( Horrifying )


By Eesha Pendharkar — August 03, 2021 5 min read

Tennessee aims to levy fines starting at $1 million and rising to $5 million on school districts each time one of their teachers is found to have “knowingly violated” state restrictions on classroom discussions about systemic racism, white privilege, and sexism, according to guidance proposed by the state’s department of education late last week.

Teachers could also be disciplined or lose their licenses for teaching that the United States is inherently racist or sexist or making a student feel “guilt or anguish” because of past actions committed by their race or sex.

The guidance received immediate backlash from advocates of students of color in the state who say it would have a disproportionate impact on already underfunded, majority Black and Latino school districts.

https://www.edweek.org/leadership/a-5-million-fine-for-classroom-discussions-on-race-in-tennessee-this-is-the-new-reality/2021/08

The online, often predatory lending companies benefit from lower-income Americans needing emergency cash. That aligns with Summers’s concern trolling about an ‘overheated’ economy.

BY ALEXANDER SAMMON, DAVID DAYEN AUGUST 2, 2021

Larry Summers has spent the Biden presidency in a state of perpetual concern. He is convinced that the trillions in pandemic relief, with perhaps more fiscal spending on infrastructure to come, will overheat the economy, leaving policymakers unable to contain runaway inflation without triggering a deep recession. In March, the former Treasury secretary described the state of affairs as “​​the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years.”

Most economists and experts have signaled reassurance that the recent run-up in inflation, like the 0.9 percent increase in consumer prices seen by the Department of Labor in June, is transitory, buoyed by used-car prices, supply chain problems, and reverberation off of lockdown lows. In fact, core inflation growth has already started to slow down, suggesting that the experts were right, and Summers’s concerns were overblown.

But who exactly is Summers concerned about? The ordinary laborer paying more for a bucket of chicken wings while possibly making more in wages, or the people who have preoccupied Summers for virtually his entire career: bankers and financiers? The answer may be found in his client list. Summers has been diligently laundering his reputation on behalf of “fintech” lenders, real estate startups, and Bitcoin plays, including several businesses that would benefit from an economy that values lower inflation over full employment.

https://prospect.org/economy/larry-summers-holds-positions-with-numerous-financial-bottom-feeders/

The U.S. Department of Justice is looking into claims by whistleblowers that Kaiser Permanente has been systematically defrauding Uncle Sam.

Wendell Potter
56 min ago


Et tu, Kaiser?

I was crestfallen when I read that the U.S. Department of Justice is going after nonprofit Kaiser Permanente for–according to whistleblowers–systematically defrauding taxpayers by doing exactly the same thing that Kaiser’s for-profit peers have been doing–and getting gentle slaps on the wrist for–more many years.

As Axios and Modern Healthcare are reporting, the DOJ has joined six whistleblower complaints alleging that Kaiser “made its Medicare Advantage patients look sicker than they were as a way to obtain more money from the federal government.”

It was sad for me to read that because I had always thought of Kaiser as one of the good guys (relatively speaking) in the health insurance business. Toward the end of my career at Cigna, at a time when I was growing increasingly disenchanted with my work and the industry, I got a call from a recruiter looking to fill the job of VP of Communications at Kaiser.

https://wendellpotter.substack.com/p/kaiser-defrauds-tp

About 99.999% of fully vaccinated Americans have not had a deadly Covid-19 breakthrough case, CDC data shows

By Deidre McPhillips and Christina Maxouris, CNN

Updated 4:26 PM ET, Sun August 1, 2021

(CNN)More than 99.999% of people fully vaccinated against Covid-19 have not had a breakthrough case resulting in hospitalization or death, according to the latest data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The data highlights what leading health experts across the country have highlighted for months: Covid-19 vaccines are very effective at preventing serious illness and death from Covid-19 and are the country's best shot at slowing the pandemic down and avoiding further suffering.
The CDC reported 6,587 Covid-19 breakthrough cases as of July 26, including 6,239 hospitalizations and 1,263 deaths. At that time, more than 163 million people in the United States were fully vaccinated against Covid-19.
Divide those severe breakthrough cases by the total fully vaccinated population for the result: less than 0.004% of fully vaccinated people had a breakthrough case that led to hospitalization and less than 0.001% of fully vaccinated people died from a breakthrough Covid-19 case.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/31/health/fully-vaccinated-people-breakthrough-hospitalization-death/index.html