+ This x-ray may explain why Luigi Mangione shot Brian Thompson in the back…
+ Sen. Elizabeth Warren: “Violence is never the answer…but you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands…What happens when you turn this into the billionaires run it all is they get the opportunity to squeeze every last penny.”
+ In a message to company employees, Andrew Witty, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, praised Brian Thompson for his persistent efforts to halt “unnecessary health care.”
+ A piece in Pro Publica covered a lawsuit brought by a patient suffering from ulcerative colitis, a chronic, debilitating disease, who UHC denied care. The lawsuit cited recorded phone calls in which UHC employees joked and laughed about the denied claims and ridiculed the patient’s urgent pleas for treatment as “tantrums.”
+ Cory Doctorow: “I don’t want people to kill insurance executives, and I don’t want insurance executives to kill people. But I am unsurprised that this happened. Indeed, I’m surprised that it took so long.”
+ TV news reports from outside the jail where Mangione is being held were interrupted Wednesday evening by inmates shouting: “Free Luigi! Free Luigi!”
+ Just to be clear: Brian Thompson was paid more than $10 million last year and was being sued by the Hollywood Firefighters Pension Fund, which was an institutional investor in UnitedHealthcare, for insider trading after dumping $15 million in company stock when he learned that UnitedHealth was the subject of a Justice Department probe, information that was kept secret from other investors.
+ A new Pro Publica report, largely based on leaked documents, suggest that UnitedHealthcare is “strategically limiting After reviewing leaked documents, we have found UnitedHealth is strategically limiting access to a treatment for thousands of children with autism across the country in order to cut costs.” Dan Unumb, an attorney and president of the Autism Legal Resource Center: “Yes, this therapy can be expensive. But solving the problem by denying kids access to medically necessary care is a terrible solution.”
+ A bipartisan group of legislators has introduced a bill in Congress to force UnitedHealth, CVS, Cigna and other health industry conglomerates to sell off their pharmacy businesses, which have allowed PBMs (pharmacy business managers, basically profiteering middlemen) to jack up drug prices.
+ Malcolm Harris: “’Every life is precious’ stuff about a healthcare CEO whose company is noted for denying coverage is pretty silly.”
+ TMZ reports that Luigi Mangione considered using a bomb to kill UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson but decided against it to protect the lives of innocent people. Perhaps Israel could learn a thing or two from him…
+ Walgreens is reportedly in talks to sell itself to private equity firm Sycamore Partners. This move is certain to make working conditions even more brutal and prices even more unaffordable, and ghostly shoplifters will be blamed for the problems.
+ As childhood vaccination rates plummet, infections from contagious diseases with a preventative vaccine are rising sharply: “There have been 28,120 cases of whooping cough, or pertussis, reported nationwide this year, compared to 5,889 at this time last year.”
+ Only four stars, Luigi?
+++
+ Did anyone actually campaign on raising the retirement age and then cutting your Social Security and Medicare benefits for the few crippled years you’ve left?
+ Rep. Mark Alford: “It’s gonna mean cuts to the 24 percent of the discretionary spending that we have. And it’s also going to mean looking long term at the front end of some programs like Social Security and Medicare … we can move the retirement age back a little bit.”
+ According to an analysis by the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, if the Trump tax cuts for individuals are fully extended beyond this year, the wealthiest 1% of Americans would receive an average tax cut of $45,790. The poorest 20% would receive a tax cut of only $110.
+ James Galbraith writing in The Nation on “Why Bidenomics Was a Bust”: “If voters are unhappy with the good readings on standard indicators—unemployment, the monthly inflation rate, economic growth—it must be because those indicators no longer connect to their sense of well-being.”
+ In an April survey of voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, 82% of those polled said they agreed with the proposition that a handful of “corporate monopolies now run our entire economy.” Biden and Harris ignored this sentiment; Trump played to it with entirely predictable results.
+ The price of the average home in the US has increased by approximately $140,000 since 2016. In 2005, the average rent was $759 per month. It’s now $1,521.
+ Last month, 58% of Missouri voters approved paid sick leave and an increase in the minimum wage. This month, a coalition of business owners and trade organizations filed a petition with the Missouri Supreme Court, asking it to overturn both measures.
+ Elon Musk was the largest single donor in the 2024 election cycle, spending at least $274 million to elect Trump and other Republicans. His net worth has increased by around $60 billion since the election.
