Mr Droz, I have discovered/learned something about the FDA wondering if you were aware. How could I get you a private confidential message to start the process?
I suppose if you're very right-wing and your entire frame of reference is mainstream US politics today, you might think of Democrats as Left without your brain imploding. I'm sure there was a "left" wing of Mussolini's National Fascist Party as well.
If your frame of reference is a little broader and deeper, on the other hand, and includes some history, you'll have more trouble with that idea. Despite the fact that Democrats, as your linked article notes, are occasionally found "spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate", I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anything more left-wing than mild token actions to go with that empty crowd-pleasing rhetoric.
Obama let Citi Group pick his cabinet. Was that left wing?
He bailed out the banks and threw home-owners under the bus. Left wing?
Hillary told Goldman Sachs her (faux-gressive) public face should not be confused with her genuine (elitist) private face. Left wing?
She's an absolute neocon on foreign policy. Left wing?
Biden's been supported by MBNA for years and sided with credit card companies making it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy. Left wing?
He's sent cluster bombs to Ukraine and supported literal Nazis. Socialist woke agenda?
I could go on. But if it's an idée fixe for you I don't suppose I'll nudge you away from it in any case. But I'm not the only leftist who doesn't remotely identify with these people. There are loads of people who lean left but who can't even identify tyranny because they've been told so many times that resisting these narratives is a right-wing thing. The narrative managers are saying it. You're saying it too. It's a real shame. You're losing allies. Good luck with that.
We retired to Panama 16 yr ago when the writing was on the wall. It is easier to have common sense when you are at distance. It also helps being a nurse. Medicine in the USA began to fall apart decades ago when insurance companies and BIG PHARM began to dictate to hospitals how long and how-to.....( in and out admissions) and doctors were mesmerized by new drugs. Somehow staying healthy and how to do that left the building with Elvis ! Read: Eat to Beat Disease and Fiber Fueled. Both excellent books on the new age of modern nutrition. Amazing new nutrition facts in those books. At this point in USA medicine , every patient needs a nurse advocate to sift through the system. Now CDC/FDA is worshipped as the new religion. Be VERY careful. There is massive dishonesty wrapped up in a political package with those two !!!!
This commentary is indeed "extraordinarily important", but for two reasons. The first is the face value reason about greed, corruption, and authoritarian restrictions on civil liberties and the normal practice of medicine. To the extent that this piece highlights that problem, it is helpful.
But the piece is also significantly harmful. That's because the second reason it's important has to do with the problem of terminology, which is not just a minor technicality, but goes to the heart of how to resist this encroaching neo-fascism. By identifying the corrupt authoritarianism (inaccurately) as a problem of "The Left," this commentary hurts the cause of resistance by promoting the same divide-and-conquer strategy of the censorship industrial complex. Gimme a second to explain.
There are millions of us on the left who do not consider ourselves represented by today's Democratic Party (or by Labour in the UK). There's nothing "left" about shilling for Big Pharma or war hawkery. The real left is about an empowered real democracy. It defends, not undermines, civil liberties. To the death. Yet every time anyone criticizes an unjust and dangerous mandate, or a foreign policy, or a censorship decision, they're immediately called either a right-winger, a spewer of Kremlin talking points, or a conspiracy theorist. Usually all three.
And that's bullshit. That's transparently an attempt to keep roughly half the population out of the resistance. If your average well-meaning Democratic voter who considers herself on the left hears that these forms of dissent make you a right-winger, she'll avoid it like the plague and attach herself to the official narrative. Even if, by all the usual criteria, the dissent is from a solidly, classically left-wing point of view -- anti-corporate, anti-imperialist, pro-people-over-profits. It's essentially a brainwashing operation or, if you prefer, an operation to manufacture consent. Propaganda.
So by saying the whole problem is with The Left, when you probably really mean "establishment liberal" or the Democratic Party, you're only reinforcing this fake divide and alienating tens of millions of potential allies in this rather important fight ahead of us. You're helping the propagandists. In fact you are one. Unintentionally, I'm sure, but harmfully.
We need to transcend this left-right thing on this issue. That's not what it's about. Corruption crosses those boundaries. We can't afford to exclude each other from this fight. The first thing that needs to go is this label-based fear-mongering. Laser focus on corruption. Invite everyone. That's what we need.
