3.3.c humanised mouse experiments"
there is an easy clue; the acknowledgments section of the paper attached in Fauci's panicked e-mails obtained via FOIA. this is the work "expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone". pic.twitter.com/WbLIGDouRE
Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute, said the documents show that the EcoHealth Alliance has reason to take the lab leak theory seriously. “In this proposal, they actually point out that they know how risky this work is. They keep talking about people potentially getting bitten — and they kept records of everyone who got bitten,” Chan said. “Does EcoHealth have those records? And if not, how can they possibly rule out a research-related accident?” -The Intercept
In response to inquiries from The Intercept, EcoHealth communications manager Robert Kessler replied: “We applied for grants to conduct research. The relevant agencies deemed that to be important research, and thus funded it. So I don’t know that there’s a whole lot to say.”
Stay tuned, things should get really interesting for Fauci and Daszak in the near future.
Chemical biology professor Richard Ebright: "The documents make it clear that assertions by NIH Director, Francis Collins, and NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful." https://t.co/Fw0767epSy
To review the history of EcoHealth, Fauci and Gain-of-Function research which we noted in March:
In 2014, Peter Daszak, president of New York-based nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, received a grant from Dr. Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) to work with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and others to research how bat coronaviruses can ‘evolve and jump into the human population.’
The grant’s initial funding of $666,442 began in June 2014 with an end date of May 2019, and had paid annually to the tune of $3.7 million under the “Understanding The Risk Of Bat Coronavirus Emergence” project. Notably, the Obama administration cut funding for “gain-of-function” research in October, 2014, four months after Daszak’s contract began, while the Wuhan Institute of Virology “had openly participated in gain-of-function research in partnership with U.S. universities and institutions” for years under the leadership of Dr. Shi ‘Batwoman’ Zhengli, according to the Washington Post‘s Josh Rogin.
One of the grants, titled “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence,” outlines an ambitious effort led by EcoHealth Alliance president Peter Daszak to screen thousands of bat samples for novel coronaviruses. The research also involved screening people who work with live animals. The documents contain several critical details about the research in Wuhan, including the fact that key experimental work with humanized mice was conducted at a biosafety level 3 lab at Wuhan University Center for Animal Experiment — and not at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as was previously assumed. The documents raise additional questions about the theory that the pandemic may have begun in a lab accident, an idea that Daszak has called “heinous.”
…
The grant was initially awarded for a five-year period — from 2014 to 2019. Funding was renewed in 2019 but suspended by the Trump administration in April 2020. -The Intercept
After Rogin exposed diplomatic cables last April expressing grave concerns over safety at WIV, he says: “many of the scientists who spoke out to defend the lab were Shi’s research partners and funders, like the head of the global public health nonprofit EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak; their research was tied to hers, and if the Wuhan lab were implicated in the pandemic, they would have to answer a lot of tough questions.”
In short, Daszak – who has insisted the ‘lab escape’ theory is impossible, and that random natural origin via intermediary animal species is the only answer – has a massive conflict of interest.
@PeterDaszak on Gain of Function-experiments, Dec. 2019:
"You can manipulate them in the lab pretty easily"
"… inserting the spike protein into a backbone of another virus"
"[…] insert these other related diseases and get a better vaccine.”
Furthermore, the biggest clue to SARS2’s zoonotic origins are those closest virus relatives in bat caves in Yunnan, China that have been frequently sampled by various labs over the past decade.
If you’re charged with investigating data/records that you were a part of, and you tell the rest of the team they don’t need to audit the records because you already know there’s nothing relevant in there and can close the case? pic.twitter.com/9JDPjEMOtr
Don’t You Ever Forget”: Biden Enrages Gold Star Parents Of Slain Marines
BY TYLER DURDENTUESDAY, AUG 31, 2021 – 10:45 AM
After the Biden administration royally botched the Afghanistan pullout that they had seven months to plan for, the parents of marines slain in last week’s terrorist bombing outside the Kabul airport are livid.