+ According to UBS, the wealth of the world’s billionaires has more than doubled in the last 10 years and now stands at more than $14 trillion.
+ A smaller share (7 percent) of Americans moved in 2023 than any other time since the Census has been tracking the statistic…
+ More evidence of imperial decline: According to a recent Pew survey, 92 percent of Americans now view financial stability as more important than upward mobility.
+ Trump on grocery prices: “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard.”
+++
+ Lame duck senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema cast decisive votes against Biden’s NLRB nominee, Lauren McFarren, ensuring that the Democrats will not secure control of the national labor regulator through 2026 and handing Trump effective control of the board when his term begins. The petulant Sinema, who hadn’t cast a vote since 11/21/24, seemed to enjoy making a final twist of the knife.
+ Congrats to Harvard! It’s still the place to go to learn how to run companies like UnitedHealthcare…
+ The New York Times announced last week that Paul Krugman is unplugging his keyboard after 25 years as a columnist. Remember when Krugman pocketed $50,000 for advising Enron and, after it was exposed, said he gave them a discount (i.e., “somewhat less than my normal rate.”)? Paul Krugman could always be relied on to emphasize the liberal in neoliberalism.
+ A new Gallup poll shows 62% of Americans think the federal government should be responsible for health care. It could have been 82% and Harris still wouldn’t have built her campaign around it…
+ Sen. Michael Bennet, the Colorado Democrat: “70% of people said they want a radical transformation of the American economy. People are extremely angry because they feel no matter how hard they work, they can’t get ahead and their kids won’t either.” Bennet urges the Democrats to focus on the lack of retirement, prescription drug prices, and health care, especially mental health care.
+++
+ Out of 148 million votes cast nationwide, control of the House in 2024 was decided by a mere 7,309 votes in three congressional districts: Iowa 1, Colorado 8 and Pennsylvania 7.
+ Since 2020, 39 legislators across the country have switched parties. Just two of them flipped from Democrat to Republican.
+ According to MSDNC’s data guru Steve Kornacki, “In all six of the major [New Jersey] cities or towns where Hispanics account for more than 70% of the population, the margin moved at least 20 points in Trump’s direction compared to 2020.”
+ The best thing Biden did during his presidency, finally withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan, may have doomed his presidency. It certainly sent him into a tailspin, from which he never recovered. On Election Day 2020, Biden’s favorability was +6. It improved +9 on Inauguration Day and peaked at +14.7 in March 2021. By August, it had slunk back to +9, before collapsing to -10 in December of 2021, and it never bounced back. The pivot point was the hostile media coverage of the Afghan war, followed by the emergence of the Delta variant of COVID-19, relief, inflation, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the expiration of COVID-19 relief, and the genocide in Gaza.
+ Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) during the floor debate on the GOP’s “Liberty in Laundry Bill: “I mean, ‘Liberty in Laundry.’ I mean, ‘Liberty in Laundry.’ Are you kidding me, Mr. Speaker? You can’t make this stuff up. Who came up with the title – ChatGPT? I mean, what’s next, changing the national motto to ‘Lint Free or Die'”?
+ In a bid to repair his fractured relationship with Trump, Mark Zuckerburg instructed Meta to donate $1 million to the Trump Inaugural Fund.
+++
+ Suddenly, the transgender issue, which dominated the GOP in the last few weeks of the campaign, doesn’t seem a priority for Trump.
TIME: Can I shift to the transgender issue? Obviously, sort of a major issue during the campaign. In 2016, you said that transgender people could use whatever bathroom they choose. Do you still feel that way?
Trump: When was that?
In 2016.
I don’t want to get into the bathroom issue. Because it’s a very small number of people we’re talking about, and it ripped our country apart, so they’ll have to settle whatever the law finally agrees. I am a big believer in the Supreme Court, and I’m going to go by their rulings, and so far, I think their rulings have been rulings that people are going along with, but we’re talking about a very small number of people, and we’re talking about it, and it gets massive coverage, and it’s not a lot of people.
But on that note, there’s a big fight in Congress now. The incoming trans member from Delaware, Sarah McBride, says we should all be focused on more important issues. Do you agree?
I do agree with that. On that–absolutely. As I was saying, it’s a small number of people.
+ Who will tell Nancy Mace?
+ They ran on eliminating single-sex bathrooms (which Trump now says he doesn’t care about) and now want to eliminate bank regulators!
+ Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a Republican from New Jersey, says that “high sources” in the government told him that the drones spotted at night over Monmouth County are probes from an Iranian “Mothership.” Van Drew: “Iran launched a mothership probably about a month ago that contains these drones. That mothership is off … the East Coast of the United States of America. They’ve launched drones into everything that we can see or hear and again, these are from high sources. I don’t say this lightly.”The Pentagon says nonsense: “There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States.”
+ Maybe RFK Jr can prevail on Agents Scully and Molder to investigate…
+ Trump’s transition team wants to eliminate the car crash reporting requirements that Elon Musk and Tesla have objected to. Why would we need to know if our self-driving cars tend to run into each other at 50 MPH? That’s snowflake stuff!
+ The same electorate that put Trump back into office disapproves of the criminal charges against him being dropped by a margin of 54-45. Independents feel even more strongly against letting him off the hook, 64-36.
+ It is interesting how the Make America Great Again movement is attacking measures, such as birthright citizenship, which were bedrock principles of the country from the time when they believed America was at its Greatest…
+ I’ve been slowly making my way through Emily Wilson’s lively recent translation of the Odyssey, and it struck me that the treatment of “strangers” is one of the recurring themes of the epic. It occurs again and again: Telemachus in Pylos and Sparta, Odysseus with the Phaeacians and the Lotus-eaters, on Aeolius, and even with Circe and Calypso. Zeus himself is described as Zeus Xenios, protector of strangers, and urges humans to express xenophilia, not xenophobia…
+ Greg Moes, a South Dakota dairy farmer who voted for Trump, told CNN that about half of his workers are immigrants, many of them undocumented, and that he’s confident Trump’s mass deportation scheme won’t include farm workers: “How are they going to do it? If they round them up within two days, we will not have food. There will not be food anywhere. That’s what I predict. Nobody will be filling the shelves. Nobody will be producing food. If once we have to shut down and be gone, it’s never coming back. We have to trust in our officials that are put in place.”
+ It’s a weird political syndrome where people vote for someone who repeatedly pledges to take actions that might put them out of business, believing that the politicians couldn’t possibly mean what they say…
+ In testimony before Congress this week, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council said that Trump’s mass deportation plan “would cost $968 billion in total” and likely “cause economic chaos. Reichlin-Melnick said, “We estimate that, on average, a single deportation cost the U.S. government in today’s fund money slightly under $24,000…As millions are expelled, the U.S. population and labor force would shrink—so too would the economy… Houses would become more expensive, as would groceries, restaurants, travel, and childcare. Every American would feel the pinch of inflation. After all, we estimate that a mass deportation campaign would lead to a loss in total GDP of 4.2 to 6.8% at minimum, as much as the Great Recession, and just like then, many Americans would lose their jobs In fact, a single worksite raid in 2018 under the Trump administration at a beef plant in Tennessee led to ground beef prices rising by 25 cents for the year that the plant was out of operation following the raid.”
+++
+ Most Democrats kept their mouths shut after the dispiriting not-guilty verdict in the NYC subway vigilante case. Not Rep. Jasmine Crockett: “Jordan Neely was unarmed. He needed support and care. Instead, he received a death sentence. His family grieves while the man who took his life walks free.”
+ A recent Gallup survey found that only 21% of Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the country’s criminal justice system, down from 34% in 2004. I’d be surprised if this number doesn’t drop further under the incoming Trump administration.
+ Police horses as “therapy animals?” I remember walking out of the Staple Center after being the “Al Gore analyst” for the BBC during the last night of the DNC in 2000 and watching LAPD officers on horseback trample screaming demonstrators in the “protest pen’ outside the stadium following RAtM’s performance…
+ Anita Dunn, one of Biden’s former top advisors, slammed the president’s pardon of Hunter: “A president who ran to restore the rule of law who has upheld the rule of law who has really defended the rule of law kind of saying, ‘Well, maybe not right now.’” Of course, it’s totally consistent with Biden’s flouting of the rule of international law when it comes to Gaza.
+ According to a poll from the AP, only 2 in 10 Americans approve of President Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son Hunter after earlier promising he wouldn’t.
+ So Trump’s nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, knocked over a box when she was 13. The box contained a gun, which discharged when it hit the floor, killing her father. Is this still a case of “guns don’t kill people, people kill people?”
+ The last eleven months of gun violence in the US…
+ 15,717 gun deaths
+ 29,985 gun injuries
+ 479 mass shootings
+ 741 children shot
+ 4,124 teenagers shot
+ 1,142 incidents of defensive gun use
+ 1,323 unintentional shootings
+ 632 murder-suicides
Source: Gun Violence Archive.
