We're watching the largest and most dangerous 'cult' in American history

Dr. Seth D. Norrholm
December 16, 2024

RAW STORY

I was dying…It was just a matter of time. Lying behind the wheel of the airplane, bleeding out of the right side of my devastated body, I waited for the rapid shooting to stop.

—Former Representative Jackie Speier in her memoir Undaunted: Surviving Jonestown, Summoning Courage, and Fighting Back recounting her experience after being shot five times during an ambush during her fact-finding visit to Jonestown, Guyana where Jim Jones and his cult, Peoples Temple, had built a compound.

It, combined with everything else that was going on, made it difficult to breathe…Being crushed by the shield and the people behind it … leaving me defenseless, injured.

—Metropolitan police officer, Daniel Hodges, describing being crushed in a doorway during the January 6, 2021, attack by Trump supporters on the U.S. Capitol

In both of the examples above, the individual speaking was the victim of extreme violence perpetrated by followers of a single person whose influence had spread to hundreds of people (in the January 6th case, thousands of people). In fact, Speier’s experience with the Jim Jones followers was part of the single greatest loss of American life (918 people) prior to 9/11/2001. These followings have been given an umbrella name, cult, and have involved what has been traditionally called “brainwashing.” The cult leader receives seemingly undying support as the Dear Leader or Savior. However, the term brainwashing suggests that indoctrinated members are robots without free will – behavioral scientists argue that this is not the case. It’s an oversimplification.

Rather than being seen as passive victims to an irresistible force, psychiatrist Robert Lifton argues that there is “voluntary self-surrender” in one’s entrance into a cult. Further, the decision to give up control as part of the cult process may actually be part of the reason why people join. Research and experience tell us that those who are “cult vulnerable” may have a sense of confusion or separation from society or seek the same sort of highly controlled environment that was part of their childhood. It has also been suggested that those who are at risk for cult membership feel an enormous lack of control in the face of uncertainty (i.e., economic, occupational, academic, social, familial) and will gravitate more towards a cult as their distress increases. I would argue that many of these factors are at play when we see the ongoing support of Trumpism and MAGA “theology.”


Psychologist Leon Festinger described the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in which there is a disconnect between one’s feelings, beliefs, and convictions and their observable actions. This dissonance is distressing and, in order to relieve the anxiety, people may become more invested in the cult or belief system that goes against who they are individually. As such, cult members become more “dug-in” and will cling to thoughts and beliefs that contradict available evidence. In other words, they are no longer able to find a middle ground or compromise.

How does this apply to today’s politics?

There was a time when the two major political parties in America could exhibit bipartisanship by moving across the aisle to compromise on the issues on which they were legislating. Tried and true Republicans who favored small government, lower taxes, and national security could find a middle ground with Democrats who pushed for things like universal healthcare, higher minimum wages, and progressive tax reform. The abortion issue in America has been an area of debate between the parties as they debated elements like when life begins, is a heartbeat a heartbeat, and what to do about post-birth abortions (which is murder and not actually a thing). There were largely two sides of the issue and some areas for compromise.


This is no longer possible in today’s sociopolitical climate. Although members of the GOP still refer to themselves as a political party with principled stances, the reality is they have now morphed into a domestic terror organization and to use the umbrella term, a cult – the largest and most dangerous cult in American history.

RELATED: Neuroscientist sounds the alarm on the GOP’s 'contagious sociopaths' who live among us

Cult thinking includes ardent adherence to group thinking such as – clinically speaking, in the face of distorted thinking we ask about one’s strength of conviction by querying, ”Can you think of other ways of seeing this?” Sadly, what we are seeing publicly is ‘No’ from those who still subscribe to Trumpism/MAGA.



Here are a few examples in today’s sociopolitical environment in which cultism has contributed to a lack of middle ground.

There is no middle ground on treasonous, conspiratorial, fraudulent behavior – these are crimes and, arguably, the worst crimes one could commit against their own country.

