Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 6 2024

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

Kamala Harris’s Wall Street charm offensive begins to pay off

[Financial Times, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-04-2024]

“Two finance executives close to Harris said she had reassured them that she could appoint new officials to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission who would take a less aggressive stance than current respective chairs Gary Gensler and Lina Khan.”

Rev. William Barber II demands focus on poverty, proposes debate format to ‘put facts out’

James Powel, October 3, 2024 [USA TODAY, via Common Dreams]

As the nation reviewed the vice presidential debate between Ohio Sen. JD Vance and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz Tuesday night, Rev. William J. Barber II noticed one group of people missing from the conversation: the poor.

The founder of Repairers of the Breach, The Poor People’s Campaign and the Director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale told USA TODAY in an interview Wednesday that the presidential race, and by extension the vice presidential debate, was not revealing solutions for the nearly 38 million people living in poverty in the country….

Progressives Must Act Now to Shape Kamala Harris’s White House

Jeff Hauser, Kenny Stancil October 2, 2024 [American Prospect]

Now is the time for progressives to weigh in on jobs that don’t require Senate confirmation….

…But beyond independent agencies and the Cabinet, there are many influential White House positions for which Senate confirmation is not required. Harris has no excuse for not taking her best swings here. In the same vein, progressives have no excuse for not advocating for the best possible nominees—and preparing to register disapproval if warranted.

As a general principle, Harris should appoint individuals who have a demonstrated commitment to furthering the public interest, rather than entrenching corporate power or seeking personal advancement. This means appointees’ résumés should reflect careers spent advocating for the common good—including experience in federal, state, or local governments as well as other public-sector or nonprofit work—as opposed to careers spent working on behalf of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and other nerve centers of corporate America. Moreover, given the need for an all-of-government approach to solving our myriad and overlapping crises, the people Harris names should also have the ability to creatively leverage available power to drive change.

What follows is a brief overview of key jobs and some lessons on what to look for—and look out for.

• White House chief of staff, deputy chiefs of staff, and special assistants: The chief of staff is a Cabinet-level official who exercises a tremendous amount of influence, as both adviser to the president and manager of the Executive Office of the President. The chief of staff’s duties range from selecting and supervising White House personnel to directing policy development and negotiating legislation with congressional leaders, Cabinet secretaries, and advocacy groups.

The night-and-day difference between Ron Klain and Jeff Zients, Biden’s first and second chiefs of staff, underscores the importance of getting this pick right. For two years, Klain worked constructively with the left wing of the Democratic Party—securing significant investments in clean energy and domestic manufacturing along with provisions to lower prescription drug costs and more resources to ensure the top 1 percent pays the taxes it owes—and he empowered progressive regulators to crack down on corporate wrongdoing. Since February 2023, super-rich former management consultant Zients has overseen a comparatively anemic Biden administration. Although losing the House in the 2022 midterms no doubt made the legislative side of Zients’s job tougher, that’s no excuse for failing to (a) tell a compelling story about Biden’s domestic accomplishments (including those that made Zients’s fellow plutocrats sad), and (b) convince voters that the Democratic Party has concrete plans to improve working people’s lives….

• National Economic Council….

• National Security Council….

• White House Counsel….

• Domestic Policy Council….

• Senior Communications Staff: Biden’s comms team has been dreadful, to put it mildly. Most of the electorate is completely unaware of the steps the Biden administration has taken to push the economy in a greener and more equitable direction. Kate Bedingfield and Ben LaBolt, the former and current White House communications director, respectively, deserve a lot of the blame for the disconnect between Biden’s policies and voters’ perceptions. So does Anita Dunn, former senior adviser to the president for communications. These figures decided that the best thing to do when the Biden administration fights corporate power is to not let people know about it. (Or, if it is discussed, do so in the most abstract way possible designed to reduce the chance of a fight that might, God forbid, draw attention.)

Given the popularity of cracking down on corporate crime, that’s exactly the opposite of what should be done. And Biden’s senior comms staff hasn’t only failed to convey the president’s domestic achievements; they’ve also failed to adequately explain the extent to which profiteering corporations have fueled the cost-of-living crisis, allowing Biden to unfairly take heat for inflation. For example, the Biden White House has yet to publicly condemn Scott Sheffield, the Republican mega-donor who colluded with U.S. drillers and OPEC officials to limit the global supply of oil, which ultimately increased gasoline prices and augmented fossil fuel industry profits at the direct expense of working households. (The FTC cited a second public official for similar behavior this week.) What’s more, the White House has remained silent about Sheffield’s price-fixing conspiracy even as the Trump campaign courts Big Oil donors with pledges to repeal Biden’s climate and environmental policy rulemakings. Harris can and must do better.

If Harris wins, her transition team will be making decisions about these jobs in November. Progressives ought to weigh in now!

MASTER PLAN, Ep 7: The Federalist Society Strikes Back

September 24, 2024 [The Lever]

In the first of two episodes about the creation of the Roberts Court, we use never-before-reported internal emails to expose how the master planners plotted to install new judges who would be guaranteed to deliver the rulings they wanted.

The political environment of the early Bush era provided master planners with a pivotal opportunity to mobilize the legal machine they had been building since the Powell Memo era….

… the master planners’ big problem at this particular moment: They knew it wasn’t enough to just win legislative elections or bring lawsuits. They knew they had to change the judges, or their agenda was doomed.

They needed judges who weren’t casually conservative – they had to install inculcated ideologues on the bench who would be guaranteed to deliver the rulings they want — rulings that help big business, disempower workers — and, of course, deregulate the campaign finance system.

And they needed to be ready to install their judicial picks when a seat opened up….

