State power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. The state can train subjects, but it can never develop free people who take their affairs into their own hands, for independent thought is the greatest danger that it has to fear.
--Rudolf Rocker
it’s
been depressing watching summit county and salt lake go increasingly
“woke” and “karen.” summit imposed a 45 day indoor mask mandate a
couple weeks ago as a kowtow to the pseudoscience and anxiety
appeasement of “bluetah.” both summit and SLC have been requiring
masks on kids in schools more or less all year.
first order of business for the new legislature?
freeing the people.
boom.
SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah House of Representatives voted Friday to overturn mask mandates in Salt Lake and Summit counties.
The joint resolution to terminate the mask orders, including the student mask mandate in Salt Lake City, passed by a 45-29 vote.
SJR3 passed the Senate with a 22-5 vote on Tuesday, the first day of the Utah Legislature’s 2022 general session.
Because
it’s a joint resolution, it does not need Gov. Spencer Cox’s signature
to become law, and Cox does not have the power to veto it. The Utah Legislature gave itself the ability to overturn local health orders by joint resolution in SB195, also known as Utah’s COVID-19 “endgame” bill, which was signed into law last year.
the
aptly named “endgame bill” that gave the legislature power to
countermand the unelected health commissars of covid has proven quite
useful.
perhaps this is a template for other states.
this is sound reasoning:
Republican senators supporting the resolution said wearing a mask should be a personal decision.
“People
do not like it when we make decisions for them. They just don’t,” said
Sen. Daniel McCay, R-Riverton. “Utahns should be free to wear a mask or
get a vaccine, or stay home, but the government should not be mandating
or dictating what businesses should be enforcing, especially when it
comes to personal health decisions.”
and this is NOT:
However,
Democratic senators who voted against the resolution said the
Legislature should leave mask mandates up to local control.
“If
you believe in local control, the county has decided that this is in
their best interest,” said Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights.
“It
kind of annoys me, to be honest with you, that we are wasting time in
this debate when it’s set to expire automatically, and we have
skyrocketing cases,” added Sen. Derek Kitchen, D-Sandy.
this is not “local control.” after all, what could be more local than the ability to control oneself?
this
is pushing coercive policy imposition down to a level where it can win.
this is not freedom, it’s force used to impose upon people’s lives and
livelihoods.
i heard from some friends in the area that
park city teachers were literally crying and claiming they were going to
die because the kids would no longer have to be masked.
this is a truly frightening decent into performative histrionics. the evidence is and has been overwhelming that masks in schools do nothing to stop covid. masks do not stop covid. not even N95’s. this is 100 years of settled science. it has not changed. it was ignored.
masks are a made up epidemiological cosplay cargo cult.
they
offer nothing but dehumanization and submission to the most neurotic.
the fact that so many teachers seem to love them so much should lead us
to ask some VERY pointed questions about the people with whom we have
trusted our children.
it’s really quite striking how these folks
so fond of extoling the resilience of children seem to have so little of
their own. where did they outgrow it, i wonder?
once you read that, there’s just no unreading it, is there?
a society were the teaches view the children as human shields is not a society that’s working. period.
that last part of riebe’s comments is in many way the most sinister.
“we’re wasting time on something that ends anyway!”
anyone
falling for THAT pile of steaming excrement after the manner in which
“2 weeks to flatten the curve” worked out is truly, deeply stupid.
given
the way these edicts get re-upped on expiry and have all along as a
nasty “just two more weeks” ploy to mire you in sunk cost fallacy, that
greasy claim about “it was going to expire anyway” rings cloyingly
false.
and this is grotesque:
“local
authorities should be able to take your rights and force nonsensical
and dehumanizing cosplay upon you because they have decided it’s in your
best interest. your rights have been avolitionally waived for your
convenience.”
wow. is that your for real political message?
this doesn’t work. it never did. no matter how many times you try to call it science, it will never work.
people do not want it.
and they do not want people telling them what to do.
if you want to wear one, knock yourself out. you do you and leave others out of it.
this is not what this overblown opposition is about.
they are worried about something else:
this is is a strong signal that such local bio-tyrannies will no longer be tolerated.
and it’s a sign of the short shelf life remaining on many other tyrannies as well.
this
is the real reason that jumped up county health harridans and enraged
educators are fighting so furiously on this ridiculous hill: because
once it is seen that they can be pushed back, pushback is going to
accelerate everywhere.
longtime gatopal™ doomberg (yes, cats and chickens can be friends. his substack is fantastic.) published a wonderful take on how this works the other day:
this
is what they know is coming. this is WHY they are so aggressive and
strident and accusatory about anyone who tries to start any dancing
whatsoever. their little fiefdoms rely entirely on the perception that
they cannot be challenged, that they are in control, and that this
cannot be changed.
the stalinist stunts pulled in closed county
and school board meetings that ignore debate, dissent, or accountability
stand as powerful evidence on this. they have tried to rig the game.
but
every win makes the next win easier. each opposition to and
overturning of their petty and pernicious prerogatives makes the next
retaking of authority more likely.
this is a ball that once it starts rolling, can really gather momentum.
and this is the time to do it.
public
health, public schools, and public policy have become inimical to the
functioning of a free society and to the rights of a free people to live
and thrive.
and enough is enough.
it
is time to return the governance of government to we the people and
restore the notion that its just powers are derived from the consent of
those governed, not their submission.
no matter the nonsense now
taught in far too many schools (and this is no accident), this is not
some radical new idea. it is the founding principle of america, the
bedrock notion of a republic, that most ennobling form of government
which places the rights of the individual inalienably above the state
and elevates subject to citizen.
such rights may be most readily reclaimed at the local level.
They all hate us anyhow… …so let’s drop the Big One now.
— Randy Newman
The world is waiting to know: will “Joe Biden” bomb Guatemala back to
the stone age for sending incursions of its (very fine) people across
America’s southern border? All of a sudden borders are sacred again, you
know. Of course, there’s that old problem Colin Powell used to raise
back in the Iraq War days of you break it, you own it. But, hey, don’t we already own Guatemala? And isn’t it already sort of broken?
Well, you can own a dog, say, a pitiful, broke-down, half-lame,
scrofulous, rheumy-eyed, junkyard kind of old dog, and that doesn’t stop
the dog from taking a dump on the neighbor’s property across the
street. Anyway, the only thing Guatemala is dumping in Texas and Arizona
is new voters, and that just means more democracy for us — a “win-win”
as they say in the cabinet room! (Though, Yamiche Alcindor might still
want to ask “JB” at the next presser if he would risk the US supply of
bananas. We’re having enough trouble getting auto parts, fer chrissake.)
Such are the quandaries of US foreign policy.
