“A country gets the leadership it deserves.”

That was my sentiment back in 2016 when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton for the presidency of the United States. That rather morose and quite cynical sentiment came as I watched election results from the federal prison in Denver, where I had been since mid-2015 after being unjustly convicted of violating the Espionage Act as a CIA case officer. Prison tends to taint one’s perspective of the outside world. In 2016, I couldn’t help being cynical about an election I could not participate in. With Donald Trump again being president-elect after another contentious election season, I have that sentiment again, but in a more experienced and reasonable perspective.

Back then, I was rather dismayed by the campaigns of both Trump and Clinton. With Trump, I saw a mirror image of the prison where I was watching from, racial divisions stoked by unaccountable authority figures. With Clinton, I saw the status quo and the painful reminder that the criminal justice system that I was subjected to is not the same one for those in political power. It was disheartening to see her freely run for president without being called into account for proven actions similar to what I was falsely accused of (i.e. alleged unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or materials, etc.). That these were the only two candidates the nation could come up with as choices for its leadership was tragically comical. I almost felt fortunate that I couldn’t vote for either one… almost. The right and duty to vote was something I never took lightly, and being prevented from doing so, particularly under the circumstances that led to it, hurt me dearly.

So, yes, when Trump won, I felt the country deserved him as its president. I wasn’t a part of the country then, so it was easy for me to be ambivalent. Nevertheless, I didn’t feel good about it. In fact, I felt downright depressed and depression in prison is a wholly different and tragic animal. But, then again, I knew it didn’t matter who the president was or would be… I was in prison! No president has done anything to improve prison conditions. I certainly wasn’t expecting Trump, an ostensible “law and order candidate,” to do anything that would be in my or my fellow inmates’ interest.

Trump’s reelection is deserving only in the sense that it wakes us up to the reality that to have the leadership we deserve, we have to continually work for it and never cease expecting accountable and responsive government.

The next day, I couldn’t help but notice that the sun came up once again and I can recall it was a beautiful day, even viewing it from behind bars. Trump was going to be president, but the world did not end. Like every new day, I went into that new one continuing to hold on to the hope that in a few short years, I would rejoin my dear wife and be free. I went to prison knowing I would have to persevere through tough times. But, I knew I would endure because, through support and determination, I could not and would not allow prison to define me. I had work to do to fight against challenging times, and I did so because I deserved better than what American criminal justice offered me.

I was eventually released from prison in 2018. I emerged to freedom amid a Trump presidency that gave me the haunting feeling I had moved from one prison to another. His presidency was marked by the same encouraged racial discord and divisiveness as well as the lack of accountability to power that I experienced for two and a half years in prison. I couldn’t help but feel I was back to the Black-white TV room separation state of affairs that was my reality for so long.

One of the more distressing realities of prison life was the tacit acceptance of a toxic environment and broken system as being “normal.” There was nothing normal about abusive and unaccountable authority, a populace encouraged to embrace and practice its biases, and an environment of hate. I realized that, after a while, a horrible experience tends to skew one’s view of what is “normal.” The prison mindset teaches that the only solution to a terrible situation is to just fall in line and do as you’re told, even if it is wrong. That was a lesson I was slow, if not outright refused, to learn as evidenced by a stint in solitary confinement for refusing to be demeaned by an unruly prison guard. I saw nothing “normal” about being treated as less than human and chose to stand up against it, a constant for me in and out of prison. The first Trump presidency was, for comparison’s sake, that same sort of prison “normal” that we were all forced to just deal with in the best ways we could.

If the first stint in prison didn’t defeat me, I felt I had a good chance against the one I emerged into. However, as much as I did fight against it, the taint of prison is in many ways eternal. One of the most profound nightmares I have suffered through since being released was finding myself back in prison. And, a return to prison was always worse the second time around. Even though in dreams, the prison walls felt closer, the chains were tighter, and the feelings of not being in control of my own life and being in a perpetual state of persecution felt accentuated and much more desperate than what I had experienced before. I always awaken from such dreams in a cold sweat and trembling. For me, much like those recurring nightmares, a second Trump presidency is the embodiment of that oneiric return to prison that still shakes me to this day.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. On the day after this current election, even though I am not surrounded by razor wire or armed guards, there was a haunting familiarity to what I awoke to back in 2016. The same disgust I felt in 2016 has come to the fore. Instead of seeing Clinton run for president and wondering why the same criminal justice system that put me in prison didn’t treat her the same way, I now see Trump as a president-elect and similarly wonder the same thing. It is painfully ironic that Trump has been accused of similar violations as Clinton, mainly the unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or materials specifically related to Iran, a country I specialized in while at the CIA. Allegations aside, Trump clearly violated the Espionage Act and existentially violated the laws of and endangered this country, yet he won’t see a day behind bars let alone a trial. He had a judge in his pocket to ensure the indictment was dismissed; now he will have the power of the presidency to simply make the matter go away. Such is the law and order hypocrisy of Trump and his supporters.

The weeks ending this year have been a strain for me as it feels eerily similar to those last few days of freedom I had before being forced to report to prison. It will be difficult to view Inauguration Day 2025 as anything other than a return to a familiar nightmare. That I was being pathetically quixotic about prison not being that bad was borne out in hindsight—that experience was every horror I knew it was going to be. Similarly, Trump 2.0 will have no surprises other than the very real possibility of being worse than Trump 1.0. Like dreaming of being back in prison, we know what we will be getting: an arrogant, narcissistic head of state who bungles incompetently through a presidency making people comfortable with their prejudices and continuing to spew divisive, rambling rhetoric as if he’s perpetually campaigning for office. Not having to worry about reelection down the road, there will be nothing to hold Trump back from being himself to the nth degree.

But, will this be what we as a nation deserve? Unlike my mindset in 2016, my answer to myself and us is an emphatic, “No!” This country, my country, deserves better than the prisons we have created. Trump’s reelection is deserving only in the sense that it wakes us up to the reality that to have the leadership we deserve, we have to continually work for it and never cease expecting accountable and responsive government. We deserve better than the Trump “normal” that will be revisited upon us. Even the most troubling of times can present opportunities to better oneself. Without any semblance of my previous cynicism, Trump 2.0 will provide an atmosphere of opportunity to challenge unhinged authority, confront and defeat hatred, as well as find and nurture leaders who truly work in the best interests of us all.

That’s the thing about nightmares, they are over when you wake up. My prison nightmares always end the same way, I awaken to find that I am not in prison. We know what this upcoming nightmare will be like. Whether it’s worse will depend on us and what we feel we deserve.

This feels like a movie you’ve seen before: a secular socialist government where women and ethnic minorities have rights that are respected is targeted by the United States and its allies in large part because it shows that left-wing politics can be successful. The Carter administration armed the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, setting the stage for Al Qaeda and 9/11. The Bush Administration overthrew Saddam Hussein in Iraq, creating a failed state that became a vassal of Iran and a home for ISIS. Obama killed Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, creating a failed state where slave markets have reappeared and radical Muslim fundamentalists hold sway. Now an officially designated terrorist organization has, with the help of the US and Israel, overthrown Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

Will Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its reformist leader Ahmad al-Sharaa keep their promise to limit their ambitions to Syria? Will they impose radical Taliban-style sharia law on Syria? What are the implications for Russia, which accepted Assad but did not provide sufficient air support to protect his regime? Israel has already started bombing Syria, saying that its 1974 peace deal was with the Assad government which no longer exists; will the war in Lebanon and Gaza spread into Syria even more? What are the security implications for Israel, which wanted this regime change, right next-door?

The post TMI Show Ep 34: “The Talibanization of Syria” first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post TMI Show Ep 34: “The Talibanization of Syria” appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The recent assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare—the health insurance company with, reportedly, the highest rate of claims rejections (and thus dead, wounded, and furious customers and their relations)—gives us a perfect window to understand the stupidity and danger of the Musk/Trump/Ramaswamy strategy of “cutting government” to “make it more efficient, run it like a corporation.”

Consider healthcare, which in almost every other developed country in the world is legally part of the commons—the infrastructure of the nation, like our roads, public schools, parks, police, military, libraries, and fire departments—owned by the people collectively and run for the sole purpose of meeting a basic human need.

The entire idea of government—dating all the way back to Gilgamesh and before—is to fulfill that singular purpose of meeting citizens’ needs and keeping the nation strong and healthy. That’s a very different mandate from that of a corporation, which is solely directed (some argue by law) to generate profits.

If UnitedHealthcare’s main goal was to keep people healthy, they wouldn’t be rejecting 32% of claims presented to them.

The Veterans’ Administration healthcare system, for example, is essentially socialist rather than capitalist. The VA owns the land and buildings, pays the salaries of everybody from the surgeons to the janitors, and makes most all decisions about care. Its primary purpose—just like that of the healthcare systems of every other democracy in the world—is to keep and make veterans healthy. Its operation is nearly identical to that of Britain’s beloved socialist National Health Service.

UnitedHealthcare similarly owns its own land and buildings, and its officers and employees behave in a way that’s aligned with the company’s primary purpose, but that purpose is to make a profit. Sure, it writes checks for healthcare that’s then delivered to people, but that’s just the way UnitedHealthcare makes money; writing checks and, most importantly, refusing to write checks.

Think about it. If UnitedHealthcare’s main goal was to keep people healthy, they wouldn’t be rejecting 32% of claims presented to them. Like the VA, when people needed help they’d make sure they got it.

Instead, they make damn sure their executives get millions of dollars every year (and investors get billions) because making a massive profit ($23 billion last year, and nearly every penny arguably came from saying “no” to somebody’s healthcare needs) is their real business.

On the other hand, if the VA’s goal was to make or save money by “being run efficiently like a company,” they’d be refusing service to a lot more veterans (which it appears is on the horizon).

This is the essential difference between government and business, between meeting human needs (social) and reaching capitalism’s goal (profit).

It’s why its deeply idiotic to say, as Republicans have been doing since the Reagan Revolution, that “government should be run like a business.” That’s nearly as crackbrained a suggestion as saying that fire departments should make a profit (a doltish notion promoted by some Libertarians). Government should be run like a government, and companies should be run like companies.

Given how obvious this is with even a little bit of thought, where did this imbecilic idea that government should run like a business come from?

Turns out, it’s been driven for most of the past century by morbidly rich businessmen (almost entirely men) who don’t want to pay their taxes. As Jeff Tiedrich notes:

The scariest sentence in the English language is: “I’m a billionaire, and I’m here to help.”

Right-wing billionaires who don’t want to pay their fair share of the costs of society set up think tanks, policy centers, and built media operations to promote their idea that the commons are really there for them to plunder under the rubric of privatization and efficiency.

They’ve had considerable success. Slightly more than half of Medicare is now privatized, multiple Republican-controlled states are in the process of privatizing their public school systems, and the billionaire-funded Project 2025 and the incoming Trump administration have big plans for privatizing other essential government services.

The area where their success is most visible, though, is the American healthcare system. Because the desire of right-wing billionaires not to pay taxes have prevailed ever since then-President Harry Truman first proposed single-payer healthcare like most of the rest of the world has, Americans spend significantly more on healthcare than other developed countries.

In 2022, citizens of the United States spent an estimated $12,742 per person on healthcare, the highest among wealthy nations. This is nearly twice the average of $6,850 per person for other wealthy OECD countries.

Over the next decade, it is estimated that America will spend between $55 and $60 trillion on healthcare if nothing changes and we continue to cut giant corporations in for a large slice of our healthcare money.

