Second helpings at the corporate welfare trough

Double-Dipping by PPP Healthcare Loan Recipients

Phil Mattera for the Dirt Diggers Digest

Healthcare providers have faced significant challenges during the pandemic, but it was still surprising to see that sector show up as the largest recipient of assistance under the Paycheck Protection Program. 

That’s because hospitals and other providers were already receiving tens of billions of dollars in federal aid from other CARES Act programs.

To the growing list of PPP defects we can add: double-dipping by healthcare recipients.

Take the case of Bronxcare, which operates a number of health facilities in New York City. Two of its units were revealed to have gotten PPP loans worth $2 to $5 million each (the amounts were disclosed as ranges). Previously, it received more than $100 million from the HHS Provider Relief Fund.

The Great Plains Health Alliance, a health system headquartered in Kansas, received seven PPP loans worth up to $11 million. Previously, it received more than $24 million in grants under the Provider Relief Fund as well as $16 million in expedited funds through the Medicare Accelerated and Advance Payment Program.  

The Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo, New York received a PPP loan worth between $5 million and $10 million after having received more than $40 million from the Provider Relief Fund and over $35 million in accelerated Medicare payments.

Bronxcare, Great Plains and Erie County Medical are all non-profits, but double-dipping can also be found among for-profit healthcare providers. 

VIDEO: Is it illegal for Navy veterans to protest?

To watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cC7MHsNzobw

‘My decision was to tell the truth, no matter how unpopular it made me’

UPDATED: Virtual lecture series to wrap up in mid-August

Tony LaRoche

UPDATED with a new date for the final lecture.

In the current politically charged climate, journalists often face accusations of bias in their reporting. Christiane Amanpour got her first taste of those attacks as a CNN international correspondent reporting on the war in Bosnia in the 1990s.

“Everybody comes to the world with their own lived experiences and their own biases,” Amanpour told several hundred viewers during the recent livestream discussion of the University of Rhode Island’s Taricani Lecture Series on First Amendment Rights. 

“Our job [as journalists] is not to say we don’t have biases. Our job is to report the truth and do it objectively, despite whatever biases we may have.”

Amanpour ’83, H’ 95, CNN’s award-winning chief international anchor, was the second speaker in the three-part, virtual lecture series honoring esteemed WJAR-TV investigative reporter Jim Taricani, who died last year at age 69. 

This summer’s lecture series is a preview to the annual, in-person Taricani Lecture that will begin next spring. The lectures are endowed by Laurie White-Taricani ’81, the Taricani family, and friends.

In the early 1990s, Amanpour was reporting from the war zone and witnessing attacks on Bosnian Muslims and Croats, targeted by Serbian forces for ethnic and religious reasons. She reported what she saw – in the face of opposition from world leaders who labeled the killing and torturing of civilians as “just centuries of ethnic hatred,” she said.

Couldn't socially distance?

Blame your working memory

University of California - Riverside

Here's one way to make sure no one comes within 6
feet of you.

Whether you decided to engage in social distancing in the early stages of COVID-19 depended on how much information your working memory could hold.

This is the crucial finding of a research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences coauthored by Weiwei Zhang, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. 

The study offers potential strategies to mitigate social distancing noncompliance in a public health crisis.

The researchers found individuals with higher working memory capacity have an increased awareness of benefits over costs of social distancing and, subsequently, show more compliance with recommended social distancing guidelines during the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Here's another

Working memory is the psychological process of holding information in the mind for a brief period of time -- typically, just seconds. 

The amount of information working memory can hold briefly -- its capacity -- is predictive of many mental abilities such as intelligence, comprehension, and learning.

"The higher the working memory capacity, the more likely that social distancing behaviors will follow," said Zhang, the paper's senior author. 

"Interestingly, this relationship holds even after we statistically control for relevant psychological and socioeconomic factors such as depressed and anxious moods, personality traits, education, intelligence, and income."

Mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations?

Here's what states and employers can legally require
Debbie Kaminer, Baruch College, CUNY

A safe and effective vaccine could end the coronavirus pandemic, but for it to succeed, enough people will have to get inoculated.

Recent polls suggest that the U.S. is far from ready. Most surveys have found that only about two-thirds of adults say they would get the vaccine. 

While that might protect most people who get vaccinated, it may be insufficient to reach herd immunity and stop the virus’s spread.

As a law professor who has written about the legal questions around vaccination laws, employment discrimination and religious exemptions, I see four possible approaches that governments and employers can take to ensure enough Americans are immunized against COVID-19.

Which ones are legal might surprise you.

