Volume 79, no. 9 September 2023
For decades, programs from both parties have been billed as “public-private partnerships.” While that may be the definition of fascism, it is applauded as having the good part of both sides: Private efficiency, with government funding untainted by profiteering. Private resources used unselfishly for the public good. Accountability to the people without messy politicking. In theory.
Actually, government legal use of force is combined with private sector immunity from Constitutional restraints. But currently, it is even worse: the globalist “private” sector virtually owns the government, along with a growing portion of the real assets.
American prosperity was built on industrial capitalism. Today, that has largely been replaced by financial capitalism. The neoliberal Anglo-American approach is premised on the basis that the ultimate measure of a society is its level of consumption. But in the long run, a society’s well-being and its overall wealth are determined not by what the society can buy, but by what it can make.
Massive financialization, a process of wealth extraction, has led to the building of an inverted pyramid of derivative financial “products,” which suck the oxygen from the manufacture of real output. Self-reliance erodes, and a shrinking base of real wealth creation supports ever-smaller numbers in adequately paid employment (https://tinyurl.com/ykzakmza).
Wealth is increasingly concentrated in few hands. A critical mechanism, which Mathew Crawford calls “the fulcrum between authoritarianism and liberty among economic forces” is the Cantillon Effect. Expansion of the money supply results in automatic and unearned accumulation of wealth. Those closest to the “Empire Node,” where the money is first injected, profit, while everyone else is effectively taxed (https://tinyurl.com/yt2jrx5r).
The process of economic enslavement began in 1913 when the Fed, a private institution, was given control of the money supply. The Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, which pegged the world’s currency to the dollar, created “the ability to shadow tax most of the world while centralizing power at home to stave off rivals,” Crawford states. That system ended when President Nixon severed the dollar from gold, but the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) can still exert control of nations’ policies.
Dependence on government funding makes institutions eager to comply with the desires of the state—and of the donor class. But getting ordinary citizens to voluntarily comply with policies that harm them is achieved with fear of existential threats.
The Never-ending, Ever-expanding Emergency
The U.S. just endured the 22nd replay of the 9/11 disaster, which was followed on Oct 26, 2001, by the enactment of the radical USA PATRIOT Act, giving the executive branch “every tool” as demanded by Attorney General John Ashcroft. Matt Taibbi states that the U.S. became the world’s Death Star, constructing the most fearsome military-intelligence state ever seen, including a “targeted-killing” drone program. It created the 240,000-person Department of Homeland Security (DHS) (https://tinyurl.com/mve954as). In 2016, Barack Obama created the Global Engagement Center, which “takes advantage of the best talent and tools throughout the private sector and government” (https://tinyurl.com/49bhb8y8) and which “helped birth the censorship state,” Taibbi writes. He observes that the Fifth Circuit decision in Missouri v. Biden (see p3) allows the DHS to squirm free of an anti-censorship injunction.
The State of Exception applies most clearly to terrorists. And the “domestic terrorist” label is being broadly applied—to parents attending a school board meeting, vaccine resistors, pro-life activists, and Trump supporters (such as Ashli Babbitt?). “Existential” threats include another 9/11, another pandemic, an “insurrection” that “threatens our democracy,” “climate change,” and Trump.
The Censorship Industry
Academia, aided by grants from the National Science Foundation, is developing tools a quantum leap ahead of the Gestapo and Stasi. One goal is to use machine learning and network analysis tools to locate sources where “misinformation” originates and learn how it spreads. Students are being prepared for disinformation-related jobs (https://tinyurl.com/2d2s44sw).
The Globalists Could Fail
Henry Kissinger supplied the rationale for the “Grand Chessboard” strategy, explained by Zbigniew Brzezinski, for U.S. “dollar and banking financialized hegemony”: “He who controls money controls the world.” But, writes Alastair Crooke in The Mackinder Strategic ‘Bible’ Reconsidered, “It always has been: ‘He who has manufacturing capacity, raw materials, food, energy (human as well as fossil) and sound money can change the world.’ But Kissinger simply ignored those adjunct conditions, and based the U.S. instead in the creation of a global spider’s web of weaponised dollars (touch it, and the sanctions gossamer poisons you). Additionally, this system was multiplied through Wall Street parsing out access to trillions in newly created money only to the compliant” (https://tinyurl.com/5dc4ezmt). Russia and the global South are working on an escape strategy. And what if American patriots took back their country?
The end stage of the global debt pyramid should be cause for terror in the global financial elite (https://tinyurl.com/yc4euyxx). Fascism could be defeated once again.
