#David Sirota

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

By Chris Williams

New Yorkers are known for having a temper. Some blame it on the traffic and dirty water hog dogs. Personally? I blame it on the cost of living. If you compare the value of $20 in 1970 New York to $20 in the Big Apple now, the cost of living has gone up a whopping 677.46%. A big part of that increase has been housing. Back in 2012, a man ran an entire campaign premised on the rent being too damned high. But, man, if you thought New Yorkers were pissed about rent prices back then… wait until they really can’t afford rent.

Before we even get to the obvious ethical issues involved with Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito sitting on this case despite receiving lavish gifts from landowners with a vested interest in this matter, it is worth taking a second to reflect on the Supreme Court’s drift from just a decade ago.

It would still be newsworthy if the Court decides to even hear the case. A little over a decade ago, James Harmon tried to bring a very similar case to the Supreme Court, arguing that the New York’s rent stabilization law constituted a taking. The Court ultimately decided against hearing Harmon’s case. With that in mind, read an assessment given based on that case a decade ago in The Tenant:

“If the Supreme Court chooses to consider the Harmons’ lawsuit, it would mean that four Justices—presumably Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito—believe there is a valid argument for a radical expansion of property rights, that destroying legal protections for tenants is as much an idea whose time has come as abolishing racial segregation was in 1954.”

It can be startling to see how quickly opinions on the judiciary can change. In framing the above quote, the author brought up the importance of precedent, citing cases like Roe, Brown, and Lawrence v. Texas. The thinking at the time was that even if the Court wasn’t the biggest fan of a given outcome, it’d respect the decisions of the jurists before them. Clearly written before Dobbs and Sackett, but the rest ages pretty well.

Now we’ve subbed Gorsuch into that foursome that couldn’t come together… and added Kavanaugh and Barrett.

The YOLO Court era has arrived. Because who’s to stop them?

If the Court gets rid of rent control, it is hard to understate the significance it would have on the lives of New Yorkers. From Lever News:

“Samuel Stein, a housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society, an anti-poverty organization in New York, said if the Supreme Court were to overturn the rent stabilization law, ‘It’s the end of New York City.’

‘Rents would go up significantly around the city,’ he continued. ‘There will be a tremendous amount of displacement. You will have a lot of people leaving New York City, you will have a lot of homelessness, you’ll have a lot of overcrowding.’”

There was a point in time you could rely on the Court to respect stare decisis. Dobbs and Bruen show that’s no longer the case. If ever a Court was willing to get rid of the 50+ years of rent control, it would be the Roberts court.

We should find out if they will hear the case by the end of September.

[oediex]

I'm finally watching Don't Look Up, that films is *wild*.

Does anyone know of any good critical thinking pieces on the film? Either written or video essays on YT are fine. It's giving me many thoughts, I want to examine them further by reflecting on other people's thoughts.

I doubt anyone will see this, because it's a film from 2 years ago, but just in case!

[jus-morbo]

[arthropooda]

[eelhound]

"Democratic leaders only did things like enact Social Security, create Medicare, pass the Voting Rights Act, and end the Vietnam War once they feared the electoral consequences of inaction. The same dynamic holds today: you can bet Democratic leaders will not fulfill their longtime promise to statutorily codify reproductive rights until and unless they feel the same kind of anger and pressure as their predecessors felt in their day.

That’s how democracy is supposed to work: we’re supposed to evaluate representatives not on their personalities or party affiliations, but on their records, and when they fail to deliver on their promises, those representatives are supposed to fear being denied their party’s nomination and thrown out of office by their own voters.

'Politicians respond to only one thing — power,' wrote Ta-Nehisi Coates back in 2011. 'This is not the flaw of democracy, it’s the entire point. It’s the job of activists to generate, and apply, enough pressure on the system to affect change.'

That’s how the American right ultimately brought us to this horrible moment: they conditioned Republican voters to actually expect and demand things, and punish those who wouldn’t deliver.