MASTER PLAN, Ep 8: Shock and Awe At The Supreme Court

October 1, 2024 [The Lever]

Operatives like Leonard Leo and Brett Kavanaugh aimed to seize the moment and dramatically shift the balance of the Supreme Court, which was still upholding at least some campaign finance laws — and they had their perfect candidates in mind. But when Bush went off script and nominated Harriet Miers, a trusted lawyer from his inner circle, the conservative legal movement launched an insurgency. The result was the creation of the Roberts Court.

By the end of 2005, the master planners’ legal movement, which had been building since the Powell Memo era of the early 1970s, had managed to largely stack the Supreme Court. But one big question remained: Would the last remaining swing-vote justice join the master planners in their quest to deregulate the campaign finance system and gut anti-corruption laws?

MASTER PLAN Bonus: The Other Memo

September 26, 2024 [The Lever]

Lever Time producer Arjun Singh and investigative journalist David Daley discuss the other memo behind the conservative takeover of the courts.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet for SCOTUS

[Talking Points Memo, October 5, 2024]

There’s a curious reference several pages into the Jack Smith filing that was unsealed this week, which provided the fullest account yet of Trump’s effort to coup his way out of losing the 2020 election.

It’s to the 2000 Brooks Brothers Riot, an event that Smith characterized as a “violent effort” to block vote-counting in Florida after the 2000 election. On its face, Smith was using the riot as an analogy for aspects of what happened in 2020….

Of the justices currently on the court, Justices Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Roberts all advised the Bush campaign in some form or another on the 2000 election fight. By including the reference to the Brooks Brothers Riot, Smith tied the violence of Trump’s 2020 election theft attempt back to the 2000 election. I’m open to interpretations here, but given his audience, it’s striking as a particularly sharp way of calling out the same people who will have final say over the case.

The Law School Dean Who Quietly Worked to Overturn the Election 

Shawn Musgrave, October 2, 2024 [The Intercept]

On the evening of January 6, 2021 — as the Capitol Police were doing final sweeps of ransacked buildings and senators were preparing to resume the electoral vote count — former President Donald Trump asked the White House switchboard to get Mark Martin on the phone.

A retired North Carolina Supreme Court justice, Martin was a key adviser to Trump’s multi-pronged fight to overturn his loss in November 2020. In discussions with aides and administration officials, Trump considered Martin’s counsel as important as that of attorney John Eastman, who’s currently under indictment in two states and may be disbarred in a third. Trump so trusted Martin that another legal adviser name-dropped him to bolster his own pitches….

An Oil Giant Railroads Its SCOTUS Connection To Gut Environmental Law

October 4, 2024 [The Lever]

A fossil fuel tycoon tied to Neil Gorsuch and other corporate power brokers are pushing the Supreme Court to help approve a controversial oil train and kill environmental protections.

Sports betting will do to America what it’s done to Australia. 

[Jacobin, via Naked Capitalism 10-01-2024]

…More than a million gambling ads are broadcast annually in Australia, across TV, radio, and the internet. Half of those are from just five companies.

Sports betting has recently been liberalized in the United States. Australia presents the nightmare scenario of what happens when the industry starts to hit its full potential.

The incessant nature of the commercials form part of what one might call the gambling-industrial complex. It is a status quo that benefits several key stakeholders in society at the expense of some of the most vulnerable.

Australians lose more on gambling than any other nation on Earth, around US$22 billion per year, or over a thousand dollars per person. That’s twice what it is per capita in the United States or United Kingdom.

The CEO of the Alliance for Gambling Reform, Martin Thomas, described it as “social harm on an industrial scale.” He’s not wrong.

A 2023 report by Labor MP Peta Murphy called on gambling advertising to be pulled from TV, and now a bill with that aim is advancing through federal parliament….

The second part of this landscape is the media, which has much to lose from gambling reform. TV and print in Australia are controlled by two conglomerates: News Corp — Rupert Murdoch’s local outfit — and Nine Entertainment. Between them, they have all the big national and regional newspapers, the main pay TV platform, and one of the two big free-to-air TV networks….

Global power shift

The Lobito Corridor: Washington’s Answer to Belt and Road in Africa 

[Geopolitical Monitor, via Naked Capitalism 09-29-2024]

Gaza / Palestine / Israel

Special Report: Emails show early US concerns over Gaza offensive, risk of Israeli war crimes

Humeyra Pamuk, October 4, 2024 [Reuters]

Reuters reviewed three sets of email exchanges between senior U.S. administration officials, dated Oct. 11 to 14, just days into the crisis….

The emails, which haven’t been reported before, reveal alarm early on in the State Department and Pentagon that a rising death toll in Gaza could violate international law and jeopardize U.S. ties in the Arab world. The messages also show internal pressure in the Biden administration to shift its messaging from showing solidarity with Israel to including sympathy for Palestinians and the need to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza….

Early on, concerns grew inside the administration about America’s image with its Arab allies.

After Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza’s hospitals, schools and mosques, the U.S. State Department’s top public diplomacy official, Bill Russo, told senior State officials that Washington was “losing credibility among Arabic-speaking audiences” by not directly addressing the humanitarian crisis, according to an Oct. 11 email. Gaza’s health authorities reported that day a death toll of about 1,200.

As Israel defended the strikes, saying Hamas was using civilian buildings for military purposes, Russo wrote that U.S. diplomats in the Middle East were monitoring Arab media reports that accused Israel of waging a “genocide” and Washington of complicity in war crimes.

“The U.S.’s lack of response on the humanitarian conditions for Palestinians is not only ineffective and counterproductive, but we are also being accused of being complicit to potential war crimes by remaining silent on Israel’s actions against civilians,” Russo wrote.