AAPS Statement on Mask Mandates
The AAPS Board of Directors released the following statement (https://tinyurl.com/6486cszd):
“As masking mandates are contrary to the fundamental medical principle of informed consent, all masking mandates currently in place must be rescinded, and no future mandates should be imposed. Furthermore, since mask mandates for viral illnesses provide no clear benefits, while creating potential for harm, individuals should be empowered to choose to not observe such mandates that are either currently in existence or that may be imposed in the future.”
AAPS cites the Cochrane systematic review of available empirical evidence on efficacy (https://tinyurl.com/3n6cmv6d) and notes that at least 60 studies and reports show potential harm.
Flashback
Observations made by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s:
“The democratic tendency…leads men unceasingly to multiply the privileges of the state and to circumscribe the rights of private persons,…often sacrificed without regret and almost always violated without remorse. Men become less and less attached to private rights just when it is most necessary to retain and defend what little remains of them.”
“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp, and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate to rise above the crowd.
“The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
The Meaning of ‘SMART’
This acronym stands for “self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology” for computer hard drives. Now there are “smart meters,” “smart cars,” “smart phones,” “smart cities,” and “smart homes.” A smart illusion of safety and convenience, but actually it’s about tricking us into digital control and surveillance, wrote James Melville. My power company informs me how much I spent on air conditioning, laundry, lighting, etc. Will it be able to cut me off if I exceed my “carbon footprint” allowance?
X X X
“The more technological the world becomes, the greater is the danger…As the former minister in charge of a highly developed armaments economy it is my last duty to state: Every country in the world may be dominated by technology; but in a modern dictatorship this seems to me to be unavoidable. Therefore, the more technological the world becomes, the more essential will be the demand for individual freedom and the self-awareness of the individual human being as a counterpoise to technology.”
Albert Speer, https://tinyurl.com/552rs8sf
Resolution for Annual Meeting
The only Resolution submitted by the deadline in time for the annual meeting concerns the World Health Organization convention (https://tinyurl.com/y723nu4v):
Now therefore be it resolved, that the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons opposes the WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (“WHO CA+”) as drafted by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body of the World Health Organization.
The End of Foreign Aid?
Ironically, Washington’s global empire has subsisted on foreign aid, writes David Stockman—that is, oil and industrial goods bought on the cheap from the Persian Gulf oil states and the factories of East Asia. Foreign governments and their central bankers enabled the Fed’s long-term easy money regime to persist for five decades after August 1971, trading their workers’ labor and their natural resources for massive dollar IOUs.
After repeated embarrassments in foreign wars, the U.S. national security state switched to attacking demonized enemy states by the purportedly bloodless means of economic sanctions. That amounted to weaponizing the “Exorbitant Privilege.” “Reserves” built up by foreign nations and their central banks could be seized. When Washington seized $300 billion held abroad by the Russian central bank, everything changed. “In addition to being terrible investments, Treasuries are now clearly political tools for Washington to coerce others.” Other countries have taken note. Beijing has sold about 25% of its Treasuries since 2021, an enormous change in such a short period. This is at a time when the Rosy Scenario predicts $25 trillion of federal deficits over the next 10 years (https://tinyurl.com/2rpbuwcf).
Adverse Event Reporting
· Adverse events in human research appear to be massively underreported. Based on FOIA requests to the Office for Human Research Protections for the years 1990-2000, there were only 878 incident reports and eight deaths for 70 million subjects—“the tip of an iceberg” (https://tinyurl.com/ywr5bua6). The author’s proposed reforms evidently have not been implemented.
· Pfizer’s confidential pharmacovigilance documents requested by the European Medicines Agency contained nearly 1.6 million adverse events (https://tinyurl.com/3jt6fdyd).
· Now discontinued, the CDC’s v-safe system had 71 million symptoms reported following COVID jabs, revealed only after more than a year of litigation (https://tinyurl.com/68b3ux6c).
AAPS Calendar
Oct 26-28. 80th Annual Meeting, Fort Worth, TX.
ACTION OF THE MONTH
Scholarships for medical students/residents to attend annual meeting: contact [email protected]. Contribute to AAPS Educational Foundation: aapsonline.org/scholarships.
Yes, You May Prescribe IVM, But…
In oral argument before the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Apter v. HHS (No. 3-22-cv184), the U.S. attorney representing FDA basically said that FDA could say virtually anything it wants, even if it leads to patient deaths, without being held accountable by the courts. It is simply providing information (https://tinyurl.com/2p8rup52). The case was brought by a group of physicians who complained that the FDA’s unwarranted disparagement of ivermectin interfered with their treatment of COVID patients (for AAPS amicus, see https://tinyurl.com/ykj2wa7d).