That same attitude is what’s needed from Democratic voters now — not just rage aimed at the conservative ideologues turning back the clock, but also rage at the Democrats who control the government today. Those elected officials must be forced kicking and screaming — against their own desires — to actually produce. Not tomorrow. Now.

Of course, many of us have been saying this for decades — and have been berated and belittled for doing so. But at least for a moment, it finally feels like we’re no longer alone.

If that’s fleeting, we’re screwed. If it’s enduring, then there’s still a tiny glimmer of hope."

- David Sirota, from "Democratic Leaders Don’t Fear Their Own Base. They Should." Jacobin, 25 June 2022.

[kevinsreviewcatalogue]

Review: Don't Look Up (2021)

Don't Look Up (2021)

Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content, graphic nudity and drug content

<Originally posted at https://kevinsreviewcatalogue.blogspot.com/2024/02/review-dont-look-up-2021.html>

Score: 4 out of 5

Don't Look Up is a movie that wants to be Dr. Strangelove for global warming, and whether or not it pulls it off depends on your tolerance for very heavy-handed satire. Adam McKay, the film's director and co-writer (together with former Bernie Sanders speechwriter/advisor David Sirota -- i.e. a man literally paid to write stump speeches for a politician) who had previously made The Big Short and a whole bunch of 2000s Will Ferrell comedies, wasn't shy about the movie he was making. He said point-blank that he went out of his way to write the most heavy-handed, blunt-force metaphor for global warming he could possibly think of, a comet destroying Earth that we have the ability to deflect but for some reason aren't, and the result is a pure sadist show filled with unlikable people who you're waiting to see receive their comeuppance, while the only ones who get anything resembling a happy ending are the beleaguered scientists and bureaucrats who serve as mouthpieces for the writers.

I felt it more or less succeeded at doing that, but I also felt that it, almost accidentally, stumbled into something I've rarely seen: a Lovecraftian comedy, specifically one that still goes all-in on his brand of cosmic horror rather than soften it. The central conceit of many of H. P. Lovecraft's stories, that of humanity being small and meaningless in the grand scheme of a universe far bigger than them that doesn't care about any of their puny accomplishments, is one that's usually played for horror, most notably by Lovecraft himself and the many artists influenced by him. When that kind of material is given a lighthearted touch, it's usually in the context of stories that borrow the aesthetics of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (doomsday cults, grotesquely visceral monsters with lots of tentacles, alien gods with unpronounceable names) but give humanity the chance to effectively fight back. This movie takes the opposite track. It's a movie about a comet that's coming to hit Earth and destroy everything. It doesn't give a flying fuck about any of us; it's a comet, an inanimate ball of rock and ice randomly drifting through our solar system that just so happens to be on a collision course with Earth. The protagonists, the graduate student Kate Dibiasky who discovers the comet and her astronomy professor Dr. Randall Mindy who does the numbers and realizes that it's going to impact Earth, are framed as the kind of heroes Lovecraft would write, people who slowly but surely go mad from the revelation of just how meaningless their existence is in the face of looming extinction. In fact, the basic premise is not unlike that of Junji Ito's manga Remina, which plays a very similar scenario for some truly fucked-up horror, complete with both stories having satire of celebrity culture as a running theme.

But this movie takes that premise and, instead of using it to try and scare the viewer, uses it to mine the darkest possible laughs it can think of. Kate's breakdown on a talk show as she tries to warn the world about the comet goes memetic and is treated like Britney Spears' meltdown in the late '00s. Dr. Mindy's reaction is to dive head-first into wine, women, and song, exploiting his new status as a rock star scientist to have an affair with a morning show host and bask in the fame and adulation of the world because he knows, deep down, that anything else is pointless and he may as well enjoy his last few months on Earth. And most importantly, the film's main satirical thrust is that humanity probably does have the ability to deflect the comet and save itself, but is just too goddamn stupid and greedy to do so. The President is a vain, corrupt, bullying, media-obsessed idiot whose administration is rife with nepotism, cronyism, and graft (guess who was President when this movie was written), the "visionary geniuses" of the tech industry are more concerned with a mix of pie-in-the-sky utopianism and getting rich than in the actual, practical, day-to-day problems that most people face, and the media is chiefly concerned with celebrity gossip and other frivolous stories and buries serious issues that might hurt their ratings. Humanity as a whole doesn't go mad from the revelation of the comet, at least not at first, but that's because, as far as this movie is concerned, we're already living in a world gone mad.