Then there’s this Shangri-La called Ukraine. Can anyone find it on
the map? It’s nowheres around here. Let’s face it: Ukraine is not
sending us any new voters or bananas. What good are they? You might
argue: they exported the Vindman twins to America (win-win); they
supported Hunter Biden’s cocaine habit for six or seven years and paid
the mortgage on The Big Guy’s beach house. So, maybe we do owe them.
But then, it’s said that Russia is lurking on Ukraine’s border like a
hungry bear at the edge of a sheep pasture, licking its chops, fork and
knife in its fisted paws, napkin tied around its throat, visions of
mutton-filled perogies dancing in its head. The whole DC foreign policy
establishment says we should take a few potshots at that bear, teach it a
lesson. I say, just throw Guatemala over the fence, let the bear chew
on that, including a few bananas for dessert. There it is: problem
solved.
Another possibility, which the “Joe Biden” admin seems to favor a
little, is World War Three. We couldn’t lose that, could we? Well, at
worst it would be a “lose-lose” so at least nobody else would win. Would
the US be any worse off without New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and a
few more population centers teeming with homeless junkies? (Who rarely
show up at the polls to vote, by the way… and if you asked, could they
even tell you who’s running for president?) World War Three begins to
look like our silver linings playbook. London, Paris, and Berlin are not
our problem, to be blunt about it. Even as you read this, “Joe Biden”
is striving to explain his thoughts on these vexing matters, but he’s
talking out of his ass so much it’s hard to tell whether he is setting
forth actual policy or just breaking wind.
Isn’t it refreshing to not have to lede with Covid-19? It looks like “Joe Biden’s” effort to change the channel
is working. Even so, there is some interesting Covid-19 news, like: the
whole endless, heartbreaking, demoralizing episode is winding down.
Whoa! That’s a shock! What will Western Civ do without it? In the UK,
Boris Johnson put a stop to all restrictions, mask mandates, and vaxx
passports, just like that (snap) on Wednesday. Then France
announced it would lift most Covid-19 restrictions in February, which is
a little more than a week from now, for those of you who haven’t
mastered the new maff. Then, on Thursday, Austria’s parliament
voted to approve mandatory vaccinations for everybody in the country —
say, what? — leading the casual observer to wonder whether half of
everybody in that country is maybe super pissed-off at their government,
seeing how France and the UK are going the opposite way.
Let’s be honest: it’s getting laughable to seriously advocate vaxxing
up a whole goshdarn population when it’s perfectly obvious now that the
vaxxes don’t work and are making a lot of people sick with everything
that can go wrong in a human body, plus Covid-19. Are nations
such as Austria and Germany not looking plumb insane now? Can the
European Union endure such wildly contradictory policy among its member
states, and not make itself ridiculous? Let’s just say, the situation in
Europe is in flux and events are moving fast.
Here in our exceptional nation, it is lately discovered — to the chagrin of the elite managerial classes — that The Science
personified by Dr. Anthony Fauci is not medical science after all but
rather political science. Ah! I see now why so much confusion has been
sown over Dr. Fauci’s management of the Covid-19 pandemic. If he
actually represented medical science, he might not have killed several
hundred thousand people in this country by withholding and suppressing
effective treatments and promoting deadly vaccines. He might not have
disgraced the entire medical establishment and half-wrecked the system
it works in. But, to paraphrase another eminent political scientist of
yore, Josef Stalin, while one death is a tragedy, a half-million is a
mere statistic. There’s science anyone can understand!
DISCUSS: Johnson ends “plan B” Covid restrictions in England
All mask mandates lifted
Vaccines certificates no longer required
work from home orders rescinded
UK Prime Minister has announced the end of all restrictions allegedly brought in to combat the spread of the “Omicron variant”.
This is just the latest in the series of back-pedalling moves on the
pandemic narrative, which will be subject to an article of their own in
the near future.
The plan B measures coming to an end include mask mandates in shops
and on public transport, the need to show vaccine certificates to enter
certain public spaces, and the requirement on working from home.
This order applies to England only, as the devolved governments of
Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have final say on their own
restrictions. However, it is still a remarkable turnaround, that sparks
some very interesting questions moving forward:
Why are the measures being dropped?
Will the rest of the UK follow suit?
Is Boris Johnson on the way out? If so, who’s up next?
Is the end of Covid, or is it a set-up for another push later in the year?
What will the public response be?
Will people demand the restrictions be put back in place?
Will some people still wear masks and social distance, even if they don’t have to?
The Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation of 2010 ordered the
Government Accountability Office (GAO), an investigative body for
Congress, to audit the Fed’s alphabet soup of emergency lending programs conducted during and after the 2008 financial crisis. The GAO found that a cumulative $16.1 trillion
had been pumped out to Wall Street firms by the Fed – at super cheap
interest rates. The GAO provided data for the peak amounts outstanding
and also a cumulative total.
Why is a cumulative total essential and relevant? Because one
institution in 2008, Citigroup, was insolvent for much of the time the
Fed was flooding it with cheap loans. (Under law, the Fed is not allowed
to make loans to an insolvent institution.) And when an insolvent
institution is getting loans rolled over and over by the Fed for a span
of two and a half years, at interest rates frequently below one percent
when the market wouldn’t loan it money at even double-digit interest
rates, it’s highly relevant to know the cumulative tally of just how
much Citigroup got from the Fed. According to the GAO, that tally came
to $2.5 trillion for just some of these Fed loan programs. (See page 131 of the GAO study here.)
The academic scholars that compiled the Fed’s loans during the financial crisis for the Levy Economics Institute also provided cumulative tallies. Their tally, which included additional Fed bailout programs not included by the GAO, came to $29 trillion.
The largest of the Fed’s emergency loan programs to Wall Street
trading houses in 2008 was called the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, or
in alphabet-soup-speak, PDCF. It made a cumulative tally of $8.9
trillion over a span of more than two years. Just three Wall Street
trading firms received 64 percent of that money: Citigroup, a cumulative
$2.02 trillion; Morgan Stanley, a cumulative $1.9 trillion; and Merrill
Lynch, a cumulative $1.78 trillion.
Back in 2008 there was no law that forced the Fed to ever
reveal the names of the banks that borrowed this money from the Fed and
the amounts borrowed. The Dodd-Frank legislation made these disclosures
by the Fed the law of the land. But Dodd-Frank set up a two-tier level
of disclosures. If the emergency lending program was under Section 13(3)
of the Federal Reserve Act, as the Primary Dealer Credit Facility was,
the Fed would have to reveal the firm names and amounts borrowed one
year after the program had been terminated. But emergency operations
conducted through the Fed’s so-called “open market” operations would not
have to reveal the names of the firms and amounts borrowed until two
years after the loans were made.
