Citizen Cartwright

Biden’s concern as he departs: Oligarchy of the ultrawealthy

In his Oval Office farewell speech Wednesday night, the president said, “I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern … the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. 

 

“Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

 

(Federal Reserve data show that the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans hold more than five times the wealth of the bottom 50 percent combined, The Associated Press reports.) 

 

“More than a century ago, the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts,” Biden said. “They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had. Workers want rights to earn their fair share. You know, they were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class, the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again.”

 

Biden said: “You know, in his farewell address [in 1961], President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us that about, and I quote, ‘The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.’”

 

“I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.”

 

Biden also said: “We need to get dark money — that’s that hidden funding behind too many campaign contributions — we need to get it out of our politics. We need to enact an 18-year time limit, term limit, time and term, for the strongest ethics — and the strongest ethics reforms for our Supreme Court. We need to ban members of Congress from trading stock while they are in the Congress. We need to amend the Constitution to make clear that no president, no president is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office.”

 

Biden expressed his thanks to the American people and said that after his 50 years of public service, “Now it’s your turn to stand guard. May you all be the keeper of the flame. May you keep the faith. I love America. You love it, too.”

 

Here is the full transcript of Biden’s speech, from The New York Times.

Pete Hegseth’s hearing, and the pressure campaign to get him confirmed

Republicans “warmed” to the combat veteran and former Fox News host at his Tuesday confirmation hearing for Defense secretary, Roll Call says.

 

“Admittedly, this nomination is unconventional,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss. “The nominee is unconventional, just like that New York developer who rode down the escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy for president. That may be what makes Mr. Hegseth an excellent choice.” 

 

Ranking member Jack Reed, D-R.I., said the totality of allegations against Hegseth, including excessive drinking, sexual assault and financial mismanagement of organizations he led, along with Hegseth’s own previous statements about the military, disqualified him from the job. 

Hegseth skirted specific allegations about his personal conduct, saying he’d been the victim of false allegations by anonymous sources, circulated by media organizations he said were determined to destroy him, reports The New York Times.

“I’m not a perfect person, but redemption is real.” he said. “I have failed in things in my life, and thankfully I’m redeemed by my lord and savior Jesus.”

He billed himself as a Washington outsider and change agent who, unlike Pentagon chiefs before him, wasn’t beholden to special interests or specific companies. He vowed to return a “warrior ethos” to DOD, root out wokeness and to reinstate, with pay and rank, troops who were discharged for refusing an order to take the coronavirus vaccine.

 

President-elect Trump told Republican senators in meetings last week that Hegseth’s confirmation is a priority for him, turning the process into a loyalty test, says The New Yorker.

The Trump team’s efforts to crush dissent range from public-media campaigns, paid for by billionaires, to targeting vulnerable senators in conservative states, to “more underhanded” tactics aimed at intimidating and discrediting potentially hostile witnesses, The New Yorker says.

Several Republican senators have said they’re waiting for the FBI’s background report on Hegseth to assess the conflicting claims about his behavior.

But according to multiple well-informed sources, the bureau failed to interview several potentially crucial witnesses, The New Yorker reports.

The FBI regards the president who appointed the nominee — in this case, Trump — as “the client” who determines the scope of the inquiry, The New Yorker says.

The FBI’s report on Hegseth may be irrelevant, in any case, because it appears that most senators will never get to see it, says The New Yorker. Wicker, who was briefed on the FBI investigation into Hegseth last Friday, doesn’t plan to share the bureau’s findings with any senator other than Reed, the top-ranking Democrat.

 

Committee member Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who’d been seen as a key Republican skeptic of Hegseth’s nomination, said she’ll support him after his performance at Tuesday’s hearing.

What special council’s report on Trump effort to overturn 2020 election says

Jack Smith, the special counsel who indicted President-elect Trump on charges of illegally seeking to hold on to power after losing the 2020 election, said in a final report released early Tuesday that the evidence would have been sufficient to convict Trump in a trial, if his 2024 election victory hadn't made it impossible for the prosecution to continue.

