JD Vance and the hidden financial power brokers guiding global politics.
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Quite young to be selected as a vice presidential candidate, JD Vance is just 39 years old. After graduating from Middletown (Ohio) High School, Vance joined the U.S. Marine Corps, where he served from 2003 to 2007 as a combat correspondent and reflecting upon his service has said, “he was lucky to escape any real fighting.”. He then graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State in 2009, subsequently attended Yale Law school, where he served as a staff member on The Yale Law Journal. His role was focused on citation checks. There are no articles on record which he is credited with writing for the publication which suggests that while he contributed to the journal, he did not hold a prominent editorial position that would typically involve writing articles or leading editorial decisions.
JD Vance wrote a book, “Hillbilly Elegy,” published in 2016 characterizing himself as an Appalachian hillbilly from the Rust Belt which rapidly became a New York Times best seller. One reviewer said that she enjoyed the book but felt that his real life does not reflect the values he espoused in the book. Other reviewers noted that the volume seemed to be a professional collaboration with a competent ghostwriter.
By Michael Kranish, writing for the Washington Post
By Michael Kranish, writing for the Washington Post
JACKSON, Ky. — Deep in a quiet mountain holler called Panbowl Branch, outside a decaying town of 2,000 in one of America’s poorest counties, sits a ramshackle red brick home. The roof is roughly patched with torn tarps, the front porch is heaped with discarded goods and the yard is littered with cars and boats in disrepair.
Three decades ago, this home sheltered a young JD Vance as he fled a tumultuous life in Ohio to spend summers with his grandparents — a period he cited as pivotal to his success in his speech last week accepting the vice-presidential nomination. Today, the battered house sits amid a community that has suffered deeper decline since Vance described the region’s ruin eight years ago in “Hillbilly Elegy,” his bestseller, which was turned into a 2020 film.
Vance’s experience with a dysfunctional extended Appalachian family here and in Ohio formed the backbone of the book, as he recounted how generations of abuse and violence had shaped him and his relatives. It includes tales of his uncle nearly killing a man by slicing him with an electric saw and his grandmother soaking his grandfather with gasoline and lighting him on fire.
Those dramatic stories primarily involve Vance’s close relatives — who are either deceased or did not respond to requests for comment. The incidents aren’t documented in court records in a community often loath to involve authorities in family disputes, but numerous friends and neighbors who are close to Vance’s family said they don’t doubt that the stories are broadly true.
JD Vance found positions with a number of venture capital firms. establishing relationships with Silicon valley heavyweights who later became financial contributors to aid his political aspirations. Those firms were run by members of the British Pilgrims Society (see the previous BigMouth post on JD Vance’s wife, Usha) and people closely affiliated with the Battelle Memorial Institute (Columbus, Ohio).
Hollywood then made a film about JD Vance, “Hillbilly Elegy,” a 2020 American drama directed by Ron Howard, adapted from a screenplay by Vanessa Taylor, based on the 2016 memoir of the same title.
JD Vance was then elected to the US Senate, representing Ohio in 2022, receiving significant support from Silicon Valley, The City of London, and British Pilgrims Society financiers.
As a freshman senator with no experience, he was quickly placed on six important Senate Committees.
According to Wikipedia Vance has promoted strongly conservative social policies, opposing abortion, same-sex marriage, and gun control, and has proposed banning transgender healthcare for minors. He differs from mainstream Republican views on market interventions, taxes, the minimum wage, unionization, tariffs, and antitrust policy, while opposing American military aid to Ukraine. BigMouth note: Notice the difference between social policy and fiscal policy, a record which may reflect the preferences of those who helped put him in office.
JD Vance’s investment decisions and cleverly obscure financial disclosures clearly reflect the assistance of top tier corporate handlers. See Senator J.D. Vance. (Nov. 24, 2021).
How deeply could money and the personal connections that facilitate it influence JD Vance’s politics? Some of his more memorable quotes are telling -- “Mr Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office.” (April 2016, New York Times), Trump is “America’s Hitler” (February 2016, private message), Trump is “cultural heroin” and someone “leading the white working class to a very dark place.” (from his book, “Hillbilly Elegy.”) But sometime during his primary run for an Ohio Senate seat in 2021, Vance transformed into a Make America Great Again true believer, winning Trump’s support, the Senate seat and now the vice-presidential nomination. One might well ask how that could happen. BigMouth notes that such a radical transition is not comparable to Vance’s conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism which is something like transitioning from being a nominal Christian to being a slightly less nominal Christian. Yes he justified it with an appreciation of catholic philosophy and meeting influential catholics, but he is not exactly Mother Theresa, or is he? Please see the previous BigMouth post regarding Vance’s charming wife Usha for more on this question.
