News bits: Another monster at the USSC; Abortion cruelty in TX; Fun fact check; Fun headlines

The Atlantic writes about another monster lawsuit that would gut a major part of federal government power to regulate vast amounts of money and financial crime: 

The Case That Could Destroy the Government

What was once a fringe legal theory now stands a real chance of being adopted by the Supreme Court

This Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case that poses the most direct challenge yet to the legitimacy of the modern federal government. The right-wing legal movement’s target is the “administrative state”—the agencies and institutions that set standards for safety in the workplace, limit environmental hazards and damage, and impose rules on financial markets to ensure their stability and basic fairness, among many other important things. The case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, threatens all of that. Terrifyingly, this gambit might succeed.

The case involves garden-variety securities fraud. George R. Jarkesy Jr., a right-wing activist and conservative-radio talk-show host, ran a pair of investment funds with $24 million in assets. But he misrepresented how the funds were run, paid himself and his partner exorbitant fees, and inflated the assets’ value. As punishment, the SEC fined him several hundred thousand dollars and prohibited him from working in some parts of the securities industry—very standard stuff.

Jarkesy responded with what can be described only as chutzpah. He didn’t just contest the SEC’s ruling; he alleged that the SEC’s entire process against him was unconstitutional. Among other things, he asserted that Congress never had the authority to empower the SEC and that the SEC adjudicator who punished him was too independent from presidential control.

In May of last year, Jarkesy’s arguments were accepted by two judges on the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In a 2–1 decision, the court agreed with Jarkesy, all but ruling the SEC’s entire existence unconstitutional. The opinion was so extreme that Judge W. Eugene Davis, twice appointed by Republican presidents—and elevated to the appeals court by Ronald Reagan—dissented vigorously.

Jarkesy’s most far-reaching constitutional argument is built on the “nondelegation doctrine,” which holds that there may be some limits on the kinds of powers that Congress can give to agencies. Jarkesy argues that, when Congress gave the SEC the power to decide whether to bring enforcement actions in court or in front of an independent agency adjudicator, it gave away a core legislative function. It thus violated the doctrine and engaged in an unconstitutional delegation.

This is wild stuff. Not long ago, a lawyer would have been laughed out of court for making such nondelegation claims. Today, they’d have a good chance of destroying the federal government’s administrative capacity—taking down its ability to protect Americans’ health and safety while unleashing fraud in the financial markets.

Whether Congress’s grant of authority to the SEC was constitutional should not be a close question. Congress has delegated expansive authority to government agencies since the dawn of the republic. Only twice in American history has the Supreme Court concluded that a delegation to an agency ran afoul of the Constitution—and both of those times, nearly 90 years ago, involved unusual statutes nothing like this one.  

The SEC was created as an independent agency in 1934, after the financial crash of 1929, to thwart the sort of market manipulation that preceded the Great Depression; Congress has granted it additional powers over the years to continue protecting financial markets. Responding to catastrophes and guarding against market manipulation is exactly the kind of work that Congress should empower the executive branch to do. Requiring Congress to legislate in response to every new fraud some crook might dream up would not be a good use of its time. And there’s no reason to think that delegating authority to police markets runs afoul of the Constitution. 

Notice how the radicalized autocratic, plutocratic, theocratic USSC can take down democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. It just does it slowly, one case at a time, as quietly as possible. Power and wealth flow to wealthy elites and big corporations from government and individual citizens.

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From the Don't Blame the Cruel Anti-Abortionists Files: The Hill reports that the Texas state attorney is arguing in court that women who have been denied medical treatments for problem pregnancies should sue the doctors, not the state of TX.  

Lawyers in the Texas attorney general’s office said Tuesday that women should sue their doctors, not the state, over a lack of access to abortion in defending the state’s strict law.

Beth Klusmann of the Texas Attorney General’s Office made that point in oral arguments before the state Supreme Court in a case challenging Texas’s abortion ban, which bars doctors from providing abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected — typically around six weeks into pregnancy — with exceptions only for cases in which the life of the mother is at risk.

“If a woman is bleeding, if she has amniotic fluid running down her legs — then the problem is not with the law,” Klusmann said. “It is with the doctors.”

Klusmann was responding to plaintiffs in the case, who had charged the legislation had plunged the state into a “health care crisis.”

The lawsuit in Zurawski v. Texas was brought by 22 women who said that state law had forced them to carry nonviable and dangerous pregnancies to term — in other words, to go through the ordeal of pregnancy with a fetus that would not survive, and that in many cases was putting them at serious risk.

The arrogance and callousness of the monsters that run the state of TX is breathtaking. First, TX legislators write sloppy, ambiguous laws that incentivized people to report doctors and health care providers for violating their crappy laws. Then, they tell women caught in the crossfire to sue the doctors.

TX sounds like a hell hole for women and other hated groups, but lots of people love the place, including lots of women and people in targeted groups. 

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To lighten things up here’s a fun history bit & fact check. The asserted history fact:

Here’s the PolitiFact verdict:

• Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s assertion is undercut by two centuries of U.S. history, including land gains following wars against Mexico, Spain, Filipino rebels, Japan and Native American tribes.

• United States-Mexico war, 1848: Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded 55% of its territory, including the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming.

McCarthy, dressed in formal attire, embarrassed himself when he make his false assertion on November 26, 2023 in a speech at the Oxford Union. The Oxford Union is the 200-year-old debating society at the University of Oxford in England.

Those Republican elites. They’re just so full of . . . . . . MAGA!!

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“Epic humiliation”: GOP mocked for rejecting Hunter Biden offer to testify publicly --
“What the Republicans fear most is sunlight and the truth,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin

AOC Says Republicans Would Be “Humiliated” If Hunter Biden Hearing Was Public -- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Republicans are afraid that the public will see that they have no case

It’s Official: Mike Johnson Is Even Less Competent Than Kevin McCarthy Was -- We’re now barreling toward a government shutdown and the House of Representatives is completely paralyzed.