These two angles -- McKay and Sirota's intended one of a satire of the world's (lack of) response to global warming, and a film that takes a lot of the tropes of cosmic horror and plays them for comedy -- feed into each other and produce a pitch-black satire reminiscent of an Armando Iannucci story, a good episode of South Park, or the background worldbuilding of a Grand Theft Auto game. This movie ain't subtle. The comet is a plain-as-day metaphor for the climate crisis that practically screams the message into your face, most notably when Dr. Mindy goes on a furious rant on a talk show that, barring the specific subject matter of the comet, may as well have come from the unshackled id of any climate scientist, meteorologist, or environmentalist who decided to one day say "fuck it" and let everyone know what they really think of all the bullshit they have to put up with. The entire 138-minute runtime of this movie is an escalating exercise in cringe comedy as Dr. Mindy, Kate, and the underpaid civil servants and bureaucrats who take them and the crisis seriously find themselves stonewalled, tripped up, and belittled by the vapid, selfish, ignorant dumbasses who actually run the show. Its sense of humor is mean-spirited and often insulting, but it saves its bile for very specific and deserving targets while still affording enough humanity to its protagonists to make me actually care about them, especially as the film rolls towards its conclusion.

Make no mistake, though, this is a very funny metaphor for global warming, much of it sold by an excellent all-star cast. Meryl Streep plays President Janie Orlean as a combination of every terrible thing that's ever been said about Donald Trump and every terrible thing that's ever been said about Hillary Clinton (again, you can tell that a Bernie Sanders advisor co-wrote this), the kind of mediagenic, charismatic politician who looks good in front of the cameras but whose administration is a pit of slime. Streep is clearly relishing the chance to play someone who'd be an unrepentant villain if not for the fact that she's also a complete fucking moron. Mark Rylance plays the President's partner-in-crime Peter Isherwell as a mix of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs who gives off the sense that he's not just a greedy robber baron but someone who genuinely seems to believe his own bullshit, that his sci-fi scheme to save the day would not only work but elevate human civilization into a utopian golden age, and that he's spent too long marinating in the stew of hare-brained Silicon Valley techno-dreamers to think about any practical problems. Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry as the talk show hosts Brie Evantee and Jack Bremmer are playing clear parodies of Kelly Ripa and Al Roker, and perfectly capture everything obnoxious and saccharine about morning talk shows and daytime news. The supporting cast is a non-stop parade of both rising stars and "hey, it's that guy!" actors, including Jonah Hill as Janie's Jared Kushner-esque son/Chief of Staff who serves as a symbol of the White House's corruption, Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi as a pair of pop stars putting on a benefit concert who contribute a hilarious song to the soundtrack, Ron Perlman as a war hero with a few screws loose who leads the initial mission to try and deflect the comet, and Timothée Chalamet as a punkish slacker whose response to the comet is to get right with God. Finally Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Rob Morgan get the "straight man" roles as Dr. Mindy, Kate, and the government scientist Dr. Oglethorpe, all of them offering up welcome reminders of why they're all considered some of the best actors of their respective generations (and, in Lawrence's case, reminding us why she was an A-lister before she did Passengers) as they have to navigate the sick, sad world around them in their long-shot effort to save it. Even here, though, they're not immune from the film's satirical barbs, each of them (especially Dr. Mindy) shown to not quite be as above-it-all as they assume they are.

The Bottom Line

It's so in-your-face with its politics and message that it risks feeling insufferable even if you agree with it. But me? I found it to be a hilarious, pitch-black, and frequently on-point satire that pulls no punches and manages to somehow combine big laughs with existential dread. I recommend giving it a watch.

