1
Pravda News!
141 readers
219 users here now
founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
2
3
4
5
7
50
'An Absolute Joke': Trump DOJ Partially Releases Epstein Files, Many Heavily Redacted
(www.commondreams.org)
The US Department of Justice on Friday released a massive—but incomplete—trove containing hundreds of thousands of records related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a move that came as Democratic lawmakers vowed to pursue "all legal options" after the Trump administration blew a deadline to disclose all of the files.
The DOJ uploaded the files—which can be viewed here in the section titled "Epstein Files Transparency Act"—to its website on Friday. Earlier in the day, Deputy US Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the agency would not release all the Epstein files on Friday, as required by the transparency law signed last month by President Donald Trump.
Friday's release includes declassified files, many of them heavily redacted and some of which were already publicly available via court filings, records requests, and media reporting. Files include flight logs and masseuse lists.
Curiously, a search for the words "Trump" and "Epstein" in the posted documents returned no results.
— (@)
While not accused of any wrongdoing, Trump was a former close friend of Epstein, who faced federal sex trafficking charges at the time of his suspicious 2019 death in a New York City jail cell.
Responding to the DOJ's document release and delay in fully disclosing the files, Elisa Batista, campaign director at UltraViolet Action, said in a statement that “if the Trump administration had its way, they would undo the sacrifice of survivors who came forward to demand transparency and accountability, as well as all those abused by Epstein who were unable to."
“Trump’s failure to release the Epstein files is an insult to survivors and a further stain on an administration that continuously bends over backwards to protect abusers—and just violated the Epstein Files Transparency Act to do so," Batista added. "We will continue to fight alongside the brave survivors—many of whom were young girls when they were abused by Epstein—who took great risk to reveal Epstein’s globe-spanning sex trafficking network.”
Britt Jacovich, a spokesperson for the progressive political action group MoveOn, said following Friday's release that “President Trump’s Department of Justice is breaking the law by holding all of the Epstein files hostage, and yet again, Trump is doing absolutely nothing."
"Trump doesn’t care about the victims or the millions of Americans calling for justice," Jacovich added. "He only cares about protecting the rich and powerful, even those who abuse young women and children. Every single person named in the Epstein files and involved in the cover-up should face accountability, regardless of their political party. No more delays, no more obstruction.”
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
8
9
10
Philadelphia A rally in Philadelphia on Nov. 28 kicked off the 103-mile March for Mumia to Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution (SCI) Mahanoy to demand proper health care and elder care for incarcerated people and the release of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The march started at the Market Square Monument in . . .
Continue reading 12 days vs. 44 years: The 103-mile march to free Mumia at Workers.org
From Workers World via This RSS Feed.
11
12
8
Mitt "47%" Romney's Post-Career Call to Tax the Rich Met With Kudos and Criticism
(www.commondreams.org)
In a leaked fundraiser footage from the 2012 US presidential campaign, Republican candidate Mitt Romney infamously claimed that 47% of Americans are people "who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you name it." On Friday, the former US senator from Utah published a New York Times opinion piece titled, "Tax the Rich, Like Me."
"In 2012, political ads suggested that some of my policy proposals, if enacted, would amount to pushing grandma off a cliff. Actually, my proposals were intended to prevent that very thing from happening," Romney began the article, which was met with a range of reactions. "Today, all of us, including our grandmas, truly are headed for a cliff: If, as projected, the Social Security Trust Fund runs out in the 2034 fiscal year, benefits will be cut by about 23%."
"Typically, Democrats insist on higher taxes, and Republicans insist on lower spending. But given the magnitude of our national debt as well as the proximity of the cliff, both are necessary," he argued. "On the spending-cut front... Social Security and Medicare benefits for future retirees should be means-tested—need-based, that is to say—and the starting age for entitlement payments should be linked to American life expectancy."
"And on the tax front, it's time for rich people like me to pay more," wrote Romney, whose estimated net worth last year, when he announced his January 2025 retirement from the Senate, was $235 million. "I long opposed increasing the income level on which FICA employment taxes are applied (this year, the cap is $176,100). No longer; the consequences of the cliff have changed my mind."
— (@)
"The largest source of additional tax revenues is also probably the most compelling for fairness and social stability. Some call it closing tax code loopholes, but the term 'loopholes' grossly understates their scale. 'Caverns' or 'caves' would be more fitting," he continued, calling for rewriting capital gains tax treatment rules for "mega-estates over $100 million."
"Sealing the real estate caverns would also raise more revenue," Romney noted. "There are more loopholes and caverns to be explored and sealed for the very wealthy, including state and local tax deductions, the tax rate on carried interest, and charity limits on the largest estates at death."
Some welcomed or even praised Romney's piece. Iowa state Rep. JD Scholten (D-1), a progressive who has previously run for both chambers of Congress, declared on social media: "Tax the rich! Welcome to the coalition, Mitt!"
— (@)
US House Committee on the Budget Ranking Member Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), who is part of the New Democrat Coalition, said: "I welcome this op-ed by Mitt Romney and encourage people to read it. As the next chair of the House Budget Committee, increasing revenue by closing loopholes exploited by the wealthiest Americans will be a top priority."
Progressive Saikat Chakrabarti, who is reportedly worth at least $167 million and is one of the candidates running to replace retiring former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), responded: "Even Mitt Romney now agrees that we need to tax the wealthiest. I call for a wealth tax on our billionaires and centimillionaires."
Michael Linden, a senior policy fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, said: "Kudos to Mitt Romney for changing his mind and calling for higher taxes on the rich. I'm not going to nitpick his op-ed (though there are a few things I disagree with), because the gist of it is right: We need real tax reform to make the rich pay more."
— (@)
Others pointed to Romney's record, including the impactful 47% remarks. The Lever's David Sirota wondered, "Why is it that powerful people typically wait until they have no power to take the right position and effectively admit they were wrong when they had more power to do something about it?"
According to Sirota:
The obvious news of the op-ed is that we've reached a point in which even American politics' very own Gordon Gekko—a private equity mogul-turned-Republican politician—is now admitting the tax system has been rigged for his fellow oligarchs.
And, hey, that's good. I believe in the politics of addition. I believe in welcoming converts to good causes in the spirit of "better late than never." I believe there should be space for people to change their views for the better. And I appreciate Romney offering at least some pro forma explanation about what allegedly changed his thinking (sidenote: I say "allegedly" because it's not like Romney only just now learned that the tax system was rigged—he was literally a co-founder of Bain Capital!).
