Trump threatens the governor of the state of Maine “we are the federal law”.
OTTAWA — Prime Minister Mark Carney called a snap election on Sunday, saying he needs a mandate from Canadians to take on U.S. President Donald Trump.
The federal campaign kicks off days ahead of a new slate of Trump tariffs, and at a time when Canadians are increasingly worried the president will make good on his threats of economic and cultural takeover.
“President Trump claims that Canada isn’t a real country. He wants to break us so America can own us. We will not let that happen,” Carney said outside of Rideau Hall in Ottawa. “We’re over the shock of the betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons.”
We the Resistance in America stand with Prime Minister Carney.
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That terrible man is at it again, huh @felix_dakat, in ensuring that the real essential services remain running.
Taken from… https://www.ilovephilosophy.com/t/abortion-and-its-merits-for-us/81124/17?u=magsj
Another opportunity to discuss epistemic hygiene:
I’d never heard of this source, so I was already skeptical. Anyone can create a website and post anything, and many sources exist to push agendas rather than to inform. That trend is much more common on the right, so the fact that this website is clearly targeting people who identify as “conservative” was a red flag – though a small one, there are some great conservative-leaning publications doing great work. I’m on alert, but open.
By here, I know this is an editorial, not a news story. How? The FCC is an independent agency, the President doesn’t directly control it (contrary to how Trump thinks the federal government works). By law, the commission can’t be stacked: only three commissioners can belong to the same party. It’s true that in November there were 3 democratic commissioners, but only one of them was appointed during Biden’s term, the other two were appointed during Trump’s first term.
So to describe it as “Biden-controlled” is literally false on a number of levels. Still, it might be said by a semi-respectable right-leaning opinion page belligerent. But in the first half dozen words we know this isn’t straight reporting, it’s spin at best.
By this point, I’m deeply suspicious that this is not a sincere attempt to describe anything or make a good-faith argument. Soros is a conservative boogeyman, he’s virtually always invoked as a code word for Jews. In the context of a suspicious source falsely describing a situation, tying whatever they’re spinning to Soros strongly suggests this is somewhere between clickbait and partisan misinformation.
So who is conservativebrief? Here’s a report on the company from 2022, by an [independent journalist](an independent journalist I’ve followed for years. He notes that their business model involves paying right-wing influencers to post their articles on Facebook, and their connection to the broader right-wing astroturfing industry.
We should have very low credibility about what they have to say, they aren’t a news source, they’re a tabloid.
Still, a tabloid can publish true things, so maybe there are some true things in this article. And in fact, like all good lies this one appears to start from a true event, the bankruptcy and restructuring of the Audacy. That link is to CNN, and maybe you don’t like CNN, but they at least link to directly to the FCC Order in question – That’s a great sign for credibility! Linking to the actually documents they’re talking about!
The FCC order approved a restructuring in bankruptcy and the transfer of the radio stations from Audacy to itself, and, as the FCC notes, the same approval has been given to Audacy’s competitors – see footnote 48 on page 8, listing 7 similar approvals given to different media companies doing the same thing, at least 5 of them issued during the Trump administration under the former, Republican FCC chair, Ajit Pai; and footnote 49 on the same page noting the longstanding principle on which these types of approvals are granted. Here is the order for a similar waiver from 2019, for a similar transaction involving iHeart Media, Audacy’s larger competitor.
So this seems both routine, and temporary: Once the reorganization is completed, the new entity has 30 days to file start the normal approval process. (FCC Order page 13, paragraph 35
George Soros is connected, but he didn’t acquire anything. Audacy went bankrupt and is restructuring itself; Soros Management Fund (SMF) owns a lot of Audacy’s debt; SFM is an investment firm, so buying distressed assets as an investment is what it does; George Soros is the founder and Chairman of SFM.
After the sale, Audacy continues to own the radio stations, and as far as I can tell SMF’s interest will be converted to stock and bought out by Laurel Tree Opportunities Corporation (LTOC) who will own a majority stake in Audacy. LTOC is owned by FPR Capital Holdings LLC, which is the investment arm of the Fund for Policy Reform, and Alex Soros (George’s son) is on the board of the FPR. (FCC Order page 3, paragraph 6).