Hopefully, Thompson’s murder will spark a conversation about the role of government and the commons—and the very real need to end the corrupt privatization of our healthcare system.

On the other hand, Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) single-payer Medicare For All plan would only cost $32 billion over the next 10 years. And it would cover everybody in America, every man, woman, and child, in every medical aspect including vision, dental, psychological, and hearing.

Currently 25 million Americans have no health insurance whatsoever.

If we keep our current system, the difference between it and the savings from a single-payer system will end up in the pockets, in large part, of massive insurance giants and their executives and investors. And as campaign contributions for bought off Republicans. This isn’t rocket science.

And you’d think that giving all those extra billions to companies like UnitedHealthcare would result in America having great health outcomes. But, no.

Despite insanely higher spending, the U.S. has a lower life expectancy at birth, higher rates of chronic diseases, higher rates of avoidable or treatable deaths, and higher maternal and infant mortality rates than any of our peer nations.

Compared to single-payer nations like Canada, the U.S. also has a higher incidence of chronic health conditions, Americans see doctors less often and have fewer hospital stays, and the U.S. has fewer hospital beds and physicians per person.

No other country in the world allows a predatory for-profit industry like this to exist as a primary way of providing healthcare. Every other advanced democracy considers healthcare a right of citizenship, rather than an opportunity for a handful of industry executives to hoard a fortune, buy Swiss chalets, and fly around on private jets.

This is one of the most widely shared graphics on social media over the past few days in posts having to do with Thompson’s murder…

Sure, there are lots of health insurance companies in other developed countries, but instead of offering basic healthcare (which is provided by the government) mostly wealthy people subscribe to them to pay for premium services like private hospital rooms, international air ambulance services, and cosmetic surgery.

Essentially, UnitedHealthcare’s CEO Brian Thompson made decisions that killed Americans for a living, in exchange for $10 million a year. He and his peers in the industry are probably paid as much as they are because there is an actual shortage of people with business training who are willing to oversee decisions that cause or allow others to die in exchange for millions in annual compensation.

That Americans are well aware of this obscenity explains the gleeful response to his murder that’s spread across social media, including the refusal of online sleuths to participate in finding his killer.

It shouldn’t need be said that vigilantism is no way to respond to toxic individuals and companies that cause Americans to die unnecessarily. Hopefully, Thompson’s murder will spark a conversation about the role of government and the commons—and the very real need to end the corrupt privatization of our healthcare system (including the Medicare Advantage scam) that has harmed so many of us and killed or injured so many of the people we love.

It’s disturbing how the US news media flits from story to story, seemingly incapable of sustaining attention on events that require it. The nightmare of Gaza which received in-depth treatment for over a year has now faded from view eclipsed by other dramatic developments in the Arab East.

In recent weeks, news out of the Middle East has been dominated by Israel’s devastating attacks on Lebanon and the now Israeli-enforced “ceasefire.” These days, the major reporting has to do with the al Qaeda spin-off, Hayat Tahrir al Sham, on the move and capturing the major Syrian cities of Aleppo and Hams.

While these developments are, of course, consequential, the continuing war on Gaza and its lingering wounds deserve our attention.

Against this backdrop, it was notable that on a single day this week the New York Times carried three significant stories, filling a full page and a half, on the continuing nightmare in Gaza. The pieces included one on Amnesty International’s new report charging Israel with genocide in Gaza, and another on a deadly Israeli strike in the midst of one of the “humanitarian zones” in Gaza. The largest of the three stories was titled “For the disabled, life in Gaza was always a struggle. Now it’s agony.” Combined, the three describe the horrors of Gaza’s last 14 months, the continuing bombings visited on its displaced Palestinians, and the agonizing future that lays before so many of them.

Just because it’s disappeared from the front pages doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

The Amnesty International story was significant for several reasons. It is, after all, the world’s preeminent human rights organization. When I served a four-year term as a presidential appointee to a US commission that dealt with issues of religious freedom, our annual reports and our own investigations relied heavily on the work of Amnesty. The State Department does as well. Whether dealing with countries in Africa, Asia, or the Arab World, attention is given to what Amnesty has reported. Countries are routinely denounced for their abusive behaviors with the notation “as Amnesty International has reported”—with one exception, and that is, of course, Israel. Amnesty’s work everywhere has been revered, but when it has been about Israel, it has been reviled.

It's therefore quite consequential that Amnesty has taken this bold step to declare quite forcefully that “Israel committed, and is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.” They continue, “Israel’s unlawful conduct throughout its military offensive, resulted in unprecedented harm to Palestinians in Gaza that resulted in the massive scale of killings and serious injuries over a short period of time.”

In response to these charges, the Israelis have followed what has become their familiar script. They “lie, deny, and obfuscate.” And they ultimately fall back on charging their accusers with bias. Interestingly, to date, there has been little or no response from officials in Washington.

That was not the case back in 2022 when Amnesty International and another prominent human rights organization, Human Rights Watch, issued reports finding that Israel had imposed an apartheid system on the Palestinian people under their control. Congress and the White House were quick to denounce both human rights groups—upon whom they rely so heavily for information on other countries.

Also worth noting was the fact that neither the Washington Post nor the New York Times even carried the story about the apartheid charges. This genocide report, on the other hand, has received major coverage in both papers.

It’s heartbreaking to look at the faces of these children sitting in the rubble of destroyed neighborhoods. They are innocents without a future.

The story of the Israeli airstrike in al Mawasi was both cruel and deadly. Cruel because it is supposed to be a humanitarian shelter zone where Palestinians whom Israel ordered to evacuate other areas were supposed to be safe. Bombings of this sort are a daily occurrence, but rarely receive coverage, both because they have become commonplace and because the “big” stories of the day are occurring elsewhere.

Maybe the most disturbing story of the three was the piece about the plight of the disabled in Gaza. Before this war there were 56,000 disabled persons in Gaza. While no new data is available, it is certain that the number has grown significantly in the past year. The Times accompanied its story with pictures of children without limbs lacking wheelchairs, rehabilitation facilities, or surgery when needed. The story describes in some detail the agony confronted by a disabled Palestinian in Gaza who simply needs to go to the bathroom where there are none that can accommodate a wheelchair.

It’s heartbreaking to look at the faces of these children sitting in the rubble of destroyed neighborhoods. They are innocents without a future. It’s hard to imagine living in a crowded tent area in the midst of winter or in the remains of a destroyed building on a bombed-out street. But this is life for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children.

It’s always painful to face human suffering. But it’s important that we do it, especially in the case of Gaza, because we Americans are in part responsible for it.

Just because it’s disappeared from the front pages doesn’t mean it’s not happening. It is ongoing, and so it’s important that the New York Times brought it home to us one day this week.

The following is the text of a speech given in Oslo, Norway on the Eve of Nihon Hidankyo receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.

Thanks first to Ingeborg Brienes for organizing today’s event. It was an unexpected honor to be invited to join Nihon Hidankyo’s Nobel Peace Prize delegation. I am glad to be here to celebrate the Peace Nobel Prize with dear and courageous Hibakusha friends and other dedicated activists, to represent the U.S. peace movement, and to add my voice to the Hibakusha’s profound warning that human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.

I first joined the World Conference Against A and H Bombs in Hiroshima in 1984. That was after we had launched the nuclear weapons freeze movement in the U.S. which played a role in ending the Cold War. It followed our successful campaigning to prevent three U.S. ports from being transformed into nuclear weapons bases. Visiting Hiroshima and engaging with Hibakusha (the A-bomb survivors) and opponents of the more than 100 U.S. military bases and installations across Japan was a life changing experience for me, as it has been for so many others.

As Wilfred Burchett, first Western journalist to witness the ruins and suffering in Hiroshima in 1945, later correctly reported that despite their excruciating physical and emotional suffering, the Hibakusha became the world’s most powerful and influential force for nuclear weapons abolition. With the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Hibakusha, their tortured testimonies, and their urgent appeal for a nuclear weapons free world now rings out more powerfully around the world.

Friends, there is no way that we can adequately thank Nihon Hidankyo and its Hibakusha members for their courage and steadfastness in warning the world about the existential danger we face in order to save humanity.

It has been my privilege to return to Hiroshima and Nagasaki many times in support of Japan’s nuclear weapons abolition movement. I had the extraordinary opportunity to meet, learn from, and to work with Hidankyo members and some of the organization’s most ravaged, wounded, and courageous founders, Watanabe Chieko, Yamaguchi Senji, and Taniguchi Sumiteru. Would that they had lived long enough to witness the Nobel Committee’s recognition of their sacrifices and to reinforce their existential warning.

Twenty-five years ago, amid a speaking tour, Tanaka Terumi—Hidankyo’s general secretary for 20 years—asked a heartfelt question: “Who will remember us when we (Hibakusha) are gone?”

Now we know. With the Nobel Peace Prize, a good part of the answer is that the world will remember. The question is whether humanity will heed the Hibakusha’s appeal.

Nihon Hidankyo was created in the wake of the 1954 U.S. Bravo H-Bomb test, a bomb which was 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A bombs. Since then, Hidankyo’s core demands have been: Prevent nuclear war, eliminate nuclear weapons, and obtain essential medical care and services for A-bomb victims.

Recklessly, not only have the nuclear powers failed to respond to these life-affirming demands, but today U.S. nuclear terrorism in the form of its first strike doctrine is the cornerstone of both the United States’ and Japan’s national security doctrine. And preparations and threats of nuclear attacks are central to the military doctrines of the other eight nuclear weapons states. Tragically, for 60 years, despite Japan’s peace constitution, its military has insisted that it has the right to deploy and use tactical nuclear weapons, like those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan has facilitated the U.S. and other nuclear powers’ refusal to fulfill their Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligation to engage in good faith negotiations for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons. Like the nuclear powers, it has yet to even send an observer to the conference on the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) at the U.N. And, many Hibakusha continue to be denied medical care as Tokyo continues to insist that all Japanese must bear the burden of its disastrous 15 Year War. We can hope that with Hidankyo’s Nobel Peace Prize, popular pressure will lead the Japanese government and the nuclear powers to reverse course and join the TPNW.

I want to make four additional points:

Contrary to the myth propagated by former U.S. President Harry Truman, the A bombs were not necessary to defeat Japan. Senior U.S. military officials from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Curtis LeMay and William Leahy all advised that “it wasn’t necessary to hit Japan with that awful thing.” Secretary of War Henry Stimson told Truman that Japan’s surrender on terms acceptable to the U.S. could be negotiated. In 1942, General Leslie Groves, who led the Manhattan Project, told the incoming senior scientist and future Nobel Peace Prize recipient Joseph Rotblat, that since Germany would not be getting the bomb, the A bomb project was then directed against the Soviet Union. With the A bomb, Truman said, he would have “a hammer over those boys,” meaning Soviet leaders. The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were thus sacrificed on the first altar of the Cold War.

Second, we need to correct a mistake in the Nobel Committee’s announcement of this year’s prize. Nuclear weapons have been used repeatedly since the 1945 A bombings. Daniel Ellsberg, a principle author of U.S. nuclear war planning in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, revealed that during numerous international crises and wars, the U.S. has used its nuclear arsenal in the same way that an armed robber uses his gun when pointed at his victim’s head. Whether or not the trigger is pulled, the gun has been used. Such threats and preparations were made at least three times during European crises, 13 times to maintain U.S. Middle East hegemony, five times during the Korean War and subsequent Korean crises, three times against China, four times against Vietnam, and during the 1954 CIA Guatemala coup and the Cuban Missile Crisis. All other nuclear powers have made such nuclear preparations or threats at least once. Tragically, this is the playbook that the Kremlin is using with its Ukraine War nuclear threats. Add to these, there have been nuclear weapons accidents, false alerts, and miscalculations. The truth is that we are alive today more because of luck than because of wise policies.