“The department’s view that the Constitution prohibits the continued indictment and prosecution of a president is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the office stands fully behind,” Smith wrote.

“Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the office assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial,” he wrote.

Trump was indicted in August 2023 on charges of working to overturn the election, but the case was delayed by appeals and ultimately significantly narrowed by the conservative-majority Supreme Court, which held for the first time that former presidents have sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts, The Associated Press notes. 

The Justice Department delivered the 137-page volume — half of Smith’s overall final report— to Congress just after midnight on Tuesday, says The New York Times.

The release of this volume of the report came less than a day after Judge Aileen Cannon, who oversaw Trump’s other federal case — about classified documents — issued a ruling allowing it to be made public.

She, also prohibited the Justice Department from immediately releasing — even to Congress — the second volume of Smith’s report, which is about the documents case. Cannon has scheduled a hearing for Friday in her home courthouse in Fort Pierce, Fla., to discuss how to handle that volume.

In a social media post shortly before 2 a.m. Tuesday, Trump said, “Jack is a lamebrain prosecutor who was unable to get his case tried before the Election, which I won in a landslide. THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN!!!”

Here is the text of the report.

Some of the thousands of state laws that took effect Jan. 1

At least 20 states increased the statewide minimum wage — the highest in Washington state at $16.66 an hour, followed by California at $16.50, says NPR.

 

And gun safety activists have been touting the wave of newly passed laws to educate consumers on the risks of gun ownership and how to securely store firearms, says USA Today.

 

Iowa and Louisiana are joining 12 other states that charge a flat individual income tax.

 

Kentucky is the latest state to legalize medical marijuana.

 

Minnesota is the latest state to increase transparency when purchasing tickets to concerts, sporting events and other big events.

 

Other new laws:

 

— New York is the first state to offer all private-sector pregnant workers 20 hours of paid leave a year for prenatal care

 

— California says schools can no longer require teachers to out LGBTQ+ students to their parents

 

— Illinois police are required to undergo autism awareness training

 

— Florida is banning children under 14 from having social media accounts

 

— California is imposing harsher sentences for large-scale "smash-and-grab" retail theft

 

— Texas no longer requires car safety inspections

 

— Colorado says all eggs sold in the state must come from a cage-free facility

ABC News succumbed to Trump’s pressure; will others?

By John Dineen
Columnist, One dog barking

There’s a theme emerging in some of the news recently. It began just before the election, when owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times both killed plans by their editorial boards to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris to be president.

 

Since Donald Trump was elected, more stories have followed the same theme:

— Several tech CEOs have made $1 million contributions to Trump’s inaugural committee.

— Tech leaders also have made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago

— And the tech bro who got there first with the most, Elon Musk, may already be seeing return on his investment: According to Reuters, the Trump transition team plans to kill a regulation requiring the reporting of accidents involving self-driving vehicles — most of which involve cars by Musk’s Tesla.

— This follows Trump’s announced plan to nominate Jared Isaacman, a tech billionaire with close ties to Musk and SpaceX, to head NASA.

 

Of course, where there are carrots, there are sticks: The Senate had a press protection bill pending that had passed the House with bipartisan support; it would have barred the federal government from compelling reporters to reveal confidential information, such as sources. Trump announced his opposition, and Senate Republicans blocked floor action.

 

Most notable of all was the decision by ABC News, revealed last weekend, to settle a libel suit filed by Trump. The decision is striking, given the difficulty facing public figures under U.S. law to win such suits in the absence of particularly egregious behavior.

Historian Timothy Snyder, who has written frequently about authoritarianism, calls it “obeying in advance.”

Margaret Sullivan commented:

“ABC News should never have caved. They might well have prevailed if they had hung in there. The legal bar is very high for libeling a public figure, and Trump is the ultimate public figure. Instead, this outcome encourages Trump in his attacks on the press — and he needs no encouragement.

“As one law professor told the Times, what ABC News did was very unusual,” she said. “News organizations generally don’t settle ‘because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side.’”