Read the dissents though, they’re spicy and they support conservativebrief’s take (poorly in my view, but maybe you can convince me otherwise).
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Do you not recall hearing about the radio station buy-outs situation in September last year…? I was wondering what had happened to that Breaking News from way back then, so…
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It seems like this… led to:
Feb. 12, 2025, 7:03 PM GMT
By Ja’han Jones
Several officials handpicked by Donald Trump to serve in his administration have attacked the media in recent days over coverage of the president’s anti-immigration policies.
Last week, Brendan Carr, the conservative attack dog Trump tapped to lead the Federal Communications Commission, announced that his agency is investigating the San Francisco radio station KCBS — owned by radio conglomerate Audacy — after it broadcast federal immigration agents’ live locations last month.
This…
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Tuesday carried out raids at the offices of George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations (OSF) in Bengaluru, Karnataka. The searches come as a part of the probe agency’s investigation into alleged violations of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).
The case pertains to alleged foreign direct investment (FDI) being sourced by OSF and the utilisation of these funds by certain beneficiaries in alleged contravention of FEMA guidelines, according to PTI.
(This is a developing story)
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There has been a high amount of fraud [bribery and corruption] coming from that region of India, it is a hotbed of criminal activity and there is an ongoing investigation into the money-laundering that fuelled said ‘bribery and corruption’.
I would say, that the entire investigation is of a delicate nature and is not global news.
Racial disparities in policing and jailing are also due to the fact that black people are committing way more violent crimes than any other racial group. And are twice as likely to live in poverty. So tend to live in poorer areas, which tend to have higher crime, which requires a higher police presence. Plus the fact so many young black men today are indoctrinated with music and “black culture” thug mentalities about how the police are evil and they should fight back, assert themselves, be antagonistic and all that rather than just be polite.
A ton of police violence against black people would never happen if 1) those same black people hadn’t been committing crimes, 2) hadn’t been trying to run from or resist the police, or 3) were more financially responsible and hard working to live in less crime-ridden areas.
And yes, of course there is also some good old fashioned racism involved too, when it comes to the police and when it comes to the judges handing down sentences. But if you only focus on that and ignore everything else, all you’re doing is making excuses and enabling the problem to continue.
Until black people as a group stop committing so much disproportionately more violent crime compared to other racial groups, the negative stereotypes and racism among certain people prone to that sort of thing are never going to go away. Just like how Black Lives Matter only cares about the tiniest fraction of violent crime against black people, and ignores the vast vast majority which is happening by black people against each other. Refusal to admit the truth and be honest about problems is going to prevent finding solutions to those problems, just like they don’t even care about finding solutions and only use the problems for their own emotional and ideological reasons. And like BLM, financially benefiting from the problems by pretending to care.
There’s a feedback loop, though. People who are discriminated against end up getting worse educations, worse jobs, live in worse (but cheaper) neighborhoods, etc. Their kids go to worse schools, get worse educations, worse jobs, continue to live in worse neighborhoods, and they’re more likely to get involved in crime because education, income, and neighborhood are strongly associated with likelihood of getting involved with crime.
It’s easy to underestimate the effects of even small amounts of discrimination across a whole population. See e.g. Shelling’s Model of Segregation.
Depending how much people tend to blame others for their misfortunes, and attribute life outcomes to innate characteristics rather than social forces beyond their control, a little bit of discrimination can create a feedback loop that leads to significant differences in outcomes, perpetuating discrimination.
Besides which, demanding that “black people as a group” do something guarantees that it will never happen, which is just game theory: if discrimination ends only when every individual does something, then no individual has any incentive to do that thing, so no one does anything and nothing changes; if everyone in a given race is treated as a criminal, and only the actual criminal get the benefit of disregarding the law, then individuals have an incentive to be criminals.
If instead we demand that e.g. police try very hard to treat individuals as individuals and not as racial tokens, then individual members of every race are properly incentivized with respect to crime.
Like black people aren’t having black people meetings where they strategize about how to be “as a group”, they’re a bunch of individuals and they act and choose as individuals. If we want the group to change, we need to incentivize the individuals. And if we want to incentivize the individuals, we should be upset when individuals are treated as mere tokens of the group.