Third, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock warns, we are 90 seconds to midnight, meaning apocalypse. All of the nuclear weapons states are upgrading their nuclear arsenals and delivery systems. The U.S. is spending $1.7 trillion to replace its nuclear arsenal and its triad of delivery systems. Russia has just lowered its doctrinal threshold for nuclear weapons use and underlined its nuclear threat by launching a nuclear-capable ballistic missile against Ukraine. With China expanding its nuclear arsenal, we are now three scorpions in a bottle. As U.S. President-elect Donald Trump returns to power, France and Britain are vying to provide Europe’s nuclear umbrella. North Korea is increasing the size of its nuclear arsenal and displayed its nuclear resolve with a commitment to nuclear weapons in its constitution. Many worry that Israel could use its nuclear weapons against Iran’s nuclear project. And India and Pakistan, the two nuclear powers of South Asia, remain at loggerheads.

Finally, there is Trump, the would-be dictator. His former national security adviser wrote that Trump is driven by his instincts and that he brought the world closer to nuclear war with his 2017 Fire and Fury nuclear threats against North Korea than almost anyone knows. Trump and his coterie plan to purge the military to ensure its loyalty to Trump, not to our Constitution, and they are committed to dominating China militarily, economically, and technologically. As a result, in the coming years, in the U.S., to prevent nuclear war, we will need to do more than defuse the confrontations over Ukraine, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and Korea. Our campaigning will require defense of constitutional democracy.

With humanity facing the greatest danger of nuclear apocalypse since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize wisely refocuses world attention on the urgency of renewing nuclear disarmament diplomacy. Let us celebrate the Hibakusha who have awakened the conscience of the world.

With their testimonies across the world, including at the U.N., they forged the powerful but still inadequate taboo against the use of nuclear weapons. Their descriptions of the Hell that they witnessed and survived led most of the world’s governments to understand that for humanity to survive, priority must be given to addressing the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, not so-called “state security” interests. Thus we have the Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which seeks to hold the nuclear weapons states accountable to their Article VI Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligation to engage in good-faith negotiations for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons.

Numerous popular disarmament initiatives are being boosted by the Peace Prize award to Nihon Hidankyo. In the U.S., there will be webinars and meetings in many communities. Our Back from the Brink campaign, initiated by Physicians for Social Responsibility, is at the leading edge of our movement, supported by 43 members of Congress and city councils across the country. It calls for negotiation of a verifiable agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons, renunciation of first-use policies, ending the president’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons, taking U.S. nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert, and cancelling the plan to replace the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal with enhanced weapons.

Friends, there is no way that we can adequately thank Nihon Hidankyo and its Hibakusha members for their courage and steadfastness in warning the world about the existential danger we face in order to save humanity. Let the Nobel Peace Prize lead us to insist on No More Hiroshimas, No More Nagasakis. No More Hibakusha. No More War.

Over 8,000 Americans, on average, die every day. Many of these Americans die unnecessarily. Their cause of death? The United States — our planet’s richest nation — still does not have in place a national health care system that guarantees everyone adequate medical attention.

One particular American’s death last week has refocused attention on that absence. On December 4, a gunman murdered the chief executive of a corporate insurance powerhouse that regularly registers hefty profits denying health help to sick people who desperately need it.

That chief exec — UnitedHealthcare’s 50-year-old Brian Thompson — died on a Manhattan sidewalk after a short hail of bullets from a still unidentified assassin.

The bullet casings from the shooting carried their own message. They read, according to police sources, “deny,” “defend,” and “depose,” a clear reference to the profit-first gameplan America’s giant insurers ever so relentlessly follow: deny the claim, defend the lawsuit, depose the patient.

Thompson stepped into the UnitedHealth empire over two decades ago and, notes the American Prospect journalist Maureen Tkacik, spent most of his career there “running its Medicare business, the cash cow around which much of the far-flung health care colossus essentially revolves.”

Our health care system, in the end, shouldn’t be making our rich richer.

Three years ago, Thompson became the CEO of this “cash cow,” UnitedHealth’s biggest branch. His UnitedHealthcare unit’s 140,000 employees last year pulled down over a quarter-trillion dollars — $281 billion — in revenue. That intake helped his company’s annual profits jump 33 percent over their 2021 level. Thompson himself last year pocketed $10.2 million in personal compensation.

The chief exec of the overall UnitedHealth operation, Andrew Witty, at his end collected some $23.5 million, enough to rank him the nation’s highest-paid health insurance CEO. Witty’s take-home equaled 352 times the pay of UnitedHealth’s typical employee.

What’s been making UnitedHealth’s operations so rewarding for execs at the company’s summit? UnitedHealth operates in the shadowy world of “Medicare Advantage,” the program that gives America’s senior citizens the option to contract out their Medicare to private health-service providers.

These private providers collect fixed fees from the federal government for each of the senior citizens they enroll. They make money when the cost of providing health care to those seniors amounts to less than what the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services pays them in fees. And that core reality gives private providers an ongoing incentive to limit the care their patients receive.

No Medicare Advantage provider, the American Prospect’s Maureen Tkacik points out, has done more than UnitedHealthcare to systematically seize the opportunity that incentive creates — “by simply denying claims for treatments and procedures it unilaterally deems unnecessary.” Industry-wide, Medicare Advantage providers deny 16 percent of patient claims. UnitedHealthcare, the Boston Globe has reported, last year denied patient claims at a 32 percent rate.

The massive advertising campaigns that Medicare Advantage inflict upon the American people never, of course, mention anything about denials or the limits Medicare Advantage plans place on which doctors their enrollees can see and which hospitals they can use. That advertising instead, the KFF health care think tank detailed last year, typically urges viewers to call a toll-free “Medicare” hotline that has no connection whatsoever with the federal government’s official Medicare hotline.

Many of the over 9,000 ads that Medicare Advantage outfits run daily during the annual fall open enrollment period, the KFF researchers add, misleadingly suggest that seniors may miss out on financial savings or benefits “if they don’t sign up for a Medicare Advantage plan.”

For the Medicare Advantage industry, all this advertising has paid off handsomely. Just over half of Medicare’s beneficiaries have now chosen to take privatized care over the original public Medicare.

Seniors with the good fortune to stay healthy usually don’t give their Medicare Advantage plans much of a second thought. But those seniors enrolled in Medicare Advantage who find themselves needing medical help all too often find themselves facing one frustration after another. Years of those frustrations erupted bitterly onto the national scene after Brian Thompson’s murder.

“Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one online reaction to a CNN posting of a shooting video. “Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”

“Compassion withheld,” read another reaction, “until documentation can be produced that determines the bullet holes were not a preexisting condition.”

Within hours after Thompson’s death, a research institute at Rutgers University had found scores of similar-in-spirit posts that together reached 8.3 million viewers across multiple platforms. UnitedHealth’s official Facebook report on Thompson’s death, meanwhile, quickly drew 35,000 responses using the social networking “Haha” emoji — and only 2,200 emotes expressing “Sad.”

Some of the fiercest reactions to Thompson’s death came from within the medical community.

“This is someone who has participated in social murder on a mass scale,” a medical student wrote in one typical post.

“My patients died,” a nurse spat out in another, “while those bitches enjoyed 26 million dollars.”

“If there’s anything our fractured country seems to agree on,” mused Bloomberg’s Lisa Jarvis, “it’s that the health care system is tragically broken, and the companies profiting from it are morally bankrupt.”

“To most Americans,” agreed the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino, “a company like UnitedHealth represents less the provision of medical care than an active obstacle to receiving it.”

That obstacle, the numbers show, has been devastatingly effective. The United States, a recent Commonwealth Fund study found, currently rates last in health among major high-income nations. Americans “die the youngest and experience the most avoidable deaths” despite living in a nation that spends almost twice as much on health care — as a share of gross domestic product — as any of its high-income peers.

Some 25 percent of Americans, Gallup polling adds, have people in their family who have had to delay medical treatment for a serious illness because they couldn’t afford the care. Some 79 percent of America’s nurses, for their part, say they’re working in inadequately staffed health facilities.

Thompson’s murder won’t change any of those stats. The system that enriched him lives on — and the incoming Trump administration figures to make that system even worse. The corporate-friendly Heritage Foundation, in its controversial Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump term, is proposing that Medicare Advantage become the “default option” for all new Medicare enrollees.

A move along that line, notes analyst Heather Cox Richardson, would “essentially privatize Medicare” and significantly raise the program’s cost.

With Thompson’s death, America’s health care powers feel and fear the American public’s anger now more than ever. These giants, Reuters reports, have already begun enhancing the security they provide their top execs.

The challenge for the rest of us? We need to help channel the anger about health care that so many Americans feel today toward ending the system that has so failed America’s health. We need to remake health care into a vital and vibrant public service.

Our health care system, in the end, shouldn’t be making our rich richer. Our richest instead should be paying enough in taxes to help all Americans stay healthy.

The murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thomas coupled with the overwhelmingly gleeful public reaction thereto has corporate executives at evil companies thinking twice–not about their actions, but upping their personal security.

The post Taking Stock first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post Taking Stock appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The DMZ America Podcast’s Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) are joined by Terry Anderson of the Cartoonist Rights Network International to discuss the state of political cartooning in the United States and around the world during a time of political transition and the ongoing seismic disruption in the print media ecosystem that supported the profession throughout the previous century.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 183: The Censorship War Against Political Cartoonists first appeared on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

The post DMZ America Podcast Ep 183: The Censorship War Against Political Cartoonists appeared first on Ted Rall's Rallblog.

For decades consumer groups have been sounding clarion calls for action against the “silent violence” causing massive casualties that arise from the unbridled power of corporate greed, criminal negligence, or indifference. They cite statistical and case studies that the media and lawmakers mostly ignored or relegated to low levels of enforcement.

Corporate bosses just have their corporate lawyers and public relations hacks brush away such warnings and pleas. One day stories they knew would not have legs if they just kept quiet or mumbled some general words of regret, promising some vague improvements to their products and services.

But year after year, the deadly toll goes up, not down, and the horrors continue. For example, at least 5000 people A WEEK die in hospitals in the U.S. due to “preventable problems,” concluded a peer-reviewed study by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine physicians in 2016. This is just one of numerous such studies of hospital-induced infections, overuse of antibiotics, medical malpractice or what is called “medical error,” prescribing bundles of drugs that backfire, “accidents,” deskilling and understaffing.

There has been no mass mobilization by either government officials or industry executives to address this staggering toll of at least 250,000 fatalities a year!

Behind these figures are real people with families, friends, and coworkers shocked, incensed, or despondent over avoidable losses of life and preventable harms. Some of them undoubtedly knew the specific causes and demanded correction and compensation, to no avail.

"Just under the surface is a seething whirlpool of resentment, anger, frustration, and bitterness about corporate abuses."

Avoidable casualties also arise from the sweeping denial of insurance coverage for ill or injured patients by greedy unregulated or underregulated health insurance companies maximizing profits and bonuses for CEOs. Many insurance companies are now using AI to help wear down consumers.

About two thousand Americans a week lose their lives because they cannot afford health insurance to cover prompt diagnosis and treatment costs. System-driven patterns of denial of benefits by health insurers also cause deaths and injuries. The companies have algorithms that automatically delay or deny needed procedures without even seeing a patient’s medical records or speaking with the patient’s physician.