U.S. GDP grew at a 5.2% rate in the third quarter, even stronger than first indicated (Darn Biden and his rotten economy /s)

A Texas Woman Goes Before School Board To Announce Porn Addiction Claim. She Blames the Scholastic Book Fair -- It turns out the woman may work for a conservative publishing company trying to take down Scholastic (Darned scholastic porn books /s)

Republicans Trip Over Their Own Assholes Trying to Take Down Hunter Biden 😮

Sarah Huckabee Sanders 🤪 appoints anti-LGBTQ+ Christian nationalist to oversee state libraries -- Jason Rapert recently called LGBTQ+ people a cult and a "devil of Hell."

Ah Sarah, what a patriot, full of charm and grace.

So, what did he say?

Oh, that’s what he said

News bits: The quadrillion dollar lawsuit; Law concepts; How close we came on 1/6

The Hill writes about a tax law case now pending before the USSC. This is another case that could gut the entire federal government if corrupt plutocrats win and get to protect their wealth from taxation. 

Supreme Court to consider ‘quadrillion-dollar question’ in major tax case

  

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in early December on a case that has the potential to broadly reshape the U.S. tax code and cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue.

At issue in Moore v. United States is the question of whether the federal government can tax certain types of “unrealized” gains, which are property like stocks or bonds that people own but from which they haven’t directly recouped the value, so they don’t have direct access to the money that the property is worth.

Large portions of the U.S. tax code require that income be “realized” before it can be taxed, but critics say it’s an inherently wishy-washy concept that courts have just been ignoring for years due to administrative impracticalities.

Even if the court limits the scope of its decision to the specific tax referenced in the case, known as the mandatory repatriation tax, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs could cost $340 billion over the next decade, according to the Justice Department.

For comparison, that would cancel out all the extra revenue generated by the $80 billion IRS funding boost and then add $140 billion to the national deficit, which now stands between $26 and $33 trillion, according to various measurements.  “It’s the million-dollar question, just with a few more zeros: the quadrillion-dollar question,” Harvard University tax law professor Thomas Brennan told The Hill.

“On one extreme, if the Supreme Court decides that a realization requirement is present in the 16th Amendment … then there are a number of code sections that arguably would be invalid or have to be reworked,” he said.

These sections could involve partnership tax rules, rules on the taxation of debt and commodities, taxes on futures contracts and the international tax rules that string these areas together between countries.

“On the other extreme, even if the Supreme Court finds in favor of the taxpayers, they could do so in a narrow way that’s limited to the particular situation at hand, or in a way that … forecloses the possibility of Congress enacting wealth taxes but that doesn’t disturb much of existing tax law,” Brennan said.

This is another major front attack in America's authoritarian radical right war on government, taxes and regulations. If the plutocrats win big, a lot of power will flow from government and the people to rapacious elite brass knuckles capitalists and soulless corporations.

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A pre-trial filing by DJT in the government’s criminal insurrection case against him asks the court for leave to file subpoenas for more documents and information related to the 1/6 Committee. DJT calls the documents and information “Missing Materials.” In this case, the documents and information were never missing, but they were just not asked for by DJT in discovery. This appears to be a set-up for another issue for consideration on appeal in case DJT is found guilty. At this point, it seems he probably will be found guilty of something in this particular lawsuit.

This filing is under a rule called Pretrial Rule 17(c). The filing party asks for subpoena power to get more information, but not for the purpose of discovery and introduction at trial. The judge described it like this: 

“not intended to provide a means of discovery for criminal cases,” but rather “to expedite the trial by providing a time and place before trial for the inspection of subpoenaed materials.” Accordingly, Rule 17(c) subpoenas are not appropriate where the moving party seeks materials “procurable reasonably in advance of trial by exercise of due diligence,” or operate “as a general ‘fishing expedition.’ .... Courts must be careful that rule 17(c) is not turned into a broad discovery device, thereby undercutting the strict limitation of discovery in criminal cases found in Fed. R. Crim. P. 16.”

The party asking for subpoena power under 17(c) has to show three things about the requested information, (1) relevance, (2) admissibility, and (3) specificity. Here's how those three concepts are defined for this lawsuit.

Relevance: “The first prong of this test— relevance—requires the Court to assess whether the documents sought have ‘any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence.’”

Admissibility: If relevant, then the court looks to the rules of evidence to see if the information is admissible in court. There are many rules, often with multiple exceptions making this a fact-intensive analysis.

Specificity: This prevents fishing expeditions in hopes of finding something useful when there is no particular reason to think something useful might be there. While it may sometimes be impossible to “describe fully” the materials being sought, “courts will not approve a subpoena for documents based upon requests for disclosure from broad categories of documents.”

Anyway, the judge rejected DJT’s request for subpoena power. Actually, the filing was a farce. Some of the requested information was already disclosed to DJT during discovery, while some of it did not even exist. For other information, the court could not analyze relevance because the requested information was a broad swath of material and the subpoena request did not bother to state what relevant information it was looking for, the court writing: “The relevance prong is not satisfied merely because a defendant can articulate what they hope to find in the subpoenaed evidence.” 

Finally, the judge rejected the rest of DJT’s Rule 17(c) filing like this: The broad scope of the records that Defendant seeks, and his vague description of their potential relevance, resemble less “a good faith effort to obtain identified evidence” than they do “a general ‘fishing expedition’ that attempts to use the [Rule 17(c) subpoena] as a discovery device.”

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Apparently new information being reported about DJT’s 1/6 coup attempt raises an issue I was unaware of (or forgot about), namely the possibility that Mike Pence would recuse himself from the counting of electoral votes in Congress. Without Pence, the count would have been stymied. Dog only knows what chaos that might have led to. 