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President Trump seems to have overplayed his cards — big time.
His decision, announced this weekend, to send a high-powered U.S. delegation to the island, apparently uninvited, is already backfiring. The administration tried to present it as a friendly trip, saying that Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President JD Vance, would attend a dogsled race this week with one of their sons and that Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, would tour an American military base.
But instead of winning the hearts and minds of Greenland’s 56,000 people, the move, coupled with Mr. Trump’s recent statement that “one way or the other, we’re going to get it,” is backfiring.
Over the past 24 hours, the Greenlandic government has dropped its posture of being shy and vague in the face of Mr. Trump’s pushiness. Instead, it blasted him as “aggressive”and asked Europe for backup. And the planned visit may only strengthen the bonds between Greenland — an ice-covered land three times the size of Texas — and Denmark. [NYT]
Trump officials disclosed secret war plans in a group chat
The White House confirmed today that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had revealed secret war plans in an encrypted chat group that included a journalist, two hours before U.S. troops launched attacks against the Houthi militia in Yemen. It was an extraordinary breach of American national-security intelligence that shocked several Defense Department officials.
The chat included some of the most influential figures in President Trump’s inner circle, among them Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz, the national security adviser. Walz mistakenly added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, to the group. Goldberg, who was included in the highly sensitive conversation for the two days leading up to the strikes, published an article today about the exchange.
Hegseth described the war plans on the commercial messaging app Signal, rather than the secure government channels that would normally be used for classified and highly sensitive war planning. That in itself could be a violation of the Espionage Act, Pentagon officials said.
In addition, the officials said that revealing operational war plans before planned strikes could also put American troops directly into harm’s way.
Trump denied knowing anything about the chat, but the incident provided a stark reminder of an earlier Washington controversy: Both the president and many of his allies suggested Hillary Clinton should have been imprisoned for using a private email server while she was secretary of state.
Hegseth is unfit for the job. That Trump didn’t see that from the beginning speaks to his own malfeasance. He’s not going to succeed as a world class autocrat with incompetent people working for him. Plus, having this guy in charge of the Defense Department, he’s endangering the rest of us. Trump may be able to engender fear in people, but he won’t get their respect.
Why is the crime rate/s so high amongst the black community…? because their family members -for the last few decades- cover-up the crimes for their family members.
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No comeback = no incentive to not do crime, on generational-levels.
Break that cycle / break the problem.
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They can’t agree, on how to be as a group, because they are a very ‘broad church’ of backgrounds peoples and places… black is a colour, not a binding designation of similarities and ancestry, so probably best to start there.
Wild idea, I know, but for me, personally, when someone is like “this innocent person was shot to death by police because the police assumed they were a criminal because they are black”, that’s just a bad thing and an example of the police failing to do what they are supposed to do, the officers involved are bad at being police and at the very least shouldn’t be police any more (and looks a lot like those police are much more criminal than the innocent people they shot to death).
Like every group of humans, the vast majority of black people are not criminals, and we should be upset when people who are not criminals get treated like criminals.
Racist police who will assume you are a criminal no matter what you do = no incentive not to do crime.
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That claim is misleading and often used to push harmful narratives. Crime statistics in the U.S. are influenced by a range of social, economic, and systemic factors, rather than just race.
Here are a few key points to consider:
- Socioeconomic Factors – Poverty, unemployment, and lack of access to resources contribute significantly to crime rates. Historically marginalized communities, including many Black communities, have faced systemic disadvantages that correlate with higher crime rates in some areas.
- Policing and Reporting Bias – Crime data is shaped by law enforcement practices. Black communities are often more heavily policed, leading to higher arrest rates, even when crime rates are comparable across racial groups. Studies show that white Americans also commit violent crimes at significant rates, but they may be less frequently arrested or prosecuted in certain cases.
- FBI Crime Data – The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) statistics show that violent crime is committed by people of all racial groups. While Black individuals are arrested at disproportionate rates for some crimes, this does not mean they are inherently more criminal. Other factors, such as population density and socioeconomic conditions, play a major role.
- The Majority of Crime is Intraracial – Most crimes, including violent crimes, occur within racial groups. For example, most violent crimes against Black victims are committed by Black offenders, just as most violent crimes against white victims are committed by white offenders.