[msclaritea]

Adam McKay Accused of Basing 'Don't Look Up' on Self-Published Novel

The lawsuit claims Stanley’s Comet was “reviewed, received and considered” by numerous people at Mosaic, including Miller and McKay.

It wasn’t until over a decade later that McKay wrote the screenplay for Don’t Look Up. In an effort to prove that McKay couldn’t have “independently created” the work without using Stanley’s Comet, the lawsuit states that McKay has given “contradictory” interviews about the inspiration for the film. One story McKay “repeated in several interviews,” the lawsuit says, was that the film came out of a conversation he had with journalist David Sirota about climate change.

“Sirota mused that it was like a comet (or an asteroid or a meteor, depending on the interview) hurtling toward the Earth, but no one seemed to care,” the lawsuit reads. “McKay has repeatedly claimed that Sirota’s climate change metaphor inspired him to write the movie script.” (Sirota received a “Story By” credit on Don’t Look Up and is named as a co-defendant in the suit.)

David Sirota caught lying and getting sued. Couldn't have happened to a better asshole.

[mitjalovse]

Domino is a record label based in London, so the fact that most of their signings are a part of the English scene makes a lick of sense. However, their scouts or whatever they are called look outside their country to get some intriguing groups, including Dirty Projectors. While the latter do resemble the indie rock scene of New York – you can hear this is their base –, they basically add, well, everything. Sure, they don't reach the level of maximalism with their tones, yet they can be overwhelming at times. Still, the sheer mastery of Mr. David Longstreth does bring the entire suspense of an utter crash to a halt. He established a certain sonic identity that can be malleable, though you can continue to hear that as nothing else but Dirty Projectors.

[libraford]

I remember early on in the trump administration- I was sitting at the mechanic's lobby and he was on the news with a giant stack of papers wrapped in a big red ribbon. And he talked about how the regulations imposed by previous administrations got in the way of business and prevented every day americans from reaching the american dream. And he took a pair of shears and cut the ribbon, symbolically cutting the red tape, as a promise to undo all regulations that hot in the way of moving forward.

And I looked to the woman waiting in the lobby with me, in her 60s, who shook her head along with me at the gesture, because we both lived on a low income side of town and people in our tax bracket know what happens when regulations are slack- people get sick, they get hurt, they die.

Disaster happens when people are careless and each regulation is written in blood.

Fuck that guy.

Picture id/transcript: (a screenshot of a news report by Heather Cox Richardson from february 15 2023)

But the derailment of fifty Norfolk Southern train cars, eleven of which carried hazardous chemicals, near East Palestine, Ohio, near the northeastern border of the state on February 3 has powerfully illustrated the downsides of deregulation. The accident released highly toxic chemicals into the air, water, and ground, causing a massive fire and forcing about 5,000 nearby residents in Ohio and Pennsylvania to evacuate. On February 6, when it appeared some of the rail cars would explode, officials allowed the company to release and burn the toxic vinyl chloride stored in it. The controlled burn sent highly toxic phosgene, used as a weapon in World War I, into the air.

Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine has refused federal assistance from President Biden, who, he said, called to offer “anything you need.” DeWine said he had not called back to take him up on the offer. “We will not hesitate to do that if we’re seeing a problem or anything, but I’m not seeing it,” he said.

Just over the border, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said that Norfolk Southern had botched its response to the accident. “Norfolk Southern has repeatedly assured us of the safety of their rail cars—in fact, leading Norfolk Southern personnel described them to me as ‘the Cadillac of rail cars’—yet despite these assertions, these were the same cars that Norfolk Southern personnel rushed to vent and burn without gathering input from state and local leaders. Norfolk Southern’s well known opposition to modern regulations [requires] further scrutiny and investigation to limit the devastating effects of future accidents on people’s lives, property, businesses, and the environment.”