Worse yet, the evidence indicates that Pence actually considered recusal, in part because it would be “too hurtful to my friend” for him to seal DJT’s loss of the 2020 election. This is stunning. Pence actually believed that DJT was his friend. What a self-deluded fool.  

Just as bad, Pence considered the feelings of his imaginary friend as a reason to back away from his constitutional duty. That’s beyond insane. Clearly, Pence as the VP of the US had no idea of what it actually meant to take the oath of office. Literally no idea. He thought that personal friendship, real or imagined, had some role to play. The arrogant self-centeredness and blind, stupid loyalty of these people to a proven monster is jaw dropping and terrifying. How gullible can these people be?

 

Finally, what got Pence to change his addled mind was a talk with his son, a Marine. In that family chat, Pence’s son had to remind his befuddled, clueless dad that he took an oath that imposed duties the office of the VP that had to be performed. For crying out loud! What if Pence’s son had been like the evil bone spurs himself or his morally rotted spawn Don Jr., Eric or Ivanka? Pence would have recused himself and let the 1/6 horror play itself out.

And despite all of this, there are still tens of millions of gullible Americans who will vote for DJT, thinking he is on their side, cares about them and will vindicate their grievances. The WaPo published this yesterday: 

ABC News reported Tuesday that on Christmas Eve 2020, Pence had momentarily decided against presiding, in part because it would be “too hurtful to my friend.” ABC also reported that Pence has testified that Trump personally suggested that he recuse. (The Washington Post has not independently confirmed the reporting.)

“Not feeling like I should attend electoral count,” Pence wrote in notes obtained by special counsel Jack Smith, according to ABC. “Too many questions, too many doubts, too hurtful to my friend. Therefore I’m not going to participate in certification of election.”  

Pence testified that he reversed course after a conversation with his son, who cited the vice president’s constitutional duty, according to ABC. The date of that conversation is not clear, but it came at some point during a trip that Pence took to Colorado, which records indicate lasted from Dec. 23 to Jan. 1.

So finally, Pence actually believed there were “too many questions, too many doubts,” which led him to want to recuse. What questions? What doubts? Stolen election? What a fucking gullible idiot Pence was and still is. Pence is the con man’s dream mark, gullible and dim-witted. This reporting indicates that he actually believed there was merit to the blatant stolen election lies the DJT dark free speech Leviathan was poisoning America with.

Our democracy and civil liberties hang by a thread.

Time to ask the really serious question............... Which came first?

 

Oh shit, I got sidetracked, that was NOT the question I wanted to ask, what I really wanted to ask was..........

Which came First, Trump or Trumpism?

Of course before Trump it wasn't called Trumpism, but did it exist by some other names? 

So did Trumpism exist before Trump or did Trump create Trumpism?

News bits: About RFK Jr's candidacy; Democracy's twin threats; Deranged thinking

A letter to the WaPo from a reader commented:

The Nov. 20 Style article “What does the Kennedy name mean now?” quoted Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an independent candidate for president in 2024, as saying at a recent campaign event, “If I get 34 percent in the battleground states, I can win those electors. … It’s winner take all. So in a three-way race, all I have to do is beat the other two by a point.”

Of the many false and misleading statements by Mr. Kennedy, none might be more dangerous than that.

Mr. Kennedy is playing on the ignorance of many Americans about how a president is elected in the United States. If he takes a handful of states in a close election, that would mean that no one will have gotten an electoral majority, and the choice will go to the House of Representatives, voting by state. Even if Democrats retake the House majority, Republicans probably will control a majority of state delegations, and thus will select former president Donald Trump, the likely 2024 Republican nominee.

This outcome would again negate the popular vote. It would differ from past instances in which the popular vote has been thwarted because of who will benefit. Mr. Kennedy’s egotism could well put the United States into the ranks of those countries where a dictatorship comes to power by constitutional means.

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The MSM does not comment much on the second major threat to democracy, years of attacks on the right to vote. That is scary. E.J. Dionne writes in a timely WaPo opinion: 

Over the next year, the survival of democracy should be the central issue in American politics. To insist on this is to be a realist, not an alarmist. But making that case requires identifying two distinct threats.

The first is Donald Trump, who is already at the center of our national conversation. The second is the ongoing assault on voting rights, which rarely commands the airwaves.

We are paying far less attention to the long-term deterioration of the right to vote, the essential building block of a democratic republic. It’s easier to overlook because chipping away at access to the ballot has been a subtle, decade-long process. It began with the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision that gutted Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, thus sharply circumscribing the Justice Department’s power to enforce the law.

In his decision in Shelby, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. claimed that even without a strong Section 4, the Voting Rights Act bans discrimination under Section 2, which “is permanent, applies nationwide, and is not at issue in this case.”

Permanent? Not if the 2-1 decision last week from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit is allowed to stand.

The court’s majority arrogantly tossed aside what Congress explicitly said it was doing when it passed the law, claiming miraculous powers to read the “text and structure” of the act as preventing private parties, including civil rights groups, from bringing cases under Section 2. As the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer noted, the ruling’s claim that only the Justice Department had this authority ignored “Congress’s intentions, Supreme Court precedent and decades of practice.”

This is no minor bit of judicial activism. Rick Hasen, a law professor at UCLA, wrote in the Election Law Blog that the ruling would eliminate the bulk of the cases aimed at protecting voting rights because “the vast majority of claims to enforce section 2 of the Voting Rights Act are brought by private plaintiffs, not the Department of Justice with limited resources.” Bye bye, Voting Rights Act. Indeed, there were immediate signs (in a key Louisiana case, for example) that the 8th Circuit ruling would be used to overturn earlier voting rights actions.