"And yet, these kinds of reversals (without explicit apologies, of course) often come off as both long overdue but also vaguely inauthentic, or at least not as courageous and principled as they seem," Sirota continued, stressing that "when Romney had real power, he fortified the rigged tax system that he's only now criticizing from the sidelines."
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
13
Variety (12/17/25): FCC chair Brendan Carr “suggested that he was simply holding broadcasters to a legally required ‘public interest standard’ when he…threatened ABC and its affiliates if they did not ‘take action’ on [talk host Jimmy] Kimmel.”
FAIR readers know well how the content of news is connected to its structure. Even as we see reporters doing community-serving, powerful-afflicting work, the key questions, when push comes to editorial shove, are: Who owns it? Who pays the bills?
Right-wingers have long known that. And they’ve known the importance of pummeling regulators into giving them whatever they want. Former RNC chair Rich Bond called it “working the refs.”
Under Trumpist Brendan Carr, the FCC is, as is well known, threatening stations that deliver content they disapprove (FAIR.org, 2/26/25), very much in violation of the First Amendment. Asked in a Senate hearing (Variety, 12/17/25) if it’s “appropriate to use your position to threaten companies that broadcast political satire,” Carr responded that “any licensee that operates on the public airwaves has a responsibility to comply with the public interest standard.”
But Trump’s FCC is also seeking to further loosen ownership limits and allow powerful media conglomerates to usurp more of the airwaves (CJR, 10/20/25; FAIR.org, 10/8/25). A filing from the group Free Press calls out the expected “devastating consequences on the public’s welfare and ultimately democracy itself.”
The filing’s author, Free Press senior advisor Derek Turner (12/18/25), explained:
Broadcast TV chains and their lobbyists claim that consolidation is in the public interest, arguing that mergers and acquisitions result in an increase in local news—and that local reporting declines in the absence of consolidation. This is nonsensical, and it runs counter to all available evidence.
Television broadcasters continue to do well, and brag to Wall Street that they have cornered the distinct market niche that local-TV stations serve. But those financial fortunes don’t spur greater investment in journalism. These giant companies work to slash costs after mergers—striving to maximize their profits to generate greater returns for shareholders.
Allowing allegedly local broadcast firms to acquire even more stations—in markets where they already have stations, and in new cities—will put control over news in still fewer, more corporate hands. And it will decrease the numbers of local journalists reporting on communities they actually live in.
And, not for nothing, it will increase these big conglomerates’ ability to extract monopoly rents from advertisers and pay-TV distributors.
Which is why we say: Support independent outlets with a different bottom line.
From FAIR via This RSS Feed.
14
15
Rights Groups Warn FBI Probe of Anti-ICE Activity Portends New Crackdown on Lawful Dissent
(www.commondreams.org)
Rights groups are expressing alarm over new reporting about the FBI carrying out nationwide anti-terrorism probes against activists protesting against federal immigration enforcement officers.
The Guardian on Friday published a report detailing an internal FBI document that outlines "criminal and domestic terrorism investigations” into “threats against immigration enforcement activity” in 23 regions across the US.
The FBI document, which was dated November 14, is a response to National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by President Donald Trump in late September that demanded a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts."
The FBI report cites two violent attacks against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities in Texas to argue that there has been "an escalation in violence compared to past attacks, which primarily resulted in property damage."
Additionally, the FBI report directs agents to look for "indicators" that an anti-ICE activist may be planning to carry out an attack on immigration enforcement officials, including "stockpiling or distributing firearms," as well as using encrypted messaging apps and "conducting online research" about immigration agents' movements and locations.
The last two of these three "indicators" are raising red flags for rights groups, which are warning that they could be used as the pretext for mass infringement of constitutional rights to speak freely and protest peacefully.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told the Guardian that the FBI appeared to be treating US citizens with suspicion for engaging in activities protected by the First Amendment.
"It is not illegal to do online research about the publicly available movements of government officers or to communicate through encrypted apps like Signal or WhatsApp," she said. "While the document refers to using encrypted communications to ‘discuss operational planning’, that term is undefined and ambiguous, leaving it open what kinds of conversations might draw FBI scrutiny."
Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project, expressed concern to the Guardian that the FBI document is "infused with vague and over-broad language, which was exactly our concern about NSPM-7 in the first place."
"It invites law enforcement suspicion and investigation based on purely First Amendment-protected beliefs and activities," Shamsi explained. "People who are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing can be subjected to surveillance or investigation. That imposes stigma. It can wrongly immesh people in the criminal legal system."
Adam Goldstein, vice president of strategic initiatives at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), published an analysis on Thursday that criticized a recently unearthed memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi that fleshed out the concepts laid out in NSPM-7.
In particular, Goldstein argued that Bondi's memo risks using law enforcement to investigate people based on their political ideologies rather than on suspicion that they are engaging in criminal activity.
"People who conspire to engage in actual criminal behavior should be investigated, arrested, and prosecuted," Goldstein wrote. "But these memos aren’t narrowly focused on groups that exist for the purpose of ideologically motivated violence, which act to bring about violence; they broadly condemn particular viewpoints and lay a foundation for a government watchlist of American groups which share those viewpoints."
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
15
President Donald Trump—the self-described "most anti-war president in history"—on Friday said the US military is "striking very strongly" against Islamic State strongholds in Syria" following the killing of two Iowa National Guard members and an American civilian interpreter in the Mideast nation.
"Because of ISIS’s vicious killing of brave American Patriots in Syria, whose beautiful souls I welcomed home to American soil earlier this week in a very dignified ceremony, I am hereby announcing that the United States is inflicting very serious retaliation, just as I promised, on the murderous terrorists responsible," Trump said on his Truth Social network.
"We are striking very strongly against ISIS strongholds in Syria, a place soaked in blood which has many problems, but one that has a bright future if ISIS can be eradicated," the president continued. "The Government of Syria, led by a man who is working very hard to bring Greatness back to Syria, is fully in support."
"All terrorists who are evil enough to attack Americans are hereby warned—YOU WILL BE HIT HARDER THAN YOU HAVE EVER BEEN HIT BEFORE IF YOU, IN ANY WAY, ATTACK OR THREATEN THE U.S.A.," he added.
— (@)
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on X that "earlier today, US forces commenced OPERATION HAWKEYE STRIKE in Syria to eliminate ISIS fighters, infrastructure, and weapons sites in direct response to the attack on US forces that occurred on December 13th in Palmyra, Syria."
According to the Wall Street Journal, Jordanian warplanes also took part in Friday's attacks, which reportedly hit more than 70 targets in Syria.