Shapiro was likely referring to the fact that in 2017, after donors from the railroad industry poured more than $6 million into Republican political campaigns, the Trump administration got rid of a rule imposed by the Obama administration that required better braking systems on rail cars that carried hazardous flammable materials.

According to David Sirota, Julia Rock, Rebecca Burns, and Matthew Cunningham-Cook, writing in the investigative journal The Lever, Norfolk Southern supported the repeal, telling regulators new electronically controlled pneumatic brakes on high-hazard flammable trains (HHFT) would “impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits.” Railroads also lobbied to limit the definition of HFFT to cover primarily trains that carry oil, not industrial chemicals. The train that derailed in Ohio was not classified as an HHFT.

Nonetheless, Ohio’s new far-right Republican senator J. D. Vance went on the Fox News Channel show of personality Tucker Carlson to blame the Biden administration for the accident. He said there was no excuse for failing infrastructure after the passage last year of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, and said that the administration is too focused on “environmental racism and other ridiculous things.” We are, he said, “ruled by unserious people.”

:end id/transcript

[qqueenofhades]

Ignoring his inflammatory rhetoric, do you think Bernie's *POLICIES* are actually that extreme? I've read them over and, if he had a softer approach, they seem like they'd be sound policies to me

The problem with Bernie is that it's hard to know, in actual practice/reality, what his policies are. Yes, on paper, everyone knows what they are, and it's not a week if he's not writing yet another op-ed in the Guardian about Workers' Rights or Climate Justice or whatever. But like.... what good does that do anyone? Everyone who reads the Guardian probably agrees with those things already, and that includes me -- I read it, I financially support it, etc., but it's not where I come for policy actions or where I want to see US senators spending all their time. (Like, Bernie, aren't there other people you could be talking to, who could actually do something about this?) It's the definition of preaching to the choir, where he's regurgitating a boilerplate piece of progressive ideology but not actually doing anything about it or attempting to reach an audience who doesn't already agree with him. (Plus the Guardian, unfortunately, is always also willing to let his ex-campaign manager, David Sirota, bash the Democrats for something, but never mind that.)

Likewise, Bernie's actual voting record in the Senate isn't always a match with the things for which he has (very loudly) advocated, and he's a multi-millionaire old white man from Vermont (one of the whitest states in the Union) who has often seemed interested in preaching socialism for everyone else but resisting any scrutiny or participation in that for himself. He has gotten a lot of mileage and built a disproportionately influential political career out of championing so-called leftist progressivism/socialism, but as I keep saying about him, he never seems to do anything about it. "Tax billionaires" or "save the planet" are extremely broad-brush statements that everyone in the liberal camp can mostly agree on. And no, I wouldn't say those positions are particularly extreme; they're pretty much mainstream Democratic ideology at this point. Indeed, I think Bernie gets unwarranted traction out of positioning himself as the "radical" alternative to the Democrats, when most of the things he says are now basically part of the party platform and have been adopted or explored in some shape or form. Just because they can't actually be implemented at the moment, whether due to legislative roadblocks or otherwise, doesn't mean that they're not moving in that direction.

Likewise, Bernie's favorite hobbyhorse of Medicare for All is often used by his fans to irrationally bash the Democrats, as if we don't have universal healthcare -> quod erat demonstrandum, Democrats Are Neoliberal Shills. I've written many posts about the state of the healthcare debate in America and how passing even a much-watered-down Affordable Care Act cost Obama control of Congress for pretty much the rest of his presidency. So if Bernie and co. want to offer a roadmap for how to pass another major healthcare reform/overhaul that goes even further than the ACA -- trust me, everyone's listening and wants to know how to do that. That is neither extreme nor particularly, at least among Democrats, controversial in the way it was in 2009, when we still had Blue Dog Democrats in red states like Nebraska and South Dakota. But a) we have the united fascist bloc of Republicans who would object and obstruct it on principle, and b) we DON'T have enough Democrats to just pass it by fiat and have that be the end, because that's not the way things have worked in the history of anything.