Thus, it appears that in 2019 the Fed decided to make astronomical
sums available to Wall Street’s trading houses not through a Primary
Dealer Credit Facility (which it set up again in March 2020) but through
its repo loan open market operations.
The repo loan market is an overnight loan market where banks, brokerage firms, mutual funds and others make one-day loans to each other against safe collateral, typically Treasury securities. Repo stands for “repurchase agreement.”
On September 17, 2019 the overnight loan rate spiked from an average
of about 2 percent to 10 percent – signaling that one or more firms were
in trouble. So the Fed effectively became the repo loan market on
September 17, 2019 and exponentially grew the amount of loans it was
making over the following months. Its repo loans lasted until July 2,
2020, by which time it had re-established the alphabet soup list of
emergency loan programs from 2008.
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington D.C., an
independent federal agency, outsources the vast majority of its
emergency lending programs to the New York Fed, one of 12 privately
owned regional Fed banks. The largest shareowners of the New York Fed
are the following five Wall Street banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup,
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of New York Mellon. Those five
banks represent two-thirds of the eight Global Systemically Important
Banks (G-SIBs) in the United States. The other three G-SIBs are Bank of
America, a shareowner in the Richmond Fed; Wells Fargo, a shareowner of
the San Francisco Fed; and State Street, a shareowner in the Boston Fed.
We have now crunched the numbers for the New York Fed’s emergency
repo loans for the periods in which it has thus far released the names
of the borrowers: the last 14 days of September 2019 and the full fourth
quarter of 2019. (The New York Fed is releasing the transaction data on
a quarterly basis here. You have to delete the Reverse Repo transactions.)
After crunching the numbers, it now appears that the New York Fed may
have intentionally thrown in a dizzying array of term loans to this
one-day (overnight) repo loan market in order to disguise the fact that
the trading units of the largest banks it supervises were the largest
borrowers.
For example, the New York Fed offered one-day repo loans every
business day but periodically also added 14-day, 28-day, 42-day and
other term loans. Let’s say a trading firm took a $10 billion loan for
one-day but on the same day took another $10 billion loan for a term of
14 days. The 14-day loan for $10 billion represented the equivalent of
14-days of borrowing $10 billion or a cumulative tally of $140 billion.
If we simply tallied the column the New York Fed provided for “trade
amount” per trading firm, it listed only $10 billion for that 14-day
term loan and not the $140 billion it actually translated into.
When we tallied the New York Fed’s “trade amount” column for the
fourth quarter of 2019, the New York Fed’s repo loans came to $4.5 trillion.
But when we set up a new column that adjusted the loans by the number
of days in the term, the Fed’s repo loans for the fourth quarter of 2019
came to $19.87 trillion, or 4.4 times the “trade amount” column.
Just six trading houses received 62 percent of the $19.87 trillion,
as illustrated in the chart above. The parents of three of those firms,
JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, are shareowners of the New
York Fed. The New York Fed is allowed to electronically create the
trillions of dollars it loans at the push of a button.
Below is the chart that shows the understated amounts borrowed using
just the New York Fed’s “trade amount” column for the fourth quarter of
2019. Below that we’ve also adjusted the Fed’s repo loans to account for
the number of days in the term for the period of September 17, 2019
through September 30, 2019. (The Fed released this transaction data
separately at the end of September in 2021.) It shows, convincingly,
that from the get-go of the financial crisis in 2019, the same three
firms were at the center of the borrowing.
The Fed originally tried to pass the problem off to corporations
draining liquidity from the financial system by withdrawing their
quarterly tax payments in the fall of 2019. But among the largest
depository banks in the country where those quarterly tax payments would
be held are Wells Fargo Bank and Bank of America, in addition to
JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup’s Citibank. But as the chart below shows,
neither Wells Fargo nor Bank of America seem to be having any major
liquidity issues. In addition, three of the largest borrowers (Nomura,
Barclays and Deutsche) are the trading affiliates of foreign banks. Are
we really expected to believe that U.S. corporations are holding their
quarterly tax payments with the trading units of foreign banks?
The Fed’s audited financial statements
show that on its peak day in 2020 the Fed’s repo loan operation had
$495.7 billion in loans outstanding. On its peak day in 2019, the Fed’s
repo loans outstanding stood at $259.95 billion. It should be noted that
there was no COVID-19 pandemic crisis in the U.S. in 2019. The first
case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was reported by the CDC on January 20,
2020.
It’s long past the time for the Senate Banking Committee and the
House Financial Services Committee to haul the relevant parties to a
hearing, put the witnesses under oath, and get to the bottom of this
second clandestine Wall Street bailout by the Fed in the span of 11
years.
Thanks to Maxwell for contributing this article. I haven't had time to look around much at its source, The Adam Group, but check it out. It looks like an excellent source of education and means toward patient advocacy.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Why You Need An Advocate
Evidence: The money behind COVID protocols in Tennessee hospitals
The
hospital has historically been the place we knew we could count on to
act in the best interest of patients. If we were sick and needed urgent
care, the hospital was our trusted partner to help us get better.
Sadly,
those days are gone. Billions of dollars in COVID relief funds are
pouring into Tennessee hospitals through the CARES Act. The CDC
publishes Provider Relief Fund COVID-19 High-Impact Payments here. This money has conditions that must be met to receive it, and these conditions are killing COVID patients and destroying families across Tennessee.
We
know hospitals are getting marching orders from the American Hospital
Association (AHA) and our state health department. Here is a special bulletin from AHA regarding these funds. This special bulletin from AHA describes eligibility and distribution of funds.
Tennessee hospitals receive even more money for every COVID case
based on COVID relief legislation that created a 20 percent premium (or
"add on") for Medicare patients. (Source: USA Today, Fox News, Healthcare Compliance Association)
Our Governor, Bill Lee, and the Financial Stimulus Accountability Group (FSAG)
released recommendations in early October 2021 for additional
investment of federal relief dollars ($3 billion), so there is currently
no end to the medical murder for money scheme. (Source: SpartaLive.com)
We cannot say every Tennessee
hospital chooses money over ethics. There may be some hospitals
refusing this money and faithfully adhering to the Hippocratic Oath to
do no harm. But Adam Group advocates' experiences with more than a dozen
Tennessee hospitals indicate an unprecedented pattern of patient abuse
and violation of rights against patients and their families, including
medical kidnapping, disregard for powers of attorney and
conservatorships, poor patient care, deceptive practices, and
potentially criminal behavior.
Why an advocate?
We know why Tennessee hospitals are behaving in ways that violate patient and family rights.