John: My apologies for offending you, but what I said is accurate. I'm an independent scientist who has been involved with technical issues for over forty years. In every case it is the Left that is substituting political science for actual Science. Climate change, energy policies, COVID, K-12 education, etc. are all the same: political science instead of Science.
Not offended, John. I just don't think that what you call The Left is actually The Left. My definition of The Left -- the classic, historical, textbook, accurate definition -- does not, *by definition*, include shills for corporate interests like Big Pharma.
John: Yes definitions can sometimes be hard to get agreement on. FYI, this is a LOT more than a Big Pharma matter. It involves choice of what I do with my body; it involves whether medical practitioners are free to give their best advice to patients; it involves the education of our children; etc. In short it is Science vs political science. IMO the primary proponents of political science instead of Science are those on the Left.
Well most of it is directly related to Big Pharma and its greed, power, and corruption of the regulatory and political systems. All of that is anti-left.
Granted, there's also generic ugly authoritarianism at play, which you may be tempted to assign to the left since, yes, at the moment it's mostly Democrats. But aside from Democrats not being truly left-wing -- not remotely left-wing I'd say -- despite occasional weak gestures to the contrary, we've seen grotesque authoritarianism all along the ideological spectrum at various times in various places. To me authoritarianism stands separate from the left-right spectrum, a distorting influence that undermines right-wing ideals as much as left-wing ones.
Having said that, I do know what you mean. One of the weirdest things to me, as a left-wing guy, is how consistently the push-back on this nonsense at a government level has come from right-wing Republicans (and Tories in the UK), forcing me to agree with people I've always thought of as anathema to my values.
But consider also that the nongovernmental push-back is just as much from the left: Russell Brand, Glenn Greenwald, Pierre Kory. There is a unique confluence of cross-ideological interests here. It's an opportunity that can be squandered by loose labeling. So I think placing the blame on The Left is, at a minimum, too broad a stroke. As I've said elsewhere, it feeds into this very damaging phenomenon whereby people who identify as left will think that dissent from this GroupThink makes them right-wing. Which will terrify them out of joining the dissent.
So if your goal is to promote right-wingness or to demonize left-wingness, go ahead and keep using that term the way you do here. If your goal is to fight back against this corrupting influence in our society, I suggest you might not want to scare off a good half your potential allies.
John: My goal has nothing to do with promoting "right-wingness." As a scientist my goal is for our technical policies to be based on real Science. However, the fight is always with political science. Unfortunately the Dems are almost always the main proponents of that.
Thank you for saying this, John S. This post was excellent, until it did the ‘left’ thing. That should’ve been omitted, to be sure. It’s divisive and distracting; thus counterproductive, as you explain so well.
I listened to the short voice clips of the proceedings of the 5th court of appeals. FDA Attorney Ashley Cheung Honold is a hotshot lawyer who knows how to quote chapter and verse the myriad of laws, regulations and statutes that govern the FDA. I wonder if the plaintiffs' legal team are equally aware of them. Common sense doesn't account for much in this case. I don't see them winning the case based on what I've heard so far. Please tell me I'm wrong.
I appreciate your accurate insight into the many areas this agency corruption affects including the climate and election lies that have undermined our basic human rights.
The basic problem is that for many decades Congress, SCOTUS, and even POTUS offices were held by people who only gave "lip service" to the Constitution.
The federal government was only given 18 powers, see Article I, Section 8, Clauses 1-18 of the Constitution. None of those 18 Clauses are even remotely related to establishing agencies such as the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID. or most 3 letter agencies such as the FBI, CIA etc. Do the research and read them for yourself.
None of the Amendments gives Congress, SCOTUS or POTUS the right to create agencies such as the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID, FBI CIA etc.
Under the 10th Amendment it is only the States or the People who have the right to establish agencies such as the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID, FBI, CIA etc. That means that IF a State set up one of these agencies, that agency only has jurisdiction to operate in the State that set it up.
