Brownstone Institute
The WHO, the UN, and the Reality of Human Greed
From the Brownstone Institute
The World Health Organization (WHO) is not plotting to take over the world. We need to remember what it is; an organization of fairly ordinary people, not especially experts in their field, who have landed jobs and benefits that most of us would envy. Not intrinsically nefarious, the organization is just being obedient to those who fund it and who define how those funds must be used. This is necessary if its staff are to keep their jobs.
The WHO is, however, promoting a new treaty being discussed by its governing body, the World Health Assembly (WHA), aimed at centralizing its control over health emergencies. The WHA is also amending the International Health Regulations (IHR), which have force under international law, to give the WHO power to demand lockdowns, mandate vaccines for you and your family, and prevent you from travelling.
‘Health emergencies,’ in this context, are any potential risk that the Director-General determines might cause a significant problem to health. This could be a viral variant somewhere, an outbreak of information that he/she disagrees with, or even changing weather. The current DG has already insisted that all of these are major and growing threats. He even declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern after 5 people in the world died of monkeypox.
The rest of the United Nations (UN), in its current desperation over impending climate Armageddon, is much the same as the WHO. As temperatures reach giddy heights that were useful for growing meat and barley in Medieval Greenland, most of its staff don’t really believe we are on the cusp of extinction. They are just ordinary people paid to say these things, and concerned about job security and promotion if they don’t.
People whose wealth has made them very powerful see great gain in having the WHO and the UN act in this way. These people have also invested heavily in the media and politics to ensure broad support. Staff of the WHO and the UN who fight this from within are hardly going to enhance their career prospects. There is also just enough of a grain of truth in the stories (viruses do kill people and CO2 is rising while the climate is changing) to self-justify the overall harm they know they are doing.
The advantages of organizational capture
In reality, large organizations work for those who fund them. Most of their staff just do what they are told and accept their paychecks. A few courageous ones tend to leave or get pushed, many who lack the courage of their convictions hide behind the organization hoping that others will step up first, and some are a bit clueless and cannot really figure out what is going on. An unfortunate few genuinely feel trapped into submission due to difficult personal circumstances.
When the ethos of funding the WHO and the wider UN was about helping the world’s populations to improve their lot, this is what the staff generally advocated for and worked to implement. Now that they are guided by the very wealthy and by multinational corporations that have investors to please, they advocate and work for the benefit of these new masters with the same enthusiasm. This is why such organizations are so useful to those who wish to expand personal power.
In discussing how a relative few can influence or run these powerful international organizations, it is easy to think it is all unbelievable or conspiracist, if you don’t pause and really apply your brain. How could so few take over the whole world? If someone has as much money as whole countries, but does not have a country to look after, they really do have quite a lot of scope. Applying some of this money strategically to specific institutions that then serve as tools to influence the rest is achievable. Their staff will be grateful for this apparent largesse.
Institutional capture of this type is achievable when we relax rules on taxation and conflict of interest. allowing certain individuals and corporations to gain vast financial leverage and to openly apply it. If we then allow them to form public-private partnerships, their aims can be further subsidized with our money. If we allow our politicians to treat politics as a lifetime career, they will soon realize that rather than pleasing the populace it is more effective to cozy up with these people who can fund their career.
They can do this behind closed doors at resorts like Davos, while the corporate media distracts us by fawning over a teenager on the main stage raging against the machine. The result is inevitable, because the politicians need money and positive media coverage, and the cartels of the wealthy need more amicable laws.
International public health is now a stunning example of such corporate capture. The same entities fund the training colleges, research groups where the students will seek jobs, modelling that will define their priorities, agencies where they will implement their learning, journals they will read, and the mass media that will assure them it is all for the best. The media will also publicly vilify those who step out of line. The climate issue is not terribly different if you dig a bit. Those who comply will have assured careers, and those who don’t will not. Such industries will then shift to policies, and study results, that benefit the sponsors.
Try to think of a rich person who genuinely lost interest in becoming wealthier. There are a few saints in history, but greed is a powerful force that is seldom assuaged by accumulation of the stuff that greed seeks. There is nothing new under the sun, not greed and not those who try to pretend that the fruit of greed is something good.
The opportunities of feudalism
To achieve success in accumulating more power and wealth, you would have to, by definition, take sovereignty and wealth from others. Most people don’t like having this taken away from them. Power in a true democracy is granted by the people, not taken, and only held on the consent of those who granted it. Few ordinary people want to give up their wealth to someone already wealthier than them – they may consider transferring it in taxes in order to gain mutual benefit, but not giving it to another to use as the receiver pleases. To succeed in accumulating power and wealth it is therefore often necessary to take it by force or by deceit. Deceit (lying) is usually the least risky alternative.