There
are billions of dollars in federal COVID relief funds flowing into
hospitals in exchange for strict compliance to requirements and
protocols dictated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Once you
see the evidence connecting the money to COVID patient care, you begin
to understand why COVID patients are dying in hospitals, alone and
separated from their families--often on ventilators.
You need these facts BEFORE you or someone you love admits to a hospital for COVID treatment.
If
admission has occurred, you need someone immediately to help you
through the difficult process of keeping yourself or someone you love
from being a victim of these deadly protocols.
Most Tennessee hospitals will not recognize powers of attorney and will isolate patients from their families.
What
are your rights? How can you stop hospitals from implementing deadly
COVID protocols? The Adam Group advocates can help you navigate this
system and help you assert your rights.
Evidence: Connecting COVID relief money to COVID patient care
In
exchange for receiving billions of dollars in COVID relief funds,
Tennessee hospitals have a clear directive for treating COVID patients.
Tennessee hospitals must follow COVID treatment protocols declared in
the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Treatment Guidelines:
"The COVID-19 Treatment Guidelines have been developed to provide
clinicians with guidance on how to care for patients with COVID-19."
The
Guidelines claim (page 21) that remdesivir (marketed as Veklury), an
antiviral agent, is the only FDA-approved drug for the treatment of
COVID-19 (for emergency use), and the document provides all instructions for administering remdesivir to hospitalized COVID patients.
Here is what we know:
Remdesivir was stopped after kidney failures occurred in COVID
drug trials and it previously failed in trials against Ebola. (Source: Medical Buyer)
In clinical trials and case series, adverse effects such as acute
kidney injury (AKI) and renal replacement have been linked to the use of
remdesivir. Kidney injuries, including proximal tubular epithelial cell
necrosis, have also been observed in animal studies during the drug’s
development. (Source: Planet Today News, A Final Warning)
The World Health Organization (WHO) recommended against the use of remdesivir in COVID patients. (Source: WHO, NBC News, Forbes)
Remdesivir costs in the range of $2,600 to $3,500 for a five- to ten-day course. (Source: ABC News, NPR)
Approval of remdesivir for the exclusive treatment of COVID raises
red flags. Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir was cleared by the FDA for the
treatment of COVID-19. The FDA authorization occurred two days after
Gilead revealed it was aware of “positive data”
from a clinical trial of remdesivir by the US National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The NIAID and the trial are
both led by Anthony Fauci.
Only
a handful of physicians and other healthcare professionals are brave
enough to speak out against the use of remdesivir on COVID patients for
fear of losing their licenses and being tried and hung in the court of
public opinion. Dr. Bryan Ardis is not afraid to share information about remdesivir. In this video, Dr. Ardis explains how hospital protocols are murdering Americans by prescribing remdesivir, which causes renal failure.
We also know:
The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Actprovides immunity from liability
(except for willful misconduct) for claims of loss caused by, arising
out of, relating to, or resulting from administration or use of countermeasures to
diseases, threats, and conditions; and to entities and individuals
involved in development, manufacture, testing, distribution, administration, and use of such countermeasures.
1.
The PREP Act defines a covered person to include (i) the United States;
(ii) manufacturers and distributors of covered countermeasures; (iii)
“program planners”; and (iv) “qualified persons” who prescribe, administer, or dispense covered countermeasures.
2. PREP Act immunity reaches “all claims for loss”under
federal and state law. Loss is broadly defined to mean “any type of
loss,” including (i) death; (ii) physical, mental, or emotional injury,
illness, disability, or condition; (iii) fear of such injury, including
medical monitoring costs; and (iv) loss of or damage to property,
including business interruption loss.
3. The loss must have a causal relationship to the administration and use of a covered countermeasure.
4.
The medical product at issue must be a covered countermeasure. The PREP
Act specifies four types of covered countermeasures: (i) a qualified
“pandemic or epidemic product”; (ii) a “security countermeasure”; (iii) a drug, biological product, or device that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized for emergency use; and (iv) a “respiratory protective device” that is approved by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).
A pandemic or epidemic product includes any drug, biological product, or device
developed “to diagnose, mitigate, prevent, treat, or cure a pandemic or
epidemic” or used “to limit the harm such pandemic or epidemic might
otherwise cause.” In addition, drugs, biological products, or devices
used to treat the side effects of a pandemic or epidemic product, or to
enhance their effects, may themselves be covered countermeasures. In
either case, to
be a covered countermeasure, the pandemic or epidemic product must be
approved, licensed, or authorized for emergency use by FDA.
Security
countermeasure refers to a drug, biological product, or device used “to
diagnose, mitigate, prevent, or treat harm from any biological,
chemical, radiological, or nuclear agent” identified by the Secretary of
Homeland Security as a material threat to national security.
The
emergency use category of covered countermeasures includes drugs,
biological products, and devices that FDA has authorized for use outside
its ordinary regulatory processes via an Emergency Use Authorization
(EUA). FDA has made wide use of its emergency authorities in
response to the COVID-19 pandemic, issuing EUAs for certain in vitro
diagnostic products (i.e., tests for COVID-19), antibody tests, personal
protective equipment (e.g., respirators and face shields), ventilators, therapeutic drugs, and vaccines.
Section
6005 of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and Section 3103 of
the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act)
amended the PREP Act to add a fourth covered countermeasure category for
certain respiratory protective devices (such as N95 respirators). To be
covered by the PREP Act, the respiratory protective device must be (i)
approved by NIOSH under 42 C.F.R. Part 84; and (ii) determined by the
Secretary to be a priority for use during a public health emergency. FDA
issued an EUA on March 2, 2020, for the use of NIOSH-approved filtering
respirators intended for general use to protect health care personnel
against COVID-19.
The “Willful Misconduct” Exception
If
a claim is within the PREP Act’s scope, a covered person is generally
immune from legal liability. The “sole exception” to immunity is when a
covered person proximately causes death or serious physical injury to
another person through willful misconduct. A serious physical
injury must be life threatening, permanently impair a body function,
permanently damage a body structure, or require medical intervention to
avoid such permanent impairment or damage. Willful misconduct requires
that the covered person acted (i) intentionally to achieve a wrongful
purpose; (ii) knowingly without legal or factual justification; and
(iii) in disregard of a known or obvious risk that is so great as to
make it highly probable that the harm will outweigh the benefit.
In
other words, remdesivir (Veklury) is the ONLY drug FDA approved under
an EUA for the treatment of COVID-19. Use of remdesivir and ventilators
are covered countermeasures under the PREP Act, which provides liability
immunity to all doctors and hospitals that prescribe, administer, or
dispense these two countermeasures.
Not
only are hospitals making money off COVID diagnoses of patients, but
hospitals also make money off the use of ventilators and remdesivir, AND
hospitals are immune from all liability if they use these covered
countermeasures.