Blaming crime on race alone ignores the deeper issues at play, such as systemic inequality, historical discrimination, and disparities in policing and sentencing. A more productive approach is addressing the root causes of crime, such as education, economic opportunity, and criminal justice reform.
This is the way forward we need to support. If the Democratic Party doesn’t get on board, we need a new political party.
A few hours ago on the floor of the Senate, Bernie Sanders torched billionaires, scorched Trump, and burned every shred of political cowardice in his path.
Here is his fiery speech, word for word:
Mr. President,
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to travel in many parts of our country. And I have been able to talk to folks in Nebraska, in Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona. And what I am hearing from in all of these states and in fact all over the country is that our nation right now faces enormous crises, unprecedented crises in the modern history of our country.
And how right now at this moment we respond to these crises will not only impact our lives, it will impact the lives of our kids and future generations. And in terms of climate change, the well-being of the entire planet.
And Mr. President, what I have to tell you is that the American people are angry at what is happening here in Washington, DC and they are prepared to stand up and fight back. In my view and what I have heard from many, many people is that they will not accept an oligarchic form of society where a handful of billionaires control our government, where the wealthiest person on Earth, Mr. Musk, is running all over Washington, DC slashing the Social Security Administration so that our elderly people today are finding it extremely difficult to access the benefits that they paid into.
Where Mr. Musk and his friends are slashing the Veterans Administration so that people who put their lives on the line to defend us will not be able to get the health care that they are entitled to or get the benefits that they are owed in a timely manner. Slashing the Department of Education. Slashing USAID.
And why is all of this slashing taking place? It is taking place so that the wealthiest people in this country can receive over $1 trillion dollars in tax breaks.
Now, I don’t care if you are a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent. There are very few people in this country who think that you slash programs that working families desperately need in order to give tax breaks to billionaires.
Mr. President, I am the former chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, and I have had the honor of meeting with veterans in my own state of Vermont—all over Vermont—but all over the country. These are the men and women who put the uniform of this country on and have been prepared to die to defend our nation and American democracy.
And these veterans and Americans all over our nation will not accept an authoritarian form of society with a president who undermines our Constitution every day. Every day there’s something else out there where he’s undermining our Constitution and threatening the very foundations of American democracy. That is not what people fought and died to allow to happen.
Mr. President, I am not a historian, but I do know that the founding fathers of this country were no dummies. They were really smart guys. And in the 1780s, they wrote a Constitution and established a form of government with a separation of powers.
A separation of powers—with an executive branch, the president; a legislative branch, the Congress; and a judicial branch.
These revolutionaries in the 1780s had just fought a war against the imperial rule of the King of England who was an absolute dictator, the most powerful person on Earth. And these revolutionaries here in America forming a new government wanted to make absolutely sure that no one person in this brand new country that they were forming would have unlimited powers.
And that is why we have a separation of powers. That is why we have a judiciary, a Congress, and an executive branch. In other words, way back in the 1780s, they wrote a Constitution to prevent exactly what Donald Trump is trying to do today.
So, let us be clear about what is going on. Donald Trump is attacking our First Amendment and is trying to intimidate the media and those who speak out against him in an absolutely unprecedented way.
Mr. President, he has sued ABC, CBS, Meta, the Des Moines Register. His FCC is now threatening to investigate NPR and PBS. He has called CNN and MSNBC “illegal.”
In other words, the leader—or the so-called leader—of the free world is afraid of freedom. He doesn’t like criticism. Well, guess what? None of us like criticism. But you don’t get elected to the Senate, you don’t get elected to the House, you don’t become a governor, you don’t become a president of the United States unless you are prepared to deal with that criticism.
And the response to that criticism in a democracy is not to sue the media, is not to intimidate the media. It’s to respond in the way you think best.
But Mr. President, it is not just the media that Trump is going after. He is going after the constitutional responsibilities that this body, the United States Congress, has. And I will say it amazes me, it really does, how easily my Republican colleagues here in the Senate and in the House are willing to surrender their constitutional responsibilities. Give it over to the president.
Trump has illegally and unconstitutionally withheld funds that Congress has appropriated. You can’t do that. Congress has the power of the purse. We make a decision. We argue about it here. Big debates, vote-aras, the whole thing. Make that decision. That money goes out. The president does not have the right to withhold funds that Congress has appropriated.