One way to look at this problem is that all those agencies are Unconstitutional and operate under "Color of Law" not actually under Law, meaning any harm caused a Citizen by these agencies must be cared for and Fair Market Value compensation be given the harmed Citizen by the agency doing the harm and such agency must be disbanded and any fraud removes any seeming protections that agency has. This also should mean that any agent, officer or employee of any such agency would be subject to trial or tribunal for Treason and if convicted pay the penalty for said Treason.
It would not be impossible that, for example, every Pharmacist, Drug Representative, Drug Company Officer, Physician and the State Boards of Pharmacy and Medicine Members would also be subject to trial or tribunal for Treason if their promoting or following an unscientific program that caused harm to a citizen was proven.. (Possibly including those paid to Lobby Congress to pass a law relating to the unscientific program that caused the harm being subject to Treason also).
By our own laziness and believing the lies told by those campaigning for political office, we are everyone carrying some of the guilt for the way things are in the U.S. currently.
Have things gone too far to pull them out of the fire? That answer is left up to everyone of us. How we respond, in a lawful manner, will go a long way in determining if things are pulled out of the fire.
In the classic words of Pogo: "We have met the enemy and it is us!"
We all bear a measure of responsibility, even by our own silence. If we correct the situation it will be corrected by "We the People" not by some elected group of individuals. The question is, "Are We the People" up to the task or will we keep silent because of fear?
"How did the Executive branch allow agencies like the FDA to be run by parties that they are supposed to regulate?" Simple. MONEY and lots of it. Nothing lubes the machinery of state better. Big Pharma lobbyists carrying suitcases of cash with promises of more if politicians play along works like magic.
FYI for: Katherine Watts has documented how this came to be.
"How did the Executive branch allow agencies like the FDA to be run by parties that they are supposed to regulate? 3) How did our Judicial system allow bad actor agencies to arrange to have no real legal oversight?"
She has gathered all the legislation going back decades to previous administrations that passed laws that stripped congress and the courts from their power to overrule what the health secretary does. It basically nullifies the Constitution and strips us of our rights. If you haven’t read this yet it will open your eyes to see how the last 3 years were possible.
The lifecycle of bureaucracy is that it usually starts with logic and the good intentions of helping people by creating parameters, guidelines, regulations etc. After it’s put into place, it quickly becomes a tool of corporate interests and profit. Holding these people accountable for their crimes may do something to deter it in the future, for a few minutes anyway, but that seems unlikely to even happen. I hope it does though and I’m glad doctors are trying.
It’s simply the nature of bureaucracy to become corrupted. It’s just always been this way. When you creat massive complexity, which bureaucracy does, it makes it only possibly for large, lucrative industries to thrive, and it makes the perfect conditions for fraud. Through Covid, we all gained an education into how the FDA, the NIH, the CDC (etc) work, and it wasn’t pretty. But this has been happening for decades. We just didn’t know to what degree it was happening because they’re SO much bureaucracy.
The idea of the FDA is great -keep us all safe from industry. But in reality, they approve of very dangerous things, prevent safe and healthy things, and make a lot of money doing it (hello cushy consulting jobs in the pharmaceutical industry after retiring from the FDA/CDC/NIH/HHS). Greed is a human condition. It’s just very sad and depressing. And the people who work at the FDA, have no doubt, convinced themselves that they are doing a great job serving the public. What a mess.
Did we (well, not me) demote ourselves to the status of a flock of sheep to be sheared when we followed orders to sign up (contract) for Obamacare? Might be worth reviewing that legislation. The 800 number at the time was 1-800-f(1)uc-kyo. Somebody on Zerohedge ran the probability and concluded it was not a coincidence. I had, many years before, abandoned allopathic medicine, so I never signed up. I pay cash to a naturopath.
The big tipoff for me was when the shots were FREE. I guess I'm old enough to have heard "Never accept anything free from the government" over and over in my childhood.
Mr Droz, I have discovered/learned something about the FDA wondering if you were aware. How could I get you a private confidential message to start the process?
W. Sterchak
Writes Sterchaxonsubstack
I suppose if you're very right-wing and your entire frame of reference is mainstream US politics today, you might think of Democrats as Left without your brain imploding. I'm sure there was a "left" wing of Mussolini's National Fascist Party as well.
