Saturday, April 30, 2022

Michigan Investigated Hundreds Of Doctors, Nurses Over COVID-Related Complaints

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Michigan Investigated Hundreds Of Doctors, Nurses Over COVID-Related Complaints

Authored by Alice Giordano via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Hundreds of nurses and doctors, including a chief medical examiner, have been investigated by the state of Michigan on COVID-related allegations ranging from videotaping a wedding where some guests weren’t wearing masks to telling trick-or-treaters not to get the vaccine.

A nurse prepares a COVID-19 vaccine in Southfield, Mich., on Sept. 29, 2021. (Emily Elconin/Reuters)

Authorities dismissed many of the complaints. Dozens are still pending, with a number referred for disciplinary action. Some have been referred to the Michigan Attorney General’s office for criminal prosecution.

An allergy and asthma specialist is the subject of one of the referrals sent to the attorney general. The complaint accuses the doctor of prescribing “a lethal dosage” of ivermectin.

Copies of the complaints, which total more than 500, were provided exclusively to the Epoch Times. The Pacific Justice Institute obtained the records through a FOIA request. The institute represents some of the accused nurses and doctors.

The Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs received and investigated the complaints. Those they have investigated have either been dismissed or referred to its enforcement division for disciplinary action or the AG’s office. Many are listed as still being listed “under board review.” The list provided to the institute includes complaints as recent as February 24, 2022.

One of the nurses the Pacific Justice Institute represents is Holly Austin, a college nursing professor who holds a doctorate in nursing.

She faced the revocation of her license by the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs for speaking at a public school board meeting in December of 2021 as a parent against plans to reinstitute a mask mandate at her children’s school.

Dave Peters, a staff attorney with Pacific Justice Institute, told The Epoch Times he was shocked when the state continued its investigation into Austin even after he submitted a 100-page response to the state’s allegations that she was spreading misinformation.

I remember not long ago that such actions by government authorities or anybody else would have had the entire journalist community howling about suppression and chilling free speech, ” said Peters, who also holds a master’s degree in medicine.

According to documents Peters provided to The Epoch Times, it took the state more than a year to close the investigation against Austin. The state concluded in a March 3, 2022 letter “that following a thorough review and investigation,” it had “determined a violation of the Public Health Code cannot be substantiated.”

More than 200 doctors and nurses found themselves under investigation just for expressing concerns about the COVID vaccine or for not wearing or promoting the wearing of masks. One doctor was reported for shaking hands with someone who wasn’t wearing a mask; another was the subject of a complaint for claiming he had a bad reaction to the COVID vaccine.

In February, Ljubisa Dragovic, Chief Medical Examiner for Oakland County, found himself under investigation by the state for performing autopsies without wearing a mask.

“When you are working in an environment with deceased individuals there is no active sneezing or coughing on the part of the cadavers. It was nonsense,” Dragovic told The Epoch Times, “you can’t get or give COVID to a dead person.” Dragovic said he couldn’t wear a mask because his glasses would fog up, and he couldn’t see what he was doing.

“The last thing you want to be is blinded while using a sharp scapula,” he said.

Dragovic, who is fully vaccinated and believes in wearing masks around live patients and co-workers, said he spent about two hours answering questions from investigators for the Michigan Medical Licensing Board.

According to Dragovic, another medical examiner filed the complaint. The person was “totally crazed with fear over COVID,” Dragovic said. That doctor was hired at the height of the pandemic to perform autopsies but refused to do so out of fear he would contract COVID-19, even locking himself in his office at times. He eventually quit, according to Dragovic.

The complainant only filed the allegation a year later after Dragovic refused to give the doctor a job reference.

Peters says the case is an example of how the state investigations had nothing to do with keeping the public safe.

This was used to kill free speech to intimidate people into submission,” he said, “period.”

Dozens of the complaints were againt doctors who issued mask waivers to children. Three nurses were accused of falsifying proof of vaccines, including one who allegedly did so for a friend for a cruise.

The licensing board referred complaints against two physicians and two chiropractors to the Michigan Attorney General’s Office for “not following COVID-19 safety precautions.”

The board investigated several physicians and nurses for either promoting or prescribing ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine.

The complaint against Austin cites an email she wrote to the Brighton School Board that included a compilation of research she had conducted on the harm of wearing masks. She cited over 200 studies.

“I implore you to be informed of the current literature regarding masks and their ineffectiveness to decrease the transmission of COVID-19, the potential and inherent harms of masks on our pediatric population, and the short term and long term sequelae to our youth with continued mask mandates,” Austin wrote.

Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs did not respond to inquiries from The Epoch Times about the investigations.

Tyler Durden Sat, 04/30/2022 - 21:30

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PayPal Bans Various Alternative Media Personalities Who Criticize Perpetual Wars

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In 2022, one has to be utterly naive to believe that Silicon Valley behaves in an independent manner from the political process. In fact, Silicon Valley often acts as the private enforces of the US Deep State.

This is most apparent when it comes to foreign policy discourses that challenges the Globalist American Empire’s discourse.

With the Russo-Ukrainian conflict underway, the corporate media has worked to create a monolithic narrative on this conflict. It has to go the Marvel Comic route of portraying Russia as the villain and Ukraine as the victim, while the US and its NATO allies are the heroes. That’s how low geopolitical analysis has fallen these days.

Thankfully, there’s an alternative media ecosystem that has emerged to challenge this cartoon narrative. From Antiwar.com to Moon of Alabama, various websites have popped up to offer a unique perspective on this conflict. Namely, a perspective that blames the West for creating this security dilemma. 

One website that has done an excellent job in exposing the Globalist America Empire and its satrapies, is MintPress News. For the “grievous crime” of giving an alternate take to the Russo-Ukrainian war, Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod of MintPress have had their PayPal accounts blocked. As anti-war journalist Caitlin Johnstone noted, Caleb Maupin, a journalist critical of the American empire, also has his Paypal account blocked. 