Over 1 Million Flee ‘Total Destruction’ in Lebanon, With Cease-Fire Demanded

Edward Carver, October 04, 2024 [CommonDreams]

The Appalling Attack on Ta-Nehisi Coates Is a Massive Media Failing

Meredith Shiner, October 2, 2024 [The New Republic]

…It is extremely disorienting to find yourself in the season of personal accountability described above while also reckoning with the total abdication of accountability from the institutions that hold the actual power to grapple with and correct the utter destruction this past year has wrought—from establishment Judaism to American politics and the mainstream media. We have watched Israel kill civilians, parents, children, doctors, aid workers, journalists, and many more, ostensibly in the name of Judaism but more likely in the furtherance of Benjamin Netanyahu’s craven political career—and ultimately in the abandonment of every value our religion and basic human rights should uphold.

We have witnessed antisemitism get stripped of its meaning and used as a tool to silence legitimate criticism of these very structures and their failure to stop the killing. We are told consistently that there is no right way to speak out against a clear wrong because systematically every method of protest, from campus demonstrations to essays to books to social media posts to peaceful marches on the streets, is framed as an amorphous attack on Jews everywhere as opposed to focused critiques of a specific wrong being perpetrated by a few powerful individuals….

A week prior to Coates’s on-air mugging, Representative Rashida Tlaib was baselessly smeared on CNN, with anchor Jake Tapper fabricating comments from Tlaib to frame a “gotcha” question for Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, trying to get Whitmer to condemn Tlaib as antisemitic for something she never said. When Whitmer wouldn’t, another CNN anchor, Dana Bash, did a very special segment where she stated antisemitism is a both-sides problem and then refused to apologize for having mischaracterized Tlaib, in a follow-up segment to address the widespread criticism of her first.

CNN harmfully distorted a legitimate critique: Tlaib, in an interview with a Detroit news outlet and in alignment with the position of the American Civil Liberties Union, opposed Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s decision to charge peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan, saying, “This is a move that’s going to set a precedent, and it’s unfortunate that a Democrat made that move. We’ve had the right to dissent, the right to protest. We’ve done it for climate, the immigrant rights movement, for Black lives, and even around issues of injustice among water shutoffs. But it seems that the attorney general decided if the issue was Palestine, she was going to treat it differently, and that alone speaks volumes about possible biases within the agency she runs.”

Oligarchy

All That Twitters 

[The Baffler, via Naked Capitalism 09-30-2024]

In a May 2022 SEC filing, Musk listed a number of his planned Twitter co-investors and their equity stakes, so we had some idea who was helping him buy the company. Other reporting—including a public show of support from Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal and text messages produced for a Delaware court that revealed a $1 billion commitment from billionaire tech luminary Larry Ellison—helped fill in the picture. But once Twitter went private that October and Musk set about slashing and burning the divisions of the company that offended him, there was no definitive list of its shareholders, or the names of the trusts, funds, LLCs, and other corporate entities holding their shares.

This August, a federal judge ruled in favor of a motion filed on my behalf by Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to unseal a list of shareholders that had been filed by the company, since renamed X, under seal as part of one of the many civil lawsuits that it faces in the wake of Musk’s disastrous turn at the helm. We now have a complete list—dated April 2023—of who helped Musk acquire Twitter. I’ve argued that this list is important for a number of reasons, but here’s just one: according to the Washington Post, anyone who invested more than $250 million received special access to sensitive data about the company and its users. Who pitched in that much? Saudi Arabia, Qatar, a mysterious UAE-based venture capital firm, a lawless crypto exchange, and CIA contractor Ellison. I’m sure they’re happy with their access. What follows is a rough taxonomy of X shareholders—a half-serious attempt to categorize and account for the moneymen helping boost Musk Inc. It takes a lot of cash to prop up an oligarch, and some of it comes from unsavory sources….

Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust
Larry Ellison is the eighty-year-old founder of Oracle. Larry Ellison started his business with help from the CIA and is the second richest person in the world after Elon Musk. Larry Ellison owns the Hawaiian island of Lanai, where he invited Musk to come cleanse himself of drugs. Larry Ellison strategized about how to overturn the 2020 election. Larry Ellison promises a world where “citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.” Larry Ellison will bury us all….

Binance Capital Management Co., Ltd
One of the more laughably corrupt companies around, Binance is also the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange by volume. Its cofounder and CEO, Changpeng Zhao, is currently finishing up a slap-on-the-wrist term in U.S. federal prison for money laundering violations. Binance paid a fine of more than $4 billion for allowing its platform to become a financial clearing house for terrorists, money launderers, sanctioned oligarchs, and other bad guys. The multibillion-dollar company has no official headquarters (before he copped a plea, Zhao was based in the United Arab Emirates). Binance Capital Management Co.—which put $500 million into Musk’s buyout—is registered in the Cayman Islands with an office address on a residential street in Malta….

The Most Powerful Crypto Bro in Washington Has Very Weird Beliefs

Gil Duran, October 1, 2024 [The New Republic]

…A Public Citizen study last month found that crypto companies, which contributed less than $10 million to super PACs over the past two election cycles combined, have raised more than $200 million in 2024—accounting for nearly half of all corporate contributions this cycle. Most of that money has flowed into pro-crypto Fairshake, the largest corporate-backed super PAC in this election cycle (and the second-largest overall, after a pro-Trump PAC); as of Friday, Fairshake had spent $120 million on U.S. House and Senate races this year, according to an analysis by Sludge.