Insurance policies are full of fine print deductibles, co-pays, waivers and exclusions that drive consumers and their doctors up the wall. Insurance premiums are paid by patients or employers ahead of time with advertised assurances.

In the past two months, consumers have been overwhelmed by a blizzard of television ads by giant insurers e.g., Aetna, Cigna, and Humana for their Medicare (dis)Advantage plans aimed at elderly beneficiaries. The ads are loaded with “freebies” that paint the companies as charities instead of cunning commercial marketers. In reality, denial of benefits is higher for these plans than for traditional Medicare. Moreover, these plans push patients into narrow networks of physicians and hospitals and subject them to dreadful over-use of “prior authorization.” The latter means some remote company doctor or medical professional decides whether a physician with a patient can be reimbursed for a specific treatment. This results in overwhelming paperwork for the doctors, immense profits for the companies, and degraded treatment for patients.

An October 31, 2023 NBC investigation titled “‘Deny, deny, deny’: By rejecting claims, Medicare Advantage plans threaten rural hospitals and patients,” by star reporter Gretchen Morgenson exposed another deadly impact of Medicare (dis)Advantage programs on rural hospitals in America.

These companies are so entrenched that they have become largely immune to exposés. They have gamed the system to straitjacket both patients and healthcare workers. The healthcare industry gets away with about $360 billion in computerized billing fraud and abuses every year. (https://scholar.harvard.edu/msparrow/license-to-steal). Prosecutions are minimal, and lawmakers are mostly indifferent as they count their campaign cash donations. Did you see any of the major party politicians in this year’s election campaigns even mention the devastating impact of the medical industry’s greed on innocent people or the taxpayers?

Just under the surface is a seething whirlpool of resentment, anger, frustration, and bitterness about corporate abuses. Such reactions are often most pronounced in poor areas or workplaces, where people are subjected to choking pollution or exposure to carcinogenic toxins leading to cancer, heart disease, and other organ ailments.

The corporate perpetrators, however, are remote from the impacts of their operations and policies. Their hugely overpaid bosses rule from elaborate suites and enjoy unimaginable luxuries. Very few people know the names, even of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies like ExxonMobil, Aetna, Humana, Duke Energy, Bank of America, and so on. The lethality, the theft, the domination, and the escape from the rule of law are rendered impersonally by the corporatists who are now investing huge sums to go even more abstract and remote with tyrannical generative AI algorithms.

This week, a man, still on the run, made his anger very personal. Around 7:00 AM he singled out, in front of a busy midtown Manhattan hotel, the chief executive of the giant UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, and shot him. The assassin fled on an electric bike. Police collected the bullet casings from his pistol. On these casings were the words, “deny,” “delay” and “depose.”

As news of this fatal shooting spread over social media, a torrent of angry or morbid comments flooded the Internet. The New York Times reported a few, to wit:

“I’m an ER nurse and the things I’ve seen dying patients get denied for by insurance makes me physically sick. I just can’t feel sympathy for him because of all of those patients and their families.”

“Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one observer underneath a video of a CNN picture. “Unfortunately, my condolences are out of network.”

Tragically, Mr. Thompson, according to a company employee, was one of the few executives who spoke of changing the culture of the company.

But corporate culture, marinated to the core with endless cravings for ever-growing easy profits, is very hard to change – especially when it is so easy to extract more and more premium dollars from powerless consumers who lack adequate regulatory protections.

And so, the social media explosion included this typical comment on TikTok: “I pay $1,300 a month for health insurance with an $8,000 deductible. ($23,000 yearly) When I finally reached that deductible, they denied my claims. He was making a million dollars a month.”

The New York Times described a “wrenching outpouring from patients and family members who posted horror stories of insurance claim reimbursement stagnation and denials.” The ugly reality will continue to exponentially pour out with volcanic fury as the media receives more public reactions.

One wonders about the reaction if this were to have happened four months before the November election. Could the uproar have transformed the slimy rhythms of the Harris campaign, orchestrated by the Democrats’ corporate-conflicted political consultants who manage the candidate messages and who definitely don’t listen to the warnings and popular proposals by Senator Bernie Sanders?

We’ve all seen movies that tug at our heartstrings, maybe even prompt a tear or two. But every so often, a film does more than just make us feel—it makes us act. From saving dolphins to battling climate change, certain films have ignited movements that leap from the screen into the real world. The latest addition to this unexpected genre? Olive trees.

Yes, olive trees. In the West Bank, no less.

Where Olive Trees Weep is a recent documentary that delves into the hardships and resilience of the Palestinian people. It has captivated viewers around the world—not just emotionally, but in a way that has moved them to action. This isn’t just a story on screen. With the help of everyday people, it has mobilized a movement that’s planting 1,500 olive trees in one of the most contested regions on the planet.

The Intersection of Art, Activism, and Agriculture

The filmmakers behind Where Olive Trees Weep didn’t just want to connect with audiences emotionally—they wanted to inspire real change. Before the film even started rolling, viewers were invited to donate to plant an olive tree in the West Bank. What began as a cinematic experience became a grassroots movement, turning passive viewership into direct action.

Every tree cut down is a blow to the Palestinian people, but every tree planted is a defiant stand for their heritage, their survival, and their future.

These trees—planted by thousands of people around the world—are doing more than taking root. They’re providing Palestinian farmers with a sustainable source of income in a region where food security and land ownership are perpetually under siege. The trees will generate $200,000 annually in olive oil sales, creating economic stability for communities that desperately need it.

But more than that, the olive trees are a symbol of defiance. In a place where Israeli settlers destroyed 4,000 trees this year alone, planting an olive tree is an act of resistance—a stand against oppression, colonialism, and environmental degradation. Like Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, where tree planting became a form of resistance against both environmental destruction and political oppression, these olive trees are symbols of resilience and survival in the face of adversity.

The Olive Branch Strikes Back

Since the movement began, six new Freedom Farms, each home to 250 olive trees, have sprung up in the West Bank. These trees, which will live for up to 500 years, will support 15 generations of farmers, provide food and economic stability, and scrub 54 million pounds of carbon from the air. That’s the long-term vision. For now, they’re putting down roots where few dare to dig.

In Palestinian culture, olive trees are more than just crops—they’re living legacies. They represent peace, wisdom, and deep-rooted connections to the land. Every tree cut down is a blow to the Palestinian people, but every tree planted is a defiant stand for their heritage, their survival, and their future.

As settler violence escalates, this year’s olive harvest was the most dangerous in recent memory. The Palestinian Farmers Union documented over 700 attacks on farmers during the harvest. The union met with diplomats from around the world, urging them to pressure the occupation. Yet it’s the viewers of this movie, not the politicians, who have replanted a third of the olive trees lost to settler violence. (When was the last time a speech planted anything?)

And Palestinian farmers, supported by this global tree-planting movement, are standing their ground. “Protecting the olive harvest is more than safeguarding crops; it’s about defending our culture, our heritage, and the roots of our existence,” says Abbas Milhem, president of the Palestinian Farmers Union and one of the key figures in this initiative.

From Reel to Real: How Films Are Planting More Than Ideas

Where Olive Trees Weep isn’t the first film to make waves beyond the cinema. The Cove shone a harsh light on dolphin hunting in Japan, sparking global efforts to end the practice. An Inconvenient Truth made climate change impossible to ignore. And Blood Diamond made us rethink where our jewelry comes from. But what makes Where Olive Trees Weep stand out is how it transformed viewers into activists before they even pressed play. By inviting people to plant trees in real time, the film didn’t just tell a story—it became part of the story.

As the world faces relentless crises—from Sudan to Ukraine to Gaza—storytelling has never been more critical. If a film can inspire thousands to plant olive trees in a conflict zone, what else might this model achieve when applied to other global challenges?

Moviegoers have shown that even the smallest acts—like donating $20 to plant a tree—can have profound ripple effects. When stories are paired with action, they become blueprints for real change.

As for the Palestinian olive trees standing tall in the face of destruction? They’re living proof that sometimes the most powerful act of resistance is just putting down roots.

The Syrian Revolution of 2024 has succeeded in deposing the al-Assad dynasty, in power since 1970, throwing off the rule of the once mighty Syrian Socialist Baath Party, a feared and murderous one-party state. Rebel forces streamed into the capital, Damascus, Sunday morning, facing no significant resistance from government troops, amid rumors that dictator Bashar al-Assad had departed the country for parts unknown a day or two ago.

The tip of the spear of the revolution was the fighters of the Levant Liberation Council (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or HTS), a hard-line fundamentalist organization that had run the province of Idlib in an authoritarian manner in recent years. It is not ISIL (ISIS, Daesh), though that is one path the victors could take if they were so inclined. So far, their behavior in Aleppo has presented a mixed picture, with some killing of Kurds but less turmoil, including for Christians, than some had feared.

The revolution has, however, now become a mass movement, and despite the Fundamentalist Vigilante (“Salafi Jihadi”) shape of the more effective militias, all sorts of people have joined in. Many of the expatriate supporters of the revolution are businessmen and liberals, who had hoped to come to power in 2011 before al-Assad deliberately provoked a civil war and drove the opposition into the arms of Turkey and the Gulf.

Syria is not well placed for a democratic transition, though stranger things have happened. It would be a shame if the people had to trade one form of authoritarianism for another, as happened in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, and Sudan. Overthrowing a dictator is very difficult, but it is no guarantee of liberty.

Al-Assad is the seventh long-ruling Arab dictator to fall since January 2011. The strongmen of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen fell in 2011-2012. The Bahrain monarchy, however, managed to stay in power, as did Al-Assad in Syria, though the cost to the Syrian people was a years-long civil war that left hundreds of thousands dead and half the country homeless.

I wrote a book about these “Arab Spring” youth revolts, based on field work, The New Arabs, which is still good background reading — if I do say so myself.

"Syrians are better off with the possibility of social evolution than with being locked in a political iron cage, even if the ride may turn very bumpy."

Another shoe dropped when a coalition of leftist labor unions, Sufi orders, and reformist officers overthrew Omar al-Bashir in Sudan on 11 April 2019.

Of the revolts, in Egypt the youth provoked a military coup and then pressured the army to go back to the barracks. In 2013, the army made a counter-coup and Egypt has been run in an even more authoritarian fashion ever since.

In Tunisia, there was a successful democratic transition with regular elections in which the losers went home, until 25 July 2021, when elected President Qais Saied made a self-coup and abolished democracy. Tunisia is now as authoritarian or more as under Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the general overthrown in mid-January, 2011.

Libya fell into civil war and a kind of partition. Nationalist forces led by Khalifa Hafter control the eastern part of the country, and Muslim fundamentalist forces control the West, along with the capital of Tripoli. They say they have made a government of national unity, but its success is murky. Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, the CIA, and Russia support Hafter. Turkey supports Tripoli.

Yemen fell into civil war, with 80% of the population now ruled by the Houthi Shiite Zaydi militia, which has attracted some Iranian support. A southern separatist militia and Muslim Brotherhood militias have positions in southern and eastern provinces, backed by the UAE and Saudi Arabia, respectively.

Sudan saw wrangling between civilians and the officer corps, which dragged its feet on going to the barracks. On October 25, 2021, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan staged a coup and arrested many civilian officials. Then the officer corps split, with the conventional forces backing al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) special operations forces mutinying, with the support of the United Arab Emirates (they get around). The country has plunged into civil war and the humanitarian disaster rivals Gaza in its intensity.