“Why did ABC News throw in the towel? It‘s hard to know for sure, but gets easier if you are aware that the news organizations is owned by Disney, a huge corporation with a lot of turf to protect,” Sullivan said. “As the Times reported, the Disney executive who oversees ABC News had dinner with Trump’s top aide, Susan Wiles, just days before the settlement, as ‘part of a visit by several ABC News executives to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump’s transition team.’”

“Was this settlement, which includes ABC’s public expressions of regret, a simple case of kissing the ring? It sure looks that way. Trump has sworn to get revenge on his enemies and he values, above all, loyalty and kowtowing.”

Brian Stelter of CNN noted: “The president-elect has a long history of litigation, with numerous unsuccessful cases against news outlets in the past. Some media law experts believed ABC had a good chance of beating him at trial, given the inherent challenge of proving Stephanopoulos acted with ‘actual malice.’ But trials also add uncertainty and a risk of severe reputational damage – factors that ABC’s parent company, Disney, is now avoiding.”

 

Journalist Parker Molloy, writing in Nieman Lab’s predictions for 2025, argued that acquiescence won’t spare journalism organizations: 

“The bitter irony is that this voluntary surrender won’t protect these outlets from Trump’s attacks. He’ll continue using them as punching bags to rally his base, even as they bend over backwards to appear ‘fair’ to his administration. But their owners calculate that performative criticism is preferable to actual accountability journalism that might threaten their bottom lines.

“For those who remember post-9/11 journalism, this feels eerily familiar,” Molloy said. “But at least then, the press could claim they were caught off guard by an unprecedented national crisis. This time, they’re choosing compliance with eyes wide open, trading their watchdog role for a seat at the billionaire’s table.

 

“The question isn’t whether mainstream media will hold Trump accountable in his second term — they’ve already decided not to try. The question is whether enough independent voices can survive to fill the vacuum they’re leaving behind.”

 

Molloy’s prediction for 2025 is coming true early. The New York Times reported over the weekend that Trump and his allies were threatening more lawsuits.

 

In fact, on Monday, Trump sued the Des Moines Register and Iowa pollster Ann Selzer, seeking “accountability for brazen election interference” over a Nov. 2 poll that showed Kamala Harris up by 3 percentage points in Iowa.

 

According to Semafor, “news organizations are bracing” for more attacks:

“In an email shared with Semafor, Axios’ senior counsel told staff that the news organization anticipates the new administration will attempt to force reporters to out their sources, will ramp up lawsuits against news organizations for defamation, and could charge journalists with crimes using the Espionage Act,” Max Tani wrote.

One analysis suggests that voters elected Trump due in part to their revulsion at the “elites” — a category that, for many, includes legacy media. Trump and his billionaire allies — populists, apparently — are seizing that opportunity, wielding their wealth to intimidate and isolate news organizations. ABC News acquiesced, essentially waiving the protection of the First Amendment.

The near-universal dismay within the industry at ABC News’ decision may be mere bravado. Or it may indicate not every media enterprise will be so compliant. The quality of our democracy hinges on those decisions.

One dog barking is an occasional column by my husband, John Dineen. He is a former senior congressional staffer and media executive and founder of briefing.center, a policy news and information service.

Fractured fairytales

When one wave of the wand can delay or deny our dreams, I guess it’s no surprise that many of us cheer as a Prince Charming appears to take our side.

 

“Even before police arrested Luigi Mangione in connection with the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, some on the internet were hailing him as a 21st-century Robin Hood,” Axios reported last week. And he apparently fits the part. Mangione is “by consensus, handsome, and jacked,” according to a New Yorker article. 

 

More than forty years ago, Richard Meyer, a scholar of American folklore, wrote that “the American outlaw-hero is a ‘man of the people’; he is closely identified with the common people, and, as such, is generally seen to stand in opposition to certain established oppressive economic, civil and legal systems peculiar to the American historical experience,” the New Yorker article says.

 

UnitedHealthcare is the insurance arm of the world’s biggest health-care company. You and I have talked for years about the ways health insurance denials can upend people’s finances.

 

A Reuters article explains that the 2010 Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), set new baselines for who and what insurance plans must cover. As costs have gone up, insurers increasingly have turned to the prior authorization process, vetting requests for medical services before they agree to pay.