This
is why hospitals tell patients and families remdesivir and ventilators
are the ONLY treatment protocols they have for COVID-19. No other
"off-label" treatments, despite their effectiveness and safety, pay
dividends for every patient. No other treatments offer immunity from
liability in case of injury or death.
HOSPITAL WATCH LIST
These hospitals and hospital systems are the worst offenders of COVID patient care and disrespect of patient and family rights:
Tristar Summit Medical Center in Hermitage, TN (HCA)
Tristar Hendersonville in Hendersonville, TN (HCA)
Ascension Saint Thomas West in Nashville, TN
Erlanger East Hospital in Chattanooga, TN
Erlanger Baroness Hospital in Chattanooga, TN
CHI Memorial Hospital in Chattanooga, TN
Parkridge East Hospital in Chattanooga, TN
Cookeville Regional Medical Center in Cookeville, TN
Johnson’s passing though, does nothing to address a looming crisis as
bad as anything seen in the crises of the 1970s or the 1930s. A crisis
that, absent a new and versatile energy-dense replacement for fossil
fuels which has yet to be discovered, cannot be reversed. Millions of
British households were already struggling prior to the pandemic, and
there is little evidence that things have improved – although various
grants and furlough schemes may have prevented things from being even
worse. Johnson and his modern-day Marie Antoinette partying in the
grounds of 10 Downing Street while Britain’s economy was metaphorically
burning in the distance, may prove to be their downfall. And the
opposition parties may gloat over their pyrrhic victory. But it is no
more than another of history’s Versailles moments… the point when
everyone can see for themselves that the governing elite is not only out
of touch, but only out for itself. The true hardship of economic
unravelling and political revolt has yet to come. And while we may hope
that it stops short of bloody revolution and complete collapse, we have
yet to see any evidence that the ruling elite even begins to understand the process of collapse which is unfolding, still less offers any serious response to it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~`
Britain’s Versailles moment
The image
of Marie Antoinette dressing up and playing shepherdess in the grounds
of her Hameau de la Reine folly at Versailles while Paris burned in the
distance may owe more to the mythology of the subsequent revolution, but
it speaks to an aristocratic elite which had severed all ties to the realities of life for the people they ruled over. It wasn’t the first time that a schism had opened up between the rulers and the ruled, and it wouldn’t be the last.
As often happens, while history did not repeat, it very definitely
rhymed. There was the same frivolous, partying among a cavalier elite
even as the people’s bellies rumbled with hunger. There was also the
same outwardly bombastic but privately weak male ruler, hen pecked by
the stronger and more intellectually gifted foreign wife. And at the
end, there was the same inability to do more than party as their
respective kingdoms were consumed by the flames of revolt.
While such events are mostly written up
around the personalities involved, there were deeper material factors at
work. North-western Europe, for example, had been in the grip of the
“little Ice Age” during the ill-fated reign of the Stuarts. This fed
into an energy crisis as timber was consumed both for construction and
fuel faster than trees could be grown to replace it. It also led to the
run of poor harvests which all too often led to catastrophe in
pre-industrial economies. It was into this explosive mix that a
relatively new printing industry added divisive religious-based
propaganda designed to blame collective misfortune on the followers of
an opposing creed. Protestants accused Catholics of committing
atrocities. Catholics accused Protestants of persecution. Both engaged
in the age-old habit of blaming Jews for poisoning wells. This
religious zeal fuelled the murderous thirty-years’ war between 1618 and
1648, which saw as many as eight million deaths. And while England
avoided the war on the continent, the material conditions and the
religious fervour brought civil war to the British Isles soon enough.
On a smaller scale, the collapse of the
political court of Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and his
politically foreign consort, Princess Nut Nuts,
bares many similar – if not quite so apocalyptic – features. Johnson’s
rise to power was based on naked self-interest. The decision to
campaign to leave the European Union was made just hours before the
referendum campaign began and was based entirely on whether supporting
or opposing the sitting Prime Minister would offer the best route to
becoming Prime Minister himself. Aided by the imbecilic antics of the pro-remain parliamentary bloc,
Johnson was able to go to the country in December 2019 with the sole
pledge to “get Brexit done.” The result no doubt exceeded his
expectations – Labour’s former industrial red wall (more a neglected
ex-industrial wasteland these days) crumbled in the face of an
incoherent, scatter-gun opposition campaign.
Johnson’s 80 seat majority ought to have
made him invulnerable. But “getting Brexit done” means so much more
than the formality of exiting the European Union. While the Brexiteer
Tories may have imagined that they were resurrecting the glory days of
the British Empire, the economic upswing of the 1950s, or at least the
electoral success of the Thatcher years, it is doubtful that this is
what the majority of leave voters across ex-industrial, rundown seaside
and small-town rural Britain had voted for. But beyond getting a messy
exit deal, and a handful of disadvantageous trade agreements, Johnson
has been incapable of translating the Brexit and general election
mandate into the “taking back control” institutional and economic
reforms that the majority of his voter base desires.
For the most part, Johnson’s political
luck since the 2019 election has been to be opposed by a Labour leader
who has evidently had a charisma by-pass, and a Labour Party devoid of
political ideas relevant to the realities of life for millions of
British people after more than a decade of austerity and four decades of
neoliberal neglect. Even the ramshackle response to the pandemic went
largely unchallenged by an opposition which showed itself to be even
more authoritarian and even less economically competent than Johnson’s
Tories. The best Labour could offer was to do the same economy-wrecking
things the government was doing, but more, quicker, and for longer.
The lack of opposition though, also
speaks to deeper material crises brewing out of sight. Just as many on
the Tory benches were hoping to recreate some past glory, Starmer and
his backers are engaged in a similarly doomed attempt to relive the
Blair years. But the oil-based, debt bubble boom conditions which
allowed these electoral triumphs have long since faded into the mists of
history. The 2008 crash and the years of austerity which followed,
have created a very different socio-economic structure to the one which
rallied behind Blair’s “third way” message in 1997. But a Labour Party
which morphed into a party of the metropolitan middle classes is largely
both unaware of and indifferent to the plight of the sons and daughters
of the Blairite electoral coalition of the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Since at least the 1980s, prosperity has
been in retreat in Britain. What I mean by this is that, while official
GDP growth may have continued, a growing part of the population has
seen its discretionary income shrink, with those at the bottom
unable even to cover essentials like food and fuel – hence the massive
rise in foodbanks, for example. In the 1980s, we discussed this problem
in terms of a North-South divide, with a dividing line running from the
Severn estuary in the southwest to the Humber in the northeast. It was
shorthand, of course. But it spoke to an earlier divide between the
old, coal-powered industries located in the north – coal mining, steel
working, ship building, textiles, etc. – and the more recent, southern
oil-based industries of the post-war years – aviation, petrochemicals,
electronics, pharmaceuticals, etc. It was largely – though not
exclusively – the older, coal-powered industries – mostly nationalised
in an attempt to protect employment and maintain critical infrastructure
– whose decline exploded in the stagflationary crisis of the 1970s.