If your frame of reference is a little broader and deeper, on the other hand, and includes some history, you'll have more trouble with that idea. Despite the fact that Democrats, as your linked article notes, are occasionally found "spouting the usual leftwing boilerplate", I think you'd be hard-pressed to find anything more left-wing than mild token actions to go with that empty crowd-pleasing rhetoric.
Obama let Citi Group pick his cabinet. Was that left wing?
He bailed out the banks and threw home-owners under the bus. Left wing?
Hillary told Goldman Sachs her (faux-gressive) public face should not be confused with her genuine (elitist) private face. Left wing?
She's an absolute neocon on foreign policy. Left wing?
Biden's been supported by MBNA for years and sided with credit card companies making it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy. Left wing?
He's sent cluster bombs to Ukraine and supported literal Nazis. Socialist woke agenda?
I could go on. But if it's an idée fixe for you I don't suppose I'll nudge you away from it in any case. But I'm not the only leftist who doesn't remotely identify with these people. There are loads of people who lean left but who can't even identify tyranny because they've been told so many times that resisting these narratives is a right-wing thing. The narrative managers are saying it. You're saying it too. It's a real shame. You're losing allies. Good luck with that.
We retired to Panama 16 yr ago when the writing was on the wall. It is easier to have common sense when you are at distance. It also helps being a nurse. Medicine in the USA began to fall apart decades ago when insurance companies and BIG PHARM began to dictate to hospitals how long and how-to.....( in and out admissions) and doctors were mesmerized by new drugs. Somehow staying healthy and how to do that left the building with Elvis ! Read: Eat to Beat Disease and Fiber Fueled. Both excellent books on the new age of modern nutrition. Amazing new nutrition facts in those books. At this point in USA medicine , every patient needs a nurse advocate to sift through the system. Now CDC/FDA is worshipped as the new religion. Be VERY careful. There is massive dishonesty wrapped up in a political package with those two !!!!
Dr. Kory
I like your two proposals. We are praying for you and the others.
QUESTION: Why do we have Administrative Agencies, such as the FDA, that have so much power, and little or no Court oversight?
ANSWER: Because we don't have enough Courts to handle all the questions and complaints in a timely and cost-effective manner.
It's a $ issue. We would need THOUSANDS more courts in America to have Court oversight of all Agencies.
Because the Greaaaaat American Sheeple continue to let them act unopposed.
This commentary is indeed "extraordinarily important", but for two reasons. The first is the face value reason about greed, corruption, and authoritarian restrictions on civil liberties and the normal practice of medicine. To the extent that this piece highlights that problem, it is helpful.
But the piece is also significantly harmful. That's because the second reason it's important has to do with the problem of terminology, which is not just a minor technicality, but goes to the heart of how to resist this encroaching neo-fascism. By identifying the corrupt authoritarianism (inaccurately) as a problem of "The Left," this commentary hurts the cause of resistance by promoting the same divide-and-conquer strategy of the censorship industrial complex. Gimme a second to explain.
There are millions of us on the left who do not consider ourselves represented by today's Democratic Party (or by Labour in the UK). There's nothing "left" about shilling for Big Pharma or war hawkery. The real left is about an empowered real democracy. It defends, not undermines, civil liberties. To the death. Yet every time anyone criticizes an unjust and dangerous mandate, or a foreign policy, or a censorship decision, they're immediately called either a right-winger, a spewer of Kremlin talking points, or a conspiracy theorist. Usually all three.
And that's bullshit. That's transparently an attempt to keep roughly half the population out of the resistance. If your average well-meaning Democratic voter who considers herself on the left hears that these forms of dissent make you a right-winger, she'll avoid it like the plague and attach herself to the official narrative. Even if, by all the usual criteria, the dissent is from a solidly, classically left-wing point of view -- anti-corporate, anti-imperialist, pro-people-over-profits. It's essentially a brainwashing operation or, if you prefer, an operation to manufacture consent. Propaganda.
So by saying the whole problem is with The Left, when you probably really mean "establishment liberal" or the Democratic Party, you're only reinforcing this fake divide and alienating tens of millions of potential allies in this rather important fight ahead of us. You're helping the propagandists. In fact you are one. Unintentionally, I'm sure, but harmfully.