MacLeod recently published an article titled An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm” that highlighted the many ways Silicon Valley behemoths are suppressing dissenting views of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. On top of that, several YouTube videos that have gone against the uniparty line on Ukraine have been demonetized.

Paypal has traditionally been used by dissidents and independent journalists who want their work crowdfunded.

We have to remember that many of these journalists can’t make a traditional living like their mainstream counterparts who rely on traditional corporate media and wealthy sponsors to make a living. 

MintPress News Executive Director Mnar Adley told Johnstone the following about PayPal’s decision to ban her: 

Paypal banning myself and MintPress is blatant censorship of dissenting journalists & outlets. For the past decade MintPress has been unapologetically working as a watchdog journalism outlet to expose the profiteers of the permanent war state from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Sudan to Apartheid Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen to regime change operations in Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela where US weapons have flooded these nations to plunge them into devastating civil wars.

In the era of a declining US empire, censorship has become the last resort of an unpopular regime and its forever wars to make the truth disappear and critical thinking all but dead. With the war in Ukraine raging on, we’ve entered war time and Big Tech giants, including Paypal, are working hand in hand with the New Cold War architects themselves to sanction dissenting journalists. If you read the board of any of these tech giants from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Paypal, they read like a rogues’ gallery of war mongers and their agenda is clear: To control the free flow of information and target the bank accounts of anyone who dares question the official narrative of the Pentagon or State Department.

Adley added: 

It is outrageous to be told that tech giants, which are run by those who directly profit from the New Cold war including the crisis in Ukraine, could limit any journalist’s ability to fund their work. Can you imagine if this was the norm in Russia, China or Iran? Our media would be screaming about free speech and first amendment rights. Yet, when we do it’s ok because it’s under the guise of fighting ‘Russian propaganda’.

We’re living in an intellectual No-Fly Zone where online censorship of dissenting journalism has become the new norm. The US sanctions regime that is trying to starve Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Cuba and Iran and over 25% of the world’s population is now targeting its own citizens with its maximum pressure campaign so we are forced to toe the official government line in order to survive as a journalist in alternative media today.

The MintPress News Executive Director concluded with the following statement:

No matter the war waged against us, we refuse to be backed into a corner and bullied by tech giants who have a deep relationship with weapons manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and who work hand in hand with NATO that profit off the blood of millions of people around the world. The only way forward is for people to unite on a broader front of non-partisanship and fund our own media because there are more of us than there are of them.”

Maupin’s case is rather interesting. He is a speaker and journalist who has built a reputation for challenging the Globalist American Empire. Johnstone observed that his personal Twitter account has been “branded ‘Russia state-affiliated media’ by the US state-affiliated platform.

“Why should something as basic as cash transactions be subject to political censorship?” inquired Maupin when Johnstone reached out to him. “The economic war on independent countries is turning into a war on free speech. Writers and journalists must be able to eat.”

The ruling class in the West has been compelled to get creative in the way they censor people. The 1984-style of censoring people by sending jackbooted goons to their house can elicit strong institutional pushback — Supreme Court or other legislative bodies that deem such behavior as unconstitutional —  or even backlash from a vast swathe of the populace that still clings on to a strong pro-civil liberty culture. In turn, the Deep State has had to employ Big Tech actors as private enforcers of their norms.

The same dynamic is at play with financial platforms. By cutting off people from their funds, these financial entities are effectively censoring the work of many journalists who rely on the patronage of their subscribers to continue their work. This mode of censorship will continue to be the Western norm until the West “Elects a New People” and by bringing in enough alien migrants to politically transform the country, thereby making it easier to assault foundation American freedoms such as free speech.

Until then, privatized censorship will be the norm in the so-called Land of the Free. Indeed, we are navigating in dangerous waters. Without free speech in a time of geopolitical unrest, the ruling class will have a much easier time in getting the population to support misguided military expeditions abroad. 

But this time around, such confrontations will be of the highest stakes, as they will have the US face off against nuclear-armed peer competitors 

Now, more than ever, we need independent media voices to help prevent the US from sleepwalking into a conflict that has the possibility of going nuclear. 

 

The post PayPal Bans Various Alternative Media Personalities Who Criticize Perpetual Wars appeared first on Liberty Conservative News.



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Oh God It’s Going To Get SO Much Worse

ORIGINAL LINK

Listen to a reading of this article:

Rightists have spent the last couple of days freaking out and invoking Orwell’s 1984 in response to something their political enemies are doing in America, and for once it’s for a pretty good reason. The Department of Homeland Security has secretly set up a “Disinformation Governance Board”, only informing the public about its plans for the institution after it had already been established.

The disinformation board, which critics have understandably been calling a “Ministry of Truth”, purportedly exists to fight disinformation coming out of Russia as well as misleading messages about the US-Mexico border. We may be certain that the emphasis in the board’s establishment has been on the Russia angle, however.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki, in her patented “You’re such a crazy idiot for questioning me about the White House” manner, dismissed alarmed questions about what specific functions this strange new DHS entity was going to be performing and what its authority will look like.

 — @townhallcom

“It sounds like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities,” Psaki said. “I’m not sure who opposes that effort.”

The answer to the question of “who opposes that effort” is of course “anyone with functioning gray matter between their ears.” No government entity has any business appointing itself the authority to sort information from disinformation on behalf of the public, because government entities are not impartial and omniscient deities who can be entrusted to serve the public as objective arbiters of absolute reality. They would with absolute certainty wind up drawing distinctions between information, misinformation and disinformation in whatever way serves their interests, regardless of what’s true, exactly as any authoritarian regime would do.