"This is not the beginning of a war—it is a declaration of vengeance," said Hegseth. "The United States of America, under President Trump’s leadership, will never hesitate and never relent to defend our people. As we said directly following the savage attack, if you target Americans—anywhere in the world—you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you. Today, we hunted and we killed our enemies. Lots of them. And we will continue."
US Central Command (CENTCOM) said that one of Friday's airstrikes killed ISIS leader Abu Yusif in Dayr az Zawr province in eastern Syria.
“As stated before, the United States—working with allies and partners in the region—will not allow ISIS to take advantage of the current situation in Syria and reconstitute," CENTCOM commander Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla said in a statement. "ISIS has the intent to break out of detention the over 8,000 ISIS operatives currently being held in facilities in Syria. We will aggressively target these leaders and operatives, including those trying to conduct operations external to Syria."
During his first term, Trump followed through on his promise to "bomb the shit out of" ISIS militants in Syria and Iraq, killing thousands of civilians in a campaign launched by former President Barack Obama in 2014. Trump prematurely declared victory over ISIS in 2018.
Since then, the Biden and Trump administrations have bombed Syria, where around 1,000 US troops remain.
— (@)
During his second term, Trump has ordered attacks on Iran, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and boats allegedly transporting drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean. The president—who says he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize—has also deployed warships and thousands of troops for a possible war on Venezuela.
"Most anti-war president ever, also a winner of the FIFA Peace Prize, threatened to invade Venezuela for oil earlier this week and has now launched strikes in Syria," political commentator David Pakman said on X in response to Friday's attacks.
Some observers noted that the strikes on Syria took place on the same day that the Trump administration released some of the files related to the late convicted sex criminal and longtime former Trump friend Jeffrey Epstein.
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
16
11
'Another Backdoor Deal'? Billionaire Trump Ally Larry Ellison at Center of TikTok Spin-Off
(www.commondreams.org)
A group of investors including Oracle—a software giant led by billionaire Trump ally and GOP megadonor Larry Ellison—is set to control TikTok's US operations under a spin-off agreement formalized Thursday, raising concerns of undue political influence on the short-form video app used by around 170 million Americans.
TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, signed a binding deal under which Oracle, the private equity group Silver Lake, the Abu Dhabi-based firm MGX, and other investors will hold an 80.1% stake in the newly formed US TikTok entity.
NPR reported that under the agreement, "TikTok's US algorithm will be retrained with only Americans' data" and "content moderation rules around what is permitted and what is not will be set by the new investor-controlled entity."
The deal, which stems from an executive order that President Donald Trump signed in September, averts a TikTok ban in the US.
Last year, former President Joe Biden signed widely criticized legislation that would have banned the platform in the US if ByteDance did not sell it. The measure was inserted into broader legislation that included billions in military aid for Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel.
US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who voted for the package that included the potential TikTok ban, called for close scrutiny of the new agreement. Warren pointed to the Trump administration's approval earlier this year of the merger of CBS News owner Paramount and Skydance—a company run by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison.
"First Paramount/CBS and now TikTok. Trump wants to hand over even more control of what you watch to his billionaire buddies," Warren wrote in a social media post on Thursday. "Americans deserve to know if the president struck another backdoor deal for this billionaire takeover of TikTok."
Evan Greer, director of Fight for the Future, wrote in response to the deal that "TikTok has officially been sold to the worst people on Earth and no this is not an Onion headline."
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
17
18
19
20
1
Janine Jackson interviewed Popular Information*‘s Judd Legum and* Citations Needed*‘s Adam Johnson about gambling on the news for the* December 12, 2025, episode of CounterSpin*. This is a lightly edited transcript.*
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251212.mp3
Janine Jackson: If you see no problem in news outlets reporting on horrific conditions in Gaza, and what various political entities are doing or could do to address them, while at the same time a ticker at the bottom of the screen offers you the chance to gamble, for money, on whether or not “famine” in Gaza will be officially declared—this episode is not for you.
We’ll be learning about the deal just struck by “news” outlets CNN and CNBC with the “prediction market operator,” evidently what we’re calling them now, Kalshi Inc. We’ll hear from Judd Legum, founder and author at the newsletter Popular Information, and from author and analyst, Adam Johnson of the Substack The Column and the podcast Citations Needed.
CounterSpin and FAIR have, for decades now, been calling out the conflict in having the media that we rely on for news be owned and operated by corporations whose only abiding interest is profit, and quarterly profit at that. If officially signing up with gambling companies to encourage news consumers to win, or of course lose, actual money on the outcome of real-world events isn’t a clear enough sign of that conflict, and of the urgency of supporting non-corporate journalism, well, it’s hard to know what would be. You’re listening to CounterSpin, brought to you each week by the media watch group FAIR.
***
Janine Jackson: CNN and CNBC have announced they are partnering with Kalshi Inc., described by Wikipedia as “a financial exchange and prediction market…offering gambling via event contracts.” Their tagline is “Prediction Market for Trading the Future.” So these news outlets, we’re told, will now integrate Kalshi’s predictive information into their journalism. I could joke, “What could go wrong?” But seriously, what could go right?
Judd Legum is founder of the independent newsletter Popular Information. Their mission statement, if you will, declares, “You are not a spectator, and democracy is not a game.” He joins us now by phone. Welcome CounterSpin, Judd Legum.
Judd Legum: Thanks for having me.
Popular Information (12/8/25)
JJ: Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour has been going around saying—you cite it in your recent report—that “Kalshi is replacing debate, subjectivity, and talk with markets, accuracy and truth”—which I think should raise hairs on the back of your neck, frankly. He added, “We have created a new way of consuming and engaging with information.” Again, so many more questions than answers there.
But I know that there are many listeners asking, “What’s a Kalshi?” You can’t explain everything, but if you could just ground us a little bit in what we are talking about, what could be different when I turn on CNN, or next month’s CNBC, looking to find news about the world?
JL: Kalshi is a platform—and there are other similar platforms; there’s one called Polymarket as well that’s fairly prominent—and they basically allow you to take bets on any future event. We’re very familiar with sports bets, because they’ve become ubiquitous in American life, as that’s become legal. Who’s going to win in the Giants versus the Broncos? You can pick one team, you can pick the other. You can make a whole bunch of different kinds of bets on different things that might happen in the game. And if what you predict comes true, you win some money. If what you predict doesn’t come true, you lose your money.
Kalshi basically takes that concept and has expanded it to every aspect of your life. So politics obviously is something that I focus on in the newsletter. That’s something that is a major source of these prediction markets on Kalshi as well. You could bet on, who do you think is going to be the president in 2028? Do you think it’s going to be JD Vance? Do you think it’s going to be Gavin Newsom? Those are probably a couple of the leading candidates; that might be, at this point, 30 cents to buy one share of JD Vance, and if he does become president, you get the full dollar. If he doesn’t, you lose your 30 cents.