Lies and deceit don’t work on everyone, but they work on many. As the enemy of deceit is truth, and the enemy of tyranny is equality (i.e., individual sovereignty or bodily autonomy), people who insist on truth and individual rights must be suppressed by those who wish to accumulate power. The most effective way is to silence them, and to reassure the majority who have fallen for the deceit that these nonconformists are the enemy (remember “Pandemic of the unvaccinated”).
Denigration and scapegoating, using terms such as “anti-X,” “Y-denier,” or “so-called Z,” make the non-complying minority look negative and inferior. The majority can then safely ignore them, and even feel superior in doing so.
If the mass media can be brought on board, it becomes almost impossible for non-compliers to clear their name and get their message across. The largest funders of media are now pharmaceutical companies. They are also large funders of politicians. The largest owners of media are BlackRock and Vanguard (who are coincidentally also the largest shareholders of several pharmaceutical companies). So, imagine how profitable it would be if these investment houses, directly and through lackey organizations such as the World Economic Forum, WHO or the UN, thought of using such assets to provide maximum profit (as, indeed, in an amoral business environment, they are supposed to do).
If a relatively new virus came along in such a scenario, all that would be needed is to apply those media and political assets to sow fear and confine people, then offer them a pharmaceutical way out of their confinement. Such a scheme would virtually print money for their investors. This pharmaceutical escape could even be made to look like a saving grace, rather than a scheme born of, and run through, greed.
Facing reality
A short glance at reality indicates that we do seem to be going through such a scenario. We have got society into a total mess by dropping the basic rules that kept greed at bay, then let greed run rampant and called it “progress.” Fear and impoverishment are symptoms.
The WHO, the UN, and the mass media are tools. Soon other tools will impose Central Bank Digital Currencies and generously provide a Universal Basic Income (an allowance, as is given to a child) to relieve the impoverishment. This programmable currency will be spent on what the financiers decide, and withdrawn on their whim, such as on any sign of disloyalty. It is exactly what slavery is, except a whip, or even the current approach of media sponsorship, will no longer be required to keep people in line.
To fix this, it will be necessary to take the tools away from those who are misusing them, whether the tools are the WHO, UN or whatever. If your really useful hammer is going to be used by an intruder to break your legs, then get rid of the hammer. There are more important things in life than banging in nails.
Put more plainly, as democratic countries we should not be funding organizations that do the bidding of others to impoverish us and erode our democracy. That would be self-destruction. We need to decide whether individual sovereignty is a worthwhile cause. Is it really true that all are born equal and should live equal? Or should we embrace a hierarchical, caste-like, or feudal society? History suggests that those on top will probably be keen on the feudal approach. Therefore, those not on top, and those who hold to beliefs that transcend greed, had better start taking this problem seriously. Ceasing support for institutions that are being used to steal from us is an obvious starting point.
By regaining maturity regarding the reality of human nature, we can start dismantling the prison being built around us. Treat the sponsored media as if they are sponsored. Try to tell the truth as often and as rigorously as we can. When light is shed on a trap, others are less likely to fall into it. When enough decide that what is intrinsically ours must remain ours, those who want to take it will be unable to do so. Then we can address health, climate, and whatever else in a way that benefits humanity, rather than just benefiting a bunch of wealthy self-entitled miscreants.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By 
Who Controls the Administrative State?
President Trump on March 20, 2025, ordered the following: “The Secretary of Education shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.”
That is interesting language: to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” is not the same as closing it. And what is “permitted by law” is precisely what is in dispute.
It is meant to feel like abolition, and the media reported it as such, but it is not even close. This is not Trump’s fault. The supposed authoritarian has his hands tied in many directions, even over agencies he supposedly controls, the actions of which he must ultimately bear responsibility.
The Department of Education is an executive agency, created by Congress in 1979. Trump wants it gone forever. So do his voters. Can he do that? No but can he destaff the place and scatter its functions? No one knows for sure. Who decides? Presumably the highest court, eventually.
How this is decided – whether the president is actually in charge or really just a symbolic figure like the King of Sweden – affects not just this one destructive agency but hundreds more. Indeed, the fate of the whole of freedom and functioning of constitutional republics may depend on the answer.
All burning questions of politics today turn on who or what is in charge of the administrative state. No one knows the answer and this is for a reason. The main functioning of the modern state falls to a beast that does not exist in the Constitution.
The public mind has never had great love for bureaucracies. Consistent with Max Weber’s worry, they have put society in an impenetrable “iron cage” built of bloodless rationalism, needling edicts, corporatist corruption, and never-ending empire-building checked by neither budgetary restraint nor plebiscite.