So basically: if progressives want to endlessly harp on the Democrats for not magically pulling Medicare for All out of a hat, they're welcome to do that if, and only if, they can produce a credible policy/platform/program of action to actually get it passed that the Democrats could be following and aren't (and "they don't care enough about this and could fix it if they wanted!" is not that). That way, they could actually show that the reform is empirically possible and the Democrats are not carrying it out. But flatly ignoring all the political realities and blaming them for not producing a miracle in an extremely adverse legislative and political climate does not count as good-faith engagement and isn't directed toward any constructive end. It's just performative gesturing to show that they are Better Than The Establishment, something something something, and Bernie is usually one of the chief offenders in this regard, despite actually being part of the Establishment for decades.

I will give Bernie credit for two things: he has voted for all the major Democratic legislative packages with the relative minimum of selfish hostage-taking/sabotaging such as that carried out constantly by Manchin and Sinema, and he quickly shut down any talk of running (yet fucking again) in 2024, in order to support Biden's re-election bid. But as far as policies go, he's still not shown me that he either has a concrete plan to carry them out, that he knows what they are aside from broad-brush, vague and general talking points, or that he will put in the work to get them achieved, so yeah.

[marisatomay]

Doesn’t sit right with me that David Sirota is an Oscar nominee

[screenmovie]

Kate & Yule,

Don’t Look Up (2021), directed by Adam McKay and written by him & David Sirota.

[jus-morbo]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

US health insurers get more and more federal funding, deliver less and less care

The American healthcare system is the worst of all possible worlds. Unlike every other wealthy country, the US leaves its health insurance to the private sector, where your health and your life are a distant second to shareholder profits. But it’s worse, because the majority of the money those terrible, “private” insurance companies “earn” comes from public subsidies.

In other words, the US has a privately run health care sector that is publicly financed, without any public accountability or duty to the public good. Insurance companies take ever more billions from the federal government and deliver ever less care to their customers.

Cigna-exec-turned-whistleblower Wendell Potter has just published a new report that breaks down share of federal subsidies in the largest US insurers’ bottom lines:

Humana: 91%

Molina: 89%

Centene: 86%

Aetna: 73%

Unitedhealth: 72%

Elevancehealth: 68%

Cigna: 42%

https://wendellpotter.substack.com/p/the-majority-of-big-insurers-health

See that? The vast majority of US insurers’ income is public funding. That’s because of Medicare Advantage, a privatized Medicare service that 27 million older people have been tricked into signing up for, which consistently delivers worse service with higher out-of-pockets, while billing the US government for billions.

You should not sign up for Medicare Advantage, nor let anyone you love do so. Medicare Advantage will deny you care you are entitled to and leave you to sicken and die, while draining the last of your savings in co-pays:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/28/health/medicare-advantage-plans-report.html

The insurers aren’t done. They raised their prices by 24% in a single year:

https://wendellpotter.substack.com/p/the-price-of-health-insurance-has

Despite these massive profits, spiraling fees, and mounting premiums, the Biden admin is on track to let the insurers raise their prices again, though not by as much as originally announced:

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/27/politics/medicare-premiums-biden/index.html

You don’t have to be on Medicare to be part of the health insurance scam. If you’ve got an Obamacare subsidy, you are helping to transfer billions in public money to insurers, even as these ACA plans grow steadily worse. ACA plans deny one in five claims:

https://www.kff.org/private-insurance/issue-brief/claims-denials-and-appeals-in-aca-marketplace-plans/

Meanwhile, the out-of-pocket expenses your ACA insurer can rook you for just went up to $14,700/year:

https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/out-of-pocket-maximum-limit/#:~:text=For%20the%202022%20plan%20year,and%20%2417%2C400%20for%20a%20family.

ACA coverage is so poor that many of the people paying for it are best understood as “functionally uninsured”:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcouncil/2022/07/27/functionally-uninsured-the-fiction-of-healthcare-coverage/?sh=5e6547a2680b

ACA was sold as a brokered compromise between public healthcare advocates and private healthcare cultists. It created a situation where private insurers could grow larger, more powerful, more profitable, and less accountable to government, patients or doctors, so that care would steadily erode and prices mount.