The monetarist quack cure – mass unemployment and industrial closure –
left scars which continue to fester to this day. And while Thatcher’s
intention may have been to clear out unprofitable industries to provide
space for new, leading-edge technology enterprises to take hold, her
main achievement was to use the brief – two decade – spurt of North Sea
oil growth to underpin a debt-based banking and financial industry which
was blown apart by its own internal contradictions in 2008.
The retreat of prosperity continued
throughout. Although its reality was more personal than the division
between north and south or even my own contrasting of the still affluent
– for now – metropolitan suburbs of the top-tier university towns with
ex-industrial, rundown seaside and small-town rural Britain. Even
within the most affluent of university town suburbs you will find
miserable souls eking out a living from zero-hours and gig work,
supplemented by in-work benefits and occasional visits to food banks.
At the same time, you can find some seriously wealthy individuals
residing in some of the most impoverished regions of the UK.
Nevertheless, statistically, the bottom half of the income distribution
has been going backward
for more than a decade, even as the cost of essentials like food, fuel
and energy has been rising far faster than the official inflation rate.
And far fewer of those experiencing declining prosperity live in the
leafy suburbs of university cities like Oxford than in ex-industrial
towns like Ebbw Vale.
Crucially, the process of decline did not
stop just because people voted for Brexit in 2016. It is just that the
political and media elites stopped looking… not that they had been
looking too closely to begin with. Nor did the pandemic reverse the
decline, despite the political class claiming that we were all in it
together. Indeed, by severing supply chains, shutting in raw materials
production and creating an economic environment hostile to long-term
investment in key industries, the response to the pandemic has ensured
that a tide of declining prosperity will wash over even the metropolitan
middle classes far sooner than might otherwise have been the case, as
the retreat of prosperity accelerates.
While there is growing awareness among
the political class that we face an imminent “standards of living”
crisis – which they still speak about in the third person – there is no
sign that they understand the causes or the depths of what is coming.
Indeed, the emerging solution to the gas and electricity component –
providing loans to energy companies to keep consumer prices low until the wholesale price of gas falls again
– displays a serious lack of awareness of the impossibility of having
infinite growth on a finite planet, since one of the main causes of the
crisis is that we have used up all of the cheap and easy gas deposits
and are now left with only the difficult and expensive ones to sustain
us. And since we wrecked our coal industries and left ourselves
entirely dependent upon gas to back up our over-deployment of
intermittent wind generation – a process being repeated across the developed world – the wholesale price of gas is going to remain high for as long as it takes for clever people somewhere else to figure out an affordable means of coping with intermittency.
Nor, ironically, is gas our main problem. Largely hidden from view – although for much the same reason as with gas
– the price of oil has been quietly creeping up toward $90 per barrel
and looks likely to hit $100 per barrel by the summer, with some
analysts forecasting an economy-crushing $200 a barrel
in the near future. Because almost everything in the modern global
economy depends upon oil in its manufacture and transportation, coming
on top of the eye-watering price increases from disrupted supply chains,
the general hike in costs from oil price rises will be far more
damaging than simply adding anywhere between .50p and £1.00 to the price
of a litre of petrol.
The coming oil shock is no more
short-term than the gas and electricity crisis. It is just that the
brief spurt of debt-based growth between 1986 and 2008 helped to take
everyone’s eyes off the ball. And for a political elite which has
become bloated with debt-based assets and City of London sinecures it
has allowed a near complete divorce from the increasingly difficult
daily grind of the majority of the governed. And it is a consequence of
this gulf between government and governed which looks set to bring an
end to what looked to be the unassailable rise and rise of Prime
Minister Johnson. For it is only when inequality has become so wide
that political leaders come to believe themselves above the laws and
rules which govern the little people. Lockdowns for us, and cheese and
wine parties for them.
Johnson’s passing though, does nothing to
address a looming crisis as bad as anything seen in the crises of the
1970s or the 1930s. A crisis that, absent a new and versatile
energy-dense replacement for fossil fuels which has yet to be
discovered, cannot be reversed. Millions of British households were
already struggling prior to the pandemic, and there is little evidence
that things have improved – although various grants and furlough schemes
may have prevented things from being even worse. Johnson and his
modern-day Marie Antoinette partying in the grounds of 10 Downing Street
while Britain’s economy was metaphorically burning in the distance, may
prove to be their downfall. And the opposition parties may gloat over
their pyrrhic victory. But it is no more than another of history’s
Versailles moments… the point when everyone can see for themselves that
the governing elite is not only out of touch, but only out for itself.
The true hardship of economic unravelling and political revolt has yet
to come. And while we may hope that it stops short of bloody revolution
and complete collapse, we have yet to see any evidence that the ruling
elite even begins to understand the process of collapse which is unfolding, still less offers any serious response to it.
On the bright side, at least guillotines
and scaffolds are made from renewable and recycled materials and are
entirely powered by renewable energy…
Lockdown Musical Explores
the Profound Questions: What Makes a Life Worth Living? Does a Scotch
Egg Really Constitute a Substantial Meal?
Philip Roth once said that satire is “moral outrage turned into comic
art”. I hope that describes pretty well our new musical, “Scotch Egg”
which is running this weekend at the Drayton Theatre in London. Roth’s
quote certainly encapsulates the mood in which I wrote much of the Book
and the Lyrics. Kept sane mainly by Toby’s Lockdown Sceptics,
in March 2020 I watched in stunned disbelief as key principles of law
and democracy were destroyed – and all for a seriously over-rated virus.
As an ex-lawyer (now a writer and teacher) I was baffled and angered in
equal measure. I reached for my pen. However, my writing partner, Dom
Hartley, as well as being a musical genius, operates very much in a
comedic universe. He hates anything too preachy. So, together we spent
almost two years creating a show which joyfully mocks the powerful and
the tragic absurdities of lockdown. Our key aim is to be entertaining.
Always. So, the show opens with an out-of-work actor driven to
alcoholism and working for Deliveroo; there is a song sung by an
out-of-work burglar and one from an equally bereft sex-worker. Oh, and
the song “Drama” contains a rap-battle between Boris Johnson and Chris
Whitty. We don’t shy away from tragedy either – one song “Fading Away”
shows a dying man being forced to say goodbye to his wife of 50 years on
an iPad.