Trump has illegally and unconstitutionally decimated agencies that can only be changed or reformed by Congress. You don’t like the Department of Education, you don’t like USAID, fine. Come to the Congress. Tell us what reforms you want to see. You do not have the right to unilaterally do away with these agencies.
Trump has fired members of independent agencies and inspectors general that he does not have the authority to do.
But Mr. President, it is not just the media that he is trying to intimidate. It is not just the powers of Congress that he wants.
Now, in an absolutely outrageous, unconstitutional and extraordinarily dangerous way, he is going after the judiciary. His view is that if you don’t like a decision that a judge renders, you get rid of that judge. You try to impeach that judge. You intimidate judges so that you get the decisions that you want.
You know, I’m thinking back now as someone who is not a supporter of the Roberts court, and I’m thinking about one of the worst Supreme Court decisions that has ever been rendered—that is Citizens United. I’ll say more about that in a moment. And I’m thinking about the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, taking away American women’s right to control their own bodies.
In my view, these were outrageous decisions, unpopular decisions. But it never occurred to me, because maybe I’m old-fashioned and conservative, and I believe that you live by the rule of law, to say, “Hey, look at the decision Roberts made. We’re going to impeach him.”
No, we try to elect a new president who’s going to appoint new Supreme Court justices. That is the system that people have fought and died to defend.
But it’s not just the movement toward oligarchy, which is outraging millions of Americans—Democrats and Republicans, by the way—and it’s not just the movement toward authoritarianism that we are seeing. The American people, especially with Mr. Musk and 13 billionaires in the Trump administration running agency after agency…
The American people are saying as loudly as they can that they will not accept a society of massive economic and wealth inequalities, where the very richest people in our country are becoming much richer while working families are struggling to put food on the table.
Having gone all over this country, I can tell you that the American people are sick and tired of these inequalities and they want an economy that works for all of us—not just the 1%.
You know, Mr. President, we deal with a whole lot of stuff here in the Congress, and you know, virtually all of it is important in one way or another.
But let’s do something, you know, fairly radical today. Let’s try to tell the truth—the real truth—about what is going on in our society today. Something that we don’t talk about too much here in the Senate. We don’t talk about it too much in the House. We don’t talk about it too much in the corporate media.
But the reality is that today we have two Americas. Two very, very different Americas.
And in one of those Americas, the wealthiest people have never ever had it so good. In the whole history of our country, the people on top have never ever had it so good as they have it today.
Today, we have more income and wealth inequality than there has ever been in the history of America. Now, I know we don’t discuss it. You don’t see it much on TV. You don’t hear it talked about here at all. But the American people do not believe that it is appropriate that three people—one, two, three—Mr. Musk, Mr. Bezos, and Mr. Zuckerberg, three Americans, own more wealth than the bottom half of American society. 170 million people. Really? Three people own more wealth than 170 million people? Anybody here think that is vaguely appropriate?
And by the way, those very same three people—the three richest people in America—were right there at Trump’s inaugural, standing right behind the president. So, you want to know what oligarchy is? I know there’s some confusion out there. What is oligarchy? Well, it starts off when you have the three wealthiest people in the country standing right behind the president when he gets inaugurated.
The top 1% in our country now own more wealth than the bottom 90%.
CEOs make 300 times more than their average worker.
And unbelievably—real inflation-accounted-for wages today—the average American worker, if you can believe it, despite a massive increase in worker productivity, is lower today than it was 52 years ago. And during that period, there was a $75 trillion transfer of wealth that went from the bottom 90% to the top 1%. That is the reality of the American economy today. And you know what? Maybe we might want to be talking about that.
And in our America today, in that top America, that one America, the 1% are completely separate and isolated from the rest of the country. You think they get on a subway to get to work? Think they sit in a traffic jam for an hour trying to get to work? Not the case.
They fly around in the jets and the helicopters that they own. They live in their mansions all over the world in their gated communities. They have nannies taking care of their babies. They don’t worry about the cost of child care. And they send their kids to the best private schools and colleges.