In an obvious attempt to avoid yet another optics nightmare, President Biden made his way on Sunday to Dover Air Force Base, where he spoke privately with the families of the deceased – whose remains were flown in from Afghanistan.
The parents weren’t having it, according to the Washington Post.
Not only did Biden reportedly check his watch multiple times…
Gold Star Father Darin Hoover, whose son Marine Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover was killed in Kabul, alleges that President Biden looked down at his watch when all 13 fallen service members arrived at Dover Air Force Base:
…he repeatedly invoked his own son, Beau, who died six years ago of brain cancer and served in the Delaware National Guard.
As WaPo notes:
Mark Schmitz had told a military officer the night before that he wasn’t much interested in speaking to a president he did not vote for, one whose execution of the Afghan pullout he disdains — and one he now blames for the death of his 20-year-old son Jared.
Schmitz did not want to hear about Beau, he wanted to talk about Jared. Eventually, the parents took out a photo to show to Biden. “I said, ‘Don’t you ever forget that name. Don’t you ever forget that face. Don’t you ever forget the names of the other 12,’ ” Schmitz said. “ ‘And take some time to learn their stories.’ ”
Biden did not seem to like that, Schmitz recalled, and he bristled, offering a blunt response: “I do know their stories.”
“When he just kept talking about his son so much it was just — my interest was lost in that. I was more focused on my own son than what happened with him and his son,” said Schmitz. “I’m not trying to insult the president, but it just didn’t seem that appropriate to spend that much time on his own son.”
“…when you’re the one responsible for ultimately the way things went down, you kind of feel like that person should own it a little bit more. Our son is now gone. Because of a direct decision or game plan — or lack thereof — that he put in place.”
Another Gold Star parent, Shana Chappell, wrote such a scathing indictment of Biden that Facebook and Instagram have reportedly disabled her accounts.
President Joe BidenJoe Biden This msg is for you! I know my face is etched into your brain! I was able to look you straight in the eyes yesterday and have words with you. After i lay my son to rest you will be seeing me again! Remember i am the one who stood 5 inches from your face and was letting you know i would never get to hug my son again, hear his laugh and then you tried to interrupt me and give me your own sob story and i had to tell you “that this isn’t about you so don’t make it about you!!!” You then said you just wanted me to know that you know how i feel and i let you know that you don’t know how i feel and you do not have the right to tell me you know how i feel! U then rolled your fucking eyes in your head like you were annoyed with me and i let you know that the only reason i was talking to you was out of respect for my son and that was the only reason why, i then proceeded to tell you again how you took my son away from me and how i will never get to hug him, kiss him, laugh with him again etc… u turned to walk away and i let you know my sons blood was on your hands and you threw your hand up behind you as you walked away from me like you were saying “ ok whatever!!! You are not the president of the United States of America Biden!!!! Cheating isn’t winning!!!You are no leader of any kind! You are a weak human being and a traitor!!!! You turned your back on my son, on all of our Heros!!! you are leaving the White House one way or another because you do not belong there!MY SONS BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS!!! All 13 of them, their blood is on your hands!!!! If my president Trump was in his rightful seat then my son and the other Heros would still be alive!!!! You will be seeing me again very soon!!! Btw as my son and the rest of our fallen Heros were being taken off the plane yesterday i watched you disrespect us all 5 different times by checking your watch!!! What the fuck was so important that you had to keep looking at your watch????You are nobody special Biden!!! America Hates you!!!!!
$FB has decided to censor the mother of a fallen Marine. The middle class parents of kids that are used as chattel for the elite wars don’t get a voice apparently.
This company is an extension of the security state. Tyranny is here and this act of censorship is proof.
— Ed ☯️ The Obsolete Man…a Free Thinker (@DowdEdward) August 31, 2021
Another Gold Star family – relatives of Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Rylee McCollum, did not want to meet with Biden.