There is no middle ground on slavery.


There is no middle ground on allowing Americans to die through inaction in response to natural disasters and global health crises.

There is no middle ground on gunning down school children or wearing an AR-15 rifle pin and throwing away a pin to remember a Uvalde victim.

There is no middle ground on jeopardizing national security and retaining and sharing classified documents.


There is no middle ground on breaking campaign finance (i.e., hush money schemes) laws.

There should be no middle ground on tolerance of crime, period.

And so many know this. Tim Scott, Jim Jordan, and Marco Rubio (the last two having gone to law school), all know this and are smarter than they are acting – which takes us back to cult dynamics – if you are a dyed-in-the-wool cultist or pretending to be a cultist – but the outcome is the same – harm to the Country and its people – there is no difference. Whether you actually have a personality disorder or are pretending to be a sociopathically or psychopathically disordered person – if the result is the same – harm to your constituents and your country – what’s the difference? As noted in the opening paragraphs, there is a voluntary submission to cultism – Rubio, for example, identified all of the reasons why the 45th President was not qualified when he himself was running for President in 2016. However, perhaps due to his own intolerance of uncertainties in his life, volunteered for Trumpism.

What can be done?

There are exit strategies for people ensnared in a cult. One factor is accountability or repeatedly seeing the adverse consequences of the group’s behavior (e.g., indictment, incarceration, job loss) which we started to see even more of this week.

But until one party and its ardent followers can admit they are in a domestic terrorist cult and as Rep. Eric Swalwell said are “unserious” people, there is no hope of unification on the horizon. The first step is getting through to people who can’t or won’t see the truth.

ALSO IN THE NEWS: Cognitive neuroscientist explains why stupidity is an existential threat to America

About the Author:

Seth D. Norrholm, PhD (Threads: neuropsychophd; X, artist formerly known as Twitter: @SethN12) is a neuropsychologist and independent socio political columnist. Dr. Norrholm has spent 20 years studying trauma-, stressor-, anxiety-, depressive-, and substance use-related disorders and has published over 135 peer-reviewed research articles and book chapters. The primary objective of his work is to develop “bench-to-bedside” clinical research methods to inform therapeutic interventions for fear and anxiety-related disorders and how they relate to human factors such as personality, genetics, and environmental influences. Dr. Norrholm has been featured on NBC, ABC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC’s Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Politico.com, The New York Times, The New York Daily News, USA Today, WebMD, The Atlantic, The History Channel, Scientific American, Salon.com, The Huffington Post, and Yahoo.com.

Inside the DOGE billionaires' plan to kill Medicare

Robert Reich

December 16, 2024
ALTERNET

I’ve shared with you the plans of Trump’s unelected multi-billionaires, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to undermine Social Security — the most popular and successful program in the federal government, into which you’ve paid your entire working life.

Today I want to share their plan to gut Medicaid.

Medicaid is less politically popular than Social Security or Medicare, because it mainly supports poor children and families who have little or no political voice.

But Medicaid covers far more Americans.

Medicaid insures nearly half of all children in the United States. It covers 1 in 5 women of childbearing age. It also pays for a large portion of the nation’s nursing home care and mental health treatment. States and the federal government share its costs, which totaled $880 billion last year.

How are the DOGE billionaires planning to gut it?

First, by turning Medicaid into “block grants,” in which states get lump sums regardless of how many people sign up for the program. Republican senator and founding DOGE caucus member John Cornyn has already publicly stated that he favors this approach.

As more poor children and needy families sign up, block grants will force states to increase their own spending on Medicaid or restrict who gets it. Given the strain on state budgets and the negligible political voice of Medicaid recipients, it will almost surely be the latter.

A second method for gutting Medicaid favored by Musk, Ramaswamy, Cornyn, and other DOGE caucus members is to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. They claim this would save the federal government at least $100 billion over the next decade.