It goes well beyond that. You can bet about whether a pop star will say the word “cheese” during their acceptance speech for an award. You can bet on who’s going to win the next Oscars. You can bet on anything. And this has really exploded in popularity, really in 2025, because before then, we didn’t know whether it was legal, and in 2024 they won a big lawsuit, essentially establishing them as at least mostly legal.
Extra! (6/92)
JJ: Even with what you’ve just said—because I looked at the Kalshi site, and it was, who’s going to be president, would it be JD Vance or Gavin Newsom?—can’t we already see the journalistic problems there, where you’re already telling people that the next presidential race is going to be between JD Vance and Gavin Newsom already?
My first work at FAIR was around the 1992 presidential primary, and one of the things I was coding for was horserace coverage: stories that didn’t talk about ideas, didn’t talk about policy or the impacts of that policy, but were solely about who looked to be ahead in the polls. And at that time, it was generally understood that that was bad, that was bad journalism. That wasn’t what a press corps was there to do. So questions leaped to the mind about this, yeah?
JL: So I think there’s a couple of issues with that, and the first one is what you just touched on, which is that it really trivializes this coverage. Even if you just assume for a minute that these markets are accurate, and it really is a 33% chance that candidate X is going to be the next president, and a 15% chance that this other candidate is going to be—it really doesn’t matter. We will find out in November 2028 (hopefully) who will be the next president, and then we will all know. So the prediction itself isn’t really very useful if you’re a news consumer.
Judd Legum: “”If you’re a wealthy supporter of JD Vance, you now have an easy way to create a story on CNN, simply by placing a bet for your favorite candidate.”
But the other really big issue with this, especially as we are now using this to drive coverage, and essentially what CNN is saying, and what CNBC is saying, is that if we see a big move, if JD Vance goes from 30 cents to 50 cents, we’re now considering this a news event which we are going to cover on our air. So that’s crowding out the other events.
But also, these markets, while they are large overall—there’s about $50 billion wagered on Kalshi this year; it’ll probably be more next year—they are still very small in terms of markets. Stocks, there’s over $600 billion transacted in stocks every day, so it’s much easier to manipulate these markets. So if you’re a wealthy supporter of JD Vance, you now have an easy way to create a story on CNN, simply by placing a bet for your favorite candidate. It might only cost, even in the presidential context, a couple of million dollars. If you go down to the congressional level, or the Senate level, it’s going to cost much less. These are relatively small markets.
JJ: And it seems to me to be coming back to money as speech. What if I’m not betting on an election? What if I’m just a concerned citizen who wants a president or elected officials who can enact policies that help me? I’m not looking to a media outlet to tell me who’s winning in the market of money betting on the election. I want news about what’s meaningful to me. It just seems like such a core perversion.
JL: Yeah, it’s a very sort of libertarian philosophy that these markets are what’s revealing the truth. You saw that in the quote from the Kalshi CEO, which you read in the beginning, that it’s incorporating all of the relevant information. But especially in a political context—maybe you can argue that’s true (it’s not always true) with stocks, but stocks are really just about money. I mean, that’s what they are. You’re trading them. These are corporations that are trying to make money.
There’s so much more involved in politics, and especially in an era of wealth inequality, and where we are now, where most people are not using these prediction markets, to say that all available information is captured in who is deciding to spend money where in these markets, is just clearly a fallacy, which people can believe that, or they cannot believe that. But then you take that premise, and you’re now saying, “We as CNN, we as CNBC, fairly prominent news organizations, are going to accept that, and now present changes in these values as news,” really creates a distortion effect—even beyond purposeful manipulation, which I think is a big problem. But even beyond that, it distorts whose voice counts and whose voice doesn’t count.
JJ: Absolutely. And it would be one thing, and back in ’92 there would be stories that would report solely on polling, and that would be its own story, and it would be one thing, I’d have my own questions about it. But if CNN, CNBC, had a section in the news where they were like, “Oh and hey, here according to polling, or this particular kind of polling that is expressed with money, here’s this.” But to say, we are going to consider that news, and we are going to use that to shape our coverage, is Bizarro World to me, in terms of journalistic judgment.
JL: They are buckling to the pressure, under a lot of pressure, with this idea that they are biased. So that’s really what drew so many people to the polling coverage. There was quite a bit in 1992, but I would argue that there’s a lot more now, that this has become a bigger and bigger slice of the news pie, so to speak.
This is an extension of that, because what it allows you to do is have a whole other way of talking about politics, without having to actually grapple with the issues of values, with the issues of the impact on people. Because when you start talking about that, that’s when you start to open yourselves up to allegations of bias.
And it really goes to the heart of, what is your role as a journalist? Is your role to not say anything that offends anyone, and not say anything that anyone could possibly disagree with? Or is your role to actually report accurately about the actual impacts of what’s at stake in these events?
JJ: And one might say even, importantly, to represent the voices of the people who don’t have money to bet on the presidential race, to represent the voices of people who are affected by policy, but who are not making policy, who are affected by changes, but who are not in charge of making those changes. It just seems like a core part of a journalist’s job.
JL: I agree with that. I agree with that. And I think, even beyond that, even if you have money, this is not a good place to spend it. These markets are not good places to spend it.
You can look at the stock market. There’s all sorts of issues with how these companies manipulate their stock prices, and are maybe too focused on pushing their stocks up and up. But if you’re investing for your retirement, or something of that nature, you can look at the trends over 10, 20, 30, 40 years, and generally, they go up, at least over the very long term, because there are things being created. There is stuff being done, and you’re buying a little chunk of that.
These prediction markets are zero sum games. There’s somebody who’s betting that Gavin Newsom is going to be the next president. There’s someone betting that he’s not going to be. And you’re either winning or you’re losing.
And then on top of that, Kalshi, they have to make money too, so they take a fee, a chunk of that for themselves. So, overall, the participants in this market—unlike the stock market, where there’s value being created—overall, people are losing.
So if you place these bets, you can expect to lose, and that’s exactly what happens. It’s guaranteed. It’s very similar to a casino in that way. You might pull a slot machine and win, and you might win over a couple of days, but if you just sit there and pull the slot machine for six months, you’re definitely going to lose. And that’s very similar to what happens in these markets over the long term.