One reason these attempts at a democratic transition failed is that all these countries are desperately poor, except for Libya and Bahrain, which only have oil money, which functions anti-democratically to strengthen the state. Adam Przeworski at NYU, now emeritus, found that middle-income countries like Spain and Taiwan had a better chance of pulling off a transition from an authoritarian to a democratic system. Why is not clear. My guess is that in societies where the government is wealthier than the society, central state actors can overwhelm the public. Where a society has a lot of middle-class people and business interests that value democracy, as in South Korea, they just tell attempted coup-makers “no!”

It also matters what bargains elites make with each other and with the public. One problem everyone ran into in the aftermath of the Arab Spring was that a strong rural-urban divide emerged, which made it difficult to reach a satisfactory compromise. It was paralleled by a nationalist – Muslim fundamentalist divide.

In 2012-13, rural Egypt wanted the Muslim Brotherhood. Urban Egypt mostly hated the Muslim Brotherhood. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi took advantage of the split to make a coup that might satisfy both demographics.

The officer corps has collapsed in Syria, so it doesn’t look like Egypt. If it can move to elections and establish a representative government, Syrians could have a shot at a better life. But if it takes the path of Yemen or Libya, with fundamentalist militias fighting for power, then it will become (even more of) a basket case.

The fate of the 2.4 million Kurds in the northeast, and of 3.5 million Alawites in the northwest, and of possibly a million Christians — plus millions of secular-minded, nationalist Sunnis in Damascus and Aleppo, is very much up in the air. The danger of reprisals against the Alawites for having been the backbone of the Baath Party for 55 years is real.

Those considerations are for another day. Today, let the Syrians bask in the overthrow of a horrid dictatorship that tortured 10,000 prisoners to death, kept thousands of prisoners of conscience locked up, and killed hundreds of thousands of people with indiscriminate fire and barrel bombs, and sometimes chemical weapons. Syrians are better off with the possibility of social evolution than with being locked in a political iron cage, even if the ride may turn very bumpy.

Fast fashion is a poster child of capitalism. Over the past 20 years, fashion production, consumption—and textile waste—have doubled in volume. The current neocolonial status quo is characterized by labor exploitation and cultural appropriation, overproduction, resource depletion, and unprecedented waste generation.

The environmental and social impacts of fashion choices in the Global North are disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations in the Global South. Material throughput of the fashion system should be cut at least in half to stay within the planetary boundaries—but the industry is programmed for growth, mostly in synthetic or plastic garments, on a trajectory to take up to a quarter of the global carbon budget.

Looking good does not have to mean contributing to a broken system.

Our society's addiction to growth fuels this cycle, prioritising profit over all else. While offering consumers the illusion of choice, the current linear fashion business model leads to wardrobe clutter, constant pressure to keep up with trends that causes the feeling of exclusion—and exacerbates further the class divide.

But looking good doesn't have to mean fueling a destructive and exploitative growth model. Moving beyond growth and the mentality that "more stuff is better" could help reshape the fashion system—and make us happier in the long run.

The Beyond Growth Vision

What would it mean to move beyond growth in fashion—in practice?

For Citizens

Addressing the constant push for "more" would be a good start. Why do we seek more stuff? If we zoom into the basic needs behind our overconsumption, we'll find the needs to belong, to be part of a community and respected by our peers, and the needs for self-expression and feeling safe in our environment. But what if there were other ways to fulfil these basic needs instead of buying more stuff?

Buying more consciously—prioritizing quality, longevity, circularity, ethical and local production—is important. But we cannot buy our way out of the crisis of overconsumption by buying "green." The only consumer-citizens' action that can make all the difference is to simply buy less new stuff.

Before we rush to defend our right to shop as if there's no tomorrow, as enshrined in the "constitution" of capitalism, let's take a moment to talk about "less." More isn't always better, and less isn't always worse. Think about war. Production of weapons contributes positively to the growth of GDP—but are weapons a good thing? Could it be possible that too much fashion is not a good thing? And if so, how much fashion is enough? Consider this:

• A Parisian woman in the 1960s had a wardrobe of 40 garments, including shoes and accessories.
• An average Dutch wardrobe today contains 175 garments.
• A wardrobe to stay under the 1.5°C limit of the Paris agreement should contain 80 garments.
• People who voluntarily chose to downsize their wardrobes and only keep garments they love report higher levels of subjective well-being.

It turns out that, not only can we do with less, but living with a curated "less" makes us happier, more conscious about style and more in control of our spending. And—it is also great for the planet. Importantly, moving beyond the "buy more" mentality could help us take back creative control over our self-expression and encourage more diverse personal styles and empower true uniqueness.

Scaling down our irresponsible and wasteful buying habits can have a long-term reinvigorating effect on individuals and on our communities. Instead of buying new things online, alone, to feel better in a crazy world we live in, we could join mending and repair workshops, swaps, upcycling or creative clubs—meet like-minded people, make friends, and become part of a community.

For the Fashion Industry

There is no easy way to replace centuries of growth-oriented business logic overnight. For businesses, moving beyond growth would mean experimentation with ownership structures, new business models and revenue streams to move toward circularity and sufficiency. Profits are not wrong per se, but how they are distributed makes a major difference. The ordeal that Patagonia went through to transform its ownership model to create an environmental fund to replace its shareholder structure indicates that our legal systems are so tailored to growth models that even moving from shareholder to stakeholder capitalism is difficult.

It would also require rethinking the current overproduction strategy. The majority of items today do not sell: An average sell-through rate is 40-80%. Which begs the question: Does this strategy even work in a saturated market? The industry should take a look at how to reduce stock keeping units (SKUs) and focus on developing more products for circularity as opposed to more products overall. Extending responsibility of brands to what happens to their product after the sale, all the way to the end of life, could be the critical mindshift point opening up doors for responsible circular practices that have not existed before. These would include designing for the next use, repair, and re-manufacture.

Citizens are more than just consumers, and we can advocate for change and shift the narrative toward a beautiful fashion future in which less is more.

However, these changes cannot occur in competition with the dominant unsustainable and unethical growth-oriented industry practices. To move beyond growth and let post-growth business experimentation flourish, it is critical to even out the playing field through regulations. Governments could take the first step by banning or restricting business practices that constitute fast and ultra-fast fashion models. A great example is France that sets a tax for companies that put more than 2,000 styles on the market daily.

Another example is Amsterdam. They city made an effort to go beyond GDP by applying Doughnut Economic Frameworks to align the fashion industry with well-being economy principles, such as reducing waste and promoting sustainable practices. One initiative encourages citizens to mend their clothes through repair cafes, fostering a culture of reuse and reducing the demand for fast fashion.

Other options could be tax incentives for sustainable practices, restrictions on harmful materials, monitoring for transparency, support for circular economies, and education (e.g. learning how to repair your clothes). It is also crucial to regulate planned obsolescence, reinforce the right to repair, as well as implement non-for-profit extended producer responsibility. Side policies could also include banning some advertising, especially that of fast fashion brands, as well as the use of algorithms and tracking consumer data by brands.

Fashion Forward

Looking good does not have to mean contributing to a broken system. Citizens are more than just consumers, and we can advocate for change and shift the narrative toward a beautiful fashion future in which less is more. Choosing to recognize our core needs and find alternatives, as well as finding creative and joyful ways to fill them other than shopping for clothes, is an act of empowerment that can heal us, our planet, and the very system that is very, very sick.

The collective net worth of America’s top twelve billionaires has surpassed $2 trillion as of December 3.

This is an unsettling new milestone for wealth concentration in the United States. The oligarchic dozen is richer than ever, and they are endowed with extreme material power that can be used to pursue narrow political interests at the expense of democratic majorities.

There is one newcomer to the moneyed club that we surveyed back in 2020: Jensen Huang. He replaces Walmart heiress Alice Walton.

The collective wealth of this iteration of the oligarchic dozen has increased by more than $1.3 trillion, or 193 percent, since Forbes published its 34th annual list of global billionaires in April 2020.

The ascendancy of Huang is noteworthy. As cofounder and CEO of Nvidia, his wealth has skyrocketed from $4.7 billion in 2020 to $122.4 billion — a mind-boggling 2,504 percent increase — over the last four years.

Huang’s surging wealth is directly tied to the hype surrounding artificial intelligence. The demand from Big Tech for Nvidia’s semiconductor chips to power AI has pushed the company’s stock market value to new heights. To put that demand into perspective, Huang could have been the world’s first trillionaire if his ownership stake in Nvidia, currently at 3.5 percent, mirrored Larry Ellison’s 40 percent stake in software giant Oracle.

The looming expansion of the oligarchic dozen’s carbon footprint is worrisome. Every single individual owns or is a controlling shareholder of a business that is investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence.

The energy that data centers demand to power AI is effectively delaying the green energy transition. The lack of green energy supply compels data centers to rely on new and existing fossil fuel infrastructure to meet its ever-expanding power consumption needs.

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, along with others in the billionaire class, have unsurprisingly used the power of their wealth to expand their political and economic influence. They have both purchased large media platforms, which has granted them the ability to set the terms of public debate with the hopes of influencing public opinion in their favor.

Musk has not been shy about his support for president-elect Donald Trump. It is reported that his super PAC spent $200 million to ensure the Republican ticket’s electoral victory. In return, Trump is expected to repeal tax credits for electric vehicles to the competitive advantage of Musk’s Tesla.

Bezos did not directly join the fray, but he staged a coup of The Washington Post’s editorial board and prevented them from making a presidential endorsement, keeping Amazon’s current contracts with the federal government in good standing and protecting future ones.

We see the effects of this growing concentration of wealth and economic inequality everywhere – plutocratic influence on our politics, wealth transfers from the bottom to the top, and the acceleration of climate breakdown.

The International Criminal Court’s recent issuance of arrest warrants to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza has stirred up a considerable backlash. Dismissing the charges as “absurd and false,” Netanyahu announced that Israel would “not recognize the validity” of the ICC’s action. President Joe Biden denounced the arrest warrants as “outrageous,” while the French government, after agreeing to support them, reversed its stance.

Thanks to a vigorous campaign by human rights organizations, the International Criminal Court (ICC) became operational in 2002, with the mandate to prosecute individuals for genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and, after 2018, the crime of aggression. Nations ratifying the Rome Statute, the ICC’s authorizing document, assumed responsibility for arresting these individuals and submitting them to the Court for trial. The ICC prosecutes cases only when countries are unwilling or unable to do so, for it was designed to complement, rather than replace, national criminal justice systems.

Operating with clearly delimited powers and limited funding, the ICC, headquartered at The Hague, has thus far usually taken modest but effective action to investigate, prosecute, and convict perpetrators of heinous atrocity crimes.

Although 124 nations have ratified the Rome Statute, Russia, China, the United States, India, Israel, and North Korea are not among them. Indeed, the world’s major military powers, accustomed to the privileged role in world affairs that their armed might usually affords them, have often been at odds with the ICC, for it has the potential to investigate, prosecute, and convict their own government officials.

The desire of the “great powers” to safeguard themselves from the enforcement of international law is exemplified by the record of the U.S. government. Although President Bill Clinton signed the Rome Statute in December 2000, he warned about “significant flaws in the treaty,” among them the inability to “protect US officials.” Refusing to support Senate ratification, he recommended that his successor continue this policy “until our fundamental concerns are satisfied.”

President George W. Bush “unsigned” the treaty in 2002, pressured other nations into bilateral agreements requiring them to refuse surrendering U.S. nationals to the Court, and signed the American Servicemembers Protection Act, authorizing the use of military force to liberate any Americans held for crimes by the ICC.