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We have come to expect childish, morally rotted irrationality from America's authoritarian radical right elites. Another instance of it comes from the great exemplar, George Santos:

George Santos says he'll treat expulsion as a 'badge of honor' as he claims his colleagues are drunkenly having sex with lobbyists 'every night'

In an X Space hosted by conservative media personality Monica Matthews on Friday evening, the scandal-plagued Republican said he expects to be expelled when the House votes on the matter, which is likely to happen this coming week.

"I don't care. You want to expel me? I'll wear it like a badge of honor," Santos said. "I'll be the sixth expelled member of Congress in the history of Congress. And guess what? I'll be the only one expelled without a conviction."

He calls Ethics Committee chair @RepMichaelGuest a "pussy," mocks Guest's home state (Mississippi), describes his colleagues as corrupt philanderers, and says he'll wear expulsion "like a badge of honor."

pic.twitter.com/jnjPt9jph8 — bryan metzger (@metzgov) November 25, 2023

Santos is proud that he considers himself to be above the level of moral rot that characterizes his morally rotted colleagues. His arrogance and moral bankruptcy won't let him see that he just as bad as most of the rest of them, worse in my opinion.

Looks like happy George has packed on 

more than a few pounds

Washington suits him - good cafeteria!

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From the Authoritarian Radical Right Crackpot Conspiracy Files: Salon writes about the newest crackpot conspiracy theory from radical right grifters. This one is that evil feminists are suppressing the flourishing of traditional wives, women who love to be submissive and modest with their men folk. This seems like an appeal to disgruntled Incel's egos. Salon writes:

If the average American were asked what they imagine the priorities of the feminist movement are these days, most people would likely cite concerns like "fighting abortion bans" or "getting justice for sexual violence victims" or boring mainstays like "equal pay for equal work." But if you listen in to the world of right-wing social media influencers, they have a different answer. To them, feminists are single-mindedly obsessed with destroying women who identify as "tradwives."

"Angry Feminist Compares Tradwives to Neo-Nazis and White Supremacists," screams the headline from the YouTube channel for Michael Knowles, a far-right troll with 1.75 million subscribers.

"This Video Is Triggering All The Feminists," declares the headline of a video defense of tradwives from right-wing grifter Amala Ekpunobi, who has 1.7 million subscribers.

"Tradwife" is internet slang for "traditional wife." It's largely a social media trend of conventionally attractive white women putting out TikToks and videos gushing about the joys of submissive marriage and "modesty," though notably this "modest" clothing often leaves little to the imagination.

It's a neat marketing trick from tradwives to position themselves as a dangerous threat that feminists are desperate to take out. It helps sell the central, lucrative fantasy to credulous audiences: That female submission is a woman's natural desire, one that's being stolen from them by sinister feminist forces. And that you, male viewer, would be gifted with a compliant helpmeet of your very own, if not for those dastardly feminists. But these brave women of YouTube, with their picture-perfect make-up and slender-but-curvy physiques, will stand up to those bitches and restore your birthright: A smoking hot 22-year-old housewife who never talks back, never gets tired, never says "no," and never gains weight, no matter how many children she has. 

By feeding conservative audiences a largely imaginary war with feminists, the tradwives are also pulling off another sleight of hand: distracting from how their content preys upon men, especially young men, by selling them a silly fantasy as reality. In the process, they're contributing to the male loneliness epidemic, by discouraging young men from developing the skills and mindset they need to get a real girlfriend, instead of just subsisting on a steady stream of social media delusions.

For instance, one video by popular vlogger "Mrs. Midwest" is titled "10 Ways to Bless Your MAN!" and has chapters like "Cooking!", "Compliments!" and "Anticipate needs!" The comments on the video suggest that the viewers are unaware that this is not for real, and that flesh-and-blood women are not, in fact, perfectly coiffed sex-robots here to read your mind and fluff your pillows. Young men who mistake this fantasy for reality are going to have a tough time on the dating market. Inevitably, many get angry and disillusioned upon finding out that most women aren't interested in the thankless role of an unpaid maid and sex worker. Unfortunately, when that happens, there's even more right-wing propaganda aimed at them, which blames their frustrations on feminism. An entire industry of right-wing grifters, from Ben Shapiro to Jordan Peterson to Andrew Tate, are making a mint by exploiting young men who are desperate to hear that the problem isn't that they're sexist, it's that women don't like sexism.

News bits 'n chunk: DJT's war on democracy update: About Medicare Advantage plans; Etc.

The Independent reports about a new filing by DJT in his attacks on a gag order telling him to stop inciting violence:

Donald Trump’s supporters unleashed a wave of death threats and antisemitic and homophobic messages to the judge overseeing his fraud trial, as well as his chief clerk, according to a state court filing this week.

A filing to support New York Justice Arthur Engoron’s opposition to a freeze on a gag order in the case includes a statement from the court’s top security official, who has collected “hundreds of threats, disparaging and harassing comments and antisemitic messages” that followed the former president’s harassment.

Federal prosecutors – who are seeking a separate gag order – shared those threats with the federal appeals court judges who will decide whether Mr Trump should be gagged in his election interference case.

But on Friday, the former president’s attorneys dismissed those threats as “irrelevant”.

DJT's brazen threats are beyond insulting. We're in an all-out war against morally rotted, kleptocratic radical right dictatorship.

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Politico reports about some people's reactions to private sector Medicare Advantage plans, thousands of obnoxious ads for which are currently carpet bombing cable TV: 

‘It was stunning': Bipartisan anger aimed at 

Medicare Advantage care denials

A bipartisan group of lawmakers is increasingly concerned that insurance companies are preying on seniors

Enrollment in Medicare’s private-sector alternative is surging — and so are the complaints to Congress.

More than 30 million older Americans are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans, wooed by lower premiums and more benefits than traditional Medicare offers.

But a bipartisan group of lawmakers is increasingly concerned that insurance companies are preying on seniors, and, in some cases, denying care that would otherwise be approved by traditional Medicare.