This important point has gotten a bit lost in the shuffle due to the utterly hypnotic ridiculousness of the person who has been appointed to run the Disinformation Governance Board. Nina Jankowicz, a carefully groomed swamp creature who has worked in Kyiv as a communications advisor to the Ukrainian government as part of a Fulbright fellowship, is being widely criticized by pundits and social media users for her virulent Russiagating and whatever the hell this is:

 — @wiczipedia

Because of this person’s embarrassing cartoonishness, a lot more commentary lately has been going into discussing the fact that the Department of Homeland Security’s Ministry of Truth is run by a kooky liberal than the fact that the Department of Homeland Security has a fucking Ministry of Truth.

Which is really to miss the forest for the trees, in my opinion. Would it really be any better if the “Disinformation Governance Board” was run by a chill dude you wouldn’t mind having a beer with? Especially when we know the ideological leanings of this department are going to bounce back and forth between elections and will always act in service of US empire narrative control regardless of who is in office? I don’t think so.

The real issue at hand is the fact that this new institution will almost certainly play a role in bridging the ever-narrowing gap between government censorship and Silicon Valley censorship. The creation of the DHS disinformation board is a far more shocking and frightening development than last year’s scandalous revelation that the White House was advising social media platforms about accounts it determined were circulating censorship-worthy Covid misinformation, which was itself a drastic leap in the direction toward direct government censorship from what had previously been considered normal.

We should probably talk more about how as soon as people accepted that it was fine for government, media and Silicon Valley institutions to work together to censor misinformation and rally public support around an Official Narrative about a virus, the ruling power establishment immediately took that as license to do that with a war and a foreign government as well.

Like, immediately immediately. We went from a massive narrative control campaign about a virus, which people accepted because they wanted to contain a deadly pandemic, straight into a massive narrative control campaign about Russia and Ukraine. Without skipping a beat. Like openly manipulating everyone’s understanding of world events is just what we do now. Now we’re seeing increasingly brazen censorship of political dissent about a fucking war that could easily end up getting us all killed in a nuclear holocaust, and a portion of the Biden administration’s whopping $33 billion Ukraine package is going toward funding “independent media” (read: war propaganda).

 — @mtracey

We should probably talk more about this. We should probably talk more about how insane it is that all mainstream western institutions immediately accepted it as a given that World War II levels of censorship and propaganda must be implemented over a faraway war that our governments are not even officially a part of.

It started as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine, without any public discussion whatsoever. Like the groundwork had already been laid and everyone had already agreed that that’s what would happen. The public had no say in whether we want to be propagandized and censored to help the US win some kind of weird infowar to ensure its continued unipolar domination of the planet. It just happened.

No reason was given to the public as to why this must occur, and there was no public debate as to whether it should. This was by design, because propaganda only works when you don’t know it’s happening to you.

The choice was made for us that information is too important to be left in the hands of the people. It became set in stone that we are to be a propaganda-based society rather than a truth-based society. No discussion was offered, and no debate was allowed.

 — @johnpilger

And as bad as it is, it’s on track to get much, much worse. They’re already setting up “disinformation” regulation in the government which presides over Silicon Valley, the proxy war between the US and Ukraine is escalating by the day, and aggressions are ramping up against China over both the Solomon Islands and Taiwan. If you think imperial narrative management is intense now, wait until the US empire’s struggle to secure global hegemony really gets going.

Do you consent to this? Do you? It’s something you kind of have to take a position on, because its implications have a direct effect on our lives as individuals and on our trajectory as a society. How much are we willing to sacrifice to help the US win an infowar against Russia?

The question of whether we should abandon all hope of ever becoming a truth-based society and committing instead to winning propaganda wars for a globe-spanning empire is perhaps the most consequential decision we’ve ever had to make as a species. Which is why we weren’t given a choice. It’s just been foisted upon us.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. By taking our control of information out of our hands without asking our permission and determining for us that we are to be a propaganda-based civilization for the foreseeable future, they have stolen something sacred from us. Something they had no right to take.

Nothing about the state of the world tells us that the people who run things are doing a good job. Nothing about our current situation suggests they should be given more control, rather than having control taken away from them and given to the people. We are going in exactly the wrong direction.

____________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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Scooping private data doesn’t violate Fourth Amendment if the owner can still access it, court rules



The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals appears to have given the government permission to order anyone’s internet account data copied and held without any cause, whenever they want, without providing any justification, according to University of California, Berkeley School of Law professor Orin Ker

ORIGINAL LINK

Friday, April 29, 2022

DeSantis declares war on Biden's 'Ministry of Truth'

ORIGINAL LINK

By Laurel Duggan
Daily Caller News Foundation

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed to fight the Biden Administration’s proposed Disinformation Governance Board Friday, which he said was an attempt to censor ordinary people and impose narrative control.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the formation of the board Wednesday, which will be run by Nina Jankowicz, a self-described “disinformation expert” who previously attempted to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop story. DeSantis promised to fight the board in a Friday press conference.

The Biden Administration’s creation of a “disinformation” bureau within DHS is effectively a Ministry of Truth that is alien to our constitutional tradition.

Florida rejects Biden’s attempt to enforce regime-approved narratives and to stifle dissent. pic.twitter.com/fSnU2gk97x

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) April 29, 2022

“You cannot have a Ministry of Truth in this country. And so let’s get real here,” DeSantis said. “We’re not gonna let Biden get away with this one, so we will be fighting back.”

Critics including DeSantis have compared the board to the “Ministry of Truth” in the novel “1984,” an agency that produces government propaganda and decides what citizens are allowed to say and believe.

“They now have an idea – and I honestly thought this was a belated April Fool’s joke – but they are actually going to create in the Department of Homeland Security a Bureau of Disinformation. It’s basically a Ministry of Truth,” DeSantis said. “And what they want to do is, they want to be able to put out false narratives without people being able to speak out and fight back.”