Although the Bush and Obama administrations subsequently warmed somewhat toward the Court, then engaged in prosecuting African warlords and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, President Donald Trump reverted to staunch opposition in 2018, informing the UN General Assembly that the U.S. government would not support the ICC, which he claimed had “no jurisdiction, no legitimacy, and no authority.” In 2020, the Trump administration imposed economic sanctions and visa restrictions on top ICC officials for any effort to investigate the actions of U.S. personnel in Afghanistan.

Like the United States, Russia initially signed the Rome treaty. It withdrew its signature, however, after Ukraine appealed to the ICC in 2014 and 2015 to investigate war crimes and crimes against humanity that Russia committed in Ukraine. The ICC did launch a preliminary investigation that, after the full-scale Russian military invasion of February 2022 and Russian murder of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war in Bucha, expanded into a formal investigation. Taking bold action in March 2023, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Commissioner for Children’s Rights Maria Lvova-Belova for the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children.

Having previously denied wrongdoing in Bucha, the Russian government reacted furiously to the kidnapping charge. “The very question itself is outrageous,” declared Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, and the ICC’s decisions “are insignificant for the Russian Federation.” Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chair of the Russian Security Council and a former Russian president, publicly threatened a Russian hypersonic missile attack on the ICC headquarters, remarking: “Judges of the court, look carefully at the sky.” Subsequently, Moscow issued arrest warrants for top ICC officials.

Meanwhile, the United States has continued its ambivalence toward the ICC. President Joe Biden scrapped the Trump sanctions against the Court and authorized the sharing of information and funding for it in its investigations of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. But he reaffirmed “our government’s longstanding objection to the Court’s efforts to assert jurisdiction” over U.S. and Israeli officials.

The incoming Trump administration seems likely to take a much harsher line. The Republican-led House of Representatives recently passed legislation to sanction the ICC, while Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) called the Court a “dangerous joke,” urging Congress to sanction its prosecutor and warning U.S. allies that, “if you try to help the ICC, we’re going to sanction you.”

Given the policies of the “great powers,” are the Court’s efforts to enforce international law futile?

Leading human rights advocates don’t think so. “This is a big day for the many victims of crimes committed by Russian forces in Ukraine,” declared Amnesty International upon learning of the Court’s arrest warrants for top Russian officials. “The ICC has made Putin a wanted man and taken its first step to end the impunity that has emboldened perpetrators in Russia’s war.” Similarly, Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch, stated that the ICC’s issuance of arrest warrants for top Israeli officials represented “an important step toward justice for the Palestinian people…Israeli generals must now think twice about proceeding with the bombing and starving of Palestinian children.”

And, indeed, the ICC’s actions have started to bear fruit. Invited to South Africa to participate in a BRICS conference, Putin canceled his visit after his hosts explained that, in light of the arrest warrant, he was no longer welcome. Also, later that year, Russian officials returned hundreds of Ukrainian children to their parents. Although the results of the ICC’s action against Israeli officials are only starting to unfold, numerous countries have promised to honor the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant.

Even so, the ICC’s enforcement of international criminal justice would be considerably more effective if the major powers stopped obstructing its efforts.

War, war and more war.

It’s only possible for one reason: the belief that only some people are fully human. Those who aren’t . . . well, they can be killed when necessary. My inner scream at this false reality we feed ourselves — via the media, via mainstream politics — keeps getting louder and louder. Is there a way to get things to change?

To put it another way: Is there a way to transcend the abstract view of Planet Earth in which global politics operates? We have religion. We have values: Be kind, be loving, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — but they don’t seem to manifest collectively. At the collective, that is to say, the political, level, only so much kindness can be tolerated. In terms of security, kindness is weakness.

I quoted these words of Kamala Harris, delivered last August at the DNC as she accepted her nomination to be the Dems’ presidential candidate, in a previous column, but they still strike me as relevant, even though she lost the election:

“So, fellow Americans. Fellow Americans. I — I love our country with all my heart. Everywhere I go — everywhere I go, in everyone I meet, I see a nation that is ready to move forward. Ready for the next step in the incredible journey that is America.”

She added that this is “an America where we care for one another, look out for one another and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us — none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed.”

Wow, sounds great. Unfortunately, as I noted at the time, the love and empathy of which she spoke stopped at the border. In essence, she was expressing love for an abstraction, a swath of land defined by random lines on a map, created via several centuries of brutal land theft.

Nonetheless, I understand that love is specific. It has limits. We love our partner. We love our surroundings, our community. The problem, as Harris quickly went on to illustrate, is that “love” at the national level — a.k.a., nationalism — doesn’t actually exist unless there’s also an enemy: someone to fear. Our empathy stops at the border. And beyond the border . . .

Harris continued: “And America, we must also be steadfast in advancing our security and values abroad. As vice president, I have confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances and engaged with our brave troops overseas. As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

Oh, how wonderful! The great lie manifests: We need that trillion-dollar annual military budget, America! How else can we remain secure? And our allies also have to remain secure: Israel has the right to defend itself (some love, apparently, does not stop at the border). And it’s not as though Harris’s opponent — what was his name again? — in any way challenged this basic context, nor did the prevailing media: There’s always a “them” out there, who hates us, who wants to steal what we have (what goes around comes around, I guess) . . . who wants to kill us.

So we’ve got to be prepared to kill him first — which means, dehumanize! And here’s where my internal — and, at least in this moment, external — scream begins. I don’t want to be led by a “commander in chief.” I want humanity’s understanding of itself to begin with the awareness of our collective, and planetary, unity. The time for this is now, for an endless number of reasons, all of which are related to the “security” our leaders claim to be so obsessed with.

The most obvious reason, I guess, is that nobody wants nuclear war — yet Russia and the West are playing with this possibility now, as the good guys and the bad guys fight it out in Ukraine. War is the only answer — defeat the enemy, bomb Russia! And Russia responds with “inflammatory nuclear rhetoric,” denounced by the West as, gosh, inappropriate. At some point this game could blow up in everyone’s face. Yet in the current political dialogue, our security requires playing with global suicide. Any questions?

And, of course, even if “mutually assured destruction” holds tight and humanity avoids nuclear Armageddon, the unaddressed climate crisis is something else that could explode in our faces. Shockingly, “climate” doesn’t recognize the borders we’ve worked so hard to create.

What I’m trying to say is that we — all of us — need to turn evolution into a conscious process. How do we connect with one another, especially those we fear? How do we expand our sense of community and shatter the hatred we now allow to swell unabated toward our declared enemies, especially those beyond our borders? How do we shatter the divide between spiritual and political values? How do we bring, let us say, the wisdom of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin into the political realm?

One of his most well-known quotes is this; “Some day, after mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of Love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

How do we explain — to the ones in power, to the ones who write about and bow to power — that, by “discovering fire for the second time,” Teilhard didn’t mean developing nuclear weapons? How do we explain it to ourselves?

Perhaps the place to begin is by removing the “national” border from our minds and hearts.

Today is the day, if you got suckered in by those omnipresent ads for Medicare Advantage and left regular Medicare for the siren song of cheaper coverage, “free” vision, hearing, or dental, or even “free” money to buy groceries or rides to the doc.

The open enrollment period for real Medicare closes at the end of the day Saturday, December 7th; after that, you’re locked into the Medicare Advantage plan you may have bought until next year.

If you’ve had Medicare Advantage for a year or more, however, the open enrollment period is still “open” until December 7th, but you will want to make sure you can get a “Medigap” plan that fills in the 20% that real Medicare doesn’t cover.

Companies are required to write a Medigap policy for you at a reasonable price when you turn 65, no matter how sick you are or what preexisting conditions you may have, but if you’ve been “off Medicare” by being on Medicare Advantage for more than a year, they don’t have to write you a policy, so double-check that and sign up for a Medigap policy before making the switch back to real Medicare.

So, what’s this all about and why is it so complicated?

When George W. Bush and congressional Republicans (and a handful of bought-off Democrats) created Medicare Advantage in 2003, it was the fulfillment of half of Bush’s goal of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, dating all the way back to his unsuccessful run for Congress in 1978 and a main theme of his second term in office.

Medicare Advantage is not Medicare. These plans are private health insurance provided by private corporations, who are then reimbursed at a fixed rate by the Medicare trust fund regardless of how much their customers use their insurance. Thus, the more they can screw their customers and us taxpayers by withholding healthcare payments, the more money they make.

With real Medicare, if your doctor says you need a test, procedure, scan, or any other medical intervention you simply get it done and real Medicare pays the bill. No muss, no fuss, no permission needed. Real Medicare always pays, and if they think something’s not kosher, they follow up after the payment’s been made so as not to slow down the delivery of your healthcare.

With Medicare Advantage, however, you’re subject to “pre-clearance,” meaning that the insurance company inserts itself between you and your doctor: You can’t get the medical help you need until or unless the insurance company pre-clears you for payment.

These companies thus make much of their billions in profit by routinely denying claims — 1.5 million, or 18 percent of all claims, were turned down in one year alone — leaving Advantage policy holders with the horrible choice of not getting the tests or procedures they need or paying for them out-of-pocket.

Given this, you’d think that most people would stay as far away from these private Medicare Advantage plans as they could. But Congress also authorized these plans to compete unfairly with real Medicare by offering things real Medicare can’t (yet). These include free or discounted dental, hearing, eyeglasses, gym memberships, groceries, rides to the doctor, and even cash rebates.

You and I pay for those freebies, but that’s only half of the horror story.

This year, as Matthew Cunningham-Cook pointed out in Wendell Potter’s brilliant Health Care un-covered Substack newsletter, we’re ponying up an additional $64 billion to give to these private insurance companies to “reimburse” them for the freebies they relentlessly advertise on television, online, and in print.

And here’s the most obscene part of the whole thing: the companies won’t tell the government (us!) how much of that $64 billion they’ve actually spent. They just take the money and say, “Thank you very much.” And then, presumably, throw a few extra million into the pockets of each of their already obscenely-well-paid senior executives.

For example, the former CEO of the nation’s largest Medicare Advantage provider, UnitedHealth, walked away with over a billion dollars in total compensation. With a “B.” One guy. His successor made off with over a half-billion dollars in pay and stock.

Good work if you can get it: all you need do is buy off a hundred or so members of Congress, courtesy of Clarence Thomas’ billionaire-funded tie-breaking vote on Citizens United, and threaten the rest of Congress with massive advertising campaigns for their opponents if they try to stop you.

And while the companies refuse to tell us how much of the $64 billion that we’re throwing at them this year to offer “free” dental, etc. is actually used, what we do know is that most of that money is not going to pay for the freebies they advertise. As Cunningham-Cook noted, in one study only 11 percent of Advantage policyholders who’d signed up with plans offering dental care used that benefit.

Another study showed over-the-counter-drug freebies were used only a third of the time, leaving $5 billion in the insurance companies money bins just for that “reimbursable” goodie. A later study found that at least a quarter of all Advantage policyholders failed to use any of the freebies they’d been offered when they signed up.

That’s an enormous amount of what the industry calls “breakage”; benefits offered and paid for by the government but not used. Billions of dollars left over every month. And, used or not, you and I sure paid for them.

In my book The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, I lay out the story of this scam and how badly so many American seniors — and all American taxpayers, regardless of age — get ripped off by it.

And now it looks like things are about to get a whole lot worse.