Athletic (11/4/25)
JJ: That’s going to leave me with my final question. I’m, first of all, going to try to imagine us talking to people who are like, “Candidate X needs to win because I have money on candidate X, and so I’m going to do some stuff to encourage candidate X to win, whatever that might entail.” I think folks can think about that for themselves.
But in response to the last thing you said, I want to tell you what the Kalshi spokesperson said: “Kalshi works like the stock market instead of a casino. In casinos, the house always wins. With Kalshi, there is no house. We don’t win when our customers lose.” Sounds like you don’t think that’s a hundred….
JL: Yeah, that’s not true. I would agree that it’s not necessarily like a slot machine, where the odds are against you. You can see the odds, but you’re competing against the other people who are betting, and then Kalshi is taking fees. They have to make money, so you’re going to lose.
JJ: They make it sound like they’re not making any money at all. Like it’s a public interest enterprise.
JL: It’s a lot of things, but it is definitely not that. They’re interested in making money.
JJ: Well, I said finally, but I’ll just, as a coda: It sounds like, as in many issues, independent reporting that is outside of corporate control that is interested to make deals, to make money, to make…. Sometimes, as in this case, the world seems to make the case for those of us who support independent journalism. And I think we still want to say that. I don’t want a story like this to make people think “the media” are corrupt and “the media” are terrible, because there’s folks out there that are trying to actually interrogate deals like this, and trying to have a different definition of what news is.
JL: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think if there’s anything we’ve learned, really, over the last year, it’s that it’s really important to diversify your news consumption beyond corporate media, because so many of these companies are becoming more and more compromised politically.
JJ: Right. We’ll end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Judd Legum. He’s founder of the newsletter Popular Information. You should check it out. Thank you very much, Judd Legum, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
JL: Thanks for having me.
***
Reuters (12/4/25)
Janine Jackson: AdWeek, Business Insider, CoinDesk, Card Player, Investopedia, Gaming Today—they were all over it. But so far, as we record on December 10, big, important elite news media don’t seem very interested in the fact that major news outlets CNN and CNBC are going to integrate predictive market operator Kalshi into what we, perhaps quaintly, call journalism.
Reuters, for its part, tells us:
The deals indicate the growing need for prediction-market data, long viewed as niche and sometimes controversial, in the mainstream financial news, as publishers look to enhance audience engagement with new insights.
OK, so that’s troubling enough, but it isn’t “financial news” that will be affected alone.
We’re joined now by Adam Johnson. He is the author, with contributions from Sarah Lazare, of the media criticism and political analysis Substack The Column, and co-host, with Nima Shirazi, of the podcast Citations Needed. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Adam Johnson.
Adam Johnson: Hi, thanks so much for having me on.
JJ: I touched with Judd Legum on the obvious (to me) screaming problems with telling people to bet on who’s going to win the next presidential election, JD Vance or Gavin Newsom. Amongst so many other thought-stopping things, that tells you that these are the only two people that you need to be thinking about. It’s just bizarre to think that serious news outlets would think that this is on mission in any conceivable way. But for anyone thinking, “Well, elections are kind of a contest, like a football game, whatever,” we need to understand this isn’t the scope of what we’re talking about here.
Adam Johnson: “You have a double standard about which populations are considered roulette chips on a roulette table, to be used as wagers.”
AJ: No, it’s not. In fact, Kalshi permits—or permitted, I should say, before the market closed in August of last year—for people to bet on whether or not there’ll be famine in Gaza. There are many other betting opportunities at both Kalshi and their main competitor, Polymarket—which is a more lurid, more grimy version, backed by Peter Thiel. Unlike Kalshi, it’s not seeking as much mainstream credibility, although it is, of course, a main sponsor of the Young Turks.
And Polymarket lets you bet on whether, when and if Gaza will be bombed next, when the West Bank will be bombed, whether the West Bank or Gaza will be annexed—indeed, still has a market, if one wishes to bet on it, for whether or not there’ll be ethnic cleansing in Gaza. They let you bet on “mass population transfers,” which is another term for ethnic cleansing.
So these betting markets permit people—of course you can bet on whether or not Russia will bomb or invade certain territories in Ukraine. Needless to say, you cannot bet on whether or not Israel will be bombed or attacked. That is not permitted, or at least not offered. So obviously there are certain populations who are deemed worthy of this level of dehumanization and gamification, and those that are not.
You can’t bet on whether the US gets attacked. You can’t bet on whether or not Trump will be killed, although some people may argue you could, by implication, by simply betting on whether or not JD Vance will take office, or whatever. But, obviously, there are many ways that could happen.
So you have a double standard about which populations are considered roulette chips on a roulette table, to be used as wagers. Obviously these things, just prima facie, should not be legal. You should not be able to bet on genocide. I think that’s probably a fair baseline moral assertion that I would be comfortable making.
But these guys, by their own admission, they want to gamify, they want to turn every single uncertainty in life into a wagering opportunity. And as I’m sure your previous guest touched on, this is obviously rife with conflicts of interest and moral hazards for fairly obvious reasons, which is, unlike the outcome of the Bears/Packers game, there are sometimes hundreds, if not thousands of humans who have intimate knowledge of whether or not these outcomes will take place prior to the settling of the betting market. (They call it a prediction market, but it’s a betting market.) And it basically just incentivizes and promotes insider-trading. It promotes rent-seeking. Of course, none of this has any social value.
Now, the thin sort of moral logic or moral argument that its defenders have used, especially in the context of their partnership with CNBC and CNN, is that, “Oh, it provides more clear analysis,” and CNN uses this term “data.” Now, when CNN uses the word “data” in the context of its partnership with Kalshi, what it means is betting odds, just like they put the betting odds on ESPN a few years ago when ESPN and Disney got into the gambling industry. They want to promote you to go on the app and bet.
Now, presumably, we don’t know for sure, but presumably CNN is taking some percentage of this gambling money. Again, one of the dozens of obvious moral hazards is that this will incentivize the news to prioritize that which solicits the most gambling, and not that which has the most political or social relevance, not that which challenges power, not that which exposes injustice or highlights misdeeds, but that which generates people wagering.
Extra! Update (6/07)
So, obviously, this is a more extreme, kind of pornographic version of what we’ve seen in a trend in media over the last decade or so, which is this polling obsession, right? This horserace polling obsession. Obviously FAIR has written about it for decades, but this idea that, the way you turn politics into a spectator sport where you’re sort of watching, everything’s disempowered. There’s no real moral stakes, there’s certainly no kind of sense of injustice, or right or wrong. There’s just two teams that are playing, and you’re a passive consumer who roots for their respective team, or, in this instance, gambles on them.