“They want to be able to say things like ‘Russia collusion’ and perpetuate hoaxes and then have people like us be silenced. They want to be able to advocate for COVID lockdowns, they want to be able to advocate for school closures, things that are not supported by the evidence. But then when you speak out, they want to stifle dissent,” he added. “And so we reject this bureau in the state of Florida.”

The board announced Wednesday that it would begin by focusing on Russian disinformation in the lead-up to midterm elections and misinformation aimed at migrants at the southern border, according to the Associated Press.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said it sounded “like the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country” during a Thursday press conference, but declined to comment on Kankowicz’ appointment, claiming she had no information about her.

Your party funded the dossier first… and if there was FBI and DOJ bias during 2016, it was certainly against Clinton. FBI was investigating Trump since summer but didn’t make it public. American public deserved to know.

— Nina Jankowicz 🇺🇦🇺🇸 (@wiczipedia) December 8, 2017

Kankowicz said “We should view it (Hunter Biden’s laptop) as a Trump campaign product” on ABC News in October 2020 and claimed Republicans had funded the claimed the now-discredited Steele dossier in a 2017 tweet.

Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson demanded answers from the DHS about the board in a Thursday letter which focused on potential biases Jankowics could bring into the position and called her a “beacon of misinformation online.”

DeSantis’ office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.

This story originally was published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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More on the fertilizer shutdown and the plot to starve us all into submission

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​From a friend:

It turns out that in addition to Russia and Ukraine, Trinidad and Tabago are the sole other producers of any size of ammonium nitrate . The US has only CF Industries, which is being essentially shuttered by Union Pacific.   Why they have not employed a fleet of trucks I do not understand.  Discussion below the link and article. 

“Union Pacific restricts fertilizer shipments, will not accept new orders.” https://www.michiganfarmnews.com/union-pacific-restricts-fertilizer-shipments-will-not-accept-new-orders

There seem to be multiple parts to the story.  One is monopolistic behavior by UP.  Go figure, a monopoly acting like a monopoly.
The other is a result of the “trade war” and the actions started back in 2020 – take that Trinidad and Tabago!

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/12/03/2021-26314/urea-ammonium-nitrate-solutions-from-the-republic-of-trinidad-and-tobago-preliminary-affirmative

“The Department of Commerce (Commerce) preliminarily determines that countervailable subsidies are being provided to the sole known producer/exporter of urea ammonium nitrate solutions (UAN) from the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago (Trinidad and Tobago) for the period of investigation (POI) January 1, 2020, through December 31, 2020. Interested parties are invited to comment on this preliminary determination” (federalregister.gov).

Sure, if they were dumping, we need to put a stop to it. But maybe right now with all the issues in the food supply chain, this is not the time to increase the coming starvation just to punish them.  I’m pretty sure we have other ways to get the message across to this formidable foe.

I say again, the goal is mass starvation. Everything follows that goal.



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Hospitals Ignoring Price Transparency Rule Rack Up Billion-Dollar Profit

ORIGINAL LINK
Hospitals Ignoring Price Transparency Rule Rack Up Billion-Dollar Profit

Authored by Adam Andrzejewski via OpenTheBooks substack,

It’s like playing baseball with one side (patients) wearing blindfolds and the other side (hospitals) running up the score at will.

Topline

It was an historic, bipartisan healthcare reform. In 2020, President Donald Trump proposed and the Biden Administration finalized the transparency rule whereby hospitals were forced to open their books and post their prices for healthcare services online and in real time.

Blatantly, though, hospitals are refusing to comply. As of January 1, 86-percent of hospitals were not complying with the transparency rule according to an investigation by the organization Patient Rights Advocate.

One year after the rule went into effect, a staggering 857 out of the 1,000 hospitals surveyed refused to open their pricing books or were non-compliant.

In 2021, three of the largest hospital systems in the country – HCA Healthcare, CommonSpirit Health, and Ascension — made a collective $120 billion. Yet, those systems still weren’t posting their prices online by January 2022.

Even smaller “non-profit” hospital groups, like, UPMC in Pittsburgh, were non-compliant. However, in 2020, their CEO made $9 million; between 2016 and 2020, he was paid $34.7 million.

That’s like playing baseball with one side (patients) wearing blindfolds and the other side (hospitals) running up the score at will.

The Rule

The federal hospital price transparency rule took effect on January 1, 2021 as a part of the Affordable Care Act. It required hospitals to post all their prices online in a way that’s easily accessible to patients, without barriers like requiring that they submit personal identifying information.

Hospitals must provide the clear pricing information online “(a)s a comprehensive machine-readable file with all items and services” and “in a display of shoppable services in a consumer-friendly format,” according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS).

Big number

There are 361 hospitals owned by the three large hospital systems and only two of those hospitals were posting their prices. According to the report:

  • HCA Healthcare had $58.8 billion in revenue (2021) — none of 188 hospitals complied.

  • CommonSpirit Health had $33.3 billion in revenue (2021) – only one of 88 hospitals complied.

  • Ascension had $27.2 billion in revenue (2021) – only one out of 85 hospitals complied.

CommonSpirit Health and Ascension didn’t respond to requests for comment by our deadline.

Case study – HCA Healthcare

An HCA Healthcare spokesperson responded to our comment request and said the hospitals are compliant – but wouldn’t say exactly when they began posting the required information.

“Over the last year, we have worked diligently and have completed our implementation of these requirements,” the HCA spokesperson said.

“Our hospital websites have a consumer-friendly Patient Payment Estimator tool that provides relevant information to help patients understand what their out-of-pocket costs may be for hospital care, including those that are uninsured. In addition, we have posted contracted rates with third party payers using one of the machine-readable file formats listed in the regulations to provide the five types of ‘standard charges.’”

Certainly, it’s a good first step; however, more work needs to be done.

Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reviewed about a dozen of HCA Healthcare hospital’s websites and found information under “patient financial resources” or “patient payment estimator” tabs.

