Ralph Nader: To Cover Trumps Tyranny, Media Groups Must Do The Following...

 

Photo: Washington Post

The iconic activist Ralph Nader has some comforting suggestions to combat the inherent craziness of our former and former President Donald J. Trump.  Trump has done damage that will last decades to reverse. Mainly due to his ignorance of the political process.  And that is why some people love him.  Destroy democracy - right?  For those of us who believe in democracy and fight for it, here is a post worth reading:

To Thwart Trump’s Tyranny, the Media Must Cover Resistance by Civic Groups and Unions

[This version contains a small correction in the 4th paragraph—the January 18, 2025 article in the New York Times was a column, not an editorial]

By Ralph Nader

January 24, 2025

A lawless madman, with cunning political skills, is at large in our White House. After less than five days in office, he has set a record for flamboyantly issued executive orders, many violative of federal statutes and the Constitution.

A partial list: he has withdrawn the U.S. from the World Health Organization (e.g., damaging international coordination regarding pandemics), quit the Paris Climate Accords (e.g., nations working together against climate violence), selected corporate ideologues to run regulatory agencies (the purpose of which is to save lives, prevent injuries and stop consumer rip-offs), unleashed ICE to crash schools looking for undocumented kids to take away, threatened the media, readied more tax cuts for the super-rich and big companies, and halted the hiring of I.R.S. staff needed to stop massive tax evasions by the plutocracy. He has moved to make massive cuts in spending for programs protecting children and the sick (e.g., slashing Medicaid), lifting controls over oil & gas drilling, reducing support for solar and wind energy, and gutting the civil service. Meanwhile he, a convicted felon, is pardoning hundreds of convicted jailed felons who assaulted Capitol Hill police on Jan. 6, 2021, who will now be vengefully on the streets. The terrifying list goes on.  (See the Brookings Institution tracking of regulatory changes in the second Trump administration: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/tracking-regulatory-changes-in-the-second-trump-administration/).

These actions harm all Americans – that is, they produce indiscriminate injustice against both liberal and conservative low-wage workers, consumers, parents, and children. This strengthens the resistance from the people with a more unified opportunity to stop Trump. Already the first torrent of federal and state lawsuits are being filed to block Trump’s power grab. Certainly, many state attorneys general are readying lawsuits. However, comfortable with his dominance over Congress and the Supreme Court, Trump’s response is one he has previously used – figuratively mocking so sue me, ha, ha, ha.

In anticipation of the Trump rampage, the New York Times published a lead column on January 18, 2025, titled: “Are We Sleepwalking Into Autocracy?” The columnists’ answer is “Yes,” unless: “Defenders of democracy have to stay united, focusing on ensuring that checks and balances remain intact and that crucial democratic watchdog institutions (my emphasis) elude capture.”

Nice words. But the Times and other large newspapers and magazines have largely avoided a critical responsibility since the 60s and 70s. That is, without their covering the actions, litigation, initiatives, and reports of civic institutions and labor unions, little or nothing will flow from their efforts.

The Times editors know full well that without reaching millions of people, influential groups and lawmakers, the power of the civic/labor community is very significantly reduced.  This lack of media coverage has been happening for the past forty years.

Mass media coverage based on newsworthiness and editorializing empower these groups, gets the attention of more supporters and makes it more difficult for the forces of often secret autocratic government to roll over the citizenry.

The regular reporting about what activists were doing in the 1960s and 1970s made  possible the consumer, environmental, labor, and freedom of information laws.  Similar efforts now cannot gather momentum with media visibility. Legislative hearings, prosecutions, and regulatory actions cannot get jumpstarted just by the people insistent on a just and democratic society.

Over the years I’ve highlighted this exclusion coupled with suggesting newsworthy stories to hundreds of reporters, editors, and a few publishers. To little avail.

Look at the scene at the Times and the Washington Post. How often do you see op-eds from civic/labor advocates? How often do you read reviews of their books? How often do you see profiles of them? How often have the groundbreaking studies by Public Citizen, Common Cause, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Veterans for Peace, Union of Concerned Scientists Et. al received coverage? Look at the profitable Washington Post Live podcasts and see how civic and union leaders have been back-handed. How often do the celebrated Times and Post podcasts interview them? The exclusions are overwhelming, even when compared with the access extreme right-wingers receive, such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Grover Norquist.

Some may say, well, they can always use social media.  It is too cluttered, too fractured, and too impulsive. Whether we like it or not, the major newspapers’ original content feeds the radio and television stations and still has an unchallenged impact on getting attention for agendas underway that may have been floating around on the Internet for years and going nowhere.

The same situation exists for local journalism which could feed local TV and radio were it to stop ignoring incipient efforts from community activism, whistleblowers, or simply good stories called into them by alert citizens.

