Last Call For The FDA Goes Viral, Con't

The last shred of independent, objective authority in the Food and Drug Administration has been lit on fire in Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar's office trashcan, as the agency is now fully and totally under control of Azar and by default, under control of Donald Trump.

In a stunning declaration of authority, Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, this week barred the nation’s health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, from signing any new rules regarding the nation’s foods, medicines, medical devices and other products, including vaccines.

Going forward, Mr. Azar wrote in a Sept. 15 memorandum obtained by The New York Times, such power “is reserved to the Secretary.” The bulletin was sent to heads of operating and staff divisions within H.H.S.

It’s unclear if or how the memo would change the vetting and approval process for coronavirus vaccines, three of which are in advanced clinical trials in the United States. Political appointees, under pressure from the president, have taken a string of stepsover the past few months to interfere with the standard scientific and regulatory processes at the health agencies. For example, a much criticized guideline on testing for the coronavirus was not written by C.D.C. scientists, and was posted on the agency’s public website over their objections. It was reversed on Friday.

Outside observers were alarmed by the new memo and worried that it could contribute to a public perception of political meddling in science-based regulatory decisions. Dr. Mark McClellan, who formerly headed the F.D.A. and now runs Duke University’s health policy center, praised the agency’s work on vaccine development but said the policy change was ill-timed.

“We’re in the midst of a pandemic, when trust in the public health agency is needed more than ever,” he said. “So, I’m not sure what is to be gained with a management change with respect to F.D.A. when they are doing such critical work.”

Dr. Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a former associate commissioner of the F.D.A., called the new policy “a power grab.”

Many rules issued by federal health agencies are signed by lawyers or by the heads of agencies, including the F.D.A., under the umbrella of H.H.S. The new memo requires the secretary to sign them, which Dr. Lurie said could lead to delays in the regulatory process.

“It will introduce an element of inefficiency within government operations that is wholly unnecessary and likely to gum things up,” he said.

Brian Harrison, chief of staff for Mr. Azar, described the new policy as “a housekeeping matter,” aimed at no agency in particular. He said it would have no bearing on how the agency dealt with coronavirus vaccines.

“This was simply pushing a reset button,” Mr. Harrison said. “This is good governance and should have no operational impact.”

The funny part is Brian Harrison is right: this won't have an "operational impact" on the FDA approval process for a COVID-19 or other vaccines going forward because the process was always going to be Azar approving a vaccine to help Trump politically no matter what FDA testing and protocols say.

 I practically guarantee you there will be a vaccine "approved" and distributed to medical personnel before the election. There's going to be a big fight about this and whether or not anyone takes the vaccine, but it will absolutely be announced in late October and will be made available "soon" for widespread use.

That "soon" part will be a lot trickier should Trump win, but the point is Azar and Trump believe it will win him the election. Actually having the vaccine work, well, that will come later.

The Race To Replace, Con't

 Even Republicans say they want to wait until after the election for a Supreme Court battle.

A majority of Americans, including many Republicans, want the winner of the November presidential election to name a successor to Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday.

The national opinion poll, conducted Sept. 19-20 after Ginsburg’s death was announced, suggests that many Americans object to President Donald Trump’s plan, backed by many Senate Republicans, to push through another lifetime appointee and cement a 6-3 conservative majority on the court.

The poll found that 62% of American adults agreed the vacancy should be filled by the winner of the Nov. 3 matchup between Trump and Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden, while 23% disagreed and the rest said they were not sure.

Eight out of 10 Democrats - and five in 10 Republicans - agreed that the appointment should wait until after the election.

Trump needs the support of the Senate, which currently has a 53-47 Republican majority to confirm a nominee. So far two Republican senators - Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski - have said publicly since Ginsburg’s death Friday that they think the winner of the election should make the nomination.

 

Vast majorities of Americans want a lot of things, including healthcare, affordable prescriptions, a raise to the minimum wage and universal firearms background checks, but Republicans keep ignoring that anyway.  No reason to think anything different will happen here.

 

Leading Florida Republican politicians are launching an all-out effort to convince President Donald Trump to nominate federal Judge Barbara Lagoa to the U.S. Supreme Court — a move they say would boost his reelection chances in the must-win swing state.

The biggest names in the Florida GOP are working behind the scenes to advocate for Lagoa: U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott have sprung into action, along with Gov. Ron DeSantis, Rep. Matt Gaetz, Florida campaign director Susie Wiles and the president’s former impeachment defense lawyer, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to interviews with a dozen Republicans familiar with the effort.