While HCA hospital websites all have downloadable files of standard charges, they all include disclaimers that the prices can vary in several ways from what is stated.

The HCA files all also have shorthand or abbreviated descriptions of the services, making it hard to understand some of the services.

HCA also includes a gross cost and a discounted cost of services but lack the required payer-specific negotiated charges, and de-identified minimum and maximum negotiated charges.

The hospital websites are also required to have a “display of at least 300 shoppable services.” In the absence of the shoppable services list, hospitals can display an internet-based price estimator tool that patients can access without having to submit personal identifying information.

The HCA websites have these patient payment estimators, where patients can search for a service. But the customer must add their information — their full name, date of birth and insurance. This appears to violate the rules.

Case study — UPMC

Susan Manko, vice president of public relations for UPMC and University of Pittsburgh, told OpenTheBooks that the Patient Rights Advocate report is inaccurate.

“The PRA website is (and has been for some time now) wrong,” she said.

“PRA completely missed that the appropriate pricing information has been available to the public on these hospitals’ websites for more than the past year and that these hospitals are compliant with federal regulations regarding pricing transparency.”

She provided the links for UPMC Shadyside and UPMC Magee-Womens, which indeed have a price estimator tool and a machine-readable file of items and services on the websites.

Patient Rights Advocate argues that while UPMC’s machine readable file lists prices for services provided by three dozen insurance companies, it lacks specific plans, like HMO and PPO plans, making the list incomplete. The rule clearly requires that “each list of payer-specific negotiated charges must be clearly associated with the name of the third party payer and plan.”

Big potential penalties

Price transparency can revolutionize U.S. healthcare by introducing price competition in the industry. Price disclosure also helps to prevent gouging and surprise billing.

So, on January 1, CMS increased the penalty for hospitals that don’t comply with the transparency rule. The upper bound penalties for the three large healthcare groups with 361 hospitals could collectively exceed $724 million per year.

Minimum penalties start at $300 per day for smaller hospitals with 30 or fewer beds, and increase to $10 per bed per day for hospitals with more than 30 beds, up to $5,500 per day.

If hospitals aren’t in compliance for a full year, the minimum penalty is $109,500 per hospital, and the maximum penalty is more than $2 million per hospital.

Key background

Patient Rights Advocate reviewed the websites of 1,000 licensed hospitals – out of the 6,000 across America. The group analyzed whether the required pricing information was posted.

Hospitals are required to display the price of the 300 most common shoppable services, either in a standard charges list or a price estimator tool. But the report criticized the latter, saying “price estimator tools” give non-binding estimates (including price ranges) accompanied by disclaimers.

That’s far different from actual price disclosure, the report noted.

The report found most hospitals did not post all payer-specific and plan-specific negotiated rates.

For instance, there was incomplete or missing data fields, fields with zeros, N/As and asterisks for negotiated rates.

It also found that hospitals often listed many more “accepted insurance plans” on their websites away from where they listed their standard charges, implying that their standard charges didn’t include all accepted plans.

Our organization at OpenTheBooks.com was at the forefront of shaping the federal rule, encouraging the public in the fall of 2019, and beginning of 2020 to comment on the health care price transparency proposal put forth by the Trump Administration.

With that push, about 2,000 comments were sent to Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Biden Administration finalized the rule. A true bipartisan reform that forces transparency from a politically powerful group.

Noncompliant hospitals—a year later and no fines

As of March 2022, CMS, which enforces the rule, has issued approximately 345 warning notices to noncompliant hospitals, a spokesperson told OpenTheBooks.com on April 25.

The agency has also issued 136 corrective action plan requests “to hospitals that previously received warning notices but have not yet corrected deficiencies,” and 145 hospitals “have received case closure notices after having addressed previous citations,” the spokesperson said.

CMS hasn’t issued any penalties because “each hospital that has come under compliance review has resolved its deficiencies, or is in the process of doing so.”

OpenTheBooks.com filed a Freedom of Information Act request earlier in April, asking HHS to divulge which hospitals received noncompliance notices and corrective action plans and whether the general public has notified HHS of noncompliant hospitals.

While HHS has acknowledged the request, it has not yet provided the records.

But the spokesperson said, “specifics surrounding the compliance and status of hospitals are not publicly available. The Hospital Price Transparency final rule indicates that once CMS issues a civil monetary penalty, CMS will make public the name of the hospital on a CMS website; releasing this information prematurely could identify hospitals that have already taken corrective actions and come into compliance after issuance of a warning letter, given the relationship in timing of our reviews and the hospitals being at various stages addressing compliance requests.”

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Crucial quote

Until CMS strongly enforces the rule, there is no reason for the remainder of the hospitals to comply, the Patient Rights Advocate report noted.

“We are now entering the second year since the hospital price transparency rule became law, and compliance remains at very low levels,” the report stated. “The largest hospital systems are effectively ignoring the law, with no consequences.”

Critics

The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2021 that some hospitals have posted pricing data on their websites but they “masked the information from online search results, using special code that blocks pricing data on their websites from the results of search engines,” noting the coding is illegal under new rules that take effect in 2022.

One hospital system, the North Oaks Health System, based in Hammond, La., posted some data early in 2021 but removed it two weeks later, as none of its competing hospitals had posted their rates.

“You get nervous about putting those negotiated rates out there,” the system’s chief financial officer, Mark Anderson, told The Journal. “You don’t know who will look at those rates and say, ‘I want to negotiate to the Medicare rates.’ We didn’t want to put ourselves at a competitive, strategic disadvantage.”

*  *  *

Additional Reading

An OpenTheBooks.com June 2019 report “Top 82 U.S. Non-Profit Hospitals: Quantifying Government Payments and Financial Assets” showed that hospitals with non-profit tax status and their CEOs are getting richer while the American people are getting healthcare poorer.