Sometimes they vacation not in a Motel 6, not in a national park, but on the very own islands that they have. And on occasion, for the very very richest—just to have for a kick, have a little bit of fun—maybe they’ll spend a few million dollars flying off into space in one of their own spaceships. Sounds like fun.
But it is not just massive income and wealth inequality that we’re dealing with today. We have more concentration of ownership than ever before. While the profits on Wall Street and corporate America soar, a handful of giant corporations dominate sector after sector—whether it’s agriculture, transportation, media, financial services, etc., etc.
Small number of huge corporations—international corporations—dominating sector after sector. And as a result of that concentration of ownership, they are able to charge the American people outrageously high prices for the goods and services we need.
Mr. President, we don’t talk about it too much. Maybe we should. But there are three Wall Street firms—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—that combined are the major stockholders in 95% of our corporations. Got that? Three Wall Street firms—three—are the major stockholders in 95% of American corporations.
So, Mr. President, that is one America. People on top doing phenomenally well. Not only do they have economic power, they have enormous political power. That’s what’s going on there. They live like kings. That’s one America.
But there is another America.
And in that other America, 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck. And millions of workers from one end of this country to the other are trying to survive on starvation wages.
And unlike Donald Trump, I grew up in a family that lived paycheck to paycheck. And I know the anxieties that my mom and dad had, living in a rent-controlled apartment. Can we afford to buy this? Why did you buy that?
And that’s the story taking place all over America.
What does living paycheck to paycheck mean?
It means that every single day, millions of Americans worry about how they’re going to pay their rent or their mortgage. All over the country, rents are skyrocketing. And people are wondering: What happens—what happens to me and my kids if rent goes up by 20% and I can’t afford it? Where do I live? Do I have to take my kid out of school? Where do I put my kid? In worst case scenario, do I live in my car?
Let’s be clear. There are many people who are working today who are living in the back of their cars.
How do I pay for child care?
I talked to a cop, a guy the other day—a police officer—spending $20,000 a year for child care.
How do I buy decent food for my kids when the price of groceries is off the charts?
What happens if I get sick or my kid gets sick or my mother gets sick and I got a $12,000 deductible and I can’t afford to go to the doctor?
How, at the end of the month, am I going to pay my credit card bill—even though I am being charged 20 or 30% interest rates by the usurious credit card companies?
People are worrying about simple things. What happens if my car breaks down and the guy at the repair shop says it’s going to cost $1,000 and I don’t have $1,000 in the bank? And if I don’t have a car, how do I get to work? And if I don’t get to work, how do I have an income? And if I don’t have an income, how do I take care of my family?
Those are the crises that millions of Americans are experiencing today.
But it’s not just working-age Americans.
Today, in our country, half of older workers—older workers—have nothing in the bank as they face retirement. And they’re watching TV and they’re saying, “Mr. Musk is firing Social Security workers,” and actually worrying whether Social Security will be there for them.
And it’s not just older workers with nothing in the bank wondering what happens when they retire. Twenty-two percent of seniors are trying to survive on $15,000 a year.
I dare anybody in this country—let alone somebody who’s old, who needs health care, needs to keep the house warm—try to survive on $15,000 a year. And there are people here, by the way, talking about cutting Social Security.
Mr. President, it is not just about income and wealth inequality. It is about a health care system which everyone in the nation understands is broken, is dysfunctional, and is outrageously expensive.
I hear my Republican friends—you know, I don’t know where they are today—wanting to destroy the ACA. And my Democratic friends say, “Oh, we got to defend the ACA.” ACA is broken. It doesn’t work.
In my state, the cost of health care is going up 10, 15%. In America today, you got 85 million people uninsured or underinsured.
Function of the health care system today is not to do what a sane society would do—guarantee health care to all people in a cost-effective way—something which, by the way, every other major nation on Earth manages to do.
The function of our health care system, as everybody knows, is to make billions of dollars in profits for the insurance companies and the drug companies.
So I say to my Democratic friends: It’s not good enough to defend the Affordable Care Act. It’s a broken system. You got to have the guts to stand up and allow us to do what every other major nation does—guarantee health care to all people as a human right—not allow the drug companies and the insurance companies to make massive profits every year.