But the reason for the saving is that work requirements would cause an estimated 600,000 people — most of them unable to work — to lose coverage (according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office).

The third idea DOGE is considering is to cut back on the expansion of Medicaid that came with the Affordable Care Act. That expansion enabled adults in families earning up to $43,000 a year to get health care coverage. (Under it, the federal government pays 90 percent of the costs.)

Step back for a moment and consider what’s being proposed.

If the Affordable Care Act’s expanded Medicaid is cut back, hundreds of thousands of Americans in families earning up to $43,000 a year will lose their health care.

If Medicaid is turned into block grants or if work is required of people unable to work, many hundreds of thousands more will lose their only access to health care, including large numbers of children.

The presumed goal of the DOGE exercise is to reduce the federal budget deficit.


Yet Trump and his billionaires are planning to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which disproportionately have benefited large corporations and wealthy people like themselves, along with additional tax cuts and loopholes for the wealthy.

The estimated cost of extending the Trump tax cuts is at least $5 trillion — more than twice the amount Musk has stated DOGE will cut in “wasteful” government spending.

The richest man in the world and his billionaire colleagues are seeking to reduce money spent for the health care of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, at the same time they’re seeking to reduce taxes on themselves and others who are the richest and most privileged.

Anything wrong with this picture?

Many of the Americans who will be shafted by all this voted for Trump in 2024.

They may never discover that Trump is behind this because Trump won’t have his fingerprints on the Medicaid cuts. He’ll hide behind Musk and Ramaswamy’s DOGE and the newly formed DOGE caucus in Congress.

Not even their fingerprints will be obvious because block grants to the states, work requirements, and elimination of the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion will all do the dirty deed quietly.

Nor will working Americans discover that big corporations and the wealthy are reaping most of the savings from the gutting of Medicaid in the form of lower taxes. Most working Americans haven’t yet discovered how skewed the 2017 Trump tax cut has been to the wealthy and big corporations, so why should they discover it in future years?

One more thing.

Employer-sponsored health insurance — available to most salaried workers in large corporations but rarely to hourly workers or contract workers — remains untaxed.

This is one of the largest tax expenditures in the federal government.

As I said, Medicaid costs about $880 billion a year. The exclusion from taxes of employer-provided health insurance costs the federal government a very large fraction of that — the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated $299 billion in 2022; the Congressional Budget Office projects $641 billion by 2032.

It’s another well-disguised benefit for the privileged that’s underwritten by the non-privileged. Yet I’d be astonished if DOGE touched it.

Why go after the costs of Medicaid and not the costs of employer-provided health insurance? For the same reason Trump’s billionaires will happily cut taxes on themselves even as they gut health care for millions of poor kids and working-class families.

What’s considered “waste and fraud” often depends on whether one is looking downward or upward, and the billionaire DOGEs look only downward. But the biggest waste and fraud is found at the high rungs — in tax loopholes and tax expenditures used by wealthy individuals and big corporations. (Did I hear anyone say “carried interest?”)

When Trump chose Dr. Mehmet Oz, the multimillion-dollar celebrity doctor (who infamously promoted hydroxychloroquine while holding over $615,000 in shares of the drug’s distributor) to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Trump said Oz will “cut waste and fraud within our country’s most expensive government agency.”

Believe that, and you should believe in hydroxychloroquine.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

How white supremacy prevented America from having single-payer healthcare

Thom Hartmann
December 17, 2024 
ALTERNET

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

In the wake of the assassination of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson, Americans are wondering out loud why we’re getting ripped off by giant insurance companies when every other developed country in the world has healthcare as a right and pays an average of about half of what we do — and gets better outcomes.

