Good move: Biden commutes death sentences of 37 federal inmates

As his term of office winds down, Joe Biden is trying to minimize the damage that Trump can do and one of things is the federal death penalty. The federal death penalty had.not been carried out for 17 years but when Trump took office in 2017, he proceeded to carry them out with vigor. Biden put back the moratorium when he took office in 2021 but there were still 40 people on death row. He has now commuted 37 of those.

Biden has been somewhat of a vacillator on the death penalty, supporting it during the heyday of ‘get tough on crime’ but then evolving as the political climate changed.
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The BRICS challenge to US financial dominance

The US is an imperial power. Unlike other former empires such as Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium, it hides its imperial nature by various ways, as Daniel Immerwahr describes in his book How to Hide an Empire that I reviewed back in 2019 and further discussed here. Rather than exercising direct over control over large countries, the US empire consists of small regions it calls ‘territories’ and bases scattered over all the world, because that enables it to exercise control without having to deal with large local populations. It is what Immerwahr calls a ‘pointillist’ empire.

China is challenging the US on the global stage and is also adopting the pointillist model with its ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ in which China invests heavily in infrastructure and other development projects in countries around the world, cementing economic links. Back in 2019, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosted a summit on this and despite heavy lobbying by the US to deter countries, 125 nations signed up and attended.
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Chaos comes early to the US

After Trump was elected and started surrounding himself with weirdos for his cabinet and advisory roles, people like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, Elise Stefanik, and Pete Hegseth, I expected that come January 20th when he actually takes office would be when the chaos started.

But it looks like he decided to get an early start and has chosen the budget process to throw his weight around. The current budget authorizes funding only until midnight on Friday and Republican speaker Mike Johnson thought he had worked out a deal to keep the government running. But then Elon Musk waded in and said the bill was not good enough and effectively scuttled it yesterday. Johnson then tried to get another bill that had the main thing that Trump wanted, which was to suspend the debt ceiling for two years so that he could give his wealthy friends a big tax cut. In order to get it passed in the House of Representatives, Trump vowed that any Republican who voted against it would face primary challengers supported by him.
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The rise of the manosphere

There have been many ugly developments following the election victory of Trump. It seems like all the worst elements in society who harbor abhorrent views have been emboldened to think that they are in control.

Christine Fernando writes about one particular area, and that is the rise of what is known as the ‘manosphere’, where men think that they now have even more power over women than they had before and are willing to say so openly.

Isabelle Frances-Wright, director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank focusing on polarization and extremism, said she had seen a “very large uptick in a number of types of misogynistic rhetoric immediately after the election,” including some “extremely violent misogyny.”

“I think many progressive women have been shocked by how quickly and aggressively this rhetoric has gained traction,” she said.

The phrase “Your body, my choice” has been largely attributed to a post on the social platform X from Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and far-right internet personality who dined at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida two years ago. In statements responding to criticism of that event, Trump said he had “never met and knew nothing about” Fuentes before he arrived.
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Michael Moore responds to the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting

In response to the outpouring of anger at the for-profit health insurance companies for their predatory practices that was unleashed by the killing by Luigi Mangione of the UnitedHealth care CEO, there has been a lot of pearl-clutching by the ruling classes and their pundits and political lackeys in both parties, pleading with people not to think of the shooter as a hero and saying that ‘political violence has no place in America’. The last sentiment is utterly disingenuous. Political violence is as American as apple pie and has been used routinely by the ruling classes and their repressive state apparatuses when their power is challenged by ordinary people. What they are scared of is when their authority is challenged by protestors and when political violence targets them.

Apparently Mangione had issued a hand-written manifesto. Many of the mainstream media have refused to publish it in full even though it is very short and have instead quoted bits of it. They have not given any reasons why they did this even though there are many fake ones circulating. Ken Klippenstein says that he has obtained the genuine one and has published it and it is reproduced here in full.

“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

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Film review: The Name of the Rose (1986)

I saw this film a long time ago, soon after it came out. I did not remember much of the details except that it was dark and moody and set in a remote abbey in the Middle Ages and involved the murder of several monks that a visiting monk William of Baskerville (played by Sean Connery) and his assistant Adso of Melk (a very young Christian Slater) try to solve.