In the US, opioid-maker Purdue is bankrupt. Its global counterparts make millions 

[The Examination, via Naked Capitalism 09-30-2024]

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

What this Boeing strike is really all about

Allison Morrow and Chris Isidore, September 14, 2024

…Last year, Boeing didn’t make a profit. In fact, the plane maker has lost money every year since 2018, when a series of deadly crashes and near-disasters left its reputation and finances in the gutter. If Boeing were any other business — and not a too-big-fail half of a global duopoly — it almost certainly would have declared bankruptcy.

Still, in 2023, the CEO — an accountant by training — got a 45% pay bump, to nearly $33 million.

Meanwhile, wages for Boeing’s 33,000 unionized employees have been stagnant.

They are, quite simply, furious.

Years of pent-up resentment over Boeing’s mismanagement, combined with pandemic-era inflation and a resurgent labor movement, made this strike inevitable….

In 2014, CEO James McNerney inflamed tensions with the rank and file when, on an investor call, said he would delay his retirement because “the heart will still be beating, the employees will still be cowering.” ….

All of this presents an early test, and an opportunity, for Boeing’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, who took over just five weeks ago.

Ortberg, a mechanical engineer with nearly four decades of experience in the aerospace industry, has the unenviable job of undoing a decade’s worth of executive missteps that prioritized efficiency over quality and wrecked the company’s relationship with its unionized workforce — roughly 20% of all Boeing employees.

A strike is hardly ideal for the new boss, especially given Boeing’s concurrent crises of multiple federal investigations into January’s almost-catastrophic door-plug blowout, two of its astronauts stuck in space and awaiting rescue from Boeing’s rival, SpaceX, plus a cadre of angry customers and a stock price that’s lost 40% of its value this year.

But so far, Ortberg appears to have built up some goodwill. He spent his first day at work last month touring the factory floor in Renton, Washington, and announced he would do his job primarily from the Seattle office, close to several factories and a good 2,300 miles from the company’s corporate offices in Virginia that have come to symbolize Boeing’s departure from its roots.

Predatory finance

A Toxic Explosion in Private Equity Payouts

Maureen Tkacik and Luke Goldstein, October 2, 2024 [American Prospect]

Private equity barons just pocketed as much as $850 million from the company behind this week’s massive chemical blast in Georgia.

They’re not capitalists — they’re predatory criminals

Crypto founder paid LA cops to help extort victims for crypto, FBI alleges 

[Coin Telegraph, via Naked Capitalism 09-30-2024]

Adam Iza, who ran the crypto trading platform Zort, accumulated wealth funneled through shell companies, spent on luxuries and concealed the receipt of tens of millions of dollars without reporting income taxes, according to a United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) affidavit filed in an LA federal court on Sept. 23 and made available on Sept. 26.

Iza also allegedly paid three Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) deputies to unlawfully file search warrants and access police data, according to the affidavit.

Iza — also known as Ahmed Faiq and “The Godfather” — allegedly bragged about paying as much as $280,000 a month to the deputies and is accused of using police information to try to coerce one alleged victim, identified only as “E.Z.,” into handing over a laptop used to store crypto.

Monopoly Round-Up: Corporate Slumlords and Housing Cartels  

Matt Stoller [BIG, via Naked Capitalism 09-30-2024]

Restoring balance to the economy

135.9 Million Reasons Why the Working Class Is So Angry 

Les Leopold, October 06, 2024 [Common Dreams]

Workers know that when a private equity firm buys up the company at which they work or a stock buyback is announced, they are likely about to get kicked in the face….

Solutions Are Easy to Find, But Political Will is not

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (especially not the labor-averse space mogul Elon Musk) to design simple solutions that would provide some protection against needless mass layoffs. Here’s a list:

1. The Security and Exchange Commission, which deregulated stock buybacks in 1982, should basically outlaw them again by limiting stock buybacks to no more than 2 percent of corporate profits. Today, nearly 70 percent of corporate profits go to stock buybacks.
2. Debt used in leveraged buyouts should be limited to no more than 10 percent of the purchase price. That would protect workers from being sacrificed to service enormous debt loads.
3. Add two simple clauses to the $700 billion of taxpayer money that goes for federal purchases of goods and services. It should read:
   1. No taxpayer money shall go to corporations that lay off taxpayers or conduct stock buybacks.
   2. For those companies receiving taxpayer money, layoffs must be voluntary, not compulsory, as is already the case for many white-collar employees.

Reducing the use of mass layoffs to provide financing for corporate and executive looting would be a big win for working people. Alas, we all know deep down that politicians are not about to bite the Wall Street hands that feed them. In the meantime, millions of workers will continue to be sacrificed on the alter of corporate greed.

How Congress Gets Its Groove Back

David Dayen, September 30, 2024 [American Prospect]

The Supreme Court’s recent rulings will change how Congress writes laws. It may even force the legislative branch to take a hard look at its own dysfunctions….

…The doctrine of “Chevron deference” said that courts must give executive branch agencies wide latitude to interpret ambiguous statutes, as long as the decision was reasonable. But on behalf of herring companies like Loper Bright, Chief Justice John Roberts overturned Chevron deference, ruling that federal agencies no longer get the benefit of the doubt, and that judges are empowered to “exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.”

This was a long-standing goal of conservatives and corporations. It interrupts the normal process of agency rulemaking and lets courts throw out regulations they don’t like. With the Supreme Court under right-wing control, that presages a deregulatory bonanza.

Hearing this story, you might consider it a struggle for power between the judiciary and executive branches. Yet it’s really an attack on Congress.

The Constitution vests all legislative authority in the first branch of government, which explicitly authorized executive branch agencies to carry out their statutory wishes. If judges now get to decide what those statutes actually mean, Congress is cut off from the execution of the laws it passes….