“McCollum’s sisters and father joined his widow, Jiennah McCollum, on the trip to Dover — but when it came time to meet Biden, only Jiennah went in,” according to WaPo.
One of McCollum’s sisters felt Biden’s words were ‘scripted and shallow,’ and a conversation which only lasted a couple of minutes in “total disregard to the loss of our Marine — our brother, son, husband and father.”
“It had to be one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do,” said Schmitz. “You make some calls, here’s the aftereffect. It’s got to be difficult. I’m not saying it was easy at all. But you can’t run up and hug someone as if you had nothing to do with it. It’s not going to work that way when you’re commander in chief.”
Having consulted for a long time, you get a sense of who’s competent and who’s not. Who’s a scammer and who’s trying to do it right – doing it right meaning take care of the client and your people, getting them into a self-sustaining mode, then “get out of Dodge.”
That’s the essence of a sustainable business – one that grows, brings its people along with it, and puts the consultant where she belongs — teacher and advisor – not embedded in the operation.
A good consultant is a trusted advisor. A good company offers mature products that the customer can maintain and adapt to their circumstances. These are core competencies of a sustainable business.
You have to know how to make your own bed. For exmaple, every company needs to reorganize some aspect of its business — if you need McKinsey to tell you how to do it, you’re toast.
When your products require endless support for “customer success”, they are not serving the customer’s needs. Which makes that aspect of their business (and yours) is unsustainable.
Simple mathematics.
When a company is no longer sustainable, put it on your “short” list. Not that you short it immediately — but you will eventually clear your long position and start placing shorts.
It may be instructive for us all on how NOT to do something.
The War in Afghanistan Is What Happens When McKinsey Types Run Everything
An Afghan General blames defense contractors for the collapse of the Afghan army. A government inspector blames the “the pervasiveness of overoptimism” by U.S. generals. It’s all that, and more.
I had a piece ready to go on Lina Khan’s attempt to break up Facebook, but I think it’s more important to talk about the competence problems revealed by the war in Afghanistan. There are monopoly elements involved, but there is a more basic question at work that keeps coming up, whether it’s the Boeing 737 Max, opioids, Covid mismanagement, or anything else of social importance. Do we have the competence to govern ourselves anymore? There’s also a follow-on question. Will this loss spur genuine reform of our McKinsey-ified elites who failed so spectacularly?
Also:
Other People’s Money, or why Wall Street itself is getting ripped off by a monopolist that charges 25 cents to send an email to investors.
Other People’s Money, or why does getting an email of your college transcript cost $9?
In Texas, hospitals are using Covid to try and suppress nurse wages.
What happened when the Centers for Disease Control hired Boston Consulting Group to run their vaccine rollout?
Sony builds an anime monopoly.
This is my first newsletter in three weeks. I was on vacation. I won’t normally have absences like this, but honestly, I was burned out. Don’t worry, I’m refreshed, and I have a good issue queued up for early next week, and some fun ideas going forward.
And now…
War Machine, starring Brad PItt.
“The Pervasiveness of Over-Optimism”
In 2017, Netflix put out a satirical movie on the conflict in Afghanistan. It was titled War Machine, and it starred Brad Pitt as an exuberant and deluded U.S. General named Glen McMahon. A fitness fanatic nicknamed ‘the Glanimal’ by his crew of adoring frathouse henchmen, McMahon is modeled on the real-life military leader Stanley McChrystal, who ran the surge in Afghanistan before being fired for saying disparaging things about Obama administration officials (including then VP Biden) on the record to Rolling Stone magazine.