+ Over a three-year period, the Sheriff’s Office in Broward County, Florida, cooked its own crack cocaine so it could sell it to people that deputies would then arrest for buying crack cocaine. The DA’s office is attempting to clear the convictions.
+ In 2020, Kshama Sawant led the effort to secure a ban on chemical/crowd control weapons used by police in Seattle. Now, the all-Democrat city council and mayor are trying to repeal the measure.
+++
+ A new assessment published in Environmental Research estimates that all regions on the planet will hit the 1.5 °C warning threshold by 2040 or earlier and that 31 out of 34 regions will reach the 2.0 °C threshold by 2040. For 3.0 °C, 26 out of 34 regions are predicted to reach the threshold by 2060.
+ Once one of the planet’s top carbon sinks, the Arctic is becoming a carbon emitter as its permafrost melts.
+ According to a new study published in Science, warming ocean waters killed about half of the common murres off Alaska’s coast (more than four million birds) and have shown no signs of recovery.
+ Carbon markets don’t work to reduce carbon emissions. That’s the damning conclusion of a new report published in Nature. Even so, the World Bank, US Treasury, IMF and the UN keep pushing them as a decarbonizing solution for the Global South.
+ The first ice-free day in the Arctic Ocean may arrive before 2030.
+ According to a new report from the UN, more than three-quarters (77.6%) of Earth’s surface has become permanently drier in the last 30 years.
+ The nine largest wildfires in California’s history have occurred since 2017, including three of the five deadliest.
+ Big Tech’s AI boom is generating a natural gas infrastructure boom. Scott Strazik, the CEO of GE Vernova, maker of gas turbines, told investors: ” “They’re not building those data centers with an assumption for anything other than 24/7 power. Gas is well suited for that…I can’t think of a time that the gas business has had more fun than they’re having right now.”
Meanwhile, Alberta is trying to lure tech companies to build huge, power-hungry AI data centers in the province and run them on natural gas instead of solar or hydro. This will give the oil and gas industry a fresh market for its planet-killing product.
+ The persistent drought in Brazil has driven the price of Arabica coffee to a record high, topping the peak set in 1977.
+ It’s not just the salmon that have returned to the Klamath River after the dams were removed, but a whole riverine ecosystem. Michael Belchik, Yurok Fisheries Department Sr Policy Analyst: “If you look at Jenny Creek & the Klamath main stem in the Iron Gate reservoir footprint, you see tens of thousands of willows coming up. A whole riparian forest is being reborn even right now.”
+++
+ Meet Mad Dog, Jr.: Commander of US Marine Corps, General Eric Smith: “The advantage lies with us because our last combat was captured on somebody’s iPhone 14. China’s last combat was captured on oil and canvas, and they should not forget that.” Gen. Smith’s bellicose boast is pretty clear evidence of who has been invading other countries for the last few centuries and who hasn’t…
+ Who will tell Pete Hegseth? A study published in last week’s National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) by two economists at West Point found that the integration of women into US military combat units had no detectable impact on the performance of male soldiers other than reducing suspensions due to misconduct.
+ RFK, Jr. is pushing for his daughter-in-law and former campaign manager Amaryllis Fox Kennedy to serve as deputy director at the CIA next year so that she can “get to the bottom” of the CIA’s involvement in the assassination of his uncle.
+ A GOP senator on Tulsi Gabbard’s interviews: “Her interviews have not been going well. One [senator] told me she was the worst-prepared candidate and was kind of trying to get by on her BS personality.”
+ UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield: “In this last month of my tenure at the UN I would like to leave a legacy that the US cares.” This statement of Hysterical Moral Blindness deserves its own entry in the DSM as an example of Thomas-Greenfield Dissociative Syndrome.
At the Congressional hearing this week on Trump’s deportation plan, retired National Guard Army Maj. Gen. Randy Manner testified about the four “significant risks” it posed for the U.S. military:
1.) “Using military assets for mass deportations would negatively impact the military’s readiness and capability to accomplish its core mission of national defense…Our National Guard units are stretched thin, responding to natural disasters at home while also regularly deploying overseas in active duty status; additional training or deployments to support deportation operations would absolutely harm operational readiness and reduce the military’s ability to counter adversaries or respond to crises in combat.”