How Trump’s Psychosis Infects His Followers—And How To Get Them Better

Without Rallies, It’s Harder to Pass His Contagious Mental Disease to His MAGAites

By Bandy X. Lee

Dr. Bandy X. Lee

Many believe that the falling poll numbers for Donald Trump are a measure of his mishandling the coronavirus pandemic to the point of calamity or his divisiveness in the face of a racial crisis.  

While these things may be partially true, there is a far more important, overriding factor: his inability to hold ongoing rallies.

His loss of continual exposure to the public has meant his supporters would separate enough to see reality for themselves.  

This is a phenomenon mental health experts have spoken about in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: how his continual exposure through the presidency would make him uncontainable, and we issued a “Prescription for Survival” in March 2020, to highlight how his removal or, if not, at least removal of influence was necessary for our collective health.

Mental disease could be more contagious than other forms of infection since it does not require physical exposure but only emotional bonds.

There are many medically unjustifiable misconceptions we have about mental disease, but none is perhaps as consequential as the denial that it can be contagious.  

Indeed, its contagion could be more efficient than other forms of infection since it does not require physical exposure but only emotional bonds.  

We noted at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic that the more important pandemic to gain control over was “the mental health pandemic.”

Weakened hosts, an environment that facilitates transmission, and our lack of consideration even of the possibility—even among some psychiatrists wedded to an atomistic view of people—has made Americans more vulnerable.  

In addition, poor mental health contributes to denial, and therefore those who are the most affected are the least likely to admit that anything is wrong.  Bioterrorism is frightening, but psychological warfare even more so, for it hijacks the very mind that is capable of protecting itself.

My focus as a preventive psychiatrist has been the ecology surrounding individuals.  Contagion of mental symptoms is common in public hospital and prison settings, where there are high concentrations of untreated, severe mental disturbances.  Severe symptoms can spread among family members, criminal co-conspirators, gangs, and other tight-knit groups.  

A colleague and collaborator at the World Health Organization, Dr. Gary Slutkin, has long advocated that we consider violence and other behavior an infectious disease whose spread we can interrupt.  International terrorism and suicide are known to be contagious, for example.  

Effective prevention, therefore, requires population-level interventions and application of psychiatric principles to systems, institutions, and cultures.  The last course I designed for students at Yale Law School was one of translating law into social policies that prevent violence and further societal health.

He aced it!

VIDEO: Truly stable genius

To watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSiw_aKIHSk

What’s that smell?

How the brain organizes information about odors

Harvard Medical School

The premiere of the movie Scent of Mystery in 1960 marked a singular event in the annals of cinema: the first, and last, motion picture debut "in glorious Smell-O-Vision." 

Hoping to wow moviegoers with a dynamic olfactory experience alongside the familiar spectacles of sight and sound, select theaters were outfitted with a Rube Goldberg-esque device that piped different scents directly to seats.

Audiences and critics quickly concluded that the experience stunk. Fraught with technical issues, Smell-O-Vision was panned and became a running gag that holds a unique place in entertainment history. 

The flop of Smell-O-Vision, however, failed to deter entrepreneurs from continuing to chase the dream of delivering smells to consumers, particularly in recent years, through digital scent technologies.

Such efforts have generated news headlines but scant success, due in part to a limited understanding of how the brain translates odor chemistry into perceptions of smell -- a phenomenon that in many ways remains opaque to scientists.

The argument for clean living

A leading behavior change researcher says key steps can boost immune system, ability to fight COVID-19

Dave Lavallee

Yes, you should wear face coverings, practice social distancing and wash your hands frequently to reduce your exposure to COVID-19, but did you ever think improving your diet or reducing your alcohol consumption could also play a role in fighting the disease?

University of Rhode Island Professor of Psychology James O. Prochaska, founder of the Cancer Prevention Research Center, and one of the leading behavior change experts in the world, has an emphatic answer. And it’s based on 124 studies done all over the world.

Prochaska, inventor of the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change, said there are four behaviors that lead to the majority of chronic illnesses, which also make individuals more susceptible to infectious diseases: smoking, alcohol abuse, unhealthy eating and inadequate exercise. Add distress to what he calls the Big 4, and you have the perfect combination of factors that work against people’s ability to maintain good health.

Curious About Contract Tracing?

Here’s How it Really Works.

BY JULIE APPLEBY

IN THE MIDST of the Covid-19 epidemic, contact tracing is downright buzzy, and not always in a good way.

Contact tracing is the public health practice of informing people when they’ve been exposed to a contagious disease. 

As it has become more widely employed across the country, it has also become mired in modern political polarization and conspiracy theories.

Misinformation abounds, from tales that people who talk to contact tracers will be sent to nonexistent “FEMA camps” — a rumor so prevalent that health officials in Washington state had to put out a statement in May debunking it — to elaborate theories that the efforts are somehow part of a plot by global elites, such as the Clinton Foundation, Bill Gates or George Soros.