Official source journalism presently reigns.  Our democracy can’t afford redundant and tepid reporting in the coming days. For example, there are about 500 full-time reporters covering Congress. The mostly ditto-head reporting misses all kinds of stories. We started the quarterly forty-page newspaper, Capitol Hill Citizen (capitolhillcitizen.com) to expose some of the goings on in Congress that fall under the rubric of ignored unofficial journalismto illustrate this point.

In an era of closing weekly and daily newspapers, one might expect some coverage of this unique effort reporting on Congress, the most important and potentially most powerful institution that can turn around our deteriorating democracy. For nearly three years, none of the major newspapers and news magazines have told their readers about this rising journalistic beacon.

To sum up: the reporters and editors at the Times, Post and the rest of the national, local newspaper, radio, and TV media must rise to higher levels of their own significance and give voice to the aroused resistance against the onrushing Trumpian dictatorial regime imposing fascistic government and more concentrated corporate power.

If they cave, if they cower, as Thomas Jefferson warned, the main bulwark for our Republic crumbles. More citizens then withdraw and give up. That calamity would freeze Congress and the people who are the last ultimate rescuers of our besieged constitutional Republic.

Former Health Insurance Executive Explains How Healthcare Corporations Are Not Meeting Patients Needs

 

Photo: Center for Medicare Advocacy

Healthcare in America is out of control and expensive.  Aside from cost, coverage could be better, and understanding benefits and coverage can seem like a dark, circuitous tunnel with no end in sight.

A CNN interview with Wendell Potter of the Center for Health and Democracy is shown below.  Wendell Potter is a former Healthcare industry executive with insider knowledge of the complicated system:

What Happened To The CEO of United Healthcare?

 

Photo: Fortune

Why is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of United Healthcare dead?  He was shot out in public on the streets of New York in the daylight.  Part of the answer lies in the public's image of the corporate executives.  A fair number of the public hold the position that these corporate titans believe that each person is reduced to a number.  Are numbers run by bean counters (risk management) to get the numbers to increase shareholder profits?  Sound familiar?  Even though the CEO is human, he does not deserve to die because he holds that high corporate position. 

Again, the common perspective is that these corporate titans will try to increase shareholder value at the expense of the customer, in this case, the insurance policyholder.  What I wanted to share with the reader of this site is the letter that the iconic activist Ralph Nader wrote recently about the United Healthcare shooting and corporations - shown below:

The “Silent Violence” of Corporate Greed and Power

By Ralph Nader

December 6, 2024

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.

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?

 

How To Fix Taxes In America?

 

Photo: Visual Capitalist

I don't know how to fix the tax problem in America.  But I do know how to listen to ideas on any solution that would fix the tax system in America.  Recently, on a podcast produced by Anthony Scaramucci (President Trump's Communication guy for a few days during his first administration), the previous Governor of New York - Andrew Cuomo, was on to speak on this topic.  Below is an excerpt worth listening to:

Republicans want to support Russia, Democrats want to support the world and bring jobs home!

 

Photo: Wikipedia

In this torn nation of a myriad of ideologies among both political parties, some clarity would be nice.  Who might have some?  Who knows?  Misinformation is everywhere.  Although, retired Generals have a pretty good assessment of the current battlefield situation.  Ukraine is a perfect example.

While the Republicans have been whining about bringing jobs back to America, Democrats have been showing that American jobs are responsible for helping solve the world's problems.  In the following video by CNN, General Hodges, retired, explains how helpin Ukraine is possible while stimulating job growth in America:

And he is correct!

Trump is lying to you, FEMA will not take your house!

 

Photo: Citizen Times

Amidst the devastation that Hurricane Helene has brought to the East Coast of the United States, former President Trump is spreading lies which is harming Americans.  Yes, harming Americans by spreading disinformation.  Don't believe me?  

The video below makes the case simply.  The video by MSNBC, shows the transcript of a caller to a radio station complaining that a family member is listening to Trump which is going to cost him his life.  Why?  Because the resident refuses funding from FEMA because President Trump has indoctrinated the belief that FEMA will take your house if money is accepted.  What horse shit.  President Trump will have to answer for these and thousands of other lies - hopefully.  Watch the video - which is simply shocking:

Crazy!

Veterans' Don't Question Other Veteran's Service - Period - Says Former Navy Seal Jesse Ventura

 

Photo: CNN

One of the best interviews I have seen lately regarding politics and our current political landscape is with former Navy Seal and former Governor of Minnesota Jesse Ventura.  

In the video below by CNN, the former Governor of Minesota (and former Navy Seal) expresses criticism over the current Vice Presidential Candidate (Republican) JD Vance for his remarks of his opponent Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Walz:

Wow!  I love Jesse's remarks about JD Vance.  The former Governor (and Navy Seal) makes his case with simple arguments that are traditional values held tightly among veterans who have served.  The evidence offered is indisputable and needs to be presented to the public.  Who better than a former Navy Seal?  Jesse Ventura has had an astounding career in military, politics, and television entertainment over the decades. We should pay attention to his advice.