Battelle Memorial Institute
Battelle Memorial Institute (Battelle) is a private nonprofit applied science and technology development company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio (less than 100 miles from Vance’s hometown of middletown). Opened in 1929, Batelle has evolved into an top tier international science and technology enterprise that explores emerging areas of science, develops and commercializes technology, and manages laboratories for customers. It has 3,200 employees.
As a charitable trust organized as a nonprofit corporation under the laws of the State of Ohio, Batelle is exempt from taxation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Apart from its own endeavors, as of 2022, Batelle managed some 29,500 employees at the following strategically important national laboratories and Government facilities:
Brookhaven National Laboratory (through Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC – a collaboration between Battelle and Stony Brook University)
Idaho National Laboratory (through the Battelle Energy Alliance – a collaboration between Battelle, BWX Technologies, Inc., Washington Group nternational, Electric Power Research Institute and an alliance of universities)
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (through Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC – a collaboration between Battelle, BWX Technologies, Inc., Washington Group International, the University of California, Bechtel National, and The Texas A&M University System)
Los Alamos National Laboratory (through Triad National Security, LLC – a collaboration between Battelle, the University of California, and The Texas A&M University System)
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (in partnership with MRIGlobal as part of the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC)
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (through UT-Battelle, LLC – a collaboration between Battelle and the University of Tennessee)
Savannah River National Laboratory (through the Battelle Savannah River Alliance)
On behalf of the Department of Homeland Security:
National Science Foundation projects
In March 2016, Battelle was selected to manage the completion of the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) for the National Science Foundation.
Battelle Center for Science and Technology Policy
Battelle provides funds for a public policy research center at the John Glenn College of Public Affairs of Ohio State University to focus on scholarly questions associated with science and technology policy. The Battelle Center for Science and Technology Policy at Ohio State opened in July 2011.
Recent Batelle projects of note
Digital voting - Battelle was the contractor for a computer system on which the Voter News Service relied for tallying exit polling data in the November 2002 U.S. Congressional and Senate elections; the system failed and results were not reported until ten months after the election. The failure led to the disbanding of the VNS and the formation of its replacement, the National Election Pool.
Covid rapid test - In April 2020, Battelle Memorial Institute partnered with Ohio State University to distribute rapid tests for Covid-19, with results in less than 5 hours.
N95 respirator decontamination - On March 29, 2020, Battelle announced that it had received an Emergency Use Authorization to deploy a system to decontaminate N95 respirators for healthcare providers. Battelle received a $400 million contract from the Defense Logistics Agency for the project, known as the Critical Care Decontamination System (CCDS). Following the conclusion of the program in May 2021, Battelle invoiced $155 million, with 5 million masks decontaminated at an average cost of $31 per mask.
The influence of Batelle on the state of Ohio, national politics, Ohio State University and the US government should not be underestimated. As a graduate of Middletown (Ohio) High School and a Marine veteran with the lowest non-comissioned officer rank of corporal, it is difficult to imagine that JD Vance could have found his way through sheer determination and effort to progressing from low level marine media relations duties, to New York Times bestselling author, from country hillbilly to wealthy venture capitalist, from assistant staff at the Yale Law journal (with not a single published article) to the US Senate and now to candidate for the Vice Presidency – all in the blink of an eye.
It is not our intention to participate in the personal attack/smear strategies of contemporary politics here, but rather to reveal the degree to which outside forces govern us, forces which have replaced the integrity of our elected representatives with inviolable indebtedness of such great proportion that even the most sincere and apparently trustworthy can make decisions that in effect are wholly against the public interest.
The election by media crafted personal popularity and by cult/party/religion/race/gender membership status is not the subject here. BigMouth is attempting to shed light on the potential “ties that bind” our politicians and would be representatives, ties that increasingly permeate the political sphere as the wealth gap between those who govern or wield influence behind the scenes and the rest of us exponentially increases with each passing year. For a multibillionaire to deliver a million dollars to a future politician today is as easy as it was for then world’s wealthiest man, John D. Rockefellar, to give away dimes during the Great Depression.
For those rarer than hen’s teeth politicians who are free from financial influence or demonstrate an unbending moral fortitude, the result is a long courtship with threats of the kind Donald Trump and his associates have unrelentingly faced during the last decade. And make no mistake about it, assassination has an entire chapter in the political playbook (for the original primer on the subject see The New Clinton Body Count: Suspicious Political Deaths (Conspiracy Deaths) with potential addendum — “the missing part of an ear”.