Today’s full consciousness of the authority and ubiquity of the administrative state is rather new. The term itself is a mouthful and doesn’t come close to describing the breadth and depth of the problem, including its root systems and retail branches. The new awareness is that neither the people nor their elected representatives are really in charge of the regime under which we live, which betrays the whole political promise of the Enlightenment.
This dawning awareness is probably 100 years late. The machinery of what is popularly known as the “deep state” – I’ve argued there are deep, middle, and shallow layers – has been growing in the US since the inception of the civil service in 1883 and thoroughly entrenched over two world wars and countless crises at home and abroad.
The edifice of compulsion and control is indescribably huge. No one can agree precisely on how many agencies there are or how many people work for them, much less how many institutions and individuals work on contract for them, either directly or indirectly. And that is just the public face; the subterranean branch is far more elusive.
The revolt against them all came with the Covid controls, when everyone was surrounded on all sides by forces outside our purview and about which the politicians knew not much at all. Then those same institutional forces appear to be involved in overturning the rule of a very popular politician whom they tried to stop from gaining a second term.
The combination of this series of outrages – what Jefferson in his Declaration called “a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object” – has led to a torrent of awareness. This has translated into political action.
A distinguishing mark of Trump’s second term has been an optically concerted effort, at least initially, to take control of and then curb administrative state power, more so than any executive in living memory. At every step in these efforts, there has been some barrier, even many on all sides.
There are at least 100 legal challenges making their way through courts. District judges are striking down Trump’s ability to fire workers, redirect funding, curb responsibilities, and otherwise change the way they do business.
Even the signature early achievement of DOGE – the shuttering of USAID – has been stopped by a judge with an attempt to reverse it. A judge has even dared tell the Trump administration who it can and cannot hire at USAID.
Not a day goes by when the New York Times does not manufacture some maudlin defense of the put-upon minions of the tax-funded managerial class. In this worldview, the agencies are always right, whereas any elected or appointed person seeking to rein them in or terminate them is attacking the public interest.
After all, as it turns out, legacy media and the administrative state have worked together for at least a century to cobble together what was conventionally called “the news.” Where would the NYT or the whole legacy media otherwise be?
So ferocious has been the pushback against even the paltry successes and often cosmetic reforms of MAGA/MAHA/DOGE that vigilantes have engaged in terrorism against Teslas and their owners. Not even returning astronauts from being “lost in space” has redeemed Elon Musk from the wrath of the ruling class. Hating him and his companies is the “new thing” for NPCs, on a long list that began with masks, shots, supporting Ukraine, and surgical rights for gender dysphoria.
What is really at stake, more so than any issue in American life (and this applies to states around the world) – far more than any ideological battles over left and right, red and blue, or race and class – is the status, power, and security of the administrative state itself and all its works.
We claim to support democracy yet all the while, empires of command-and-control have arisen among us. The victims have only one mechanism available to fight back: the vote. Can that work? We do not yet know. This question will likely be decided by the highest court.
All of which is awkward. It is impossible to get around this US government organizational chart. All but a handful of agencies live under the category of the executive branch. Article 2, Section 1, says: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.”
Does the president control the whole of the executive branch in a meaningful way? One would think so. It’s impossible to understand how it could be otherwise. The chief executive is…the chief executive. He is held responsible for what these agencies do – we certainly blasted away at the Trump administration in the first term for everything that happened under his watch. In that case, and if the buck really does stop at the Oval Office desk, the president must have some modicum of control beyond the ability to tag a marionette to get the best parking spot at the agency.
What is the alternative to presidential oversight and management of the agencies listed in this branch of government? They run themselves? That claim means nothing in practice.
For an agency to be deemed “independent” turns out to mean codependency with the industries regulated, subsidized, penalized, or otherwise impacted by its operations. HUD does housing development, FDA does pharmaceuticals, DOA does farming, DOL does unions, DOE does oil and turbines, DOD does tanks and bombs, FAA does airlines, and so on It goes forever.
That’s what “independence” means in practice: total acquiescence to industrial cartels, trade groups, and behind-the-scenes systems of payola, blackmail, and graft, while the powerless among the people live with the results. This much we have learned and cannot unlearn.
That is precisely the problem that cries out for a solution. The solution of elections seems reasonable only if the people we elected actually have the authority over the thing they seek to reform.
There are criticisms of the idea of executive control of executive agencies, which is really nothing other than the system the Founders established.