… In speaking to over 20 lawmakers, current and former staffers, and experts in congressional procedure, I learned that Congress can legislate with clarity, purpose, and sufficient resolve to counteract judicial policymaking. It will require boosts in staff capacity, new processes to affirm legislative intent, stronger roles for lawmakers outside of leadership, and maybe even new agencies to assist Congress. And with almost no notice over the past few years, both parties have actually begun to work on this. Loper Bright could serve as a precipitating event to accelerate this modernization of Congress….

FORCING LAWMAKERS TO WREST BACK CONTROL of the legislative process sounds empowering. But if Congress is to meet the judiciary’s demands, it will first have to reverse its epic slide in capacity, ushered in largely by Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in 1994.

When Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives that year, crippling government was an end goal, so thinning out the personnel in Congress who see government as worth preserving became an imperative. Gingrich immediately cut professional staff, who work for committees rather than individual members, as well as legislative support staff at agencies like the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which audit and analyze policy questions. The Office of Technology Assessment, established to provide technical advice to Congress, was completely dismantled….

Health care crisis

CEO of “health care terrorists” sues senators after contempt of Congress charges 

[ars technica, via Naked Capitalism 10-02-2024]

The infamous CEO of a failed hospital system is suing an entire Senate committee for being held in contempt of Congress on civil and criminal charges that were unanimously approved by the full Senate last week.

In a federal lawsuit filed Monday, Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre claimed the senators “bulldozed over [his] constitutional rights” as they tried to “pillory and crucify him as a loathsome criminal” in a “televised circus.”

The Senate committee—the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), led by Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—issued a rare subpoena to de la Torre in July, compelling him to testify before the lawmakers. They sought to question the CEO on the deterioration of his hospital system, which previously included more than 30 hospitals across eight states. Steward filed for bankruptcy in May….

An Epic Dystopia: How a near-monopoly gained control of most of the nation’s electronic medical records, to the detriment of medical practice and doctor morale

Robert Kuttner, October 1, 2024 [American Prospect]

I periodically see three wonderful doctors, my internist and two specialists. They all know that I’m a journalist who once wrote for The New England Journal of Medicine. Every time I see them, even before they examine me, each one spends several minutes railing about something called Epic. That sort of thing tends to pique a journalist’s curiosity.

Epic, known formally as Epic Systems, turns out to be a privately held company that provides the electronic database for patient records and billing used today in 39 percent of all U.S. hospitals. But that understates Epic’s market dominance. The company has become the medical record database vendor for the vast majority of academic medical centers and other large hospital systems. Epic’s software keeps track of about 260 million individual patient records, just under 80 percent of the entire U.S. population. Its revenue was $4.9 billion in 2023, according to a company spokesperson.

Information age dystopia / surveillance state

The Empire Strikes Back 

Ken Klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 09-30-2024]

The largest Internet companies — Meta (Facebook) and Google — swiftly censored the J.D. Vance research dossier that I published this week, following X’s move to ban me and stop the circulation of the Trump campaign document.

The platforms said that the alleged Iranian origin of the dossier — which no one is calling fake or altered —  necessitated removing any links to the document. These very same companies had earlier promised not to remove content for political reasons. Even Google Drive restricts users from sharing the dossier.

The major media had been sitting on the Vance document for months despite the obvious newsworthiness of a campaign document about a Vice Presidential nominee. I was quite clear in my article that it was presumably from an Iranian hack. I sought and published a critical comment to that effect from the Trump campaign’s spokesperson. I also included a summary of the intelligence community evidence of Iran’s hack-and-leak operations targeting the campaign.

But now the empire strikes back — fearful of running afoul of the federal government’s war on foreign influence, about which there is something of a moral panic today. These are powerful forces. Very.

The decision by Meta companies Instagram, Facebook and Threads to restrict access to my news article is considerably more significant than X (Twitter). Whereas X says it has about 250 million daily active users, Meta says its platforms have over 3 billion active users. And unlike X, which is hiding behind the pretext that my news article violates their policy on “private information,” Meta just came out and said what this is really all about: fear of foreign influence….

Facebook throttles local League of Women Voters with an election coming up. Kansans, stay vigilant.

[Kansas Reflector, via Naked Capitalism 10-01-2024]

…The latest, and perhaps most outrageous, example was the suspension of the League of Women Voters of Lawrence-Douglas County‘s page on Facebook.

Sonja Czarnecki, president of the league chapter, contacted me and other local news media outlets earlier this month after Facebook axed the page for “violating community standards” and highlighting “impersonation.” Czarnecki had no idea what was going on or why. The nonprofit, nonpartisan group encourages civic participation and voting. One could scarcely imagine a more benign bunch.

The Lawrence Journal-World published a story about the suspension Sept. 17. Miraculously, the page was restored by the next day.

“This experience has been unnerving,” Czarnecki told me late last week. “It was a stark reminder that Meta is a private company, not a democracy where folks are entitled to due process and knowledge of the charges when accused. I never found out any more information about why our pages had been suspended, or why they were put back….

AI agent promotes itself to sysadmin, trashes boot sequence 

[The Register, via Naked Capitalism 10-02-2024]

Buck Shlegeris, CEO at Redwood Research, a nonprofit that explores the risks posed by AI, recently learned an amusing but hard lesson in automation when he asked his LLM-powered agent to open a secure connection from his laptop to his desktop machine.

“I expected the model would scan the network and find the desktop computer, then stop,” Shlegeris explained to The Register via email.

“I was surprised that after it found the computer, it decided to continue taking actions, first examining the system and then deciding to do a software update, which it then botched.”

Shlegeris documented the incident in a social media post.