The Republicans are said to be making the case that the longtime judge and devout Catholic has the legal chops to do the job and the conservative background to appease the GOP base, these people said.

But it’s Lagoa’s background as a Florida Cuban-American that could have the most salience for Trump. His reelection hinges on the too-close-to-call battleground state, where his campaign has made outreach to Hispanic voters a top issue, worrying some Democrats.

“If the president picks Barbara Lagoa, they will be dancing salsa with joy in Hialeah well past November,” said Gaetz, referring to Lagoa’s home town, a blue-collar majority Cuban-American city that borders Miami and leans Republican.

 

No doubt Trump has visions of standing up at his hate rallies and belching out how he's "done more for women, done more for Latinos than any president in history" with a Lagoa pick in a city like Orlando or Tampa.  It might actually work.

We'll see.

Banking On Getting Away With It

Jason Leopold and the team at BuzzFeed News give us the "FinCEN Files", a massive collection of documents that show just how pervasive international money laundering by big banks, and the hundreds of billions of dollar that get moved each year by drug cartels, crime lords, and dictators through the global financial network. And under Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, the Trump Regime has made it harder than ever to catch these bad guys -- bad guys including Vladimir Putin.

A huge trove of secret government documents reveals for the first time how the giants of Western banking move trillions of dollars in suspicious transactions, enriching themselves and their shareholders while facilitating the work of terrorists, kleptocrats, and drug kingpins.

And the US government, despite its vast powers, fails to stop it.

Today, the FinCEN Files — thousands of “suspicious activity reports” and other US government documents — offer an unprecedented view of global financial corruption, the banks enabling it, and the government agencies that watch as it flourishes. BuzzFeed News has shared these reports with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 news organizations in 88 countries.

These documents, compiled by banks, shared with the government, but kept from public view, expose the hollowness of banking safeguards, and the ease with which criminals have exploited them. Profits from deadly drug wars, fortunes embezzled from developing countries, and hard-earned savings stolen in a Ponzi scheme were all allowed to flow into and out of these financial institutions, despite warnings from the banks’ own employees.

Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations — and the banks play a key role. “Some of these people in those crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,” said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.

Laws that were meant to stop financial crime have instead allowed it to flourish. So long as a bank files a notice that it may be facilitating criminal activity, it all but immunizes itself and its executives from criminal prosecution. The suspicious activity alert effectively gives them a free pass to keep moving the money and collecting the fees.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, is the agency within the Treasury Department charged with combating money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes. It collects millions of these suspicious activity reports, known as SARs. It makes them available to US law enforcement agencies and other nations’ financial intelligence operations. It even compiles a report called “Kleptocracy Weekly” that summarizes the dealings of foreign leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin.

What it does not do is force the banks to shut the money laundering down.

In the rare instances when the US government does crack down on banks, it often relies on sweetheart deals called deferred prosecution agreements, which include fines but no high-level arrests. The Trump administration has made it even harder to hold executives personally accountable, under guidance by former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein that warned government agencies against “piling on.”

But the FinCEN Files investigation shows that even after they were prosecuted or fined for financial misconduct, banks such as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of New York Mellon continued to move money for suspected criminals.

Suspicious payments flow around the world and into countless industries, from international sports to Hollywood entertainment to luxury real estate to Nobu sushi restaurants. They filter into the companies that make familiar items from people’s lives, from the gas in their car to the granola in their cereal bowl.

The FinCEN Files expose an underlying truth of the modern era: The networks through which dirty money traverse the world have become vital arteries of the global economy. They enable a shadow financial system so wide-ranging and so unchecked that it has become inextricable from the so-called legitimate economy. Banks with household names have helped to make it so.

And on top of it all is one underlying truth: there is ample evidence to believe that the current occupant of the White House is up to his neck in this mess. 

Stay tuned. There's a lot more here to come.

StupidiNews!

• HBO cleaned up at the 77th Emmy Awards with big wins for "Succession" for Outstanding Drama series, Zendaya winning Best Actress in a Drama for "Euphoria", and multiple wins for"Watchmen".
• Late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery beside her husband Alan next week.
• At least eight are reported dead in Mumbai, India after a building partially collapsed onto a busy street, search and rescue teams are going through the rubble.
• More than 100,000 protesters marched in the streets of the Belarus capital of Minsk on Sunday as protests against the government of Alexander Lukashenko entered their seventh week.
• New archaeological evidence finds humans were in Saudi Arabia some 120,000 years ago around a prehistoric lakebed, researchers say the footprints found were most likely of Homo erectus.