First, conceding more power to the president raises fears that he will behave like a dictator, a fear that is legitimate. Partisan supporters of Trump won’t be happy when the precedent is cited to reverse Trump’s political priorities and the agencies turn on red-state voters in revenge.
That problem is solved by dismantling agency power itself, which, interestingly, is mostly what Trump’s executive orders have sought to achieve and which the courts and media have worked to stop.
Second, one worries about the return of the “spoils system,” the supposedly corrupt system by which the president hands out favors to friends in the form of emoluments, a practice the establishment of the civil service was supposed to stop.
In reality, the new system of the early 20th century fixed nothing but only added another layer, a permanent ruling class to participate more fully in a new type of spoils system that operated now under the cloak of science and efficiency.
Honestly, can we really compare the petty thievery of Tammany Hall to the global depredations of USAID?
Third, it is said that presidential control of agencies threatens to erode checks and balances. The obvious response is the organizational chart above. That happened long ago as Congress created and funded agency after agency from the Wilson to the Biden administration, all under executive control.
Congress perhaps wanted the administrative state to be an unannounced and unaccountable fourth branch, but nothing in the founding documents created or imagined such a thing.
If you are worried about being dominated and destroyed by a ravenous beast, the best approach is not to adopt one, feed it to adulthood, train it to attack and eat people, and then unleash it.
The Covid years taught us to fear the power of the agencies and those who control them not just nationally but globally. The question now is two-fold: what can be done about it and how to get from here to there?
Trump’s executive order on the Department of Education illustrates the point precisely. His administration is so uncertain of what it does and can control, even of agencies that are wholly executive agencies, listed clearly under the heading of executive agencies, that it has to dodge and weave practical and legal barriers and land mines, even in its own supposed executive pronouncements, even to urge what might amount to be minor reforms.
Whoever is in charge of such a system, it is clearly not the people.
Author
From the Brownstone Institute
By
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterizations of things I have said that are simply not true. When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been confirmed as Secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Within hours, my news feed was populated with angsty articles hand-wringing about the future of vaccines under Kennedy, whom legacy media and the establishment are certain would confiscate life-saving vaccine programs, raising the spectre of mass waves of illness and death.
In particular, this quote from Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), the only Republican who voted against Kennedy’s confirmation, appeared over and over again:
“I’m a survivor of childhood polio. In my lifetime, I’ve watched vaccines save millions of lives from devastating diseases across America and around the world. I will not condone the re-litigation of proven cures, and neither will millions of Americans who credit their survival and quality of life to scientific miracles.”
Yet, I could not find one piece of mainstream coverage of this quote that mentioned the astonishing fact that 98% of polio cases in 2023, the most recent year for which we have full data, were caused by the polio vaccine.
You read that correctly. In 2023, 12 wild polio cases were recorded (six in Afghanistan, six in Pakistan), with a further 524 circulating vaccine-derived cases, mostly throughout Africa. This trend is in keeping with data from the previous several years.
An important contextualising detail, wouldn’t you think?
The cause of this polio resurgence is that the world’s poor are given the oral polio vaccine (OPV), which contains a weakened virus that can replicate in the gut and spread in feces, causing vaccine-derived outbreaks.
People in rich countries get the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV), which does not contain live virus and therefore does not carry the risk of spreading the very disease it’s vaccinating against.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and vaccine-promoting organisations say that the way out of the problem is to vaccinate harder, as the argument goes that outbreaks only occur in under-vaccinated communities.
This may be well and good, but the total omission of the fact from media coverage that the goalposts have shifted from eradicating wild polio (not yet complete but nearly there, according to the WHO) to eradicating vaccine-derived polio (the main problem these days) underscores that this is why hardly anyone who knows anything trusts the media anymore.
A member of my extended family has polio. It’s nasty and life-altering and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
That’s why I would hope that any vaccines given would be safe – contracting polio from the supposedly preventative vaccine is the worst-case scenario, second only to death.
This is Kennedy’s expressly stated aim.
“When people actually hear what I think about vaccines, which is common sense, which is vaccines should be tested, they should be safe, everyone should have informed consent,” he said at his confirmation press conference.
“People are reacting because they hear things about me that aren’t true, characterisations of things I have said that are simply not true.
“When they hear what I have to say, actually, about vaccines, everybody supports it.”
Grown-ups who support vaccines can walk and chew gum. From the point of view of the public health establishment, the polio vaccine has prevented millions of cases and has nearly eradicated the disease.
At the same time, the world’s poorest are afflicted with polio outbreaks which we can work to prevent, and the safety of all polio vaccine products on the market should be subject to the rigorous standards applied to all other medicines.
Unless you think that poor people don’t matter, in which case the status quo might suit you fine.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Author
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