In War Machine, McMahan comes to Afghanistan with a spirited can do attitude and a frat house of hard-partying yes-men, after having ‘kicked Al Qaeda in the sack’ running special operations in Iraq. He is obsessed with inspirational speeches and weird bureaucratic box-ticking, under the amorphous concept of leadership. This kind of leadership, though, isn’t actually working with wisdom and foresight, but is more like management consulting. Prior to arriving in Afghanistan, for instance, McMahan created a system, with the acronym SNORPP to coordinate military assets. At night, he cozies down to read books on management excellence, the kind that Harvard Business Review publishes as sort of Chicken Soup for the Executive’s Soul. He is also the author of a fictional book with the amazing title, “One Leg At a Time: Just Like Everybody Else.”
And yet his mission is unwinnable, which everyone seems to understand except him and his small team. McMahan constantly makes awkward speeches that make no sense, with the tone used by untrusted executives at corporate retreats. “We are here to build, to protect, to support the civilian population,” he told his troops. “To that end, we must avoid killing it at all costs. We cannot help them and kill them at the same time, it just ain’t humanly possible.” His character reflects what the actual government watchdog charged with overseeing the war in Afghanistan called one of the central problems with the U.S. effort, “the pervasiveness of over-optimism:”
If McMahan himself is a naive fool, he is surrounded by cynical bureaucratic opponents. As he seeks support for his new strategy of putting troops in Taliban-held provinces, he is gently ignored by the President of Afghanistan, who is a drug-addicted hypochondriac, and mocked by State Department and national security apparatchiks, who are striving cynics urging McMahon to just falsify numbers to make the war look a little better and not embarrass President Obama. Troops on the ground are demoralized and confused. No one actually believes in the mission, but dammit, McMahon is gonna get it done, whatever ‘it’ is. When McMahon tries to give an inspirational speech to ordinary Afghanis in Taliban-controlled territory about how the U.S. is going to bring them jobs and schools, one responds by saying he like jobs and schools, but please go away so the Taliban won’t retaliate. “The longer you are here the worse for us. Please go.”
It’s a hilarious, and extraordinarily dark movie. It also rang true, because it was based on the work of no-bullshit journalist Michael Hastings, who was perhaps the most honest reporter about the military establishment. And, as life is true to fiction, McChrystal, the general who Hastings profiled in Rolling Stone with an embarrassing story that led to his resignation, is now a management consultant (and board member of defense contractors). He runs inspirational ‘leadership training’ at the McChrystal Group, which is McKinsey with military branding.
In fact, McChrystal and much of our military leadership is tight with consultants like McKinsey, and that whole diseased culture from Harvard Business School of pervasive over-optimism and finance-venture capital monopoly bro-a-thons. McKinsey itself had involvement in Afghanistan, with at least one $18.6 million contract to help the Defense Department define its “strategic focus,” though government watchdogs found that the “only output [they] could find” was a 50-page report about strategic economic development potential in Herat, a province in western Afghanistan.” It turns out that ‘strategic focus’ means an $18.6 million PowerPoint. (There was reporting on this contract because Pete Buttigieg worked on it as a junior analyst at McKinsey, and he has failed upward to run the Transportation Department.)
I bring War Machine up because of today’s debate over Afghanistan. While there is a lot of back and forth about whether intelligence agencies knew that the Taliban would take over, or what would happen if we left, or whether the withdrawal could be done more competently, all you had to do to know that this war was a shitshow based on deception and idiocy at all levels was to turn on Netflix and watch this movie. Or you could read any number of inspector general reports, leaked documents, articles, talk to any number of veterans, or use common sense, which, polling showed, most Americans did. (Marine vet Lucas Kunce gives a nice rundown of the problem in this interview). I mean, it’s not like a major international media outlet printed a multi-part expose, which became a handy book, detailing the fact that everyone running the show knew it was an unwinnable mess nearly a decade ago. Oh, wait
In other words, the war in Afghanistan is like seeing management consultants come to your badly managed software company where everyone knows the problem is the boss’s indecisiveness and cowardice, except it’s violent and people die.