We need to transcend this left-right thing on this issue. That's not what it's about. Corruption crosses those boundaries. We can't afford to exclude each other from this fight. The first thing that needs to go is this label-based fear-mongering. Laser focus on corruption. Invite everyone. That's what we need.
John: My apologies for offending you, but what I said is accurate. I'm an independent scientist who has been involved with technical issues for over forty years. In every case it is the Left that is substituting political science for actual Science. Climate change, energy policies, COVID, K-12 education, etc. are all the same: political science instead of Science.
Not offended, John. I just don't think that what you call The Left is actually The Left. My definition of The Left -- the classic, historical, textbook, accurate definition -- does not, *by definition*, include shills for corporate interests like Big Pharma.
John: Yes definitions can sometimes be hard to get agreement on. FYI, this is a LOT more than a Big Pharma matter. It involves choice of what I do with my body; it involves whether medical practitioners are free to give their best advice to patients; it involves the education of our children; etc. In short it is Science vs political science. IMO the primary proponents of political science instead of Science are those on the Left.
Well most of it is directly related to Big Pharma and its greed, power, and corruption of the regulatory and political systems. All of that is anti-left.
Granted, there's also generic ugly authoritarianism at play, which you may be tempted to assign to the left since, yes, at the moment it's mostly Democrats. But aside from Democrats not being truly left-wing -- not remotely left-wing I'd say -- despite occasional weak gestures to the contrary, we've seen grotesque authoritarianism all along the ideological spectrum at various times in various places. To me authoritarianism stands separate from the left-right spectrum, a distorting influence that undermines right-wing ideals as much as left-wing ones.
Having said that, I do know what you mean. One of the weirdest things to me, as a left-wing guy, is how consistently the push-back on this nonsense at a government level has come from right-wing Republicans (and Tories in the UK), forcing me to agree with people I've always thought of as anathema to my values.
But consider also that the nongovernmental push-back is just as much from the left: Russell Brand, Glenn Greenwald, Pierre Kory. There is a unique confluence of cross-ideological interests here. It's an opportunity that can be squandered by loose labeling. So I think placing the blame on The Left is, at a minimum, too broad a stroke. As I've said elsewhere, it feeds into this very damaging phenomenon whereby people who identify as left will think that dissent from this GroupThink makes them right-wing. Which will terrify them out of joining the dissent.
So if your goal is to promote right-wingness or to demonize left-wingness, go ahead and keep using that term the way you do here. If your goal is to fight back against this corrupting influence in our society, I suggest you might not want to scare off a good half your potential allies.
John: My goal has nothing to do with promoting "right-wingness." As a scientist my goal is for our technical policies to be based on real Science. However, the fight is always with political science. Unfortunately the Dems are almost always the main proponents of that.
Aha! The Dems! Exactly! Not the Left at all!
Maybe just call them psychopaths instead?!
Thank you for saying this, John S. This post was excellent, until it did the ‘left’ thing. That should’ve been omitted, to be sure. It’s divisive and distracting; thus counterproductive, as you explain so well.
I listened to the short voice clips of the proceedings of the 5th court of appeals. FDA Attorney Ashley Cheung Honold is a hotshot lawyer who knows how to quote chapter and verse the myriad of laws, regulations and statutes that govern the FDA. I wonder if the plaintiffs' legal team are equally aware of them. Common sense doesn't account for much in this case. I don't see them winning the case based on what I've heard so far. Please tell me I'm wrong.
Who knows if the judge is compromised.
I appreciate your accurate insight into the many areas this agency corruption affects including the climate and election lies that have undermined our basic human rights.
Dr. Kory, as we have a veterinarian in our family we took veterinary Ivermectin when we got Covid. It just needs to be dosed properly for your weight.
i'd like to see the FDA drown in a sea of wrongful death lawsuits
The basic problem is that for many decades Congress, SCOTUS, and even POTUS offices were held by people who only gave "lip service" to the Constitution.
The federal government was only given 18 powers, see Article I, Section 8, Clauses 1-18 of the Constitution. None of those 18 Clauses are even remotely related to establishing agencies such as the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID. or most 3 letter agencies such as the FBI, CIA etc. Do the research and read them for yourself.
None of the Amendments gives Congress, SCOTUS or POTUS the right to create agencies such as the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID, FBI CIA etc.