At the very least, such misinformation could hinder efforts to contain the virus, and at worst has sparked threats against tracers, say some observers, including the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a London-based organization that studies polarization.

The dynamic, ISD notes in a June report, “is being generated both by individual social media users and by key influencers in conspiratorial communities” and plays on fears that Big Brother is watching us.

According to that report, social media posts, mainly videos, have been associated with “widespread sharing of petitions and other efforts to galvanise political action against contact tracing.” 

The videos, steeped in disinformation and conspiracy think — whether alleging tracers’ ties to the deep state or casting them as part of a Democratic effort to interfere in the 2020 election — “are receiving more than 300,000 views each on YouTube and are being shared tens of thousands of times across public Facebook pages and groups.”

Of course, the real story behind tracing is nothing like these colorful conspiracy theories. It’s an age-old infection control strategy, and it’s a bit tedious, actually.

“We’ve been doing it in public health for decades,” said Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Staff Sergeant Shawntoria Miles, a medic with the Oklahoma Air
National Guard, calls an individual as part of contact tracing operations
in Guymon, Oklahoma in May 2020.
Visual: Sergeant Kasey M. Phipps / Oklahoma Air National Guard

Part old-fashioned shoe-leather detective work, part social work, the goal is to interrupt the spread of the illness by reaching out to people who test positive — and people they have been in close contact with — and provide needed support for them to isolate. It has to be done quickly, and it takes a lot of people. Recent case count surges in some parts of the country are making the task more difficult.

So let’s take a look at what it is and isn’t.

Fake Talking Points

Time to Bring Down Curtain On Plastic Propaganda

By FRANK CARINI

The spectacle was difficult to watch. The veteran lobbyist spent 30 minutes puking plastic propaganda. Much of what he disgorged was either laughable — he said by putting grapes in plastic packaging “you reduce the hazard of people slipping and falling on grapes” — or disingenuous, by, for example, placing the problem of oceans flooded with plastics on a lack of waste management in “rapidly developing countries in Asia” without ever mentioning the fact that for decades the United States has sent massive amounts of plastic waste to the very countries he was trashing.

His performance was held last year at the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management headquarters in Providence. I was there to cover a meeting of Gov. Gina Raimondo’s Task Force to Tackle Plastics in a fair and balanced manner. It was no easy task.

The American Chemistry Council and other lobbyists for the plastics industry like to spread bovine waste. Even during a pandemic, the Washington, D.C.-based trade association and other plastic influencers have no trouble propagating fear and misinformation. 

Last year’s presentation to Rhode Island’s Task Force to Tackle Plastics was ridiculous. The campaign to undermine bag bans and vilify reusable bags during a public-health crisis was disgusting.

Just days into the coronavirus pandemic, the plastics industry and some of its top mouthpieces, like the Plastics Industry Association, began claiming, without evidence, that reusable bags could transmit the coronavirus. Plastic was safer, they insisted.

Trump describes his re-election strategy

For more cartoons by Tom Tomorrow, CLICK HERE.

VIDEO: Don't be surprised if Trump pardons accused sex trafficker and old friend

 To watch this video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo1lDJrZKx8&feature=emb_title

UPDATED: Yet another reason to boycott WJAR Channel 10

UPDATE: WJAR's parent company cancels plan to force affiliates to broadcast insane conspiracy video
By Will Collette

UPDATED: On July 27, Sinclair Broadcasting announced it was dropping plans to force their affiliates to air the discredited COVID-19 conspiracy program, "Plandemic." Apparently, they couldn't figure out a way to fix the numerous problems with the program.  - Will Collette

UPDATED: This afternoon, Sinclair announced that they were "postponing" the mandatory broadcast of this show. They say they are adding footage to provide more "balance." 

We've covered the on-going boycott of WJAR Channel 10 after its purchase by Sinclair Broadcasting, a loony media conglomerate so radical right that they make Fox News sound like the Rachel Maddox Show.

This weekend, Sinclair is ordering all its affiliates to show a program called "Plandemic" which among many other discredited things, calls the COVID-19 pandemic a hoax, claims that masks actually cause COVID-19, part of its contradictory claim that COVID-19 is part of our natural chemistry and, somehow, was created also in a lab in Wuhan, China. 

If you're looking for the ultimate example of fake news, "Plandemic" is it. Sinclair Broadcasting recently paid an FCC fine of $48 million for for deceitful practices in its programming.

If you should happen to come upon Plandemic on Channel 10, first shame on you for breaking the boycott but second, you should read the following article (below the fold) published by Progressive Charlestown on June 12. It was written by a team of scientists to sound the alarm about rampant conspiracy theories on the pandemic.

They zero in on "Plandemic" and offer you a detailed rebuttal to the wacky content of the video. Please read on.