Collapse of independent news media

‘I’m Free Because I Pled Guilty to Journalism’ 

Julian Assange, October 02, 2024 [original.antiwar.com, via Naked Capitalism 10-02-2024]

Julian Assange’s address Tuesday morning to the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

I eventually chose freedom over and realizable justice. After being detained for years and facing 175 year sentence with no effective remedy. Justice for me is now precluded, as the U.S. government insisted in writing into its plea agreement that I cannot filed a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even the Freedom of Information Act request over what it did to me as a result of its extradition request.

I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism. I pled guilty to seeking information from a source. I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.

Climate and environmental crises

Four ways climate change likely made Hurricane Helene worse 

[Yale Climate Connections, via Naked Capitalism 09-29-2024]

Antarctica is ‘Greening’ at Dramatic Rate as Climate Heats 

[Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 10-05-2024]

Extreme Weather Around the World Risks Boosting Food Bill. 

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 10-01-2024]

The Bloomberg Agriculture Spot Index — which includes nine major products — had a monthly gain of more than 7%, the most since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent markets soaring in early 2022. While it remains far from that year’s peak, the rally comes as farms from Brazil to Vietnam and Australia battle both flooding and overly dry weather, threatening sugar, grain and coffee.

Poison PR 

[Lighthouse Reports, via Naked Capitalism 09-30-2024]

“US taxpayers funded a covert campaign to downplay the risks of pesticides and discredit environmentalists in Africa, Europe, and North America.”

Creating new economic potential – science and technology

Vietnam plans US$67 billion high-speed railway with no foreign capital 

As FTC Chair Lina Khan’s Term Expires, Democrats Are Torn Between Donors and Their Base 

[Wired, via Naked Capitalism 09-30-2024]

Are Democrats Even a Little Serious About Stopping Private Equity?

Maureen Tkacik, October 04, 2024 [American Prospect]

…AS UNIQUELY AND UNAPOLOGETICALLY SHAMELESS as Ralph de la Torre is, he is not terribly unique from a business model perspective. He founded Steward with backing from Cerberus Capital Management in 2010, the year the Affordable Care Act passage triggered what would become a trillion-dollar stampede of private equity funds into hospitals, nursing homes, surgery centers, pediatric dental clinics, and so forth. An increasingly voluminous body of research has been published documenting the consequences of this craze: showing that private equity control of health care institutions is associated with a 27 percent increase in patient falls, a 38 percent increase in central line infections, a 10 percent increase in nursing home mortality, price increases ranging from 26 percent for anesthesiology practices to 90 percent for emergency medicine, etc. De la Torre’s cash-starved hospitals, for their part, were more than three times likelier than the average hospital be cited by CMS inspectors for placing the health of patients in “immediate jeopardy,” the most serious infraction.

Perhaps most significantly, the orgy of private equity buyouts was followed by a spate of service disruptions and facility shutdowns that left thousands jobless and made it more impossible for certain types of sick patients to find a hospital bed. Private equity extraction has closed hospitals across the country and nursing homes, maternity wards, and medical clinics in virtually every state, and with those closures have come a litany of headaches for public officials: massive job losses and attendant tax revenues, last-ditch deals to save community hospitals, bad headlines, calls from angry constituents, etc.

And so over the past year or so, legislators across the country introduced a flurry of bills designed to subject health care transactions involving private investors to increased preemptive scrutiny, and in some cases protect the clinicians working in those institutions from having their clinical decisions directed by corporate bean-counters. The Oregon House of Representatives passed a bill outlawing a favored private equity trick of appointing “friendly doctors” as sham owners of medical institutions. The Minnesota House introduced a bill banning another favored private equity tactic of doing “sale-leasebacks” on hospital buildings and pocketing the proceeds for investors. The Massachusetts Senate passed a bill explicitly inspired by de la Torre and Steward, giving the state more powers to demand information about and block private equity health care transactions. And both houses of the California legislature passed bills strengthening the state’s corporate practice of medicine doctrine and subjecting private equity health care transactions to enhanced paperwork requirements and attorney general scrutiny. Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), too, introduced a federal version of some of these bills, the Health Over Wealth Act, that would require private equity firms to get special HHS licenses before acquiring health care providers, and to subject such transactions to increased oversight.

But one by one, all the state bills shriveled: The Oregon bill was killed by a fierce lobbying campaign and an unusually short legislative session; the Minnesota bill never made it to a vote; the Massachusetts bill passed the Senate but—rather unforgivably given that Gov. Maura Healey has admitted that bailing out just five of Steward’s hospitals will likely cost the state around $700 million—the bill never made it to a vote in the House. And then with a stroke of a pen last weekend, California Gov. Gavin Newsom killed off that state’s private equity health care oversight bill, which had passed both houses by overwhelming, ostensibly veto-proof margins, if the California legislature ever bothered to override a veto…..

135.9 Million Reasons Why the Working Class Is So Angry

Les Leopold, October 06, 2024 [Common Dreams]

Since 1993, 60.2 million workers who had been on the job for at least three years have been laid off, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Another 75.7 million with less than three years tenure have also been let go.

In total, that’s 135.9 million workers who know all too well the pain and suffering of a major disruption to their employment.

Working people understand that the periodic ups and downs of the economy can legitimately lead to job loss. But they also know that in many cases the reason they lost their job was not mismatches in supply and demand. Rather, their jobs were sacrificed to satisfy out and out corporate greed….

In 2025, Goldman Sachs estimates that corporations will conduct more than $1 trillion in stock buybacks. Tens of millions of jobs will be sacrificed to shift all that money to the richest of the rich….

Lawmakers Are Hiding Their Private Equity Millions

October 3, 2024 [The Lever]

As political battles loom over whether to crack down on Wall Street’s tax breaks and predatory behavior, the wealthiest members of Congress from both parties — including Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance — now have tens of millions of dollars collectively invested in private equity funds.