Our study published at Forbes showing the top 82 non-profit hospitals added billions of dollars to their bottom line, lavishly compensated their CEOs, and spent millions of dollars lobbying government to defend the status quo.

A $4,000 Covid Test In Oklahoma Resulted In A Debate On Healthcare Prices and Transparency, Forbes, published January 31, 2021.

New Documentary, InHospitable, Details The Big Profits In “Non-Profit” Healthcare, Forbes, published December 14, 2021.

Adam Andrzejewski (say: And-g-f-ski) is the CEO/Founder of OpenTheBooks.com. Last year we filed 47,000 FOIA requests and captured $12 trillion in government spending (2021). Work featured at The BBC, Good Morning America; ABC World News Tonight; USA Today; The Wall Street Journal; Forbes; and The New York Times. My presentation to the Hillsdale College National Leadership seminar posted on YouTube has 3.7+ million views. Learn more at OpenTheBooks.com.

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Tyler Durden Fri, 04/29/2022 - 17:00

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When the Waters Were Changed (Sufi)

 This is a Sufi story, from Tales of the Dervishes, collected by Idries Shah. 

Once upon a time Khidr, the Teacher of Moses, called upon mankind with a warning. At a certain date, he said, all the water in the world which had not been specifically hoarded, would disappear. It would then be renewed, with different water, which would drive men mad.

Only one man listened to the meaning of this advice. He collected water and went to a secure place where he stored it, and waited for the water to change its character.

On the appointed date the streams stopped running, the wells went dry, and the man who had listened, seeing this happening, went to his retreat and drank his preserved water.

When he saw, from his security, the waterfalls again beginning to flow, this man descended among the other sons of men. He found that they were thinking and talking in an entirely different way from before; yet they had no memory of what happened, not of having been warned. When he tried to talk to them, he realized that they thought that he was mad, and they showed hostility or compassion, not understanding.

At first he drank none of the new water, but went back to his concealment, to draw on his supplies, eery day. Finally, however, he took the decision to drink the new water because he could not bear the loneliness of living, behaving, and thinking in as different way from everyone else. He drank the new water, and became like the rest. Then he forgot all about his own store of special water, and his fellows began to look upon him as a madman who had miraculously been restored to sanity.

Thursday, April 28, 2022

PayPal Blocks Multiple Alternative Media Figures Critical Of US Empire Narratives

ORIGINAL LINK

Listen to a reading of this article:

In what appears to be yet another escalation in Silicon Valley’s redoubled efforts to quash dissident voices since the beginning of the Ukraine war, PayPal has just blocked the accounts of multiple alternative media voices who’ve been speaking critically against official US empire narratives. These include journalist and speaker Caleb Maupin, and Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod of MintPress News.

Just the other day MintPress published an excellent article by MacLeod titled “An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm” documenting the many ways skepticism of the US government’s version of events in this war is being suppressed by Silicon Valley megacorporations, including financial censorship via the demonetization of YouTube videos that don’t regurgitate the imperial line on Ukraine.

Today, both MintPress and MacLeod have been banned from using the payment service that many online content creators have come to rely on to help crowdfund their work.

 — @MintPressNews

MintPress News happens to have published critical journalism about PayPal itself in the past, like the articles it published in 2018 by Whitney Webb documenting the way shady PayPal-linked billionaires Peter Thiel and Pierre Omidyar have advanced the interests of the US empire and facilitated imperial narrative control, or this one from 2016 on how the company blocks Palestinians from opening accounts while showing no such bias against illegal Israeli settlers.

I asked MintPress News Executive Director Mnar Adley for comment on PayPal’s move. Here is her response in full:

“Paypal banning myself and MintPress is blatant censorship of dissenting journalists & outlets. For the past decade MintPress has been unapologetically working as a watchdog journalism outlet to expose the profiteers of the permanent war state from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Sudan to Apartheid Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen to regime change operations in Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela where US weapons have flooded these nations to plunge them into devastating civil wars.

“In the era of a declining US empire, censorship has become the last resort of an unpopular regime and its forever wars to make the truth disappear and critical thinking all but dead. With the war in Ukraine raging on, we’ve entered war time and Big Tech giants, including Paypal, are working hand in hand with the New Cold War architects themselves to sanction dissenting journalists. If you read the board of any of these tech giants from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Paypal, they read like a rogues’ gallery of war mongers and their agenda is clear: To control the free flow of information and target the bank accounts of anyone who dares question the official narrative of the Pentagon or State Department.

“It is outrageous to be told that tech giants, which are run by those who directly profit from the New Cold war including the crisis in Ukraine, could limit any journalist’s ability to fund their work. Can you imagine if this was the norm in Russia, China or Iran? Our media would be screaming about free speech and first amendment rights. Yet, when we do it’s ok because it’s under the guise of fighting ‘Russian propaganda’.

“We’re living in an intellectual No-Fly Zone where online censorship of dissenting journalism has become the new norm. The US sanctions regime that is trying to starve Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Cuba and Iran and over 25% of the world’s population is now targeting its own citizens with its maximum pressure campaign so we are forced to toe the official government line in order to survive as a journalist in alternative media today.

“No matter the war waged against us, we refuse to be backed into a corner and bullied by tech giants who have a deep relationship with weapons manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and who work hand in hand with NATO that profit off the blood of millions of people around the world. The only way forward is for people to unite on a broader front of non-partisanship and fund our own media because there are more of us than there are of them.”

 — @calebmaupin

PayPal has also banned Caleb Maupin, an American speaker and journalist whose work has already seen his personal Twitter account branded “Russia state-affiliated media” by the US state-affiliated platform.

“Why should something as basic as cash transactions be subject to political censorship?” said Maupin when asked for comment. “The economic war on independent countries is turning into a war on free speech. Writers and journalists must be able to eat.”