“It was stunning how many times senators on both sides of the aisle kept linking constituent problems with denying authorizations for care,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in an interview, referring to a bevy of complaints from colleagues during a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing.

Lawmakers are peppering the Biden administration with demands for reforming the commonly used tool called prior authorization, the process in which health insurers require patients to get insurer approval ahead of time for certain treatments or medications.

It “has turned into a process of basically just stopping people from getting care,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), leader of the House Progressive Caucus.

But Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said some hospitals in his state won’t take Medicare Advantage plans any more. “We can’t do it because we can’t afford the constant chasing from all the denials,” he said.

The reason that insurance companies are pushing so hard is that the government pays more per person that it pays for regular Medicare. How much more? It's hard to tell. Apparently, there is a modest increase in premiums that Advantage plans get. Added to that there's possibly a lot of fraud. A watchdog source commented:

These health plans and hundreds of others are part of Medicare Advantage, a program created by Congress in 2003 to help stabilize health care spending on the elderly. But the plans have sharply driven up costs in many parts of the United States — larding on tens of billions of dollars in overcharges and other suspect billings based in part on inflated assessments of how sick patients are, an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity has found.

Risk score errors triggered nearly $70 billion in “improper” payments to Medicare Advantage plans from 2008 through 2013 — mostly overbillings, according to government estimates. Federal officials refused to identify health plans suspected of overcharging Medicare, citing agency policy that keeps many business records confidential. The Center is suing to make these records public.

Risk scores of Medicare Advantage patients rose sharply in plans in at least 1,000 counties nationwide between 2007 and 2011, boosting taxpayer costs by more than $36 billion over estimated costs for caring for patients in standard Medicare.

In more than 200 of these counties, the cost of some Medicare Advantage plans was at least 25 percent higher than the cost of providing standard Medicare coverage. The wide swing in costs was most evident in five states: South Dakota, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas and Arkansas.

Some academic experts and researchers believe the increase in risk scores is more likely to reflect aggressive billing than a rapid deterioration in patients’ health.

For-profit capitalism just doesn’t seem to be compatible with low-cost, easy to access health care. That probably should not be any surprise. In America, private insurance outside of Medicare is more expensive, complex and difficult to access than any other country on Earth. Why would it be any different for government programs that are turned over to the capitalists?

With so much money at stake, it is not surprising that the insurance industry has fired up a major propaganda and lobbying campaign, making it hard to understand the situation. One source wrote:

Medicare Advantage Industry Continues to 

Mislead Public to Protect Their Overpayments 

“MediScare Ads” Falsely Claim Medicare “Cuts”

In our CMA Alert referenced above, we highlighted some of the insurance industry’s misleading ads, and the culprits behind them, including the industry-funded Coalition for Medicare Choices and Better Medicare Alliance. We also discussed how the industry is falsely framing these MA payment adjustments as Medicare “cuts.” 

[Insurance] “organizations representing Medicare Advantage plans are running ads accusing the White House of cutting seniors’ benefits — a tactic the industry has used before to avoid changes to the program.”  

Fact checking industry ads: 

Ad #1 states: “Medicare Advantage saves taxpayers billions every year by delivering basic benefits at 85% of the cost of original Medicare.” 

Verdict: FALSE.

FACT: According to the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), “private plans in the aggregate have never produced savings for Medicare” [emphasis added]; see the summary of their March 2022 report, which also highlighted that while nearly all MA plan sponsor bids are below the cost of traditional Medicare, “[t]hese efficiencies are shared exclusively by the companies sponsoring MA plans and MA enrollees in the form of extra benefits. The taxpayers and Medicare beneficiaries who fund the MA program do not realize any savings from MA plan efficiencies” [emphasis added].

In other words, savings in the for-profit plans is a propaganda mirage, i.e., an industry lie. As time passes, one can assume that Advantage plans will continue to ratchet up efforts to squeeze out every possible penny of profit. 

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From the Christianity vs. Secular Democracy Files: USA Today reports:

Can 12-step programs be required for release from prison?

West Virginia is the latest state to end a rule requiring that inmates eligible for parole must complete a religious-based 12-step substance abuse disorder recovery program before being released.

The move comes after Andrew Miller, a formerly incarcerated man and atheist in West Virginia, repeatedly refused to participate in the religious program at several state jails. He called the requirement “religious coercion," according to court records. Prison officials rejected his complaints five times before two groups – American Atheists and Mountain State Justice – sued the leadership at the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation on Miller's behalf.

After a months-long legal battle, U.S. District Court Judge Joseph Goodwin in July denied West Virginia’s motion to dismiss the case and required state prison officials to remove the state’s religious programming from Miller’s parole eligibility requirements.

“Although Mr. Miller has no entitlement to parole, the record strongly suggests that he would already have been released, but for maintaining his objections to an unconstitutional policy,” Goodwin said. He also said there was an “undeniably religious nature of the program.”

Miller was released from Saint Mary's Correctional Center and Jail in October after completing the rest of the division's requirements.

The war that Christianity is waging on secularism and democracy is on all possible fronts the crusaders can think to wage war. The Christian nationalism wealth and power movement is dead serious about obliterating secularism everywhere in American society, government and commerce. 

Dutch election shows far right rising and reshaping Europe

 Snippets:

When Austria two decades ago became the first nation in Western Europe to lurch to the far right since World War II, the rest of the continent roared in outrage. Protesters haunted its politicians. Diplomats shunned them. One Belgian delegate skipped a lunch with Austria’s then-defense minister, telling reporters: “I don’t eat with fascists.”

Fast forward to 2023, when historic political momentum has given the far right a seat at Europe’s table and a chance to reshape the region’s politics and policies.

The latest victory came in the socially liberal Netherlands, where hard-right icon Geert Wilders and his anti-European Union, anti-Muslim and anti-immigration Party for Freedom landed a shocking first place finish this week in parliamentary elections.