The quantity and scope of these private equity investments are growing, even as some of these same lawmakers launch bipartisan probes into the industry and Democrats warn the funds “threaten U.S. health care and block Americans from economic success.”

In many cases, these lawmakers — several of whom have recently received hefty private-equity political donations — don’t have to disclose much about these investments. The secrecy makes it difficult to discern whether these financial dealings could pose a conflict of interest.

According to a review of recent congressional financial disclosures by The Lever, 10 United States senators and 16 representatives together have more than $150 million invested in private equity, an opaque, predatory industry that critics warn is pillaging everything from health care to housing to Minor League Baseball. Private equity firms invest in companies that aren’t publicly traded on the stock market, which limits transparency around the acquisitions.

Will Democratic Reformers Save America?

Stanley B. Greenberg, October 1, 2024 [American Prospect]

Donald Trump has reshaped the electorate, but by focusing on the cost of living, Harris could still make meaningful gains….

Stop thinking that Trump is only hurting himself by continuing to assert that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, “are eating the pets of people who live there.” While this poll was in the field, Trump focused almost exclusively on high prices, Joe Biden, the open border, and immigrants doing unspeakable things. That has shifted white working-class women back to Trump. But most important, this has pushed his base of Trump loyalists to be even more determined to vote. Republicans are now more likely to vote than Democrats.

In short, by focusing on his best issues, Trump changed the likely electorate. Trump’s strategy has darkened its mood and moved the races to being tied in the Southern and Western battleground states.

He understands that a plurality of Black voters, 60 percent of Hispanics, white unmarried women and white millennials, and two-thirds of white working-class women and white union households believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. They are looking for change….

When odious foreign policy elites rally around Harris 

[Responsible Statecraft, via Naked Capitalism 09-30-2024]

Conservative / Libertarian / (anti)Republican Drive to Civil War

The Case Against Citizen Trump— Even Darker Than We Thought It Was

Howie Klein, October 3, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

…here’s the 165 page criminal filing that Judge Chutkan allowed unsealed Wednesday.

11 damning details in Jack Smith’s new brief in the Trump election case

Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein, October 2, 2024 Politico, via [downwithtyranny.com 11-03-24]

From Trump’s fictitious stats about voter fraud to the FBI’s forensic analysis of Trump’s phone, prosecutors previewed how they would make their case at trial.

Republicans lay legal groundwork for election challenges 

Jack Queen, September 30, 2024 [Reuters, via downwithtyranny.com 10-03-2024]

The significance of Vance’s appearance at event hosted by far-right Christian nationalist 

Geoff Bennett and Ian Couzens, September 30, 2024 [PBS, via The Answer is NO. As in HELL NO. As in, “Are You F*cking Kidding Me?”, by Yosef 52, October 01, 2024 [DailyKos]

Fighting Back Against Ohio’s Plutocratic Dictatorship— Another Anti-Gerrymandering Amendment: How Republicans Keep Control Despite The Voters

Howie Klein, October 1, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

In state after state, when voters have supported anti-gerrymandering efforts, the Republican Party has used raw naked power to thwart implementation… and gotten away with it.

Writing for The Nation, Zurie Pope noted that Ohio voters have another shot at the apple next month. “A proposed constitutional amendment on Ohio’s 2024 ballot,” she wrote, “would permanently change how congressional districts in the state are drawn. The proposal, titled Issue 1, would create a 15-member Citizens Redistricting Commission— made up of Democrats, Republicans, and independents— to draw district maps. Current and former politicians, political party officials, and lobbyists would be banned from sitting on the commission, and attempts to draw districts in a way that favor one political party or lawmaker would be made unconstitutional.”….

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

The New Supreme Court Session Opens Monday. It Will Not Be Pretty

Alexander Nazaryan, October 4, 2024 [The New Republic]

… In its first week alone, the Supreme Court will hear two high-profile cases: Garland v. VanDerStock, about how much power the federal government has to regulate “ghost guns,” and Glossip v. Oklahoma, a high-profile capital punishment case that has become something of a referendum on the death penalty….

In its second week, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in San Francisco v. EPA, which could further weaken an already eviscerated Clean Water Act. Later in the term, the decision in United States v. Skrmetti—a case originating in Kentucky and Tennessee—will decide how much capacity states have in limiting access to medical treatments for minors with gender dysphoria.

Jack Smith Exposed the Insanity of the Supreme Court’s Immunity Ruling

Holly Brewer, October 4, 2024 [The New Republic]

… the brief is an inadvertent road map for how to lead a legally bulletproof insurrection. All Trump or a similarly minded future president would have to do is to execute his coup via government officials only, and in the guise of supposedly “official” acts—say, via the military—and it could not be prosecuted. As long as he hired his co-conspirators, as official government employees, he would be all set.

Civic republicanism

Say Goodbye to Truth as We Know It If Trump and Vance Win

Jill Lawrence, October 01, 2024 [The Bulwark, via downwithtyranny.com 10-02-2024]

…In his final year, as the COVID pandemic erupted, Trump’s fake news and musings ranged from farcical (doses of sunlight, injections of bleach) to outrageous (“I don’t need to have the [case] numbers double because of one cruise ship that wasn’t our fault”) to tragic (dismantling pandemic response infrastructure, minimizing the crisis, pitting states against each other, and sending mixed messages on masks and vaccines).

And that was just COVID. After Helene’s devastation, it’s hard not to think of Trump gaslighting the country in 2019 by holding up a National Hurricane Center map altered with a Sharpie to support his false statements about the expected path of Hurricane Dorian. A small incident, it might seem—comical even, except that he undermined government weather scientists, triggered backlash against them, and spread false information that could have had very concrete consequences for the Americans being misled.