Indeed, a very effective way to silence unauthorized media voices is to make it difficult for them to earn a living making their voices heard. Speaking from experience I know for a fact I couldn’t put out a fraction of the content I put out if I was forced to work a 9–5 job in some office rather than having the freedom to put all my time and mental energy into this work thanks to the generous support of my readers. Cutting me off from that funding would be the same as censoring me directly, because there’s no way I could continue the kind of work I do.

We are at a profoundly dangerous and frightening point in human history. The US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is escalating by the day and the drums of war are beating ever louder against China over the Solomon Islands and Taiwan. You think censorship is bad now, wait until this global power grab really gets going.

____________________

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Is The U.S. Going To Transition From Stagflation Directly Into A Full-Blown Economic Depression?

ORIGINAL LINK

Should the fact that the U.S. economy actually contracted during the first quarter actually surprise any of us?  Since the start of 2022, there has been crisis after crisis, and now the war in Ukraine is depressing economic activity all over the planet.  What we are facing could most definitely be described as a “perfect storm”, and the truth is that this storm isn’t going to go away any time soon.  But where do we go from here?  Will the U.S. economy bounce back, or will this new economic downturn soon become even worse?  Most economic optimists are assuming that the former will be true, while many economic realists are issuing dire warnings about what is ahead.

I was actually thinking of writing about something else today, but I knew that my regular readers would want me to talk about this

Gross domestic product unexpectedly declined at a 1.4% annualized pace in the first quarter, marking an abrupt reversal for an economy coming off its best performance since 1984, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.

The negative growth rate missed even the subdued Dow Jones estimate of a 1% gain for the quarter, but the initial estimate for Q1 was the worst since the pandemic-induced recession in 2020.

We already knew that inflation had started to spiral out of control in the United States, and now the “stag” part of “stagflation” has arrived.

So what caused this “sudden” downturn?  According to CNN, there are quite a few factors that can be blamed…

A push by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates and combat high inflation. Supply chain shortages. An ongoing global health crisis. And of course, the geopolitical earthquake caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which is also threatening to create a world food crisis.

If the U.S. economy shrinks again in the second quarter, that will officially meet the definition of a “recession”.

But as John Williams of shadowstats.com has pointed out, if honest numbers were being used the U.S. economy would still be in a recession that started all the way back at the beginning of the COVID pandemic.

Everybody pretty much realizes that economic conditions are not great right now.

So are brighter days just around the corner?  That is what some pundits seem to think

The US economy will return to growth during the second quarter, according to RSM chief economist Joe Brusuelas. “Without a doubt,” he said.

“This is noise; not signal,” Pantheon Macroeconomics chief economist Ian Shepherdson wrote in a report. “The economy is not falling into recession.”

Maybe they will be right.

But if the economy is so strong, then why are foreclosure filings absolutely soaring?

Last month, 33,333 properties across the U.S. faced foreclosure, a 181 percent jump from March 2021 and 29 percent pop from February, according to a report by foreclosure tracker Attom. The first quarter saw 78,271 properties with a foreclosure filing, a 39 percent from the previous quarter and 132 percent from last year.

Needless to say, there are other experts that have a much more negative view on what is ahead.

For example, Nancy Lazar is warning of a “synchronized” global recession…

Piper Sandler chief global economist Nancy Lazar warned on Monday that the world is in the early stages of a “very significant” and “synchronized” recession.

In an appearance on “Mornings with Maria” Monday, Lazar noted that a recession is expected outside of the United States.

“It’s going to be a global recession pulling down [the] Euro zone in particular,” she told host Maria Bartiromo. “It looks like China GDP [Gross domestic product] in the second quarter could also be negative.”

Actually, if all we suffer is a significant global recession that will be really good news.

Because right at this moment inflation is dramatically spiking all over the globe, we are witnessing the largest land war in Europe since World War II, and the UN is telling us that we are heading into a horrific worldwide food crisis.

An increasing number of Americans are starting to realize that things are moving in the wrong direction.  In Gallup’s April survey, only 18 percent of Americans rated economic conditions as “good”, and only 2 percent rated them as “excellent”…

The GDP news comes on the heels of newly released polling data from Gallup that suggested that economy confidence is extremely low among the American public.

More than four in ten (42%) of Americans said that economic conditions in America were “poor,” while another 38% said that they were only “fair” in Gallup’s April survey. Just 2% said economic conditions were “excellent,” while 18% said they were “good.”

Those are terrible numbers, and they have very serious implications for the Democrats in the fall.

But instead of focusing on fixing the economy, Joe Biden wants Congress to give him another 33 billion dollars for the war in Ukraine…

President Joe Biden is asking Congress for another $33 billion to help Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion and provide humanitarian aid to the Ukrainian people.

The proposal, which the White House will send to lawmakers on Thursday, includes $20 billion in additional security and military assistance for Ukraine, another $8 billion for economic assistance and $3 billion in humanitarian aid.

This is complete and utter madness.

To put this in perspective, the military budget for Ukraine is normally about 6 billion dollars for an entire year.

And much of the equipment that the U.S. is sending to Ukraine is being blown up by the Russians before it can even get to the fighters on the front lines.

With each passing day it is becoming clearer to everyone that this conflict is really a proxy war between the United States and Russia.

And nuclear war is increasingly becoming one of the hottest topics on Russian television.  For example, the following is a recent exchange between two Russian television personalities that is making headlines all over the globe…

“Everything will end with a nuclear strike is more probable than the other outcome,” she continued. “This is to my horror, on one hand, but on the other hand, with the understanding that it is what it is.”

It was at that point Solovyov chimed in, “But we will go to heaven, while they will simply croak.”

“We’re all going to die someday,” Simonyan agreed.

“We’re all going to die someday”?

I certainly don’t like the sound of that.

Unfortunately, many Russians are now entirely convinced that nuclear war is coming.