When he was president last time, Donald Trump substantially expanded Medicare Advantage, calling real Medicare “socialism.” Project 2025 and candidate Trump both promised to end real Medicare “immediately” if Trump was re-elected; at the very least, they’ll make Medicare Advantage the “default” program people are steered into when they turn 65 and sign up for Medicare.

These giant insurance companies ripped off us taxpayers last year to the tune of an estimated $140 billion over and above what it would’ve cost us if people had simply been on real Medicare, according to a report from Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP).

If there was no Medicare Advantage scam bleeding off all that cash to pay for executives’ private jets, real Medicare could be expanded to cover dental, vision, and hearing and even end the need for Medigap plans.

But for now, the privatization gravy train continues to roll along. The insurance giants use some of that money to buy legislators, and some of it for expensive advertising to dupe seniors into joining their programs. The company (Benefytt) that hired Joe Namath to pitch Medicare Advantage, for example, was recently hit with huge fines by the Federal Trade Commission for deceptive advertising.

The FTC news release laid it out:

“Benefytt pocketed millions selling sham insurance to seniors and other consumers looking for health coverage,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “The company is being ordered to pay $100 million, and we’re holding its executives accountable for this fraud.”

And what was it that the Federal Trade Commission called “sham insurance”? Medicare Advantage. Nonetheless, the Centers for Medicare Services continues to let Benefytt and Namath market these products: welcome to the power of organized money.

And it’s huge organized money. Medicare Advantage plans are massive cash cows for the companies that run them. As Cigna prepares for a merger, for example, they’re being forced to sell off their Medicare Advantage division: it’s scheduled to go for $3.7 billion. Nobody pays that kind of money unless they expect enormous returns.

And how do they make those billions?

Most Medicare Advantage companies regularly do everything they can to intimidate you into paying yourself out-of-pocket. Often, they simply refuse payment and wait for you to file a complaint against them; for people seriously ill the cumbersome “appeals” process is often more than they can handle so they just write a check, pull out a credit card, or end up deeply in debt in their golden years.

As a result, hospitals and doctor groups across the nation are beginning to refuse to take Medicare Advantage patients. And in rural areas many hospitals are simply going out of business because Medicare advantage providers refuse to pay their bills.

California-based Scripps Health, for example, cares for around 30,000 people on Medicare Advantage and recently notified all of them that Scripps will no longer offer medical services to them unless they pay out-of-pocket or revert back to real Medicare.

They made this decision because over $75 million worth of services and procedures their physicians had recommended to their patients were turned down by Medicare Advantage insurance companies. In many cases, Scripps had already provided the care and is now stuck with the bills that the Advantage companies refuse to pay.

Scripps CEO Chris Van Gorder told MedPage Today:

“We are a patient care organization and not a patient denial organization and, in many ways, the model of managed care has always been about denying or delaying care – at least economically. That is why denials, [prior] authorizations and administrative processes have become a very big issue for physicians and hospitals...”

Similarly, the Mayo Clinic has warned its customers in Florida and Arizona that they won’t accept Medicare Advantage any more, either. Increasing numbers of physician groups and hospitals are simply over being ripped off by Advantage insurance companies.

Traditional Medicare has been serving Americans well since 1965: it’s one of the most efficient single-payer systems to fund healthcare that’s ever been devised. But nobody was making a buck off it, so nobody could share those profits with greedy politicians. Enter Medicare Advantage, courtesy of George W. Bush and the GOP.

While several bills have been offered in Congress to do something about this — including Mark Pocan’s and Ro Khanna’s Save Medicare Act that would end these companies’ ability to use the word “Medicare” in their policy names and advertising — the amounts of money sloshing around DC in the healthcare space now are almost unfathomable.

So far this year, according to opensecrets.org, the insurance industry has spent $117,305,895 showering gifts and persuasion on our federal lawmakers to keep their obscene profits flowing.

It’s all one more example of how five corrupt Republicans on the US Supreme Court legalizing political bribery with Citizens United have screwed average Americans and made a handful of industry executives and investors fabulously rich.

They get away with it because when people choose to sign up for Medicare Advantage at 65 (or convert to these plans in their 60s or early 70s) they’re typically not sick — and thus cost the insurance companies little.

Tragically, the people signing up for these plans have no idea all the hassles, hoops, and troubles they might have to jump through when they do get sick, have an accident, or otherwise need medical assistance.

And since the last three years of life are typically the most expensive years for healthcare, the insurance denials are more likely to happen then — long after the person’s signed up with the Advantage company and it’s too late to go back to real Medicare.

This is why it typically takes a few years for people to figure out how badly they got screwed by not going with regular Medicare but instead putting themselves in the hands of private insurance companies.

The New York Times did an exposé of the problem in an article titled “Medicare Advantage Plans Often Deny Needed Care, Federal Report Finds.” It tells the story of “Kurt Pauker, an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor in Indianapolis” who’d bought an Advantage policy from Humana:

“In spite of recommendations from Mr. Pauker’s doctors, his family said, Humana has repeatedly denied authorization for inpatient rehabilitation after hospitalization, saying at times he was too healthy and at times too ill to benefit.”

This is not at all uncommon, the Times notes:

“Tens of millions of denials are issued each year for both authorization and reimbursements, and audits of the private insurers show evidence of ‘widespread and persistent problems related to inappropriate denials of services and payment,’ the investigators found.”

If you have “real” Medicare with a heavily regulated Medigap policy to cover the 20% Medicare doesn’t, you never have to worry.

Your bills get paid, you can use any doctor or hospital in the country who takes Medicare, and neither Medicare nor your Medigap provider will ever try to collect from you or force you to pay for what you thought was covered.

Neither you or your doctor will ever have to do the “pre-authorization” dance with real Medicare: those terrible experiences dealing with for-profit insurance companies are part of the past.

But if you have Medicare Advantage — which is not Medicare, but private health insurance — you’re on your own.

As the Times laid out:

“About 18 percent of [Advantage] payments were denied despite meeting Medicare coverage rules, an estimated 1.5 million payments for all of 2019. In some cases, plans ignored prior authorizations or other documentation necessary to support the payment. These denials may delay or even prevent a Medicare Advantage beneficiary from getting needed care…”

Buying a Medicare Advantage policy is a leap in the dark, and the federal government is not there to catch you. And it’s all perfectly legal, thanks to Bush’s 2003 law, so your state insurance commissioner usually can’t or won’t help.

Thus, here we are, handing billions of dollars a month to insurance industry executives so they can buy new Swiss chalets, private jets, and luxury yachts. And so they can compete — unfairly — with Medicare itself, driving LBJ’s most proud achievement into debt and crisis.

Enough is enough. Let your members of Congress know it’s beyond time to fix the Court and Medicare, so scams like Medicare Advantage can no longer rip off America’s seniors while making industry executives richer than Midas.

And if you got hooked into switching out of real Medicare and now find yourself in a Medicare Advantage plan, today is the day to back out and return to real Medicare. For more information, you can also contact the nonprofit and real-Medicare-supporting Medicare Rights Center at 800-333-4114.

The recent waves of gang violence in Haiti, that have plagued the island since February 2024, have plunged it into another major humanitarian crisis. As reported by the United Nations Human Rights Council, the violence has been centered in Port-au-Prince and other areas in the Ouest and Artibonite Departments, but the reduced access to food, healthcare services, and general economic strain due to gang violence are being felt across the departments. With increasing armed violence events, 700,000 internally displaced people, almost 5 million people facing acute food insecurity, and only 28% of functioning healthcare services available, daily life and public safety continue to erode at a rapid pace. This is especially true for women and girls.

Lack of access to the formal economy, enduring threats of public violence, and lack of adequate protections from natural disasters make it exceedingly difficult for women and girls to safely navigate city and nation-wide emergencies. Such emergencies exacerbate the other substandard conditions of education, health, legal protections against gender-based violence, and political participation of Haitian women and girls. Historically, the Haitian women’s movement and feminist activists have provided essential educational resources, legal support services, and platforms for women’s stories to be heard and this political advocacy continues during the present violence.

Haitian women’s feminist groups developed the Policy Framework for an Effective and Equitable Transition. This document highlights the legal rights of Haitian women and girls established in the Haitian Constitution, the oppression Haitian women and girls endure in private and public life as well as recommendations on how the Presidential Transitional Council (TPC) should amend proposed harmful policies already set to be put in place. This Policy Framework is part of the rich legacy of political action taken by Haitian women and feminists since the emancipation of the island from French colonial rule. Haitian feminist activists and civil society leaders have time and time again shown up for their community on the ground during natural disasters and fighting against normalized gendered violence and discrimination. In this moment, they are pushing forward this Policy Framework to display the link between a successful democracy and gender equality.

The United States and other Western countries have a clear responsibility to materially support a locally-led stabilization of Haiti that effectively addresses the needs of all Haitian citizens.

Gang violence in Haiti isn’t a new phenomenon. Throughout the country’s history, the Haitian government relied on armed gangs to assert their authority and maintain power because there was no strong military or police presence. However, the type of armed brutality evident today is a result of the rapidly decaying relationship between Haitian politicians and armed gangs following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Moreover, the armed power of these gangs, which has continued to overpower the Haitian National Police and the MSS mission, is primarily sustained by U.S. weapons sales into the country. The transitional government’s attempts to regain control and establish a stable democracy are failing to address the needs of Haitian women, expressly in this current crisis.

On the Transitional Presidential Council, its Haitian women’s groups have reported that of the nine members only one is a woman and she is one of two members who are unable to vote. In the newly established commission on criminal reform, the same pattern emerges—one woman to eight male members. The intention to restrict women in positions of political authority is cemented by the fact that during the search for an interim prime minister, there were no women invited to interview.

These patterns are dangerous because they directly undermine standards of gender equality established explicitly in the Haitian Constitution, where women are assured to hold at least 30% of political positions. Moreover, the few women that are granted access to political positions in the new government are not representatives of the women’s movement, which threatens to conceal the most pressing issues of Haitian women and girls and thus fail to adequately protect them. This is concerning because It’s been reported that women’s representation as leaders in peace processes is vital in developing sustainable peace agreements and post-conflict stability that create more just futures for the entirety of civil society.

It’s necessary that the international community, especially the United States, works according to the needs emphasized by grassroots women’s organizations and civil society. Prior international efforts meant to ease hardship in Haiti have worked to only make it worse. Decades of violent U.S. occupation, the unjust imposition of international debt from France, careless and corrupt U.N. peacekeeper missions, the destabilization of rice productions and the resulting economic fragility, along with current arms sales from the U.S., have helped create the Haiti we see today.

Because of this history, the United States and other Western countries have a clear responsibility to materially support a locally-led stabilization of Haiti that effectively addresses the needs of all Haitian citizens. Supporting Haitian feminist’s efforts such as the Policy Framework is the first step to respecting the lived experiences of people at the center of conflict and in remedying this historic violence.

On the morning of November 6, many of us found ourselves facing the seemingly inconceivable fact that Donald Trump had become the next president of the United States of America—again. Not only had he won the electoral college, but he had won the popular vote as well. There were no stories we could tell ourselves this time to explain it away. It was a clear victory and a clear loss.

As the hours and then days passed, I sat with this truth, and as I did, I came to realize that this outcome had never been inconceivable. In fact, we should have expected nothing less. We had been heading down this path for too long, so blind to reality that we hadn’t even stopped to check the map before finding ourselves utterly lost.