I mean, U.S. military leaders, like bad consultants or executives, lied about Afghanistan to the point it was routine. Here are just a few quotes from generals and DOD spokesmen over the years on the strength of the Afghan military, which collapsed almost instantly after the U.S. left.
In 2011, General David Petraeus stated, “Investments in leader development, literacy, marksmanship and institutions have yielded significant dividends. In fact, in the hard fighting west of Kandahar in late 2010, Afghan forces comprised some 60% of the overall force and they fought with skill and courage.”
In 2015, General John Campbell said that the the Afghan Army had “proven themselves to be increasingly capable,” that they had “grown and matured in less than a decade into a modern, professional force,” and, further, that they had “proven that they can and will take the tactical fight from here.”
In 2017, General John Nicholson stated that Afghan security forces had “prevailed in combat against an externally enabled enemy,” and that the army’s “ability to face simultaneity and complexity on the battlefield signals growth in capability.”
On July 11, 2021, Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said that the Afghan army has “much more capacity than they’ve ever had before, much more capability,” and asserted, “they know how to defend their country.”
Basically, look at this photo below, imagine them in camouflage, and that’s the U.S. military leadership.
The Withdrawal Anger Is *Embarrassment*
There are significant recriminations over the embarrassing media stories on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, tremendous anger that political leaders like Trump and Biden made significant mistakes in how they withdrew U.S. forces. Many of these critiques, coming from Europeans as much as American elites, are in bad faith.
Nonetheless, rather than weighing in on the merits of these arguments, I think it’s better to look at how the establishment observed a stark portrait of Afghanistan before the withdrawal, to show that the current critiques have nothing to do with operational choices.
To that end, let’s look at a review of War Machine in Foreign Policy magazine, written by one of McChrystal’s aides, Whitney Kassel, who now works at private intelligence firm The Arkin Group. In this review, Kassel noted the movie made her so upset that she started cursing, because, while there were of course mistakes, the film was totally unfair to McChrystal and demeaned the entire mission of building a safe Afghanistan. Kassel, like most of these elites, didn’t get the joke, because she is the joke.
I see the discourse on the withdrawal as a super-sized version of this Kassel’s review. The ‘Blob,’ that loose network of diplomats, ex-diplomats, generals, lobbyists, defense contractors, fancy lawyers, famous journalists, and insiders see the obvious desire for withdrawal as similar to how Kassel saw the truth-telling of Hastings and the Netflix movie. They are angry and embarrassed that they can’t hide their failures anymore. Their entire sense of self was bound up in the idea of an illusion of an unbeatable all-powerful America, even when they, like General Glen “the Glanimal” McMahon were the only ones who believed it.
And their embarrassment covers up something even more dangerous. None of these tens of thousands of Ivy league encrusted PR savvy highly credentialed prestigious people actually know how to do anything useful. They can write books on leadership, or do powerpoints, or leak stories, but the hard logistics of actually using resources to achieve something important are foreign to them, masked by unlimited budgets and public relations. It is, as someone told me in 2019 about the consumer goods giant Proctor and Gamble, where “very few white-collar workers at P&G really did anything” except take credit for the work of others.
Defense Monopolies and the Afghan Army
It’s fun to act like it was always thus, that this is how empires behave. But in fact, that’s not true. The current Blob is relatively new. And believe it or not, Western forces used to be able to actually win wars.
Going back to the last significant victory, the allies won World War II in large part for two reasons. First, the Soviet Union sacrificed 27 million people defeating the Nazis, and second, the U.S. military, government, labor, and business leaders were exceptionally good at logistics. The U.S. military had at least a dozen suppliers for each major weapons system, as well as the ability to produce its own weaponry, the government had exceptional insight into the U.S. economy, and New Dealers had destroyed the power of the Andrew Mellon and J.P. Morgan style short-term oriented financiers and monopolists who had controlled the industrial sinews of the country.
