>>9634633

It blocks production of biochemicals in the body that cause inflammation.

Pneumonia is intimately tied in with inflammation in the lungs. Inflammation includes swelling which constricts airways.

And inflamed tissues, which are swelling because fluid is collecting in them, often release fluids, and in the lungs, that fills up the airway spaces needed for oxygen absorption.

So, a drug that blocks the body's production of inflammation causing chemicals, makes things better. Almost every treatment that helps with SARS-CoV-2 is something that gives the body more time to sort out the problem itself.

So, why did we not learn this after the first SARS epidemic in 2003? Why did we not have an arsenal of treatments ready to go?

My answer. Because the public health infrastructure is thoroughly corrupt and incompetent, not just the WHO but all of it.

Why did the USA withdraw its offer of immunity to Assange?

>>9634731

The dollar will not collapse in the USA

As you pointed out, as its international role collapses, money that was stashed abroad ends up flowing back into the USA.

That is generally a good thing.

But if the dollar collapses, you will still be able to buy and sell domestic products. It's just the imported stuff that will be more expensive or hard to get. And that too, will be tempered within the USMCA. In other words foreign products from Mexico and Canada are unlikely to be affected by a dollar collapse.

This is all about strengthening US sovereignty.

And if you've been watching you will have noticed that the War Measures powers are being used to start US production of drugs and the basic chemicals use to make drugs. This is one of several areas where the USA is being prepared so that shortages of foreign products will not be so painful.

>>9634920

What if its just a big money laundering operation.

That would explain why it is thoroughly corrupt and incompetent.

>>9634920

PUBLICLY-OBSERVABLE POWER CENTERS (BUT NOT WELL-UNDERSTOOD)

BANK OF INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENTS (BIS)

UNITED NATIONS

NATO

WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION (WTO)

WORLD BANK

INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND (IMF)

VATICAN

MASONS

WORLD WILDLIFE FUND (WWF)

WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION (WHO)

CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL (CDC)

FORD FOUNDATION

ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION

OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATION

ATLANTIC COUNCIL

STRATFOR

BROOKINGS INSTITUTION

CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATONAL PEACE

RAND CORPORATION

HERITAGE FOUNDATION

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

CATO INSTITUTE

CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGESS

PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY (PNAC)

BUSINESS ROUND TABLE

INTERNATIONAL CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

PETERSON INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS

WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM / DAVOS

American Plutocrats Have Contempt for Working People

The 1 percent Wants Americans to Work Themselves to Death

https://medium.com/politics-fast-and-slow/american-plutocrats-have-contempt-for-working-people-cc0693ebbf85

I've figured out how the world ends. It ends with the rich and connected jetting off to another planet on a warp-drive enabled starship, while the rest of us are left to deal with the inevitable man-made or natural disaster.

I don’t think this scenario, also depicted in the disaster movie “2012,” is too extreme. Several recent actions show that the 1 percent have utter disregard for working people. America is a plutocracy, (a country governed by wealthy people) not a democracy. It’s run for and by a new age of unfeeling landed gentry who think anyone who makes less than $1 million is a lower lifeform.

Here are a few recent examples:

Senators Protected Their Stock Not the Country

Several senators on both sides of the aisle, including Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.,) decided to dump their stock when they received advanced warning of the coronavirus pandemic. On Feb. 13, Burr dumped $1.7 million worth of stock.

Burr’s case was particularly damning because he chairs the Select Committee on Intelligence. His job is literally to oversee the security of the American people! Even worse, he gave advanced warning to a group of wealthy donors because apparently, only rich people deserve to be safe and sound. Who cares if the unwashed masses die?

Loeffler’s case was equally as bad. In January, she dumped her stock and invested in medical equipment and teleconferencing companies because a pandemic is always a good time to make a buck!

Republican Donor Recommended Trump Slash CDC Budget

According to an article in The Intercept published on March 26, Charles Koch, a longtime Republican donor and advocate of deregulation and laissez-faire economics, pushed for massive cuts to the CDC.

“Americans for Prosperity’s (a group funded by Koch) position, which directly contradicts the advice of medical experts who say that social isolation is essential to curbing the spread of the coronavirus, comes after the group lobbied the Trump administration in 2018 to rescind $1 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” said Lee Fang.

This is the organization that could have warned the country about the coronavirus and prevented 20,000 American deaths. Koch’s behavior shouldn’t be surprising, he has advocated for policies that allow companies, such as Koch Industries, to get away with polluting the environment for years.

Hannity: How do we get Americans back to work safely?

The answer isn't simple and the solution will likely be tailored to different communities across the country.

A Message From Us Rich Plutocrats To All You Little People

https://www.businessinsider.com/a-message-from-us-rich-plutocrats-to-all-you-little-people-2012-11

This is a response to an excerpt from Chrystia Freeland’s Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, published in October by Penguin Press.

It’s great to be what you people are now calling a plutocrat. I know. I am one.

We plutocrats live incredible lives, surrounded by luxury and insulated from risk and discomfort. Things have gone very well for us over the last several years. Since George Bush left office, the stock market has doubled, we got a (sweet!) $700 billion rescue of the financial system, and corporate profits are at a 50-year high. BOOYA!

The growing economic distance between people like me and the little people like you hasn’t been this great in a long, long time. You may call that inequality. We call it freedom. But if things are going to continue to go this well, you people need to get with the program. Here, I’d like to have a frank discussion about that.

It is something of a puzzle to many of you little people why we plutocrats, who have benefitted most from these trends, view President Obama with such intense disdain. Why, you might ask, given how good the economy has been to you plutocrats, are you so maniacally angry?