The District Court dismissed the case on the basis that sovereign immunity protects agencies and officials. The Fifth Circuit reversed in part and remanded the case, stating that the doctors could use the Administrative Procedure Act to bypass sovereign immunity for certain claims.
Attorney Rick Jaffe cautions that FDA’s acknowledgment that doctors may legally prescribe off-label is not an “all’s clear” for prescribing ivermectin because state medical boards regulate the practice of medicine (https://tinyurl.com/47zpwxz8).
Searching fda.gov on “ivermectin” on Sept 18 still brings up “Why You Should Not Use Ivermectin to Treat or Prevent COVID-19,” with the famous photo of a horse, as the first entry.
The tweet that showed the horse captioned with FDA saying, “Seriously y’all. Stop it,” was not a command, but merely a “quippy tweet” that shared information, stated U.S. attorney Ashley Cheung Honold in response to a question from Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod (https://tinyurl.com/ejp3p7pe).
The Court’s decision stated: “FDA is not a physician. It has authority to inform, announce, and apprise—but not to endorse, denounce, or advise… The Doctors have plausibly alleged that the FDA’s posts fell on the wrong side of the line between telling about and telling to…. Even tweet-size doses of personalized medical advice are beyond the FDA’s statutory authority.”
SCOTUS to Decide Public-Private Censorship
The unprecedented lower court ruling to prevent government officials from urging social media to censor posts, though partly upheld by the Fifth Circuit, is temporarily stayed by a ruling from Justice Samuel Alito (https://tinyurl.com/ms8ed3ah).
The lawsuit Missouri v. Biden, brought by Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey (AAPS News, July 2023), alleges that government actors “coerced” private companies to engage in censorship. The government claims there is a difference between persuasion and coercion, and argues that requests for censorship by the FBI, for example, aren’t “inherently coercive merely because the FBI is a powerful law enforcement agency” (ibid.).
AAPS secretary Lawrence Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., writes, quoting from the original preliminary injunction, “While not admitting any fault in the suppression of free speech, Defendants blame the Russians, COVID-19, and capitalism for any suppression of free speech by social-media companies.” And all the harm was supposedly in the past, so let’s move on.
Attorney Rick Jaffe points out that the Fifth Circuit vacated all but one of the lower court’s prohibitions and significantly modified the sixth. The wording (the government may not “significantly encourage”) may turn government officials into “verbal stunt pilots” (https://tinyurl.com/4nx8rkde). It also removed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), and the State Department from the order.
In appealing to the Supreme Court, “the Borg has made a mistake,” writes Matt Taibbi. After the 5th Circuit ruling, only government action against protected free speech remained barred. Administration lawyers, however, apparently couldn’t let the principle of a ruling saying the Biden White House was “in violation of the First Amendment” stand. “Instead of keeping the whole censorship store and losing only the right to violate the Bill of Rights openly, they’re going to a hostile Supreme Court to put everything at risk. ‘They took the cheese,’ is how one lawyer put it.”
The Biden Administration has decided “to engage in a public fight for the right to try to suppress things like criticism of lockdown policies by plaintiff physicians Bhattacharya, Kulldorff and Aaron Kheriaty. As Bhattacharya puts it, this is true scientific opinion, targeted ‘just because the speech contradicts government policy’…. It’s a historic opportunity to argue one of the defining issues of the age,” Taibbi writes (tinyurl.com/mpsyx7nc).
Tip of the Month: Interstate medical licensure through the Compact continues to be a trap for the unwary. While promoting itself as a better approach, the Interstate Medical Licensure Compact does not accept anyone who has medical board discipline or is even under investigation, whatever that means. Its whopping $700 fee, which is in addition to state licensure fees, is non-refundable even if it declines to accept a physician. Renewal of state licenses is not allowed through the Compact unless the state license was first obtained through the Compact. But the Compact is quick to report any discipline by one state to all the other states where the physician is licensed. In the last six years, fewer than 5% of physicians have applied to participate in the Compact, and 10% of applications have been rejected. It does not accept anyone without current ABMS or AOA board certification. Minutes of the compact commission board meetings note cases where physicians who paid the $700 non-refundable fee were rejected due to lack of certification. Examples: https://tinyurl.com/386j2t7w; https://tinyurl.com/mr4cuyr7; tinyurl.com/3c525353.
Canceling Wrong-think in Canada
Psychologist Jordan Peterson has been ordered by the College of Psychologists in Ontario to undergo “professional coaching” and may be delicensed. Charges were brought against him by “the administrative board granted government mandate to protect the public from misbehavior on the part of the practitioners of my profession.” Two stem from criticisms of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau; others from condemning the “increasing tide of surgical butchery” in the name of “gender affirmation.”