Today, this short-termism has taken over everything, including the military, which is now dominated by McKinsey-ified glory hounds without wisdom and defense contractors with market power. And this leadership class hasn’t just eroded our strategic capacity, but the very ability to conduct operations. Two days ago, Afghan General Sami Sadat published a piece in the New York Times describing why his army fell apart so quickly. He went through several important political reasons, but there was an interesting subtext about the operational capacity of a military that is so dependent on contractors for sustainment and repairs. In particular, these lines stuck out.
Contractors maintained our bombers and our attack and transport aircraft throughout the war. By July, most of the 17,000 support contractors had left. A technical issue now meant that aircraft — a Black Hawk helicopter, a C-130 transport, a surveillance drone — would be grounded.
The contractors also took proprietary software and weapons systems with them. They physically removed our helicopter missile-defense system. Access to the software that we relied on to track our vehicles, weapons and personnel also disappeared.
It’s just remarkable that contractors removed software and weapons systems from the Afghan army as they left. Remember, U.S. generals constantly talked about the strength of the Afghan forces, but analysts knew that its air force – on which it depended – would fall apart without contractors. The generals probably hadn’t really thought about the logistical problems of what dependence on contracting means. It’s just stunning that NATO forces would be trying to stand up an independent Afghan army, even as NATO contractors disarmed that army due to contracting arrangements.
I suspect the problem isn’t simply related to Afghanistan, because these kinds of problems are not isolated to the Afghan army. Last month, I noted that American soldiers are constantly complaining that bad contracting terms prevent them from fixing and using their own equipment, just as Apple stops consumers from repairing or tinkering with their iPhones. In 2019, Marine Elle Ekman noted that these problems are pervasive in the U.S. military.
Besides the broken generator in South Korea, I remembered working at a maintenance unit in Okinawa, Japan, watching as engines were packed up and shipped back to contractors in the United States for repairs because “that’s what the contract says.” The process took months.
With every engine sent back, Marines lost the opportunity to practice the skills they might need one day on the battlefield, where contractor support is inordinately expensive, unreliable or nonexistent…
While a broken generator or tactical vehicle may seem like small issues, the implications are much larger when a combat ship or a fighter jet needs to be fixed. What happens when those systems break somewhere with limited communications or transportation? Will the Department of Defense get stuck in the mud because of a warranty?
No one is invading the U.S., so these problems aren’t immediately obvious to most of us. Yet, with the collapse of the Afghan army, now we see an example of what happens when a military is too dependent on contractors, and that support system is removed (which adversaries could do to the U.S. military if they pursue certain strategies.) It turns out that the cost of not being able to repair your own equipment is losing wars.
More fundamentally, the people who are in charge of the governing institutions in our society are simply divorced from the underlying logistics of what makes them work. Everything, from the Boeing 737 Max to the opioid epidemic to the waste inside most big corporations to war, has been McKinsey-ified. And it’s all covered up with moral outrage, partisanship and culture warring, public relations, and management wisdom bullshit.
I’ll finish on a note of optimism. This loss in Afghanistan, while hugely embarrassing, could serve as a wake-up call. After the loss in Vietnam, a group of military officers, led by John Boyd, one of the greatest American military strategists in U.S. history, created a military reform movement, to change the way the Pentagon developed and used weapons, and they made enormous progress in restructuring key parts of the defense establishment. (One of the members of Boyd’s “Fighter Mafia,” Pierre Sprey, the man responsible for the remarkable A-10 Warthog, just passed away.) Similarly, the British, after losing the American Revolution, radically reformed their corrupt and antiquated systems of governance. Losing wars is a great spur to reform. It means that we as a society get to look at ourselves honestly. We may choose not to act on what we see, but we do in fact have the opportunity. And that’s not nothing.
UPDATE: I’d like to apologize to Whitney Kessel. She is no longer at the Arkin Group. After a stint at Palantir, she ended up at Morgan Stanley, where she is now the Head of Cyber Event Management for North America, which is not at all a highly paid fake job full of make work.