As I point out in The Hidden History of American Healthcare: Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich, and brought up with Joy Reid on her program last week, America is:

— The only developed country in the world that doesn’t recognize healthcare as a human right,

— The only country with more than two-thirds of its population lacking access to affordable healthcare and a half-million families facing bankruptcy every year because somebody got sick,
— The only country in the developed world where over 40% of the population carries $220 billion in medical debt,
— And the only country in the developed world that has, since its founding, enslaved and then legally oppressed and disenfranchised a large minority of its population because of their race.

These things, along with UnitedHealth’s $370 billion in revenue and $32 billion in profit, are connected.

Roughly 60 percent of Americans would have had to take out a loan or otherwise borrow or beg for money to deal with a single, unexpected $1,000 expense.

Yet annual family medical copays and out -of-pocket deductibles averaged $6,575 in 2023, when the Kaiser Family Foundation did a comprehensive survey of Americans. This strikes minorities particularly hard, which, it turns out, is not an accident.

The simple fact is that, were it not for slavery, white supremacy, and the legacy of “scientific racism,” America would have had a national, single-payer healthcare system in 1915, just 31 years after Germany put into place the modern world’s first such program.


At the center of the effort to prevent a national healthcare system — or any form of government assistance that may even incidentally offer benefit to African Americans — were Frederick Ludwig Hoffman and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, which promoted his “science based” racial theories to successfully fight single-payer health insurance.

Racism is the main reason that America doesn’t consider healthcare a human right and provide it to all citizens, in contrast to every other developed country in the world. Racist whites, particularly in the South, have worked for over a century to make sure that healthcare is hard for Black people and other minorities to get.

And their biggest ally, their founding spokesperson in the post–Civil War era, their biggest champion right up to the 1940s, was a man that most Americans have never heard of.


In 1884, 19-year-old Frederick Ludwig Hoffmann left Germany for America after failing at a number of job attempts and being rejected for the German Army because he was “physically deficient” and frail, standing five-foot-seven and weighing a mere 110 pounds. He arrived in New York with $4.76 in his pocket, speaking “not a word of English” but determined to prove wrong his mother’s assessment that he was a “good-for-nothing.”

From this humble beginning, Hoffmann went on to become one of America’s most influential statisticians and analysts of public health, making numerous consequential discoveries about how industrialization was killing American workers.

He dropped the last n in his last name, became so fluent in English that his accent was nearly indistinguishable, and married into an upscale Georgia family. By 1920 he was an American citizen, vice president of America’s largest insurance company, and a national authority on the now-discredited pseudoscience called scientific racism.


In 1908, his article “The Mortality from Consumption [tuberculosis] in the Dusty Trades,” published by the US Department of Labor, produced the first national efforts to reduce lung damage in the workplace. He also published the first work (1915) linking tobacco to lung cancer.

From this, he became vice president of the National Tuberculosis Association (today known as the American Lung Association) and later demonstrated the connection between exposure to asbestos and the disease that killed my father, mesothelioma (a bit of data that asbestos companies worked to keep hidden for the next 80 years).

But Hoffman’s most controversial lifelong obsession was with the relationship between disease, race, and society.


On one of his first trips to Georgia, he wrote, he came across a book by Dr. Eugene R. Corson, a Georgia obstetrician, titled The Vital Equation of the Colored Race and Its Future in the United States. It was apparently an updated or shortened version of Corson’s widely read “The Future of the Colored Race in the United States From an Ethnic and Medical Standpoint,” published in 1887 in the New York Medical Times.

This was just after the failure of Reconstruction, and a widespread topic of speculation, particularly in the South, was whether Black people would soon outnumber white people in that part of the country.

The Ku Klux Klan and others calling for wholesale slaughter and suppression of Black people claimed that they were more likely to have larger families because they were “more prolific,” code for “excessively sexual,” a charge that had persisted from the earliest days of slavery and led to the murder of Emmett Till (among others).


However, the “scientific” racists of the day, like Corson, thought differently. Corson led a movement suggesting that people of African ancestry, now lacking “the protective womb of slavery,” would die out for the simple reason that the Black race was “inferior to whites.”