Under the 10th Amendment it is only the States or the People who have the right to establish agencies such as the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIAID, FBI, CIA etc. That means that IF a State set up one of these agencies, that agency only has jurisdiction to operate in the State that set it up.
One way to look at this problem is that all those agencies are Unconstitutional and operate under "Color of Law" not actually under Law, meaning any harm caused a Citizen by these agencies must be cared for and Fair Market Value compensation be given the harmed Citizen by the agency doing the harm and such agency must be disbanded and any fraud removes any seeming protections that agency has. This also should mean that any agent, officer or employee of any such agency would be subject to trial or tribunal for Treason and if convicted pay the penalty for said Treason.
It would not be impossible that, for example, every Pharmacist, Drug Representative, Drug Company Officer, Physician and the State Boards of Pharmacy and Medicine Members would also be subject to trial or tribunal for Treason if their promoting or following an unscientific program that caused harm to a citizen was proven.. (Possibly including those paid to Lobby Congress to pass a law relating to the unscientific program that caused the harm being subject to Treason also).
By our own laziness and believing the lies told by those campaigning for political office, we are everyone carrying some of the guilt for the way things are in the U.S. currently.
Have things gone too far to pull them out of the fire? That answer is left up to everyone of us. How we respond, in a lawful manner, will go a long way in determining if things are pulled out of the fire.
In the classic words of Pogo: "We have met the enemy and it is us!"
We all bear a measure of responsibility, even by our own silence. If we correct the situation it will be corrected by "We the People" not by some elected group of individuals. The question is, "Are We the People" up to the task or will we keep silent because of fear?
"How did the Executive branch allow agencies like the FDA to be run by parties that they are supposed to regulate?" Simple. MONEY and lots of it. Nothing lubes the machinery of state better. Big Pharma lobbyists carrying suitcases of cash with promises of more if politicians play along works like magic.
FYI for: Katherine Watts has documented how this came to be.
"How did the Executive branch allow agencies like the FDA to be run by parties that they are supposed to regulate? 3) How did our Judicial system allow bad actor agencies to arrange to have no real legal oversight?"
https://bailiwicknews.substack.com/p/orientation-for-new-readers
She has gathered all the legislation going back decades to previous administrations that passed laws that stripped congress and the courts from their power to overrule what the health secretary does. It basically nullifies the Constitution and strips us of our rights. If you haven’t read this yet it will open your eyes to see how the last 3 years were possible.
The lifecycle of bureaucracy is that it usually starts with logic and the good intentions of helping people by creating parameters, guidelines, regulations etc. After it’s put into place, it quickly becomes a tool of corporate interests and profit. Holding these people accountable for their crimes may do something to deter it in the future, for a few minutes anyway, but that seems unlikely to even happen. I hope it does though and I’m glad doctors are trying.
It’s simply the nature of bureaucracy to become corrupted. It’s just always been this way. When you creat massive complexity, which bureaucracy does, it makes it only possibly for large, lucrative industries to thrive, and it makes the perfect conditions for fraud. Through Covid, we all gained an education into how the FDA, the NIH, the CDC (etc) work, and it wasn’t pretty. But this has been happening for decades. We just didn’t know to what degree it was happening because they’re SO much bureaucracy.
The idea of the FDA is great -keep us all safe from industry. But in reality, they approve of very dangerous things, prevent safe and healthy things, and make a lot of money doing it (hello cushy consulting jobs in the pharmaceutical industry after retiring from the FDA/CDC/NIH/HHS). Greed is a human condition. It’s just very sad and depressing. And the people who work at the FDA, have no doubt, convinced themselves that they are doing a great job serving the public. What a mess.
Did we (well, not me) demote ourselves to the status of a flock of sheep to be sheared when we followed orders to sign up (contract) for Obamacare? Might be worth reviewing that legislation. The 800 number at the time was 1-800-f(1)uc-kyo. Somebody on Zerohedge ran the probability and concluded it was not a coincidence. I had, many years before, abandoned allopathic medicine, so I never signed up. I pay cash to a naturopath.
The big tipoff for me was when the shots were FREE. I guess I'm old enough to have heard "Never accept anything free from the government" over and over in my childhood.