This, of course, removes the conversation away from the normative or the ideological into the realm of fatuous and speculative and horserace, because, again, predicting things is not a very meaningful political analysis. It’s not a meaningful political insight. You’re not at the Gulf Greyhound race with some retirees waving tickets in the air. These are real human, life-and-death situations.
Obviously, many of the things being wagered on, now some of the things you’re wagering on, are maybe fairly benign. What’s the weather in Chicago? There are markets for all kinds of inanities, but there’s really a lot of human life–ending stuff, like the genocide in Gaza, like whether or not certain cities in Ukraine are occupied and bombed by Russian forces. And, again, the fact that you can’t do that for Israelis or Americans does indicate that there are certain lives that are considered intrinsically valuable, and there are those who are considered chips on a roulette table.
And so the conflicts of interests are obvious. Obviously, CNN cannot determine the news, but they can certainly determine the perception of the news, which is to say they can very easily move markets by any report or comment they make on air. Now, Kalshi has in-house betters, so Kalshi themselves wagers on the market. So to what extent are they going to use their partnership, or their emphasis on certain betting markets, to manipulate markets to their liking?
And, again, all this does is incentivize scams and insider-trading and rent-seeking and all these kinds of parasitic economic activity that produces nothing of value. It doesn’t cure a disease, it doesn’t make the trains go faster, it doesn’t provide news. It doesn’t edify or educate or create a more robust civic polity. It does nothing of moral or social value. It’s just pure race-to-the-bottom removed gambling, which is unfortunately one of the major exploding markets in our economy, along with various kinds of AI scams.
And so CNN getting in on it is really just an open admission that their job is not even really to hold power to account, or to whatever the kind of Journalism 101 moral cliche you want to use, “afflict the comfortable,” that kind of thing. It’s a gamification.
Real News Network (12/5/25)
And Harry Enten, the data guy who’s spearheading this, I asked him directly on Twitter. I said, “Are you going to permit, are you going to put odds up on the screen, to bet on famine in Gaza?” He didn’t get back to me, but I am sort of curious where they’re going to draw that line. Are they going to use things like war, conflict, genocide, starvation, famine, disease as that which can be wagered on, which I think on a basic moral intuitive level we know is wrong, even if it’s directly or indirectly, many of these markets are openly, directly wagering these things. And whether or not this is something that CNN gets a rake from, like any other casino.
And like all gambling, it’s a regressive tax. It fundamentally takes money, in the aggregate, from poor and working people, and moves it to five counties in Connecticut and Nevada and California and New York.
And that’s the end game. The end game is just to keep picking people’s pockets. We see this with the rise of pushing crypto. And, again, it’s no accident that the Trump family fortune has increased $1.8 billion since he’s taken office, and it’s almost all on crypto. It’s just a way of legalized bribery, and they want to “democratize” the pool of people who were involved, whether it’s crypto or NFTs, before that fad went away. And gambling is just another version of that. It’s a way of creating more marks. And by partnering with CNN, you’re pushing this app on more marks.
JJ: All right, well, we’re going to end there for now, for the moment. We’ve been speaking with Adam Johnson of the Substack The Column, and of the podcast Citations Needed. Thank you so much, Adam Johnson, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
AJ: Thank you for having me.
From FAIR via This RSS Feed.
21
5
Elon Musk Is Vowing Utopia Driven by AI and Robotics. Bernie Sanders Has a Few Questions
(www.commondreams.org)
The world's richest man, Elon Musk, continues to insist that the artificial intelligence technology he profits from will create an economic utopia free from poverty, where work is optional and saving money is unnecessary.
But at a time of unprecedented wealth inequality that the Trump administration Musk supports has helped to accelerate, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) expressed incredulity about how Musk envisions such a future coming about.
Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, made his comments on his social media app X, in response to billionaire investor Ray Dalio, who'd announced that he and his wife were contributing to an initiative backed by the Trump administration to create savings accounts for children born between 2025 and 2028.
Dalio mentioned that the computer billionaire Michael Dell and his wife had also pledged $6.25 billion to the effort.
— (@)
Unprompted, Musk responded: "It is certainly a nice gesture of the Dells, but there will be no poverty in the future, and so no need to save money. There will be universal high income."
It's a theory that Musk has proposed repeatedly of late. Last month, while on a podcast, he suggested that thanks to rapidly accelerating AI and robot technology, all labor will soon be automated, making the need for wages obsolete: "In less than 20 years, working will be optional. Working at all will be optional. Like a hobby."
Earlier this week, he postulated—in almost Marxian fashion—that automation would do away with the need for money as a store of value.
“I think money disappears as a concept, honestly,” he told another podcast. “It’s kind of strange, but in a future where anyone can have anything, you no longer need money as a database for labor allocation. If AI and robotics are big enough to satisfy all human needs, then money is no longer necessary. Its relevance declines dramatically.”
Social media users have had a field day with Musk's fanciful predictions. One noted that it was a bit strange that a person who believed money would soon lose all value recently strong-armed Tesla shareholders into giving him a nearly $1 trillion pay package, the biggest corporate compensation plan in history. Another simply asked, "Are you high on ketamine?"
But perhaps the most blistering reaction came from Sanders, one of Musk's most steadfast adversaries, who posted a sardonic response video on Thursday.
— (@)
"I was delighted to hear that through the rapid advancement in artificial intelligence and robotics that you are funding, you will be bringing about utopia to the world," the senator said. "You have told us that poverty will be wiped out, work will be optional, there will be universal high income, and that everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport, and everything else. That is wonderful news."
"I just have a couple of questions. How will this utopia come about?" he continued. "If young people can't find the entry-level jobs that used to exist, and they are unemployed without income, when are they going to get the free housing you talk about? If manufacturing workers lose their jobs because robots take their place, when are they going to get the free healthcare you promise? If a young nurse with kids loses her job, how is she going to get the food she needs to feed her family?"
Sanders then turned his attention to the fact that Musk spent an unprecedented amount of more than $270 million to help elect President Donald Trump, who earlier this year enacted historic cuts to the social safety net to fund tax breaks that overwhelmingly benefit the rich, in what has been described as the greatest upward transfer of wealth in US history.
"I look forward to hearing about how you and your other oligarch friends are going to provide working people with a magnificent life that you promise," he continued. "Because let's not forget, Donald Trump, the guy you got elected, is kicking 15 million people off their healthcare, doubling insurance premiums for more than 20 million, and is making massive cuts to nutrition assistance and education for kids across the country."
Sanders concluded, "With that track record, I can't wait to hear how your plan to provide universal high income for every American is going to be implemented."