And Mr. President, I want to touch on an issue that gets virtually no discussion, but I think it is enormously important—and it says a hell of a lot about what’s going on in our society today.
In America, according to international studies, our life expectancy—how long we live as a people—is about four years lower than other countries. Most European countries—people there live longer lives. Japan—they live even more longer lives than in Europe.
So, question number one: Why is that happening?
We spend $14,000 a year per person on health care—almost double what any other country spends. And yet people around the world are living, on average, four years longer than we do.
But here is the really ugly fact—even worse than that.
And that is that in this country, on average, if you are a working-class person, you will live seven years shorter lives than if you’re in the top 1%. If you’re a working-class person, your life will be seven years shorter than if you are wealthy.
In other words, being poor or working-class in America today amounts to a death sentence.
Mr. President, it’s not only a broken health care system.
We have got to ask ourselves a simple question—and the Biden administration began a little bit of movement in this direction—and that is: Why are we living in a nation where one out of four people can’t even afford the prescription drugs their doctors prescribe?
Why are we in some cases paying ten times more than our neighbors in Canada or in Europe? How does that happen?
And the answer of course has to do with the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and their power right here—all of the campaign contributions that they make—which has prevented us from negotiating prices.
But it’s not just health care or prescription drugs.
When we look at what’s going on in America—in Vermont and throughout this country—we have a major housing crisis. Here we are, the richest country on Earth: 800,000 people sleeping out on the streets, and 20 million people are spending more than 50% of their limited incomes on housing.
Can you imagine that? You’re a working person, spending 50% of your income on housing. How do you have money to do anything else? And the cost of housing is soaring.
Do not tell me, Mr. President, that in a nation which could spend a trillion dollars on the military—a nation that gives massive tax breaks to the rich—that we cannot build the millions of units of housing that we desperately need.
So, Mr. President, why is all of this happening?
Why do we have a health care system that is broken? Prescription drugs that are the most expensive in the world? A housing system? Education in deep trouble?
Talked to educators in Vermont, all over the country. Talked to a principal the other day from Vermont. Their starting salary at a public school? $32,000 a year. But don’t worry—they can’t afford to even bring people in because they can’t afford the housing in the community.
Why have we let education sink to the level that it has?
So I think the bottom line of all this is: The American people, I think, are catching on. And Mr. Musk—I must thank him—because he has made it very clear we are living in an oligarchic form of society.
If anybody out there thinks that Mr. Musk is running around out of the goodness of his heart trying to make our government more efficient, you have not a clue as to what is going on.
What these guys want to do is destroy virtually every federal program that impacts the well-being of working people—Social Security, Medicare, postal service, public education, you name it—so they can get huge tax breaks for the rich and eventually make government so inefficient that they will have the ability, as large corporations, to come in and privatize everything that is going on.
So, Mr. President, this is a pivotal moment in American history. And I sense that the American people have had it up to here.
They are prepared to fight back.
They do not want a government run by billionaires who have it all—whose greed is uncontrollable.
You know, we have in Vermont—and I think a lot of this country—serious problems with addiction, with drugs. People drinking too much alcohol. People smoking too many cigarettes.
But the worst form of addiction that this country now faces is the greed of the oligarchy.
You might think that if you had 10, 20 billion dollars, it would be enough. You know—kind of enough to let your family live for the next 20 generations.
But it’s not.
For whatever reason—whatever compulsive reason they have—these guys want more and more and more, and they are prepared to destroy Social Security, Medicare, nutrition programs for hungry people in order to get even more.
That, to me, is disgusting.
So, Mr. President, we are at a pivotal moment in American history. But having been all over this country—or many parts of this country—I am absolutely confident that the American people (and I’m not just talking about Democrats, who are as complicit in the problems that we have right now as our Republicans, because we got a two-party system which is basically corrupt)…
You got Mr. Musk over on the Republican side saying to any Republican who dares to stand up and defy the Trump agenda, we are going to primary you.
And on the Democratic side, you got AIPAC and you got other super PACs saying, you stand up for working people—you’re in trouble as well.
We got a corrupt campaign finance system in which billionaires are able to buy elections. And that’s why all over this country, people are not happy with our two-party system—the Republicans and the Democrats.
So, Mr. President, this is a pivotal moment in American history.
