Wokeness and Corruption and Priorities

I was blessed to have practiced surgery and medicine for 41 years. Half of those years were in the military and the other half in Boise. Since retiring from actively practicing medicine several years ago—I still teach in the military, I have been given the great gift of space and time so that I can finally figure out what I believe in. This can be a hard process, but I have concluded that faith, family and country are the most important gifts that any person could receive from a loving God. This seems obvious to most people, but when I look at my own children who are in the middle of professional careers themselves, raising families and sleeping maybe 4 hours a day or night—who knows when they sleep, I am reminded that busy successful people don’t always have the time for self-reflection, reading and reassessing priorities. My charge to them is if you do nothing else take time to pray. Then do the other things prn.

Watching our politicians hurry—the better word is precipitate, around the Capital during busy legislative days, I wonder if they have time to reflect on their own political and philosophical beliefs. What does it mean to be a conservative or liberal, a Democrat or Republican? What are your own personal “first instances” or principles? When I was in college during the very tumultuous ’60s—if you remember those days you weren’t really there so they say, there was never any discussion regarding the application of first principles to either side of a political debate. Today the argument between factions’ centers around the actual relevance of those principles. Are the Constitution and our Great Declaration and more importantly the Natural Law upon which both those documents rest, even relevant today or does progressive liberal socialism hold the answers for a better future? We no longer argue policy, but rather the principles themselves. Our inability to find a common ground may be precisely because we don’t believe in common principles. Prudence in finding common ground is almost impossible when the validity of providential truths are at stake.

Many years ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote in LIBERAL FASCISM about the evolving symbiosis between government and big business. Corporate Totalitarianism facilitated the establishment of Fascist Political Regimes in Nazi Germany and Italy. We today hear about the “deep state” usually referring to a shadow behind the scenes of government with its legions of bureaucrats and commissars that define and execute policy, but there is also operating in collusion with the government deep state a corporate deep state. In Idaho there are government positions that mirror corporate billets. The collusion is facilitated by lobbyists like IACI and the IMA/IHA/teachers unions etc. These organizations do not reward workers, or entrepreneurs, or small businessmen, farmers, or families. Instead, they reward the government-corporate deep state.

Our politicians many who have become far to cozy with the corporate elite have abrogated their responsibility to the people who elected them. Corporate CEO’s who give huge sums of money to political campaigns and whose companies give even larger sums to political action committees that also fund these campaigns—in addition to paying for politicians to attend the Governor’s Cup at several thousand dollars a “pop” or should that be a “poop”, have taken it upon themselves to declaring that as part of their corporations implicit debt to society they not only should be the arbiters for the allocation of capital—capitol produced on the backs of employees for the benefit of customers, but that they should also control the flow of ideas. Milton Freidman warned about this and he called it the “corporate state” where a small group of investors get to decide not only what is made, what service to provide, but also what you—the public should think. They want the ultimate power to allocate both capital and thought—can we all say together SOVIET? This is in fact the bases for “Corporate Wokeness”. When private organizations—companies, non-profits, NGO’s, participate in concert with government, they are no longer acting as private organizations, but as agents of the State.

This can be a two-way agency problem however. Politicians can use the private sector to secure their own positions by having private companies deny access to public platforms that the companies control. It is thus the private company doing the censoring and not the government—who is the agent and who is the client Mr. Joseph Goebbels may have asked early in the game and Mr. Zuckerberg today?

This is happening on a large scale in our State. Think about the large hospital systems who have become propagandist’s themselves. The two largest in the State have over $3billion of Revenue half of which comes in the form of government transfer payments. They are also about to receive a majority portion of an additional $475 million of “Covid Funds” to be administered by our Governor. What would happen to those funds if they didn’t support the Governor and his positions regarding masks and mandates and mitigation strategies? Is that the reason doctors and nurses and technicians have been threatened if they make public the actual censes of patients in the hospital and the acuity of those patients? And what about back-office coders who have been threatened about disclosing “creative Covid coding” practices?

I have talked to many health care workers over the past 19 months who are afraid of expressing their own views and even more importantly I have talked to patients who have told me that their own doctors are afraid to offer their own clinical opinion—don’t vaccinate your child comes to mind. When a large percentage of people are unwilling make a stand for what Classical Liberalism demands, not only freedom of conscience but diversity of opinion, we are in the 9^th inning of this great “American Experiment”

Over the last month many medical organizations—AMA, American College of Surgeons, Residency Programs and Academic Institutions have published various declarations and signed petition supporting Black Lives Matter(BLM), Critical Race Theory(CRT), Covid mandates, masks, and type2 mitigation strategies. These organizations all receive government funding and in our State our Governor controls much of that funding—it is supposed to be the legislature, but what shrunken violets they have become. I believe every doctor, nurse, technician and even administrator in any organization should be able to speak up and out and voice their opinion on any of these issues—as individuals not representatives of their organizations. But if an organization takes on the role of speaking for everyone within the organization that becomes problematic—one may call it diabolical. What happens to the resident that doesn’t sign a declaration or a private doctor that doesn’t join the crowd? Will there be some form of clandestine retribution? More call days/month or fewer consults? Even the threat is coercive and just because it is a private organization limiting one’s free speech and not the government, to me it becomes more problematic, more coercive, and more evil.

During the Idaho August heat wave, I recommend that every legislator take some time and space and reflect about all the symbiotic corruptions that are operating out in the open. What about the price of admission being “taken care of” by a lobbyist at the Governor’s Cup? What about a campaign contribution from a hospital system that receives transfer payments controlled by the legislature and Governor? What about the “free speech” of health care workers being threatened by organizations who receive transfer payments from politicians whose campaigns they contribute too? What about individual citizens, patients, workers, mothers and fathers and their families, businesses, farmers and ranchers none of whom participate in the corruption.

My charge to legislators and our Governor is to rethink how you are doing business. The corruption has been going on for so long that many can’t even see it for what it is. In the next few months before the primaries “We the People” should allow all of you the opportunity to renounce the corruption that is running rampant in our State.

If you don’t, we should throw you guys out. Everyone from both parties that doesn’t reject corruption should be thrown out.

Talk about being “WOKE’! Or would that be more like a “great awakening”? Big difference.

In Idaho—it doesn’t have to be this way. Industry—government—lobbyists are not involved in a “love triangle”. The relationship is more about mutual protection, power and money—lust. Maybe in the type of environment described, masks and type 3 mitigation strategies should be required? That way the people won’t have to see what is going on. Ear plugs may also helpful. Other protective measures like deploying The Capital Police or National Guard would be up to Mr. Bedke who has always professed a disdain for any show of force especially when it comes to protecting a lobbyist as opposed to a private citizen.

MAGA “Fight Like Hell”