But the unexpectedly strong showing by the “Dutch Donald Trump,” who has long pledged to ban the Quran and halt acceptance of asylum seekers, amounted to a powerful warning to mainstream Europe.

Wilders’s success, while shaped in part by domestic conditions, has further buoyed the global hard right, days after Javier Milei, a far-right economist and former television pundit, was elected president in Argentina.

Ahead of next year’s elections in the United States — where Trump is seen as a close ally of Europe’s anti-migrant, right-wing nationalists — the ascendancy of the far right in Europe is being closely watched as a bellwether of voter rage against traditional politicians in the West.

Far-right parties have taken power in Italy, extended their rule in Hungary, earned a coalition role in Finland, become de facto government partners in Sweden, entered Parliament in Greece and made striking gains in regional elections in Austria and Germany. Slovakia is also something of a far-right success story, with the far-right Slovak National Party among the coalition partners supporting populist Robert Fico — who hails from the far left but opposes migration and LGBTQ rights.

Wilders’s victory in Europe’s last big election of the year has renewed concern — or hope, depending on your perspective — that the far right could gain clout or become kingmakers in next spring’s European Parliament elections, with ramifications for the E.U.’s stance on migration, LGBTQ and reproductive rights, climate action and support for Ukraine.

Meanwhile, hard-right leaders across Europe have emerged as some of the strongest backers of Israel in the current conflict in Gaza.

The number of migrants entering Europe this year soared to levels not seen since 2016, amplifying the far right’s rallying cry against migrants and prodding mainstream politicians toward harder lines. After extended debate, E.U. nations have backed changes to the bloc’s migration rules that could get final approval as soon as early next year. Front-line countries such as Italy and Greece could send more migrants to other countries — or be paid by those that refuse. Importantly, deportations could be sped up and detention times extended.

The rest: 

https://archive.ph/4SrPE#selection-1305.0-1305.542

The first question that enters my mind, is this:

While we liberals believe in immigration, have we ignored for too long the anxieties of those people who see too many immigrants as a threat? Do we simply dismiss them as "racist" and they counter our labeling of them by using their vote to get the government they want?

Are we about to make the same mistake in the US?

Americans have previously reacted with resignation. But not this time. A national poll conducted this month by CBS News found that only 34 per cent of Americans approve of Joe Biden’s handling of the issue, with lower marks only on inflation. Among Hispanics that figure fell to 29 per cent, and among independents to 26 per cent.

https://www.ft.com/content/de7fcbee-1c4e-4124-9787-3d23f1965efb

Regarding wealth inequality: The buy-don't-built route to gigantic personal and corporate wealth & power

Larry Motuz pointed this gem out as something of interest. It’s about wealth inequality, ownership of corporations and how wealth and power flows and accumulates:

Stocking Up on Wealth … Concentration

Speaking of competition and losers, Ronald Reagan set the tone of the neoliberal era when, in 1981, he fired 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers. The message? Workers were losers who would be subjected to the discipline of competition. Reagan called it ‘morning in America’. But really, it was ‘morning for American big business’.

Today, we are well into the next-day’s hangover, and we know how the party played out. For workers, it was a disaster. But for the rich, it was an incredible boon. Wealth didn’t trickle down so much as it got catapulted up. The result, as Figure 1A shows, was a relentless rise in the concentration of American wealth.

Gini index of wealth concentration 

among all Americans

Interestingly, as wealth got catapulted from the poor to the rich, it also got transported from the mega rich to the supremely rich. This is the story told by Figure 1B. Here, I’ve focused on the richest Americans — the folks who grace the Forbes 400 list. Even here, among the upper crust of elites, wealth has grown more concentrated. Why?

As you’ll see, the culprit seems to be the stock market.

The message is that billionaire wealth is both spectacularly large and spectacularly concentrated. .... Something is driving billionaire wealth concentration up and down. What could it be?

The stock market drives billionaire 

wealth concentration

The stock-market average seems to ‘know’ about something that it shouldn’t. Why?
.... It happens when growth is driven by inequality. .... the S&P 500 index (an average) is connected to levels of elite wealth concentration (a form of spread). But this connection only makes sense if the S&P 500 is an (unwitting) indicator of stock-market inequality..... what I’m calling ‘growth through inequality’ — explains our stock-market results. .... the S&P 500 index (an average) is connected to levels of elite wealth concentration (a form of spread). .... in simple terms, the S&P 500 tracks the total market capitalization of the 500 largest US firms. 

.... firms that are giant companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon — four corporations that have a combined market capitalization of about $5.9 trillion. .... [those huge] firms account for about a sixth of the value of the entire S&P 500. So if their stock rises, it will buoy the whole S&P 500 index. But this buoyancy isn’t really ‘growth’; it’s an artifact of corporate concentration — rich firms getting richer.

.... we’ve got evidence that the S&P 500 is an unwitting indicator of US corporate concentration. And it’s not because S&P analysts tried to make that happen. (They didn’t.) It’s because historically, an important part of (apparent) stock-market growth is simply the richest firms getting richer.
To the owners go the spoils

So what happens as rich firms get richer? Well, the rich owners of these firms also get richer. .... the concentration of corporate wealth should beget the concentration of individual wealth. So does it? At least in the United States, the answers seems to be yes. .... To the richest owners go the spoils of oligopoly.

The concentration of corporate wealth 

begets the concentration of individual wealth.

At this point we’ve got some fairly incendiary evidence. The ‘crime’ of elite wealth concentration seems to be tied directly to corporate oligarchy. But .... let’s consider the testimony of the defense’s expert witnesses. I’m talking, of course, about neoclassical economists.