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
22
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has hired a subsidiary of for-profit prison company GEO Group to aid in hunting down immigrants at their homes and places of work, according to records reviewed by The Intercept.
ICE has secured a deal with surveillance firm BI Incorporated as part of a new program, first reported in October by The Intercept, to use private bounty hunters to determine the locations of immigrants in exchange for monetary bonuses.
BI, which was acquired by the GEO Group in 2011, is one of several firms hired by ICE to provide “skip tracing” services, in which its teams of corporate investigators will use surveillance to track immigrants across the country to their homes and places of work so federal agents can easily swoop in and make arrests.
Records show ICE has already paid BI $1.6 million, with the potential for the contract to grow to as much as $121 million by the time it concludes in 2027.
ICE’s push to privatize its hunt for immigrants has drawn the scrutiny of Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., who warned it “invites the very abuses, secrecy, and corruption our founders sought to prevent.”
Neither BI Incorporated nor GEO Group immediately responded to a request for comment.
The deal illustrates a strategy of vertical integration within GEO Group, which has found a growing line of business operating for-profit immigration detention centers under the second Trump administration. In this case, the corporation stands to be paid by the federal government to both find immigrants and then to imprison them.
[
Related
Deportation, Inc.](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/19/deportation-abrego-garcia-ice-immigration/)
Shares of GEO Group, which donated to both Trump’s reelection campaign and his inaugural fund, spiked following his 2024 victory. Trump’s return to office has proven fortuitous for GEO Group: The president’s “Big Beautiful Bill” earmarked $45 billion for jailing immigrants. “This is a unique moment in our company’s history,” GEO Group CEO J. David Donahue told investors in May, “and we believe we are well-positioned to meet this unprecedented opportunity.”
GEO Group has faced decades of criticism over alleged mismanagement of its facilities and claims of rampant abuse of inmates. In August, The Intercept reported the suicide of a Chinese immigrant held at a GEO Group-operated prison in Pennsylvania. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal complaint over the facility in July, criticizing “horrific conditions” at the prison, including repeated instances of medical neglect.
In 2023, GEO Group was hit by a class-action lawsuit alleging the “months-long poisoning” from a chemical disinfectant of more than 1,300 inmates at a California immigration detention center. In May, Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, jailed for her criticism of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, alleged her GEO Group-managed jail delayed treatment while she experienced an asthma attack.
[
Related
ICE Plans Cash Rewards for Private Bounty Hunters to Locate and Track Immigrants](https://theintercept.com/2025/10/31/ice-plans-cash-rewards-for-private-bounty-hunters-to-locate-and-track-immigrants/)
The ICE contract record does not say whether BI would provide on-the-ground bounty hunting services, software-based investigative services, or a combination of both. ICE has previously told potential bounty hunting contractors, “It is dependent upon the vendor to complete the work required by contract,” but “Should a vendor choose to subcontract, that is at their discretion,” according to procurement correspondence reviewed by The Intercept.
BI has a long history in immigrant surveillance, having received hundreds of millions of dollars from the government to date through past contracts for ankle monitor-based tracking. The company specializes in remote surveillance and person-monitoring services, including sales of GPS bracelets and other tracking devices. “Location tracking enables individuals to work and live in the community while being monitored closely for curfews, movement, and more,” according to the company’s website. “BI offers ankle bracelet, wrist-worn, and mobile tracking solutions to meet the needs of varying risk levels.”
BI also touts its suite of software products, including case management applications for monitoring the movements of immigrants and other targets, as well as tools that allow agencies to chart a target’s “geographic and spatial location data” across Google Maps. It is unknown if the company has access to commercial mobile device locational data, or relies solely on body-mounted trackers.
But with many years of detailed GPS data pertaining to the every movement of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, BI and GEO Group hold a trove of locational information that would be of obvious value to the bounty hunting initiative.
In a November contracting document pertaining to the skip tracing effort, ICE told potential bounty hunting vendors they are “expected to provide their own internal skip tracing tools,” providing contractors with a great deal of latitude to employ surveillance products and techniques of their choosing. The document further noted that private ICE bounty hunters will not be provided credentials to identify them as agents of the government.
404 Media reported Thursday that ICE had also contracted with AI Solutions 87, “a company that makes ‘AI agents’ to rapidly track down targets.”
The post ICE Hires Immigrant Bounty Hunters From Private Prison Company GEO Group appeared first on The Intercept.
From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.
23
8
Gaza No Longer Officially Facing Famine—But 1.6 Million Palestinians Still in 'Man-Made Hunger Crisis'
(www.commondreams.org)
While the global initiative that tracks hunger crises concluded Friday that the Gaza Strip is no longer facing "famine," the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification report echoed warnings from United Nations leaders and humanitarian groups that "the situation remains critical" for Palestinians who have endured over two years of an Israeli assault and blockade.
Famine was declared in August, sparking a worldwide outrage over what one research group called "genocidal starvation." The new IPC report—released after an October ceasefire deal between Hamas and Israel—says that "following a significant reduction in conflict, a proposed peace plan, and improved access for both humanitarian and commercial food deliveries, food security conditions have improved in the Gaza Strip."
However, the report also notes that between mid-October and the end of November, "around 1.6 million people (77% of the population analyzed) faced high levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above)," including "more than half a million people in emergency (IPC Phase 4) and over 100,000 people in catastrophe (IPC Phase 5)."
Those conditions—over three-quarters of Gaza's population at risk of famine—are expected to continue through April. In other words, as Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), put it, "Gaza remains in a man-made hunger crisis."
The latest IPC report "underscores how fragile the gains have been since the ceasefire began in October," he said on social media. "To end this catastrophe, supplies must be let in at scale and humanitarians allowed to do their job. UNRWA has food parcels for 1.1 million people and flour for the entire population waiting to enter the Gaza Strip."
— (@)
As the Associated Press reported Friday, while Israeli government agencies rejected the IPC findings, humanitarian leaders and Palestinians have highlighted all that the people of Gaza continue to endure because of Israel's war on the strip:
"This is not a debate about truck numbers or calories on paper. It's about whether people can actually access food, clean water, shelter, and healthcare safely and consistently. Right now, they cannot," said Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam's policy lead for Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.
People must be able to rebuild their homes, grow food, and recover, and the conditions for that are still being denied, she said.
Even with more products in the markets, Palestinians say they can't afford it. "There is food and meat, but no one has money," said Hany al-Shamali, who was displaced from Gaza City. "How can we live?"