The attacks on government sources of scientific information began right after Trump took office. Four days after his inauguration, the new administration “instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website,” Reuters reported at the time. In Trump’s first year, a January 2018 study found, thousands of climate web pages were erased or obscured at agencies across the government. Alarmed scientists had mobilized during the 2016 transition to document the anticipated damage and save endangered government data.

A 2022 research paper concluded the Trump administration had “regularly suppressed, downplayed, or simply ignored scientific research demonstrating the need for regulation to protect public health and the environment.” The authors compiled a lengthy and far-flung catalogue, from firings to hiding information, drawn from the Silencing Science Tracker database. “Anti-science behavior” was documented at twenty-three federal agencies, they said, even in unexpected places like the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission.

The Trump team also tried to manipulate the U.S. Census for political gain, threatening the integrity of the constitutionally mandated population count used to determine House seats, electoral votes and the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal funds. A plan to speed up and cut short the pandemic-era 2020 count drew headlines and a lawsuit, as well as an inspector general’s warning that the Trump plan “poses a myriad of risks to accuracy and completeness.”

Mankind’s Greatest Thinkers Have Always Inveighed Against Our Tendency To Slide Into Plutocracy: Let’s Take A Look— From Plato To Tolstoy To Chomsky

Howie Klein, September 30, 2024  [downwithtyranny.com]

…Both had read The Republic, in which Plato looks askance at  the accumulation of wealth by the ruling class, arguing that in a just society, rulers should not be motivated by wealth or personal gain but by the pursuit of the common good. Recognizing  that excessive wealth corrupts the soul and that rulers must remain financially neutral to govern fairly, he proposed a philosopher-king model, where leaders are selected for their wisdom and commitment to justice, rather than wealth or status.

Enlightenment thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract  and  Discourse on Inequality) was also pretty explicit about the corrupting influence of wealth on governance, arguing that the pursuit of wealth fosters inequality, which in turn undermines the moral fabric of society. Rousseau believed that a more egalitarian political system would be the antidote to this corruption and he advocated for a society that limits the concentration of wealth in political hands.…

There are three solvents of social trust: 1) the self-aggrandizement of insiders; 2) decay of competence, and 3) precarity, generated by soaring inequality / cost of living and the decay of social mobility, all of which erode confidence in the social contract, i.e. our confidence that the system isn’t rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many.
These are of course related, but let’s tease them apart. Once insiders focus on maximizing their personal gain as the purpose and goal of their employment, the value of the institution’s service to the public / customers decays behind a flimsy screen of self-serving PR promoting the successes of the hollowed-out institution….

“For sheer public health benefit, once you establish a clean water supply it’s very hard to beat effective vaccines. We have wiped out smallpox as a disease, one that had been dreaded all the way back to prehistory. We are tantilizingly close to doing the same with polio. Other diseases that used to be a common feature of life (especially for children) are now rare and hardly thought of, because of broad vaccination programs starting in infancy. The amount of disability and outright premature death that has been avoided by these efforts over the last century is nearly beyond calculation: we life in a different and far better world because of them. That’s what makes anti-vaccine activism so frustrating. People have been suspicious of the whole idea of vaccination ever since the beginning, but the toxic skepticism really seems to have increased in recent years, reaching a crescendo during the coronavirus pandemic. The first outright anti-vaxxer I ever encountered was in about 1992, and I was baffled – I thought I was talking to someone through some kind of time portal that opened up to a hundred years before. Little did I realize! The populations of the industrialized nations have forgotten (or never known at all) what all these diseases used to do, and imagine things like measles, pertussis, and rubella to be breezy little fevers that used to make kids miss a day or two of school before they were all good as new. (You really can find anti-vaccine folks talking exactly like that). And to avoid these wholesome natural rites of childhood, you want to let evil drug companies inject horrible concoctions into perfect little babies? Defiling them forever? Get those toxin-laden syringes out of here!” • That said, when I was a mere sprat, I think I was given MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) for which I am grateful. When I look at today’s vaccinatiion schedule, I stopped counting at twenty and there was plenty to come. Knowing what I know today about CDC, I can well believe that institutional imperatives are driving that number, in addition to science. Further — and I would love to be proved wrong on this — I would bet the count of studies on interactions between all 20+ vaccines would approximate to zero. In a perfect world. we could have discussion on cutting back; a schedule that big just can’t be right. This world, however, is not perfect, and my concern is rolling back all vaccination, including MMR, taking us back to the days before Edward Jenner, when “natural immunity” meant a lot of children died early. Oh for the days when anti-vax sentiment was confined to rich [glass bowls] in Marin County, who could always send their children to hospital! (Of course, one of the reasons to burn CDC to the ground, plow the rubble under, and salt the earth is how badly they butchered the Covid vaccines, with a resulting anti-halo (?) effect for all vaccines.)

‘Why We Need Medicare for All’: Boeing Revokes Health Benefits for Striking Workers

Edward Carver, October 01, 2024 [CommonDreams]

33,000 Boeing workers lose health care coverage 

[Freight Waves, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 10-02-2024]

“Boeing has cut health care coverage for 33,000 of its workers and their families as machinists union strikes continue to halt production in the Pacific Northwest…. ‘Boeing executives cannot make up their minds,’ said IAM International President Brian Bryant in the release. ‘One day they say they want to win back the trust of their workforce. The next moment, on the heels of many recent missteps by their labor relations team, Boeing executives are now tripping over dollars to get pennies by cutting a benefit that is essential to the lives of children and families, but is nothing compared to the cost of the larger problems Boeing executives have created for their workforce and for the company itself over the last ten years. Their missteps are costing not just the workers but our nation.’”