“Maybe,” you say to yourself, “I just don’t understand economics.” I’ll let you in on a little secret. You understand economics just fine. What you don’t understand is that this fight isn’t about economics. It’s about status, privileges and power.

People like me don’t hate Obama because he’s going to raise our taxes, although we hate that plenty. We hate him because his views about the importance and primacy of the middle class diminish our status. The threat he represents isn’t economic; it’s existential. It’s not just our pocket books that are threatened, but, more importantly, our prestige and our influence on this country. Our manhood is at stake.

Facts are for little people.

We plutocrats have a long and proud history of controlling human societies, and the belief systems that we create about how the world works enable us to do that. “Earth is the center of the solar system” was a useful one for us in the past. “Lowering taxes on the rich produces growth” is one of our current favorites. You show me an orthodox belief, and I’ll show you plutocrats who benefit from it.

We understand human nature well enough to know that people believe and accept ideas for all sorts of reasons, but rarely because of facts or evidence. Mostly, people believe what suits them, what makes them feel good. And what makes us feel good is a set of beliefs that reinforce our status, privileges and power.

So it’s both annoying and hilarious that you people think you’re going to be able to talk us out of being plutocrats with “evidence” or “facts”. Our current position and power is the only fact we care about. And we viscerally hate anyone who has the temerity to challenge it.

The Rise of the New Global Elite

F. Scott Fitzgerald was right when he declared the rich different from you and me. But today’s super-rich are also different from yesterday’s: more hardworking and meritocratic, but less connected to the nations that granted them opportunity—and the countrymen they are leaving ever further behind.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite/308343/

IF YOU HAPPENED to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.” In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.

This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. (The idea of “two Americas” was a central theme of John Edwards’s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made the argument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by none other than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market, and (at least until recently) the nation’s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand. When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong.

This widening gap between the rich and non-rich has been evident for years. In a 2005 report to investors, for instance, three analysts at Citigroup advised that “the World is dividing into two blocs—the Plutonomy and the rest”:

In a plutonomy there is no such animal as “the U.S. consumer” or “the UK consumer”, or indeed the “Russian consumer”. There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take. There are the rest, the “non-rich”, the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

Before the recession, it was relatively easy to ignore this concentration of wealth among an elite few. The wondrous inventions of the modern economy—Google, Amazon, the iPhone—broadly improved the lives of middle-class consumers, even as they made a tiny subset of entrepreneurs hugely wealthy. And the less-wondrous inventions—particularly the explosion of subprime credit—helped mask the rise of income inequality for many of those whose earnings were stagnant.

>>9634837

You may not have had strep throat, but you definitely did have strep bacteria in your system. Strep is a very common bacteria found everywhere in soil. Almost everyone has strep in their gut or just on the surface of their skin.

This is how the strep bacteria ended up adapting to antibiotics. This is a REAL effect and is a REALLY GOOD REASON to not take antibiotics unless you have some infection that needs them.

When they do a throat swab and tell you that you did not test positive for strep, they don't mean there was no strep bacteria on the swab. They mean that the number of strep were below the threshold that they could be causing inflammation/infection.

Will the Establishment's Neoliberal Model of Drug Profiteering Finally Kill Us All?

Why is there even a debate on whether any Coronavirus Vaccine Should be Free?

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/03/09/will-establishments-neoliberal-model-drug-profiteering-finally-kill-us-all

Why is there even a question as to whether any Cov19 vaccine or diagnostic test kit should be free? Vaccines and diagnostic tests are essential components of any public health program, not merely conveniences to an isolated individual. When symptomatic patients are tested for a disease, indispensable information about the spread of the disease is accumulated, with potential benefit to all of us. Vaccinations in turn protect not only the individual patient but also those who might be infected by him/her. That an administration would even consider restricting access to such indispensable instruments of public health is a sad commentary on the state of political discourse today.

Some members of both parties have demanded inexpensive access, but both parties have long been complicit in a model of drug development and pricing that makes healthcare unaffordable for some even as it makes billionaires of a select few. Contrary to the impression left by the pharmaceutical industry it has not always been that way. Other more humane and productive approaches to drug development are not only possible but have also been key moments in our own medical history.

Typically the pharmaceutical industry defends patent protection for its new drugs on the grounds that the resulting monopoly profits fund new research and development. This contention is misleading on two fronts. Much of the profits go into marketing and advertising, More scandalously the development model is not another instance of Reagan’s magic of the market mythology. Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs puts it this way:

“The prevailing model, indeed, in plutocratic America is that taxpayers fund the vast majority of research and development (R&D) for pharmaceuticals and then the intellectual know-how is turned over, free of charge, to private industry so that it can market these drugs under 20 years of patent protection and then make a fortune at the cost of the American people.” I would add that these fortunes are also often at the expense of other nations as protection of these patent rights is the driving force behind misnamed “free trade” agreements.

Inequality and personal bankruptcies are not the only evils that flow from this system. CEPR economist Dean Baker points out that the inordinate profits flowing from these monopoly protections create an incentive to hide adverse reactions to drugs. Companies are occasionally fined, but the costs are the proverbial drop in the bucket.

Sachs advocates a model for vaccine development that gives primary responsibility for funding and development to the NIH. Private companies could manufacture and distribute, but under strict requirements and in a competitive marketplace. He reminds us that one of medicines great triumphs, the near eradication of polio, emerged from leadership of a not for profit foundation, the March of Dimes in funding Jonas Salk’s development of a polio vaccine. Of course these were different times. A public sector that had not only won a war and overcome a depression expressed and nurtured a broad if imperfect public spirit. Nonetheless there are still reasons to think that a well funded and fully transparent and widely argued over CDC and NIH could sustain and be sustained by democratic commitments even in troubled times. Our neighbor to the North provides one suggestive example.