Ostensibly, neoclassical economists love competitive markets and hate monopoly. But beginning in the 1980s, a weird thing happened; economists at the University of Chicago started to argue that despite lacking competition, monopolies could still be ‘efficient’. Their reasoning was that if monopolists actually behaved badly, they would be undercut by competitors, and their monopoly would be undone. Therefore, if a monopoly exists, it must be because the monopolist is doing what the market wants.

Now the logic here is torturous. We’re positing imaginary competition to justify a lack of real-world competition. But then again, neoclassical economists have never let the real world get in the way of their imaginations. And in this case, the goal of the imaginary theorizing was always obvious: it was designed get government out of the way and allow big corporations to purchase their way to power.

Backing up a bit, politicians are rarely incensed when a big corporation builds more factories. So in that sense, the government is not opposed to big companies getting bigger. But from a corporate vantage point, factory building is a less-than-ideal route to bigness. The problem is simple: if everyone builds more factories, it leads to ‘free run of production’ (Thorstein Veblen’s term) which then collapses profits. So savvy corporations are always looking for a better route to power. And that better route is to buy instead of build.

The buy-not-build tactic is hardly rocket science. As Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler observe, when you buy your competitor, you solve two problems at once: you accumulate power and reduce your competition. The difficulty, though, is that this buy-not-build tactic has the appearance of being a blatant power grab. So there’s the risk that an entrepreneurial government might get in the way.

That’s where Chicago-school theorists come in. Starting in the 1980s, they successfully preached an ideology that got the government out of the way. The net result is the modern corporate landscape, forged in large part by a string of government-approved corporate acquisitions.

Tech monopolist Google has been a prime benefactor of this buy-not-build tactic. As Cory Doctorow notes, “Google didn’t invent its way to glory — it bought its way there.” He continues:

Google’s success stories (its ad-tech stack, its mobile platform, its collaborative office suite, its server-management tech, its video platform …) are all acquisitions.

The same strategy holds for most of today’s corporate oligarchies. Their tentacles have largely been bought, not built. On this front, the numbers don’t lie: the consolidated corporate landscape of the 21st century was forged by a massive, neoliberal wave of mergers and acquisitions.

To quantify the scale of mergers and acquisitions, we’ll turn to an index called the buy-to-build ratio. As the name suggests, the buy-to-build ratio measures the corporate proclivity for buying other companies instead of building new capacity. Created by Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler (and first published in 2001), the buy-to-build ratio takes the value of corporate mergers and acquisitions and divides them by the value of greenfield investments. The greater this buy-to-build ratio, the more that corporations are buying (and not building) their way to power.

As I’ve alluded, the neoliberal era saw a massive wave of corporate mergers and acquisitions. As a result, from 1980 to 2000, the US buy-to-build ratio jumped nearly tenfold. And guess what accompanied this acquisition wave. That’s right … a sharp rise in corporate concentration. .... over the last forty years, big corporations have been buying their way to consolidated power.

One of the (few) nice things about living in an era of concentrated corporate power is that modern plutocrats are brash enough to speak plainly about their ambitions. Forget the arcane language wielded by Chicago-school economists. Today’s plutes — men like Peter Thiel — say the quiet part out loud. If you want to ‘capture lasting value’, Thiel proclaims, ‘look to build a monopoly’. Or in mantra form, ‘competition is for losers’. (emphasis added)

John D. Rockefeller would be proud.

Speaking of Rockefeller, did you know that he was one of the principle funders of the University of Chicago? Ironic, isn’t it. Rockefeller, like Thiel, spoke openly about his pursuit of power and personal enrichment. So if, during Rockefeller’s life, someone had connected elite wealth concentration to corporate consolidation, the reaction would have been “Well, that’s obvious.”

Fast forward to the 1980s and the connection became not-so obvious, at least to economists. And that’s thanks in large part to Rockefeller’s Chicago-school investment, which pumped out decades worth of pro-oligarch propaganda.

Today, we’ve come full circle. Billionaires like Peter Thiel are so hubristic that they speak brazenly about their pursuit of power, laying bare their inner robber baron. The upshot to this plute bravado is that few people will be surprised by the straight line that connects corporate oligarchy with the concentration of elite wealth.

That's sobering. Buy-don’t build is what got most of America’s major plutocrats much or most of their vast wealth and power. And if you look at it, anti-democracy authoritarianism is inherent in buy-don’t build dogma. Put another way, there is fierce competition for two things that tend to go together, wealth and power. The twin tendencies are (i) with wealth comes power, and (ii) with power comes wealth. What gets in the way of accumulating wealth? Regulations, government and the public interest or general welfare (civil liberties, transparent, honest government, etc.).

This is a very plausible explanation for the tactics and dogma that mostly animates America’s authoritarian radical right brass knuckles capitalist elites. That is just as scary as the tactics and dogma that animate America’s authoritarian radical right Christian nationalist elites. It’s a marriage made in hell for average people, democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties, but it’s made in heaven for the elites.

News Chunks: Capitalism and groundwater wars; Regarding the dangerous enraged one

In a long but excellent article, the NYT writes about how a few wealthy, mostly unaccountable elites control vast amounts of groundwater in Nevada, Kansas and Montana. Long story short, elite capitalists and their business interests are pumping groundwater fast and it will be gone in the coming years. People will simply have to move away from affected areas, including the businesses. The land alone will not sustain much in the way of modern large-scale human activities. 

This is what unregulated, social conscience-free capitalism always or nearly always does. Capitalists do not care about you, me, the public interest, or the environment. They care about themselves and profit. Period. The NYT writes about the Kansas situation (not paywalled off):

From a small brick building in Garden City, Kan., 13 men manage the use of groundwater across five million acres in the southwest corner of the state, some of the most productive farmland in America for corn, wheat and sorghum.

They serve on the board of Groundwater Management District 3, which since 1996 has overseen the pumping of 16.2 trillion gallons of groundwater — enough to fill Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir, twice over.