We’re no strangers to musical theatre, having written two previous
shows, “Crunch” (about the 2008 financial crisis) and “Vision”, which
has been produced twice at the Edinburgh Fringe and many times in
England and abroad. Although “Scotch Egg” is a comedy, it feels more
important now than these other pieces. It’s a show that we simply had to
write. It certainly seems to have sparked some interest as tickets for
this short run sold out in a few days. However, there are some remaining
seats for press or industry professionals so, if that’s you, please get
in touch via the show’s website. We are aiming for a longer run in the summer, when I hope many other Daily Sceptic readers
will get a chance to see it. In the meantime, our cast are ready to get
under those lights this weekend and try valiantly to dispel our
country’s stubborn mass psychosis with the most powerful tool of all:
mockery.
Here the blurb:
It’s 2040 and a late-night news
show is running a retrospective on the Pandemic. In the studio with
sharp-tongued presenter, Judith Harper-Jones, is ex-PM Lord Johnson. As
the Peer struggles to explain the inexplicable, a series of characters
take the audience through the comic and the tragic aspects of the
crisis.
This show explores all the profound questions: What makes a
life worth living? Is democracy dead? Does a scotch egg really
constitute a substantial meal?
With satirical numbers like, The Laws are Set in Stone and He’s Gonna Save Christmas, combined with the pathos of songs like, Fading Away and We’re All Key Workers After All, this musical romp will provide thought-provoking satire and a much-needed Covid boost – without the need for a fourth jab.
Organized workers, often defying their timid union leadership, are on the march across the United States.
By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
Original illustration by Mr. Fish.
There is one last hope for the United States. It does not lie in the
ballot box. It lies in the union organizing and strikes by workers at
Amazon, Starbucks, Uber, Lyft, John Deere, Kellogg, the Special Metals
plant in Huntington, West Virginia, owned by Berkshire Hathaway, the
Northwest Carpenters Union, Kroger, teachers in Chicago, West Virginia,
Oklahoma and Arizona, fast-food workers, hundreds of nurses in
Worcester, Massachusetts, and the members of the International Alliance
of Theatrical Stage Employees.
Organized workers, often defying their timid union leadership, are on
the march across the United States. Over four million workers, about 3%
of the work force, mostly from accommodation and food services,
healthcare and social assistance, transportation, housing, and utilities
have walked away from jobs, rejecting poor pay along with punishing and
risky working conditions. There is a growing consensus – 68% in a recent Gallup poll with
that number climbing to 77% of those between the ages of 18 and 34 –
that the only way left to alter the balance of power and force
concessions from the ruling capitalist class is to mobilize and strike,
although only 9% of the U.S. work force is unionized. Forget the woke
Democrats. This is a class war.
The question, Karl Popper reminded us, is not how we get good people
to rule. Most of those attracted to power, figures such as Joe Biden,
are at best mediocre and many, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, or
Mike Pompeo, are venal. The question is, rather, how do we organize
institutions to prevent incompetent or bad leaders from inflicting too
much damage. How do we pit power against power?
The Democratic Party will not push through the kind of radical New
Deal reforms that in the 1930s staved off fascism and communism. Its
empty political theater, which stretches back to the Clinton
administration, was on full display in Atlanta when Biden called for
revoking the filibuster to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act,
knowing that his chances of success are zero. Georgia Democratic
gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, along with several of the state’s
voting rights groups, boycotted the event in a very public rebuke. They
were acutely aware of Biden’s cynical ploy. When the Democrats were in
the minority, they clung to the filibuster like a life raft. Then Sen.
Barack Obama, along with other Democrats, campaigned for it to remain in
place. And a few days ago, the Democratic leadership employed the
filibuster to block legislation proposed by Sen. Ted Cruz.
The Democrats have been full partners in the dismantling of our
democracy, refusing to banish dark and corporate money from the
electoral process and governing, as Obama did, through presidential
executive actions, agency “guidance,” notices and other regulatory dark matter
that bypass Congress. The Democrats, who helped launch and perpetuate
our endless wars, were also co-architects of trade deals such as NAFTA,
expanded surveillance of citizens, militarized police, the largest
prison system in the world and a raft of anti-terrorism laws such as
Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) that abolish nearly all rights,
including due process and attorney-client privilege, to allow suspects
to be convicted and imprisoned with secret evidence they and their
lawyers are not permitted to see. The squandering of staggering
resources to the military — $777.7 billion a year — passed in the Senate
with an 89-10 vote and in the House of Representatives with a 363-70
vote, coupled with the $80 billion spent annually on the intelligence
agencies has made the military and the intelligence services, many run
by private contractors such as Booz Allen Hamilton, nearly omnipotent.
The Democrats long ago walked out on workers and unions. The Democratic
governor of Maine, Janet Mills, for example, killed a bill a few days ago that would have allowed farm workers in the state to unionize. On all the major structural issues there is no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats.
The longer the Democratic Party does not deliver real reforms to
ameliorate the economic hardship, exacerbated by soaring inflation
rates, the more it feeds the frustration of many of its supporters,
widespread apathy (there are 80 million eligible voters, a third of the
electorate, who do not cast ballots) and the hatred of the “liberal”
elites stoked by Donald Trump’s cultish Republican Party. Its signature
infrastructure package, Build Back Better, when you read the fine print,
is yet another infusion of billions of government money into corporate
bank accounts. This should not surprise anyone, given who funds and
controls the Democratic Party.
The suffering and instability gripping at least half the country
living in financial distress, alienated and disenfranchised, preyed upon
by banks, credit card companies, student loan companies, privatized
utilities, the gig economy, a for-profit health care system that has
resulted in a quarter of all worldwide COVID-19 deaths—although we are
less than 5% of the world’s population—and employers who pay slave wages
and do not provide benefits is getting worse. Biden has presided over
the loss of extended unemployment benefits, rental assistance,
forbearance for student loans, emergency checks, the moratorium on
evictions and now the ending of the expansion of the child tax credits,
all as the pandemic again surges. The handling of the pandemic, from a
health and an economic perspective, is one more sign of the empire’s
deep decay. Americans who are uninsured, or who are covered by Medicare,
often frontline workers, are not reimbursed for over-the-counter COVID
tests they purchase. The Supreme Court – five of the justices were
appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote – also blocked the Biden administration
from enforcing a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers. And on
the horizon, fueled by the economic fallout from the pandemic, are
large-scale loan defaults and another financial crisis. The worse things
get, the more discredited the Democratic Party and its “liberal”
democratic values become, and the more the Christian fascists lurking in
the wings thrive.
As history has repeatedly proven, organized labor, allied with a
political party dedicated to its interests, is the best tool to push
back against the rich. Nick French in an article in Jacobin draws on the work of the sociologist Walter Korpi who examined the rise of the Swedish welfare state in his book “The Democratic Class Struggle.”