 

Prior authorizations were used 46 million times in 2022, up from 37 million in 2019, Reuters says, citing a KFF analysis of privately managed Medicare Advantage plans for people aged 65 and older or who are disabled. CVS denied 13 percent of such requests, UnitedHealthcare denied 8.7 percent, and Blue Cross Blue Shield denied 4.2 percent.

 

Only about 10 percent of patients appeal these denials, and of those challenges, about a third fail, KFF says. Among the reasons people don’t appeal are difficulties understanding the complexity of health coverage and being too sick, says KFF.

 

United Health’s coverage limits apply to a wide range of treatments. Just four days ago, a ProPublica headline read, “UnitedHealth is strategically limiting access to critical treatment for kids with autism.” And on Nov. 19, ProPublica headlined: “How UnitedHealth’s playbook for limiting mental health coverage puts countless Americans’ treatment at risk.”

 

Yesterday’s Morning Briefing from KFF Health News was headlined “CEO was aware of UnitedHealthcare’s PR problem before shooting.” 

 

The Commonwealth Fund, an independent research organization, reported in August on ways Americans increasingly struggle to get their health insurance to work for them. 

 

Also in August, the Commonwealth Fund published “Mirror, mirror 2024: A portrait of the failing U.S. health system,” comparing performance in 10 nations. The other countries are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

 

“The U.S. continues to be in a class by itself in the underperformance of its health care sector,” the report says. 

 

The United States is the only developed country without universal health care coverage (government-funded insurance). 

She’s on Kash Patel’s enemies list but doesn’t want a pardon

Sarah Isgur worked at the Justice Department from 2017 to 2019 as director of the Office of Public Affairs and senior counsel to the deputy attorney general, during the investigation into connections between Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.

 

She’s one of 60 people named in “Government Gangsters,” a 2023 book by Kash Patel, Trump’s pick to be the next director of the FBI, as “members of the executive branch deep state” — a “cabal of unelected tyrants” who posed “the most dangerous threat to our democracy.” Patel has since said the incoming Trump administration must deal with the deep state “criminally or civilly.”

 

As President Biden reportedly considers preemptive pardons for many of Trump’s perceived enemies, such as the people on Patel’s list, Isgur says in a New York Times opinion essay that she doesn’t want a pardon and hopes nobody else will.

 

“If we broke the law, we should be charged and convicted. If we didn’t break the law, we should be willing to show that we trust the fairness of the justice system that so many of us have defended. And we shouldn’t give permission to future presidents to pardon political allies who may commit real crimes on their behalf.

“This past spring, arguing in a brief to the Supreme Court that Mr. Trump shouldn’t have immunity from prosecution, Mr. Biden’s Justice Department reminded the justices that ‘the executive branch and the criminal justice system contain strong safeguards against groundless prosecutions.’ Many former government lawyers — including a number of us on Mr. Patel’s list — were quick to publicly agree, stressing how dangerous and unnecessary such a grant of blanket immunity would be.

 

“We emphasized the importance of the rule of law and the trust we had in the jury system. Yet now that the shoe is on the other foot, suddenly we would accept total immunity from prosecution for anything we did during our time in government?”

 

“A pardon would also let Mr. Patel off the hook. If he wants to prosecute everyone on his list, it’s going to require a lot of law enforcement resources. At a time when much of the American public wants the president to focus on inflation, crime and immigration, voters may not be pleased if drug cartels are a lower priority than prosecuting Liz Cheney for treason.

 

“And as Americans start to see his lack of evidence, Mr. Patel will look ridiculous. If anything, he may end up making heroes out of his targets, who would, in turn, be able to raise money for the exorbitant cost of their legal defense from outraged Americans until judges would predictably throw out these frivolous cases.

“If I accepted a pardon, Mr. Patel could also claim that it proved the ‘deep state’ rigged the system. He could argue that he would have gotten convictions against all of us, without ever having to make his case — to a jury or to voters.

 

“Populists and cynics from both political parties want to destroy the rule of law because it’s a lot easier to tear down an institution than to build one. That’s why those of us on Mr. Patel’s list should force him to show his work.”

