North Carolina’s… state budget contains a provision that gives extraordinary investigative powers to a partisan oversight committee co-chaired by Senate Leader Phil Berger (R) and House Speaker Tim Moore (R).

The Joint Legislative Committee on Government Operations — or Gov Ops for short — is empowered to seize “any document or system of record” from anyone who works in or with state and local government during its investigations. The rule applies to contractors, subcontractors, and any other non-state entity…

Gov Ops staff will be authorized to enter “any building or facility” owned or leased by a state or non-state entity without a judicial warrant. This includes the private residences of subcontractors and contractors who run businesses out of their homes…

Alarmingly, public employees under investigation will be required to keep all communication and requests “confidential.” They cannot alert their supervisor of the investigation nor consult with legal counsel.

No example of a barter economy… has ever been described… all available ethnography suggests that there has never been such a thing.

“What is most striking to me, and most discouraging, is that [Americans] are so apathetic while being neither blind nor unconscious. They know and deplore the oppression [and] the terrible poverty… They witness the rise, more ominous every day, of racism and reactionary attitudes—the birth of a kind of fascism. They know that their country is responsible for the world’s future. But they themselves don’t feel responsible for anything, because they don’t think they can do anything in this world… In America, the individual is nothing. He is made into an abstract object of worship; by persuading him of his individual value, one stifles the awakening of a collective spirit in him. But reduced to himself in this way, he is robbed of any concrete power. Without collective hope or personal audacity, what can the individual do? Submit or, if by some rare chance this submission is too odious, leave the country.”

• Simone de Beauvoir, America Day by Day

“The largest single-employer strike in American history now appears inevitable,” said union President Sean O’Brien