But we have had difficult moments before. And I am confident, from the bottom of my heart, that if we stand together, and we do not allow some right-wing extremists to divide us up by the color of our skin, or our religion, or where we were born, or our sexual orientation…
If we stand together, we can save this country. We can defeat oligarchy. We can defeat the movement toward authoritarianism. And in fact, we can create an economy and a government that works for all—not just a few.
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I know you like charts and graphs.
And I am not underestimating the effects of even small amounts of discrimination. I didn’t even make a claim as to the ultimate cause or causes of the black violence. I am merely pointing it out, and refusing to make excuses for it.
If you want to make headway with your idea that “black people aren’t a group”, yeah I agree and all I can say is, good luck with that. No one monoliths and treats races more like totalized homogeneous groups than liberals do. Well except for BLM itself. And don’t pretend like racial monolithing isn’t already a deep aspect of black culture and the thinking of those who consider themselves to be, and often are, part of the disenfranchised / poorer / underclass.
It tends to be more conservative right-wing people who think of others as individuals, not as members of groups primarily. I have never seen a liberal/leftist talk about people as if they were individuals first, group members second. Hell, intersectionalism is the literal antithesis of individualism, and I bet you think intersectionalism is pretty cool, right? I bet you even think it somehow promotes viewing people as individuals rather than as essentially nothing but mismashed collections of group identifications.
And, black people VOTE as a group in the US. Consider the political diversity, or lack thereof, among black voters compared to white voters. But naw, they are all just a bunch of individuals, right? Must be a coincidence.
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apply this same reasoning to the bible
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Sure. Want to initiate?
I have two thoughts on this.
The first is that that’s not at all what Black Lives Matter is protesting. High profile cases of black people being killed by the police were a jumping off point, but it was protesting the fact that black peoples and white peoples lives are not treated as of equal worth. All-cause morality is significantly higher among black people than white people (953.5 vs 802.5 per 100k), and among youth it’s nearly double (42.33 vs. 24.07 per 100k).
My other thought is that that chart is of a a weird metric. Black people are a much smaller part of the population than white people, so if murderers killed people at random from the population, you’d expect most murderers to kill more white people than black people.
A better metric is that black people make up only 12% of the population, but nearly half (44%) of homicide victims. If black lives matter, we should care about that.
It also seems like you’re saying that it’s not your problem because you’re white. Am I misinterpreting that?
I agree that liberals do this and that it’s a problem. That’s not an excuse to start doing it, it’s morally and factually wrong.
And I don’t think it’s true of conservatives any more in my experience – certainly not if the arguments about immigration and race I’ve been having across ILP for the past year are at all representative of contemporary conservatism.
But I don’t think saying that races aren’t monoliths is in tension at all with claims about intersectionality. You can talk about instersectionality purely in terms of statistics and still say important and meaningful things. And in that sense, intersectionality is anti-monolith: subpopulations do not necessarily follow trends seen in the whole population, so even where an identity or trait has predictive power in general, it may not have predictive power for a subset of people with that identity or trait. So the presence of one trait or identity may have predictive power about the predictive power of another trait or identity.
That’s anti-monolith, statistically sound, intersectionality.
I mean, racism is an almost explicit plank of the Republican platform at this point, and I’m not sure if “all black people don’t vote for people who hate black people” says much about group cohesion.
But even given that, there were significant differences in how uniformly democratic black subpoulations were in 2024 (e.g. men vs. women, young vs. old). There’s clearly diversity within the population, even if all subpopulations end up strongly democratic.
The American people are probably going to believe that they’re going to be getting $5000 “stimulus checks” until Trump is no longer president. It feels like a dangled carrot to keep people from thinking everything else is weird enough to do something. Just being real.
As long as they keep programs for poor kids and special needs kids, and those ACTUALLY unable to work/hustle, I have a hard time thinking anything wrong is happening here. They’re defunding programs that further “progressive” propaganda … from my vantage point.
Now… if they drastically increased income-based housing so that it forced price gougers into accountability-level rents … and only offered public funds/resources to people committed to staying clean and sober—including the wealthy who receive CORPORATE welfare, yada, yada, yada—you’d have an even harder time convincing me anything wrong is happening here.
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