The board is elected, but not by everyone: The only people eligible to vote are large landowners, a group of less than 12,000 people in an area of roughly 130,000. And in some years, fewer than 100 people actually vote. Others — cashiers at Walmart, teachers at the community college, workers at the local St. Catherine Hospital — have no say in the management of the aquifer on which they, too, rely.

The aquifer is running out of water, fast. But the board hasn’t slowed down the pumping.

In a country where the value of land often depends on access to water, powerful interests in agriculture, heavy industry and real estate draw vast amounts of water out of the ground. For generations, that water has been treated as an unlimited resource in much of the United States, freely available to anyone who owns a piece of land and can drill a well. Entire local economies have been built around the assumption that the water will never run out.

Now it is starting to run out, not only in Kansas but across much of the country. From Maryland to Hawaii groundwater levels are falling, often the result of overpumping and underregulation, made worse by climate change. As the planet warms, demand for water is increasing. At the same time, increased evaporation, as well as decreased precipitation in some places, means that less water is refilling the aquifers, accelerating their decline.

“If we don’t make change, we’re not going to have water,” said Lindsay Vaughn, a state lawmaker in Kansas who has tried to curtail pumping in her state. 

But change is being actively resisted by many of the agribusinesses, multinational companies and big landowners who depend on enormous amounts of water. They say that reducing groundwater access strikes at the heart of local and regional economies. It also strikes at their bottom lines.

“You lose land value, you lose tax base, and quite frankly you lose the way of life,” said Joe Newland, president of the Kansas Farm Bureau.

In reporting around the country, The New York Times found that the struggle is intensifying between those who benefit from pumping large amounts of groundwater and those who see it as a looming catastrophe.

Once the water is gone, it’s gone unless humans mount a major, years-long effort to replenish depleted aquafers. This raises a bigger question than just groundwater. When unregulated capitalism runs wild and butt naked until there is nothing left to exploit or to sustain the local human population, the enterprise collapses. The elites just move on, mostly cushioned and protected by accumulated wealth. Regular people are left behind to fend for themselves. That's the typical narrative, with the typical human and/or environmental wreckage. 

Capitalism, it privatizes wealth and trickles most profit (usually ~95% ?) up to the elites, while socializing human and environmental risks and harms to the rest of us. No wonder the plutocrats fight tooth, claw and poison dagger to keep their vast wealth and power. They generally fight in darkness with as much secrecy and plausible deniability as possible. That’s how Trump always operated and still does. They all do it, with few exceptions.

One critically necessary thing needed to keep rural farm operations going is fresh water. Once that is gone, affected areas will in essence be mostly bankrupt wastelands. Natural rainwater will be insufficient to maintain most modern large-scale farm operations. The day is coming when there will be a lot of irate displaced farmers asking pointed questions, but getting no good answers. The plutocrats will quietly slink away in the dead of night, leaving the usual plutocrat wreckage behind them for others to deal with.

___________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________

A long, detailed NYT opinion by columnist Thomas Edsall considers the race for president and how the MSM is stumbling, fumbling, bumbling and failing (not paywalled off - the article is worth the time to read):

Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captured the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”

Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits

a 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power

against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”

“One of those two candidates,” Klaas noted, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: It’s somehow not the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges.)”

Klaas asked:

What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?

How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?

The media, Klaas argued, has adopted a policy in covering Donald Trump of “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”

In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he called the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”

This approach, according to Klaas,

has backfired. It’s bad for democracy. The “don’t amplify him” argument is disastrous. We need to amplify Trump’s vile rhetoric more, because it will turn persuadable voters off to his cruel message.

Looking over the eight and a half years during which Trump has been directly engaged in presidential politics, it’s not as if there had been no warning signs.

The warnings that Trump is dangerous and unstable began well before his 2016 election and have become increasingly urgent.

These warnings came during the 2016 primary and general campaigns, continued throughout Trump’s four years in the White House and remain relentless as he gets older and more delusional about the outcome of the 2020 election.

In recent months, Trump has continued to add to the portrait Glass paints of him.

In March he told loyalists in Waco, Texas:

I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.

“With you at my side,” Trump went on to say,

we will totally obliterate the deep state, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.

At the California Republican Convention on Sept. 29, Trump told the gathering that under his administration, shoplifters would be subject to extrajudicial execution: “We will immediately stop all the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”

Trump has continued to forge ahead, pledging to a crowd of supporters in Claremont, N.H., on Nov. 11: “We will root out the communists, Marxist fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

Trump, the Washington Post noted, dismissed federal criminal indictments as “third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” then claimed that the indictments gave him license, if re-elected, to do the same thing: “I can do that, too.”

In an earlier story, Haberman, Savage and Swan reported that Trump allies are preparing to reissue an executive order known as Schedule F, which Trump promulgated at the end of his presidency but which never went into effect.

Schedule F, the reporters wrote,

would have empowered his administration to strip job protections from many career federal employees — who are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. While the order said agencies should not hire or fire Schedule F employees based on political affiliation, it effectively would have made these employees more like political appointees who can be fired at will.

Schedule F would politicize posts in the senior civil service authorized to oversee the implementation of policy, replacing job security with the empowerment of the administration to hire and fire as it chose, a topic I wrote about in an earlier column.

Edsall’s column is quite long. It goes on at length like this. There is a heck of a lot to write about. What Klass and Edsall are arguing is for the MSM to stop treating DJT nicely. The MSM needs to pretending DJT didn’t say the horrible things he said. A few others in the MSM have recently seem to woken up to the gravity and urgency of the threat and are starting to use words like fascist.

 

Q: Should the MSM do as Klass and Edsall are arguing, or should keep a firm and steady hand on the tiller of the status quo, i.e., will it persuade the few persuadable minds that might still be open to more warnings about DJT?