I read the book of the same name by Umberto Eco last month, and disliked it for its tedious and lengthy discussions of esoterica involving theology and heresy and religious and political intrigue of that period. The main redeeming feature of the second edition of the book was that it had a postscript by the author explaining how and why he wrote it the way he did, including his choice of the title. While it did not improve the book’s standing in my opinion, it did shed light on the writing process and what an author seeks to achieve.
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Medicare tax avoidance by wealthy people

Medicare is the government-run health insurance program for people over 65 years of age. It is a very well-run program and funded by a tax on income that is automatically deducted from people’s paychecks. The Medicare tax is not huge. It is 2.9% for most people and 3.8% for high earners. If you are self-employed, or get any income that is not a salary or wage, you are still obliged to pay that tax when you file your annual income tax. I have done so routinely with any outside income I got from giving talks or from my writings. You fill in a separate form to report self-employment income and another form to pay the tax on it. It is pretty straightforward.

ProPublica has gone through the tax records and found that very wealthy people have exploited a loophole that enables them to avoid paying any Medicare taxes on their income. The article focuses on three of the most egregious tax avoiders.

The trove of tax records behind ProPublica’s “Secret IRS Files” series contains plenty of examples of billionaire financiers who avoided Medicare tax despite earning huge amounts from their companies. In 2016, Steve Cohen, the owner of the New York Mets, paid $0. So did Stephen Schwarzman, head of the investment behemoth Blackstone. Bill Ackman, the headline-grabbing hedge fund manager, was able to shield almost all his income from the tax.
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But these maneuvers by the rich hasten Medicare’s future crisis. Sometime in the 2030s, the program’s trust fund is due to run dry. Closing the loophole, along with eliminating other ways around the tax for wealthy business owners, could raise more than $250 billion over 10 years for Medicare, according to recent government estimates.

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Rage, rage against everything

In the aftermath of Trump’s victory in November, there has been a lot of anguished analyses by Democrats and pundits as to the reasons why Kamala Harris and the Democrats did not win. These have ranged from taking comfort in the fact that although they lost the Senate, they did not lose ground in the House of Representatives to pointing out that Trump’s margin of victory in the popular vote was not that large (about 1.5%). There have been suggestions that Harris’s loss was due to young people not voting in large enough numbers, that the Hispanic vote did not support Democrats as much as they have done in the past, to women voters not turning out in sufficient numbers to compensate for losses elsewhere. These kinds of analyses have suggested that tactical changes in the campaign, such as tailoring messages more towards the groups that dropped away, may have made the difference.

These analyses rarely tend to be definitive in their conclusions and to a large extent I have not paid too much attention to them. I have been trying to understand a more basic question.

There is no question that on objective grounds Trump is terrible both as a person and as a president. I am not going to make the case for that assertion, seeing it as self-evident. His awfulness has increased with time and yet his vote totals have also increased. What has concerned me is that Trump received over 77.2 million votes in November, more than the 74.2 million he got in 2020 and much more than the 63.0 million he got in 2016. His vote as a percentage of the total population has also gone up, from 19.3% in 2016 to 22.1% in 2020, to 22.6% in 2024. This quite extraordinary.
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There’s something happening here …

… what it is ain’t exactly clear.

The opening lines from the classic Vietnam war era protest song For What It’s Worth by the group Buffalo Springfield came to my mind following the killing on broad daylight in a city street in Manhattan, New York of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, America’s largest medical insurance company. What was not strange was that the killing triggered a massive manhunt and a blitz of media publicity. In the US brazen killings with guns happen many times daily and all over the country but it takes the killing of a rich person to trigger that kind of massive search for the shooter.

While that police and media response was not surprising, what was unusual was the seeming indifference, and even in some circles glee, of the public’s reaction to the killing. Thompson personally was an unknown figure, a standard corporate type, but he was clearly seen as emblematic of the evils of the private profit-seeking health insurance industry that are well-known and hardly need to be detailed. The chief one is that they try to make more money by finding every possible means to deny coverage for patient care. UnitedHealthcare was by some measures the worst offender. The resulting huge profits are transformed into huge salaries and bonuses for top executives and shareholder rewards.
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Sarah McBride for president

It is not easy being the first to break through some barrier, especially in the field of politics. An elected official has to serve a broad constituency but the people who rallied behind you often expect you to make the advancement of the community that you represent your main priority. When Barack Obama was elected as the first person of color to be president, he had to strike a delicate balance and not be seen as prioritizing the community of color over every other group in every area. Some could argue that he went too far in not wanting to be seen as the ‘Black president’. But such ‘firsts’ have a big burden. Their main priority is to not mess up because to do so would confirm the prejudices of people that members of their community are not up to the task. Obama succeeded in that regard, even if some of us felt that he tried a little too hard to be accepted by the establishment.

As the first open member of the transgender community to be elected to congress, Sarah McBride is acutely aware of this tension, especially as the transgender community is facing so much hostility. In an extremely thoughtful interview with David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, she demonstrates a level of political maturity that is astonishing for one so young and new to the national political scene.
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