‘Just Mercy’ author on progress in criminal justice

Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, was interviewed by the PBS NewsHour on Wednesday on how his book “Just Mercy” has changed the criminal justice system and the public's understanding of it since the book was published 10 years ago.

 

“When I started doing this work 40 years ago, there were very few organizations, there were very few resources available to people who were in jails and prisons, people wrongly convicted, people condemned to die,” Stevenson says.

 

“But certainly in the last 10 years, that has shifted enormously. We have had eight states abolish the death penalty. The rates of incarceration have dropped. We're no longer seeing that steady increase that we saw during the last decades of the 20th century. We have seen some real significant reforms.

 

“Most of the young people that I wrote about in ‘Just Mercy’ who were condemned to die in prison when they were 13 and 14 have been released and they're now out. So I have been really encouraged by the success we have seen over the last decade, but more so by the number of people who are now engaged on these issues, on campuses, in policy spaces, in legislatures.”

 

“We have had a legal system for a long time that treats you better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent.

 

“And we haven't been concerned about changing that because we have just ignored this population. And I think by highlighting the people and the stories, that has shifted. And when you make the kind of mistakes that we have made — this year, we saw the 200th person exonerated after being sentenced to death.”

 

“For me, invoking mercy, invoking grace, invoking this idea that the criminal justice system isn't just about the people we are prosecuted, it's also about us, it's about what kind of society we live in, what kind of community we create when we tolerate injustice and inequality.”

 

You can watch the full interview or read the transcript here.

Democrats have prepared for 2 years for coming Trump actions

Democracy Forward, a liberal-leaning legal organization, has "unveiled a large-scale new effort aimed at thwarting President-elect Donald J. Trump’s second-term agenda from his first day in office," says The New York Times.

 

Unlike in 2017, when Democratic lawyers were unprepared for the onslaught of conservative policies, the intent is to be ready to unleash lawsuits immediately.

More than 800 lawyers at 280 organizations are developing cases and workshopping challenges to what the group has identified as 600 “priority legal threats” — potential regulations, laws and other administrative actions that could require a legal response, its leaders say. 

 

Democracy Forward has spent the last two years working to identify the possible actions the new Trump administration could take on issues they see as key priorities to defend, the group’s leaders say, using as a blueprint Trump’s first-term actions, his campaign promises and plans released by his allies, including the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 agenda.

Democracy Forward’s new project is called Democracy 2025. It’s focusing on issues including abortion rights, health care, climate change and other environmental protections, union protections and immigration. The group also has given particular weight to Trump’s promises to weaponize the systems of government, particularly the Justice Department, against those he sees as enemies, along with his pledges to dismantle federal agencies and fire thousands of government workers, the Times says.

 

The lawyers are preparing to challenge new regulations released by the Trump administration, even starting the process of recruiting potential plaintiffs who would have legal standing in court. They’re also exploring ways to take over the defense of Biden administration policies that are in litigation, such as student debt relief and women’s health protections, that now are being defended by the Justice Department and are unlikely to be continued under Trump.

Democracy Forward has "deep ties" to a number of prominent party strategists and lists election lawyer Marc Elias and Ron Klain, President Biden’s former White House chief of staff, as members of its board, says the Times.

 

The coalition has a multimillion-dollar war chest, according to the Times. Its partners include organizations such as unions, immigration advocacy organizations and groups working on abortion rights, civil rights and consumer protection.

Good news — about us!

As our Australian friends at Fix the News published their most recent edition, the first results were coming in from our election.

 

They’ve been pretty snarky about us in the past, but this time, they wrote:

 

"For what it's worth, the US stock market is at all-time highs, the uninsured rate is near an all-time low, life expectancy is at highest level ever, apartment construction hasn’t been this hot in half a century, inflation, illegal immigration, crime and obesity are falling, wages are higher than any point in history, the percentage of the population that is employed is near an all-time peak, productivity is outpacing every other comparable country, carbon emissions are declining, clean energy production is soaring, next month America's factories will start mass producing the most advanced technology on Earth, and it's still the wealthiest and most important nation in the world."