Earlier this week, the Humanitarian Country Team of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which brings together heads of UN entities and over 200 nongovernmental organizations, urged the international community to "take immediate and concrete actions to press the Israeli authorities to lift all impediments," including a new registration process for NGOs, that continue to undermine lifesaving operations, "or risk the collapse of the humanitarian response, particularly in the Gaza Strip."
The team emphasized that "humanitarian access is not optional, conditional, or political. It is a legal obligation under international humanitarian law, particularly in Gaza, where Israel has failed to ensure that the population is adequately supplied. Israeli authorities must allow and facilitate rapid, unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief. They must immediately reverse policies that obstruct humanitarian operations and ensure that humanitarian organizations are able to operate without compromising humanitarian principles. Lifesaving assistance must be allowed to reach Palestinians without further delay."
— (@)
Israel has killed at least 70,669 Palestinians in the strip and wounded 171,165 others since launching its retaliation for the Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023, the Gaza Health Ministry said Thursday. Experts have warned that the true death toll is likely far higher.
Winter storms are exacerbating already dire conditions in Gaza, including by damaging and destroying shelters of displaced people. Oxfam's humanitarian director, Marta Valdes García, said Friday that "with 1.6 million people found to be facing acute food insecurity... we are incredibly concerned that winter is already bringing flooding and more misery to thousands of hungry people with little or no money, who are now exposed in terrible living conditions."
Multiple infants have died of hypothermia in recent days, including a 14-day-old named Mohammed, whose family is living in a tent after being displaced from their home in the east of Khan Younis. His mother, Eman Abu al-Khair, told Al Jazeera that "I can still hear his tiny cries in my ears... I sleep and drift off, unable to believe that his crying and waking me at night will never happen again."
"His body was cold as ice. His hands and feet were frozen, his face stiff and yellowish, and he was barely breathing... I woke my husband immediately so we could take him to the hospital, but he couldn't find any means of transportation to get us there," the 34-year-old recalled. "As soon as daylight broke, we rushed with an animal-drawn cart towards the hospital... But unfortunately, we arrived too late. His condition was already critical."
Another 29-day-old baby, Saeed Eseid Abdeen, was declared dead at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza on Thursday, according to Drop Site News and Doctors Without Borders, also known by its French name, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).
A fourth child has frozen to death in Gaza in just 10 days—two of them babies—as Israel continues blocking tents and winter shelter aid, despite UN supplies pre-positioned at the border that could immediately shelter more than 1.3 million displaced Palestinians.
[image or embed]
— Drop Site (@dropsitenews.com) December 18, 2025 at 7:41 PM
"Children are losing their lives because they lack the most basic items for survival," Bilal Abu Saada, nursing team supervisor at Nasser Hospital, said in a statement from MSF. "Babies are arriving to the hospital cold, with near-death vital signs: Even our best efforts are not enough. They say the war has ended, but people are still having to fight for their lives."
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
24
"Starting next year, American drug prices will come down fast and furious and will soon be the lowest in the developed world," President Donald Trump claimed Friday as the White House announced agreements with nine pharmaceutical manufacturers.
The administration struck most favored nation (MFN) pricing deals with Amgen, Bristol Myers Squibb, Boehringer Ingelheim, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, GSK, Merck, Novartis, and Sanofi. The president—who has launched the related TrumpRx.gov—previously reached agreements with AstraZeneca, EMD Serono, Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Pfizer.
"The White House said it has made MFN deals with 14 of the 17 biggest drug manufacturers in the world," CBS News noted Friday. "The three drugmakers that were not part of the announcement are AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson, and Regeneron, but the president said that deals involving the remaining three could be announced at another time."
However, as Trump and congressional Republicans move to kick millions of Americans off of Medicaid and potentially leave millions more uninsured because they can't afford skyrocketing premiums for Affordable Care Act (ACA) plans, some critics suggested that the new drug deals with Big Pharma are far from enough.
"When 47% of Americans are concerned they won't be able to afford a healthcare cost next year, steps to reduce drug prices for patients are welcomed, especially by patients who rely on one of the overpriced essential medicines named in today's announcement," said Merith Basey, CEO of Patients for Affordable Drugs Now, in a statement.
"But voluntary agreements with drug companies—especially when key details remain undisclosed—are no substitute for durable, system-wide reforms," Basey stressed. "Patients are overwhelmingly calling on Congress to do more to lower prescription drug prices by holding Big Pharma accountable and addressing the root causes of high drug prices, because drugs don't work if people can't afford them."
— (@)
As the New York Times reported Friday:
Drugs that will be made available in this way include Amgen's Repatha, for lowering cholesterol, at $239 a month; GSK's asthma inhaler, Advair Diskus, at $89 a month; and Merck's diabetes medication Januvia, at $100 a month.
Many of these drugs are nearing the end of their patent protection, meaning that the arrival of low-cost generic competition would soon have prompted manufacturers to lower their prices.
In other cases, the direct-buy offerings are very expensive and out of reach for most Americans.
For example, Gilead will offer Epclusa, a three-month regimen of pills that cures hepatitis C, for $2,492 a month on the site. Most patients pay far less using insurance or with help from patient assistance programs. Gilead says on its website that "typically a person taking Epclusa pays between $0 and $5 per month" with commercial insurance or Medicare.
While medication prices are a concern for Americans who face rising costs for everything from groceries to utility bills, the outcome of the ongoing battle on Capitol Hill over ACA tax credits—which are set to expire at the end of the year—is expected to determine how many people can even afford to buy health insurance for next year.
The ACA subsidies fight—which Republicans in the US House of Representatives ignored in the bill they passed this week before leaving Capitol Hill early—has renewed calls for transitioning the United States from its current for-profit healthcare system to Medicare for All.
"At the heart of our healthcare crisis is one simple truth: Corporations have too much power over our lives," Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said on social media Friday. "Medicare for All is how we take our power back and build a system that puts people over profits."
Jayapal reintroduced the Medicare for All Act in April with Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.) and Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee Ranking Member Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). The senator said Friday that some of his top priorities in 2026 will be campaign finance reform, income and wealth inequality, the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence, and Medicare for All.
Earlier this month, another backer of that bill, US Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), said: "We must stop tinkering around the edges of a broken healthcare system. Yes, let's extend the ACA tax credits to prevent a huge spike in healthcare costs for millions. Then, let's finally create a system that puts your health over corporate profits. We need Medicare for All."
It's not just progressives in Congress demanding that kind of transformation. According to Data for Progress polling results released late last month, 65% of likely US voters—including 78% of Democrats, 71% of Independents, and 49% of Republicans—either strongly or somewhat support "creating a national health insurance program, sometimes called 'Medicare for All.'"
From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.
25
view more: next ›