We didn’t begin this journey when Biden agreed to exit the race. We didn’t begin it when it was clear Trump would run again. Not even after the first Trump win. No, we had been hurdling down this road toward a complete disconnect with large swaths of the American people for quite some time. Looking back, the clearest indication to me was the Wikileaks release of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails showing their bias toward Hillary Clinton. That moment should have forced a reckoning. But none of us stopped long enough to reflect on how broken our party had become. Instead, we blamed Russian interference for forcing us to hold up a mirror to our own issues.

We did fail. This is no one’s fault but our own. This is not Trump’s fault. This is not the fault of those who voted for Trump. This is our fault.

The Democratic party is the party of organized labor. The party supporting civil rights and protecting minorities. The party of the working class, immigrants, the disenfranchised. But over the past two years, as we watched how the party chose to run the Biden campaign and then the Harris campaign, it was hard to see that party.

I truly wanted Harris to win, of course I did. She would have championed many of the issues I feel passionately about: job creation and economic growth; social and economic inequity; well-funded social services to protect the poor, the elderly, children, and other vulnerable populations; combatting threats to the civil rights of minorities, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community; affordable health care options; sensible gun legislation; women’s reproductive rights; and climate change. I disagreed with her refusal to speak out against the war in Gaza and for not insisting a Palestinian-American speak at the Democratic National Convention. But I knew how dangerous any alternative would be. And, not for nothing, I needed to see a woman become president.

Unfortunately, the DNC didn’t allow us to choose our candidate. In silencing our choice, many felt detached from the entire process. By skipping the Iowa caucuses, it was impossible for anyone to challenge Biden’s candidacy. When he left the race, the candidacy was simply given to Harris rather than allowing Democrats to feel like they had made her their choice. At that point it was too late for her to introduce herself to the American people, to make her case, to earn our trust and our vote.

Harris’s campaign spent nearly a billion dollars. Focusing on celebrity endorsements and concert rallies only served to prove Trump’s message that Democrats were the elite, out of touch with everyday Americans. In the final days of the campaign, Harris went on a “blue wall” tour with Liz Cheney to win undecided independents and moderate Republicans. Meanwhile, alienated voters in mining towns, inner cities, and immigrant communities across the country didn’t get such royal treatment. Their votes were assumed. They shouldn’t have been.

On election day, I knew I needed to find some way to occupy my time rather than checking CNN every few minutes and watching the minutes tick by until the polls closed. I was fortunate enough to be able to work the phones from 6:30 a.m.–8:00 p.m. with Drive Your Ballot, a volunteer-run organization in Philadelphia. For thirteen and a half hours I fielded 125 calls from people who needed a free ride to the polls, regardless of their circumstances or political affiliation. When I finally sat down to watch the results come in that night, I should have known what the next day would bring. I feel foolish now not to have known.

We can’t afford to continue to make these same mistakes. We must do what Americans seem so loathe to do—stop and reflect. I know there is an immediate battle ahead, but we must assess how we lost this one first. Because we did lose. We did fail. This is no one’s fault but our own. This is not Trump’s fault. This is not the fault of those who voted for Trump. This is our fault. We didn’t listen. We presumed we knew better.

I wrote a poem a couple days after Trump’s victory and Harris’s loss. In writing through my sorrow, anger, and pain, I was able to hear the voices of those my party is meant to represent, protect, and listen to. We must do better.

Election Day

I wake early, phone lines opening at 6:30.
140 miles north
cars idle on the streets of Philadelphia—ready.
If you want to vote today, we’ll get you there.

For twelve hours, call after call after call.
The sick, the elderly, the infirm.
Disabled, addicted, blind, homeless.
Some broken, some lonely.
Some desperate for an opportunity,
any opportunity.

A woman who speaks little English
knows two words very well
and repeats them emphatically:

“No Trump. No Trump. No Trump.”

A couple at a crappy motel outside the city,
snipe at each other as we talk.
They’ve been travelling too far, are too tired,
have been looking for a ride for too long.

“I think I got to get into this mess today.
Gotta jump into this voting thing,”
a blind man tells me.
“But can’t drive myself, now can I?”

A soft-spoken girl asks,
“Can my driver please be a woman?
I need it to be a woman.”
So, when the next young woman calls
I make sure to ask if she needs any
special accommodations,
“No,” she laughs embarrassed,
“I just don’t have no money.”

The moment I hang up,
the next call comes in.
One after another after another
after another after another
after another.

Until they stop.

The next morning the sun inexplicably rises,
shining down on a state awash in red—
the City of Brotherly Love,
a blue bruise in the corner.

We failed.

We failed Auntie Audrey, 102,
whose niece didn’t own a car.
She’d seen so much in her lifetime,
but not a president that looked like her.

We failed the homeless mother of two,
desperate to traverse the city from her shelter.
“The car needs to be big enough for all of us.
I need to bring my kids.”

We failed because someone forgot.
Forgot who we were fighting for.
Forgot who needed protecting.
Forgot our soul.

They forgot those five men
at the inpatient addiction facility
who needed a second chance.

They forgot that damn couple
in that crappy motel
who went from yelling at each other,
to yelling at me
because their ride hadn’t shown up.
They were hungry. They were done.

We all need to remember.
Because when we forgot,
we didn’t just fail Philadelphia.
We failed our entire country.

The right to seek asylum or refuge from danger is a fundamental human right. It’s protected by both international and U.S. law.

But U.S. President-elect Donald Trump wants to eliminate that right, including for the most vulnerable: children. These children are often forced to cross the border without their parents to try and claim asylum in the United States.

I spoke with Arlene Rodriguez, Esteffany Luna, and Esther Ramos, who provide legal and social services to unaccompanied migrant youth in Texas. They gave me a glimpse into the daunting obstacles faced by young asylum seekers.

We’ll need to band together and advocate for local and state governments to pass legislation defending immigrant communities—and for President Joe Biden to take steps to protect migrants before Trump takes office.

Nearly a third of new cases in immigration court are minors, I learned, with 1 out of 8 being 0-4 years old.

But these children are expected to navigate the same complex processes as adults. “They have to sign their own agreements and applications, present themselves in court, and answer the judges’ questions,” said Ramos. “They’re treated very adversarially—not much different from adults.”

“Sometimes they’re so young they don’t understand what they’re being asked to do, or what is being asked of them,” Luna added.

Asylum applicants have to undergo “credible fear” screenings to convince authorities that it’s unsafe for them to go home. In interviews, documents, and court appearances, children are required to repeatedly disclose trauma, which takes a toll. “For older kids who are more conscious of the bad things they’ve experienced, it’s difficult to deal with having someone else know about it,” Rodriguez told me.

Unaccompanied minors with legal representation are nearly 100 times more likely to be granted relief than those without. But unfortunately, there’s no right to an attorney in immigration court, and pro bono legal services are scarce. And the few hard-won protections minors do have are at risk of being undermined as Trump retakes office.

During his first term, President Trump tried to terminate the 1997 Flores agreement, which set standards for the care and release of children in federal immigration custody. He gutted asylum qualifications, removing domestic and gang violence as reasons to obtain protection. And most notoriously, his “zero-tolerance” policy forcibly separated over 5,000 children from their parents in immigration custody.

Under a policy called Title 42, many asylum applicants were turned away altogether, violating their due process. Under “Remain in Mexico,” applicants including children were forced to await asylum hearings in Mexico, exposing many to danger. And courts were hostile and caseloads were rushed through.

Ramos put it bluntly: “Immigration law has always been hard—attorneys call it a dumpster fire. Under the Trump administration, it was like trying to put out a dumpster fire with a liter of gasoline.”

For children seeking asylum, the mental and emotional toll of these legal procedures is compounded by language barriers, social marginalization, and fear of deportation.

These fears can also deter their sponsors, the relatives or volunteers who take them in while their case proceeds—and who are often undocumented themselves. It can even discourage them from accessing medical care, educational services, and food banks due to fears of arrest.

The three experts I spoke to all agreed our immigration system is outdated and inefficient—but said reform should make it more welcoming, not restrictive.

Until then, we’ll need to band together and advocate for local and state governments to pass legislation defending immigrant communities—and for President Joe Biden to take steps to protect migrants before Trump takes office. You can also help by donating to organizations that support immigrants.

Asylum is a matter of life or death for these kids. If we truly care about the safety and dignity of children, our immigration policies must reflect that commitment.

For a century, the Equal Rights Amendment—or ERA—has symbolized hope and justice. Drafted in 1923, the ERA declares, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Approved by Congress in 1972 and ratified by the requisite three-fourths of states—culminating with Virginia in 2020—it has met all constitutional requirements to become the 28th Amendment. Yet its certification has been unjustly delayed.

President Donald Trump ignored it, and President Joe Biden now has the opportunity to address this injustice and reaffirm his commitment to equality and the rule of law by giving notice of its passage to National Archivist Colleen Shogan to publish the ERA.

The Constitution evolves to reflect America’s progress and values. Certifying the ERA would mark a historic step in rectifying the foundational omission of gender equality. Opponents argue that Congress’ seven-year ratification deadline and rescissions by six states invalidate the ERA. However, the American Bar Association (ABA), representing over 400,000 legal professionals, rejected these claims in a 2023 resolution. The ABA asserts that Article V of the Constitution prohibits Congress from imposing deadlines or states from revoking ratifications.

The Equal Rights Amendment is more than legislation—it promises that America values all citizens equally.

Recognizing the ERA honors the constitutional amendment process and sets a precedent for advancing democratic principles. By certifying it, President Biden would reaffirm the Constitution as a living document and uphold the rule of law.

Although the United States is seen as a global leader, it lags behind 76% of countries that guarantee gender equality in their constitutions. Enshrining the ERA would signal America’s commitment to justice and human rights. A 2016 ERA Coalition survey found that 94% of Americans support a constitutional amendment ensuring gender equality, highlighting the widespread public mandate for this change.

President Biden has long championed equality, from his work on the Violence Against Women Act to advancing gender equity through executive actions. Certifying the ERA would cement his legacy as a president who expanded civil rights and upheld fundamental freedoms.

Current federal and state laws against sex discrimination are inconsistent and subject to change. Recent Supreme Court decisions embracing originalism threaten decades of progress in gender equality. By enshrining the ERA in the Constitution, President Biden can ensure permanent protections that surpass the vulnerabilities of statutory laws.

Certification would fortify gender equality as an unassailable right and inspire progress in other areas of civil rights. The ERA offers a foundation for broader justice, creating a ripple effect across communities.

Current federal and state laws addressing gender discrimination, pay disparities, violence against women, and discrimination against pregnant individuals are inconsistent and vulnerable to shifts in political and judicial interpretation, with recent Supreme Court decisions embracing originalism threatening decades of progress. By certifying the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as part of the Constitution, President Biden can establish permanent, unassailable protections against such injustices, ensuring that gender equality is enshrined at the highest legal level. This action would safeguard the progress made and provide a foundation for advancing broader civil rights, creating a ripple effect of justice and equity across communities.

The Equal Rights Amendment is more than legislation—it promises that America values all citizens equally. As we celebrate 100 years since its inception, the time has come to fulfill that promise. The ERA has met all constitutional requirements, and the American people overwhelmingly support its inclusion in the Constitution.

President Biden must seize this moment to notify the National Archivist, ensuring the ERA’s certification as the 28th Amendment. This is not just a legal or political issue but a moral imperative. Certifying the ERA would reaffirm America’s dedication to equality, justice, and the rule of law.

By taking this bold step, President Biden would inspire future generations, honor those who fought tirelessly for equality, and secure a brighter, fairer future for all. Let this act of leadership define his presidency and the nation’s commitment to its highest ideals.