2.) “My second concern is that the military is simply not trained to do this mission. Immigration Enforcement is the responsibility of federal law enforcement agencies like ICE and CBP,” he said. “A small number of National Guard units receive a mere four to eight hours of civil disturbance training per year. This lack of training and experience greatly increases the risk of significant and potentially deadly mistakes in a charged operational environment.”
3.) “My third concern is the effect on recruiting, retention and morale…Involvement of the military in a politically-charged domestic deportation efforts would only add to those challenges,” creating what he described as “a recipe for disillusionment and a poor advertisement for potential recruits.”
4.) And “Finally, involving the military in a politically charged domestic issue like mass deportation would erode public trust in the military,” Manner argued. “Americans trust our military because it protects all of us, regardless of our politics, from the possibility of foreign aggression. When the military is tasked with carrying out domestic policies that may be controversial to some, it undermines the foundation of that trust. That, in turn, will increase risk and morale, recruitment, retention and readiness.”
+ Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, last week during his tour of Asia: “People don’t realize how much my job is diplomatic.” People would be even more surprised at how little of Tony Blinken’s job as America’s chief diplomat is diplomatic.
+++
+ Say it ain’t so, Don!
+ Presumably as a reward for putting up with Donald Jr (and perhaps a guarantee of her silence), Trump nominated Kimberly Guilfoyle as his ambassador to Greece, a nation she has repeatedly smeared on FoxNews for refusing to surrender to the austerity regime the EU and World Bank wanted to impose on it.
“I mean, nobody likes freeloaders. It doesn’t matter if you make great yogurt. I don’t care. Suck it up. Get up in the morning. Go to work. You guys are retiring too early. I know you’ve got great weather, but it doesn’t matter. And that’s part of the problem. You have politicians making out-of-control promises, buying votes with entitlements that they can’t support…It’s a joke. But guess what? Nobody is punishing them. Like when the dog pees on the rug, the puppy, like train it.”
+ Is she bringing her whip to Athens?
+ What the English non-sense poet and artist Edward Leer read in a single half-hour while suffering from a bout of boredom, loneliness and insomnia on the Island of Corfu:
“My drawing companion Edward is gone & I miss him terribly. I vow I have never felt more shockingly alone than the two or three evenings I have stayed in. Yet all this must be conquered if fighting can do it. Yet at all times, I have thought of, I hardly know what. The constant walking and noise prevent my application to any sort of work, & it is only from 6 to 8 in the morning that I can really attend to anything. Then, I am beginning bits of Plutarch and of Lucian’s dialogues. And, then, if I can’t sleep, my whole system seems to turn into pins, cayenne pepper & vinegar & I suffer hideously. You see, I have no means of carrying off my irritation: others have horses or boats; in short–I have only walking, and that is beginning to be impossible alone. I could not go to church today. I felt I should make faces at everybody, so I read some Greek of St. John, wishing for you to read it with–some of Robinson’s Palestine, some of Jane Eyre, some of Burton’s Mecca, some Friends in Council, some Shakespeare, some Vingt Ans après [Dumas], some Leake’s Topography, some Gardiner Wilkinson, some Grote, some Ruskin–& all in half an hour! O! Doesn’t he take it out of me in a raging worry? Just this moment I think I must have a piano: that may do me good. But then I remember Miss Hendon over my head has one & plays jocular jigs continually. Then what the devil can I do? Buy a baboon & a parrot & let them rush about the room?”
—Journal entry, June 12, 1857
+ Jim Carrey on why he appears in Sonic 3, after announcing in 2022 that he was retiring from the movie business: ‘I bought a lot of stuff and need the money, frankly.’
+ Rep. Josh Gottheimer, running to replace Pat Murphy as governor of New Jersey, apparently faked his Spotify list to make it appear to be a Springsteen groupie…
I guess they can’t revoke your soul for tryin’…
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
Bird in Kansas City
Charlie Parker
(Verve)
Lights on a Satellite: Live at the Left Bank
Sun Ra
(Resonance)
In France: Live at the 1977 Nancy Jazz Pulsations Festival
BB King
(Deep Digs/Elemental)
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato to Marx
David Lay Williams
(Princeton)
Planet Aqua: Rethinking Our Home in the Universe
Jeremy Rifkin
(Polity)
Against the Crisis: Economy and Ecology in a Burning World
by Ståle Holgersen
(Verso)
A Piece of Nature
“Throughout the world, what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood’s forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth… Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common.”
– Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