But instead of pushing for peace, Joe Biden and his minions just keep escalating the conflict.

If we continue to go down this path, it will end in a nightmare.

Our current economic problems pale in comparison to the possibility of a nuclear conflict, but most Americans still don’t understand the implications of the decisions that our leaders are making.

Because if they did understand, there would be giant protests in the streets of every single major U.S. city right now.

***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***

About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com.  In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including  “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”“The Beginning Of The End”“Get Prepared Now”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned)  When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending digital copies as gifts through Amazon to family and friends.  Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.  I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse BlogEnd Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe.  I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article.  The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.  I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help.  These are such troubled times, and people need hope.  John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to ask Jesus to be your Lord and Savior today.

The post Is The U.S. Going To Transition From Stagflation Directly Into A Full-Blown Economic Depression? appeared first on The Economic Collapse.



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"Are We Being Hypnotized, And Do We Like It?" - A Conversation with Professor Mattias Desmet, PhD

 https://youtu.be/nOetRv2Z9LE


On free speech, federalism, and why Berenson v. Twitter matters more than ever

 https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/on-free-speech-federalism-and-why

I’m writing this on my way to San Francisco for the first hearing in Berenson v. Twitter. San Francisco, as you may know, is in California. And California has some of the strongest free-speech protections of any state. Yes, California, ultra-liberal California.

The free speech guarantee in California constitution makes the First Amendment look weak. Section 2 of Article 1 (behind only Section 1, “All people are by nature free and independent…”) reads:

Every person may freely speak, write and publish his or her sentiments on all subjects, being responsible for the abuse of this right. A law may not restrain or abridge liberty of speech or press.

And California courts have interpreted this provision not just against state and local governments, but against corporations. California has a long history of decisions requiring large private companies to allow speech on their properties.

The Illusion Of Freedom: We're Only As Free As The Government Allows

ORIGINAL LINK
The Illusion Of Freedom: We're Only As Free As The Government Allows

Authored by John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”

- George Carlin

We’re in a national state of denial.

For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.

Case in point: on the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court appeared inclined to favor a high school football coach’s right to pray on the field after a game, the high court let stand a lower court ruling that allows police to warrantlessly track people’s location and movements through their personal cell phones, sweeping Americans up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

Likewise, although the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for a death row inmate to have his pastor audibly pray and lay hands on him in the execution chamber, it refused to stop police from using hidden cameras to secretly and warrantlessly record and monitor a person’s activities outside their home over an extended period of time.

For those who have been paying attention, there’s a curious pattern emerging: the government appears reasonably tolerant of those who want to exercise their First Amendment rights in a manner that doesn’t challenge the police state’s hold on power, for example, by praying on a football field or in an execution chamber.

On the other hand, dare to disagree with the government about its war crimes, COVID-19, election outcomes or police brutality, and you’ll find yourself silenced, cited, shut down and/or branded an extremist.

The U.S. government is particularly intolerant of speech that reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. For instance, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the latest victim of the government’s war on dissidents and whistleblowers, is in the process of being extradited to the U.S. to be tried under the Espionage Act for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Even political protests are fair game for prosecution. In Florida, two protesters are being fined $3000 for political signs proclaiming stating “F—k Biden,” “F—k Trump,” and “F—k Policing 4 Profit” that violate a city ban on “indecent” speech on signs, clothing and other graphic displays.

The trade-off is clear: pray all you want, but don’t mess with the U.S. government.

In this way, the government, having appointed itself a Supreme and Sovereign Ruler, allows us to bask in the illusion of religious freedom while stripping us of every other freedom afforded by the Constitution.

We’re in trouble, folks.

Freedom no longer means what it once did.

This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

My friends, we’re being played for fools.

On paper, we may be technically free.

In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.

As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.

In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

Government surveillance, police abuse, SWAT team raids, economic instability, asset forfeiture schemes, pork barrel legislation, militarized police, drones, endless wars, private prisons, involuntary detentions, biometrics databases, free speech zones, etc.: these are mile markers on the road to a fascist state where citizens are treated like cattle, to be branded and eventually led to the slaughterhouse.

Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction. The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses.

This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine.

That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else.

The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) has sucked the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

Unfortunately, there is no magic spell to transport us back to a place and time where “we the people” weren’t merely fodder for a corporate gristmill, operated by government hired hands, whose priorities are money and power.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.

If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

Tyler Durden Wed, 04/27/2022 - 23:25

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Mass murder of kids: FDA Rubber-Stamps Lethal Remdesivir for Infants Without Evidence of Safety or Efficacy, but plenty of death

ORIGINAL LINK

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved the use of the antiviral therapy, remdesivir, to treat COVID-19 in infants 4 weeks and older, despite having no evidence the treatment is effective or even safe for young children.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday approved the use of the antiviral therapy, remdesivir, to treat COVID-19 in infants four weeks and older.

Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a press release:

“As COVID-19 can cause severe illness in children, some of whom do not currently have a vaccination option, there continues to be a need for safe and effective COVID-19 treatment options for this population.

“Today’s approval of the first COVID-19 therapeutic for this population demonstrates the agency’s commitment to that need.”

According to the press release, the FDA’s decision to approve the therapy, marketed under the name Veklury, is supported by a clinical study conducted on infants 4 weeks and older weighing a minimum of 6.6 pounds.

The study is underway and will not be completed until February 2023. There are no published results.

However, Gilead Sciences, maker of remdesivir and sponsor of the study, provided the following details in a company press release:

  • A total of 53 hospitalized pediatric patients were enrolled in the clinical study.
  • 72% suffered adverse events.
  • 21% suffered serious adverse events determined to be unrelated to the drug.
  • Three children died from either underlying conditions or COVID-19.

Read More: FDA Rubber-Stamps Remdesivir for Infants Without Evidence of Safety, Efficacy

Renegade



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