It’s not just about rights. “It is the responsibility of men striving however imperfectly to be decent to speak when the sacrificers of children to false idols are once again roaming the earth” (https://tinyurl.com/am6d2y44).
t t t
A State of Exception: “Once a threat to health is in place, people are willing to accept limitations on their freedom that they would never theretofore have considered enduring—not even during the two world wars, nor under totalitarian dictatorships” (https://tinyurl.com/mf8cdv9f).
Correspondence
Wokeism Now Required in Medical School. The Association of American Medical Colleges, the accreditor of medical school standards, is now requiring wokesim as part of the curriculum. Learning anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology, or clinical medicine will not matter. Now, what matters is learning to apply intersectionality, which includes “overlapping systems of oppression and discrimination that communities face based on race, gender, ethnicity, ability, etc.” (tinyurl.com/bdenber3).
Suppose you discuss with your patient how membership in a marginalized group has negatively affected his health. If he asks about his lung cancer, say, “I am a board-certified intersectionality specialist. We don’t actually treat medical conditions.”
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Lake View, NY
Is There Hope after the Crisis? With so many unprecedented crises in the news, one might overlook a new global challenge to the financial system controlled by the Fed. Six new countries have joined the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa): Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The goal is to undermine the dollar’s status as the global reserve currency. The backlash started last year when the U.S. demanded that other countries join in sanctioning Russia, regardless of the effects on their economies, and is also driven by concern over the long-term effects of the massive U.S. national debt. Rejection of the dollar would mean very hard times—but it could also lead to a return to limited constitutional government and a true free-market economy free of cronyism.
Ron Paul, M.D., https://tinyurl.com/3fv3dddk
Doomed? As Alexis de Tocqueville presciently foresaw (see p 2), U.S. democracy would inevitably lead to a massive permanent state, impervious to the will of the people. U.S. representative democracy is irredeemably corrupted. This is where we are, and there will be no turning back. To whatever extent it ever truly was, America will never be made great again. Something great may eventually rise from its ashes, but the ashes will come first.
Will Schryver, https://tinyurl.com/293trtjc
No Going Back. When I was 19, I became an American citizen. It was one of the happiest days of my young life. The immigration officer gave me a civics test, including a question about the First Amendment. It was an easy test because I knew it in my heart. The American civic religion has the right to free speech as the core of its liturgy. I never imagined that there would come a time when an American government would think of violating this right, or that I would be its target. My parents had taught me that people here could criticize the government, even over matters of life and death, without worry that the government would censor or suppress us. But over the past three years, I have been robbed of that conviction. American government officials, working in concert with big tech companies, have attacked and suppressed my speech and that of my colleagues for criticizing official pandemic policies—criticism that has been proven prescient.
Reading the Fifth Circuit decision in Missouri v. Biden, I was overcome with emotion. The federal government can no longer threaten social media companies with destruction if they don’t censor on behalf of the government. But I can never go back to the uncomplicated faith and naive confidence I had in America when I was young. Our government is not immune to the authoritarian impulse. Without vigilance, we will lose our rights.
Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., https://tinyurl.com/2p9dpf6x
Equal Justice? Do you remember a chap called John Adams? He’s what they used to call a “Founding Father,” back before everything he founded got undone. Made his bones defending the most unpopular guys in town—British soldiers who’d fired on the crowd during the Boston Massacre and left five dead. He took the case because he understood that a land of laws is about first principles…. No one in this dying republic cares for first principles anymore. Trump has a harder job finding a lawyer than those British soldiers did—and the few willing to take the gig wind up facing disbarment or indictment, at the behest of their fellow attorneys. Thus, the death of equality before the law.
Mark Steyn, https://tinyurl.com/cexvce5b
Dystopia Arrives Early. In 1961, Kurt Vonnegut published “Harrison Bergeron,” a short story about how the U.S. Handicapper General enforces equal results, making sure that anyone with above-average intelligence or skills is handicapped. Set in 2081, it was 58 years too late.
Craig Cantoni, Tucson, AZ
Medicine Captured. My specialty society quarterly had a screaming headline on the cover: “Climate Change: The Biggest Health Threat Facing Humanity.” Within, was “Embracing Justice: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion [in this society].” AAP pushes transgender treatment for minors. ACOG received $11 million from the CDC to encourage members to push the COVID vaccine for pregnant women. Physicians rely upon these organizations for continuing education. But when the well has been poisoned, how can one rely on the education being offered?
Joseph Guarino, M.D., Reidsville, NC