Korpi detailed how Swedish workers, as French writes, “built a strong
and well-organized trade union movement, organized along industrial
lines and united by a central trade union federation, the
Landsorganisationen (LO), which worked closely with the Social
Democratic Workers’ Party of Sweden (SAP).” The battle to build the
welfare state required organizing – 76% of workers were unionized –
waves of strikes, militant labor activity and SAP political pressure.
“Measured in terms of the number of working days per worker,” Korpi
writes, “from the turn of the century up to the early 1930s, Sweden had
the highest level of strikes and lockouts among the Western nations.”
From 1900–13, as French notes, “there were 1,286 days of idleness due to
strikes and lockouts per thousand workers in Sweden. From 1919–38,
there were 1,448. (By comparison, in the United States last year,
according to National Bureau of Economic Research data, there were fewer
than 3.7 days of idlenessper thousand workers due to work stoppages.)” There are a few third parties including The Green Party, Socialist Alternative and The People’s Party
that provide this opportunity. But the Democrats won’t save us. They
have sold out to the billionaire class. We will only save ourselves.
Unions break down political divides, bringing workers of all
political persuasions together to fight a common oligarchic and
corporate foe. Once workers begin to exert power and extract demands
from the ruling class, the struggle educates communities about the real
configurations of power and mitigates the feelings of powerlessness that
have driven many into the arms of the neofascists. For this reason,
capitulating to the Democratic Party, which has betrayed working men and
women, is a terrible mistake.
The rapacious pillage by the elites, many of whom bankroll the
Democratic Party, has accelerated since the financial crash of 2008 and
the pandemic.
Wall Street banks recorded record profits for 2021. As the Financial
Times noted, they milked the underwriting fees from Fed-based borrowing
and profited from mergers and acquisitions. They have pumped their
profits, fueled by roughly $5 trillion in Fed spending
since the beginning of the pandemic, as Matt Taibbi points out, into
massive pay bonuses and stock buybacks. “The bulk of this new
wealth—most—is being converted into compensation for a handful of
executives,” Taibbi writes. “Buybacks have also been rampant in defense, pharmaceuticals, and oil & gas,
all of which also just finished their second straight year of record,
skyrocketing profits. We’re now up to about 745 billionaires in the
U.S., who’ve collectively seen their net worth grow about $2.1 trillion
to $5 trillion since March 2020, with almost all that wealth increase
tied to the Fed’s ballooning balance sheet.”
Kroger is typical.
The corporation, which operates some 2,800 stores under different
brands, including Baker’s, City Market, Dillons, Food 4 Less, Foods Co.,
Fred Meyer, Fry’s, Gerbes, Jay C Food Store, King Soopers, Mariano’s,
Metro Market, Pay-Less Super Markets, Pick’n Save, QFC, Ralphs, Ruler
and Smith’s Food and Drug, earned $4.1 billion in profits in 2020. By the end of the third quarter of 2021, it had $2.28 billion in cash, an increase of $399 million in the first quarter of 2020. Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen made over $22 million, nearly doubling the $12 million
he made in 2018. This is over 900 times the salary of the average
Kroger worker. Kroger in the first three quarters of 2021 also spent an
estimated $1.3 billion on stock buybacks.
Grocery
store workers cheer as they picket outside a King Soopers store after
rejecting the latest contract offer from the chain that is owned by
Kroger, Co., Thursday, Jan. 13, 2022, in east Denver. The grocery store
strike is the first in Denver since workers walked off their jobs in
1996. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski)
“Kroger is the only employer for 86 percent of their workers, making
it their sole source of earned income,” Economic Roundtable in a survey of
Kroger workers found. “Working full-time to earn a living wage would
require Kroger to pay $22 per hour for an annual living wage total of
$45,760. The average annual earnings of Kroger workers, however, equal
$29,655. This is $16,105 short of the annual income needed to pay for
basic necessities required for the living wage. More than two-thirds of
Kroger workers struggle for survival due to low wages and part-time work
schedules. Nine out of ten Kroger workers report that their wages have
not increased as much as basic expenses such as food and housing have
increase. Since 1990, wages for the most experienced Kroger food clerks
have declined from 11 to 22 percent (adjusted for inflation) across the
three regions surveyed. Across the entire grocery industry, 29 percent
of the labor force is below or near the federal poverty threshold.”
More than one-third (36%) of 10,000 employees at Kroger-owned stores
in Southern California, Colorado, and Washington said they were worried
about eviction. More than three-quarters (78%) are food-insecure. One in
7 Kroger workers faced homelessness in the past year. Nearly 1 in 5
(18%) Kroger employees said they hadn’t paid the previous month’s
mortgage on time.
More than 8,000 unionized Kroger’s King Soopers employees went on strike
on Jan. 12 in Colorado, demanding higher wages and better working
conditions from the country’s largest grocery store chain and
fourth-largest private employer.
This is where one of the emerging front lines in the class struggle
are located. It is where we should invest our time and energy.
Our capitalist democracy from the start was rigged against us. The
Electoral College permits presidential candidates such as George W. Bush
and Trump to lose the popular vote and assume office. The awarding of
two senators per state, regardless of the state’s population, means that
62 senators represent one quarter of the population while six represent
another quarter. The founding fathers disenfranchised women, Native
Americans, African Americans, and men without property. Most citizens
were intentionally locked out of the democratic process by the ruling
white male aristocrats, most of them slaveholders.
All the openings in our democracy were the result of prolonged
popular struggle. Hundreds of workers were murdered, thousands were
wounded, tens of thousands were blacklisted in our labor wars, the
bloodiest of any industrialized country. Abolitionists, suffragists,
unionists, crusading journalists and those in the anti-war and civil
rights movements opened our democratic space. These radical movements
were repressed and ruthlessly dismantled in the early 20th
century in the name of anti-communism. They were again targeted by the
corporate elites following the rise of new mass movements in the 1930s.
These popular movements, which rose again in the 1960s, moved us, inch
by bloody inch, towards equality and social justice. Most of these gains
made in the 1960s have been rolled back under the onslaught of
neoliberalism, deregulation, and a corrupt campaign finance system,
legalized by court rulings such as Citizens United, which allow
the rich and corporations to bankroll elections to select political
leaders and impose legislation. The modern incarnation of 19th-century
robber barons, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, each worth some $200
billion, summon us to our radical roots.
Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. It
is not a new story. The rich, throughout history, have found ways to
subjugate and re-subjugate the masses. And the masses, throughout
history, have cyclically awoken to throw off their chains.
Chris HedgesChris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact.Author Link
