DL Open Thread Tuesday, March 12, 2024

The backlash against the police reforms that came after the George Floyd protests has been fierce, led by the police themselves. That’s led to many jurisdictions undoing those reforms in the face of reports of rising crime – which, if you bother to look at the numbers, is the opposite of the truth. Gee, I wonder who would perpetrate such a lie?

The reactionary element is strong all around the world, and the would-be dictators fear they’re losing, which is why they have thrown off all self-imposed constraints on their behavior. The shitgibbons are even linking up internationally. The American fascist movement, for example, is greatly enamored of Hungarian thug Viktor Orbán, and was even before Trump came to power. Now the two authoritarians are boosting each other in their bid to forge a global order with mediocre white men in control. I think this effort is doomed to failure. Given who these people are, they’re just trying to use each other, and look how well that worked out for Hitler and Stalin.

Remember Robert Hur, the Trump DoJ weasel whom Merrick Garland named special counsel to investigate Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, who then used that platform to portray Biden as a drooling vegetable? He quit the DoJ the day before he’ll testify about his Biden interview before a Congressional committee. This will allow him to lie with impunity, and it also shows what a bad-faith effort his report was in the first place.

The Guardian has a good article about Lina Khan, head of the Federal Trade Commission, and her antitrust efforts to rein in the corporate forces that brought us greedflation. This is work that’s been neglected since the Reagan era, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. If media were truly interesting in their viewers and readers, rather than their advertisers, this would be in the news every day. It’s not. You don’t need an Etch-a-Sketch to draw your own conclusions.

Many factors go into making American health care by far the most expensive on Earth. One of the biggest is outrageous prices for medication.* A whole business has sprung up to take advantage of our piecemeal approach, and these so-called pharmacy benefit managers – a fancy term for “middlemen” – have put their ill-gotten gains to use lobbying Congress to kill proposed regulations.

*Republicans are full of shit when it comes to balancing the budget – if they really cared about cutting government spending rather than feeding corporate greed, they wouldn’t pass laws barring Medicare from bargaining prices with Big Pharma. They’re so full of shit they should get a prescription for constipation, and be forced to pay for it out of pocket.

The floor’s yours.