Like a lot of monopolists, Broadridge has market power despite charging high prices for a commodity service because its customers aren’t spending their own money, they are spending Other People’s Money. Stock brokers are the ‘customers,’ but they get to charge funds and firms for the cost, and get a kickback from Broadridge in the process. It’s great to buy something with someone else’s money, there’s no reason to hold prices down. And if you get a share of what you spend, you have an incentive to drive prices higher. Who cares how much the stuff you’re buying costs? You’re spending Other People’s Money!
Other People’s Money, or why does getting your college transcript cost $9? : A BIG reader sent me a note on how expensive it is to get emailed a PDF of a transcript from a university. It costs more than $9 apiece. Why? It turns out a firm called Parchment runs this service for a lot of universities, and Parchment is a roll-up of similar firms by private equity of similar firms. This is another example of Other People’s Money – the universities are the ‘customers,’ but the people who pay are the alumni and other stakeholders that need transcripts. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are kickbacks here as well.
Instead of the “targeted program management support” promised in the contract, consultants often performed rudimentary services, such as taking notes during calls between states and the CDC, and then organizing that information in PowerPoint slides for presentations, agency officials said.
This violates my recommendation to Biden, which was to keep McKinsey away from government.
UK Competition Regulator to Break Up Facebook?Ars Technica: The Competition and Markets Authority in the UK is thinking of forcing Facebook to spin off its Giphy acquisition. That’s a break-up!
Covid is No Reason to Suppress Nurse Wages: It’s hard to hire nurses these days without offering more pay, so hospitals are doing what monopolists like to do. Price-fix! They are trying to get the government to help them collude against workers. “On behalf of hospitals in the state of Texas, having an organized, consistent approach that doesn’t pit hospitals against each other in looking for staffing is what we need,” said Marc Boom, chair of the Texas Hospital Association. In other words, hospital execs want to work together to make sure no nurses get to shop their labor skills around. That would be a straight-up antitrust violation, which is why they are trying to get government approval before doing it.
Thanks for reading. Send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or comments by clicking on the title of this newsletter. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues of BIG, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation and democracy. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
cheers,
Matt Stoller
P.S. Don’t worry, I didn’t forget about Sony’s anime monopoly.
Hey Matt,
Long time reader here, I wanted to bring your attention to a sorta niche monopoly matter. Sony just recently acquired anime streaming service Crunchyroll for 1.2 billion dollars, they also acquired Funimation, another popular U.S. anime distributor, a few years ago. Both Crunchyroll and Funimation are two of the largest, and most accessible, streaming sites for anime. By purchasing Crunchyroll, Sony is essentially building an anime monopoly, something even the DOJ was afraid of despite approving the merger. Anime has grown dramatically in popularity over the past decade or so and Sony has kept pace constantly building and/or acquiring various distribution channels in Japan and around the world. Sony argues the acquisition will help them compete against streaming giants Netflix and Amazon (which are also trying to crack into the anime market), but you can color me skeptical.
Sony has said they’ll consolidate the libraries into one service, but it remains to be seen what that’ll look like. However, both Funimation and Crunchyroll offer a ton of free content, and my hunch is that it was because both services were competing against each other. However, if Sony is going head-to-head with Netflix and Amazon I imagine they’ll cut back the free content and bring prices more in line with those services. Furthermore, with distribution becoming more consolidated, it’ll likely put translators, animators, and studios in a worse bargaining position, which is saying a lot since many of them barely earnenough to survive.
I’ll admit, I’m not an industry insider, I’m just a guy who likes anime and hates monopolies, but I figured the news around the acquisition would catch your attention. If you want to explore this further I’d highly recommend connecting with some folks over at Anime News Network, which has been following the industry since the late 90s.
BY TYLER DURDENTUESDAY, AUG 31, 2021 – 10:45 AM
Econophysics2020 