ACA set the stage for Medicare privatization through Medicare Advantage. It was the template for the public-private-partnership from hell, teeing up a future where we finally get the wildly popular Medicare For All, but delivered by the same murdering profiteers who run the private system it was supposed to replace: Medicare Advantage For All.

As David Sirota writes in The Lever, Biden’s 2020 campaign recognized this, and promised us a public option where “premiums could be substantially lower than those of private plans,” but “Biden hasn’t once mentioned a public option since becoming president.”

https://www.levernews.com/health-insurers-get-government-cash-then-jack-up-prices/

When Congress votes to give billions in public money to the health insurance industry, it also votes to give millions to itself — our legislature is awash in health insurance company dark money, and Democrats — including members of the Progressive Caucus — are carrying its water:

https://bettermedicarealliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/final_2022_house_ma_letter_.pdf

Giving for-profit insurance companies more public money will not translate into better care. The CEOs of every one of those publicly subsidized insurance companies took home more than $20 million in pay last year. 86% of Centene revenues came from the public coffers. Its (recently deceased) CEO Michael Neidorff paid himself $20.6 million.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We know how to fix this. Biden laid it out in 2020:

Giving Americans a new choice, a public health insurance option like Medicare. If your insurance company isn’t doing right by you, you should have another, better choice. Whether you’re covered through your employer, buying your insurance on your own, or going without coverage altogether, Biden will give you the choice to purchase a public health insurance option like Medicare. As in Medicare, the Biden public option will reduce costs for patients by negotiating lower prices from hospitals and other health care providers. It also will better coordinate among all of a patient’s doctors to improve the efficacy and quality of their care, and cover primary care without any co-payments. And it will bring relief to small businesses struggling to afford coverage for their employees.

https://joebiden.com/healthcare/

People are angry at their insurers, and justifiably so. Cigna isn’t just raising prices and co-pays, it’s committing mass-scale fraud: “exaggerat[ing] the illnesses of its Medicare members to obtain higher payments from the federal government.” Also credibly accused of Medicare fraud: Unitedhealth and Elevance.

https://www.modernhealthcare.com/insurance/doj-joins-cigna-medicare-advantage-fraud-case

In 2019, I published Radicalized, a collection of four novellas subtitled “four tales of our present moment.” The title story, “Radicalized,” was frightening and upsetting to write, but I couldn’t stop myself. It’s a story about angry men who watch the people they love the most slowly and agonizingly murdered by care-denying insurance companies, who meet on message boards where they plot to murder health-care executives.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250228598/radicalized

Having grown up in Canada and then spent more than a decade in the UK — and now become a US citizen — it’s incredible to me that Americans tolerate this ghastly, worsening system. Not that I want to see terrorist violence! The very idea is sickening and terrifying.

But it is baffling to me that there are Americans who shoot each other over road-rage and yet as far as I know, the $20m/year vampire CEOs of profiteering, fraud-addicted insurance companies are living in comfort and safety.

It’s one of the great paradoxes of the American psyche: all of that macho, don’t-tread-on-me posturing turns to vapor when the person who’s literally condemning your family to die is a distant corporate executive.

All that anger has to be out there, somewhere, channeled by cynical operators into scapegoating and nihilism. It’s a ticking time-bomb. Imagine the political win that would accrue to the party that made saving your life and the lives of the people you love its political centerpiece. A party that met astroturf with naming names, hauling insurance execs into Congress to confront grieving mothers, fathers, children and spouses. A party that refused to let Lucy yank the football again with a “compromise” that gives us a privately managed, publicly funded service that only serves shareholders and executives.

[Image ID: The cover for the audiobook edition of my novella 'Radicalized,' which features a vicious-looking mousetrap, baited with a pill.]

[mariacallous]

I’m a little skeptical of an outlet founded by David Sirota and publishes with and supports/is supported by Jacobin.

[sataniccapitalist]