Corson promoted the Klan’s argument that “the simpler the organism, the simpler the genesis and the greater the prolificness.” But, he said, white people would prevail because they were less likely to die of disease, citing Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Population Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility.

While Black people might have more children, Corson wrote, white people would still outnumber them because Black fecundity “is more than compensated for by the ability [of white people] to maintain individual life.”

Enslaved people from Africa had found themselves in a civilization “of which [they are] not a product” and thus were less likely to be successful in “the struggle for existence.” Therefore, Corson wrote, Black people “must suffer physically, a result which forbids any undue increase in the race.”


The discovery of this theory, called the racial extinction thesis, electrified Hoffman, and he spent the rest of his life promoting it, while campaigning to stop any sort of movement toward a national health insurance program that might prevent or slow down the extinction of Black people in America.

In August 1896, the American Economic Association published a book that represented a turning point in Frederick Hoffman’s life and sealed the fate of single-payer health insurance in America. It was Hoffman’s magnum opus, summarizing decades of compiled statistics on Black versus white mortality, proving, according to Hoffman, once and for all, that for Black people, “gradual extinction is only a question of time.”

In Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, Hoffman set out not only to repeatedly make and statistically prove the above claim, but also to prove that anytime white people tried to help Black people, particularly by offering them healthcare services, the result was disaster for both.

Noting that “the Negro has failed to gain a foothold in any of the northern states,” Hoffman wrote, “he is in the South as a permanent factor . . . with a tendency to drift into the cities, there to concentrate in the most undesirable and unsanitary sections . . . and the evil effect will be more felt by the cities which are thus augmented in population of an undesirable character.”

In great detail, Hoffman spent about 300 pages documenting, with exhaustive tables and statistics, the fact that Black people were more likely to die as a result of everything from malaria to tuberculosis to childbirth.

And it was all because of their race, Hoffman argued:
“The decrease in the rate of increase of the colored population has been traced first to the excessive mortality, which in turn has been traced to an inferior vital capacity. . . . This racial inferiority has, in turn, brought about a moral deterioration . . . sexual immorality . . . diminished social and economic efficiency . . .”

And that represented a danger to white people, Hoffman wrote.

The participation of freed Black people in the contemporary labor pool and in society overall, he wrote, “in the course of years must prove not only a most destructive factor in the progress of the colored race, but also in the progress, social as well as economic, of the white race brought under its influence.”

Slavery had actually been good for Black people, Hoffman believed, and the abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War was only going to speed up the demise of that race.
“Nothing is more clearly shown from this investigation,” he wrote, “than that the southern black man at the time of emancipation was healthy in body and cheerful in mind. He neither suffered inordinately from disease nor from impaired bodily vigor.”
But with abolition, formerly enslaved people were “tending toward a condition in which matters will be worse than they are now, when diseases will be more destructive, vital resistance still lower, when the number of births will fall below the deaths, and gradual extinction of the race will take place.”

While Hoffman pioneered linking causal conditions such as asbestos and carcinogen exposure to sickness, he was so blinded by racism that a modern reader of his book constantly finds himself shouting, “But these things are also true of poor whites! These are caused by discrimination and poverty!!”

At the time, though, the vast majority of white Americans agreed with him. He was echoing the white cultural and scientific consensus of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when he wrote:
“Given the same conditions of life for two races, the one of Aryan descent will prove the superior, solely on account of its ancient inheritance of virtue and transmitted qualities which are determining factors in the struggle for race supremacy. The lower races, even under the same conditions of life, must necessarily fail because the vast number of incapables, which a hard struggle for life has eliminated from the ranks of the white races, are still forming the large body of the lower races.”

And, according to Hoffman and the other white “scientific racists,” the problem wasn’t just physical inferiority. The deepest “problem of the Negro,” Hoffman wrote, was moral:
“All the facts prove that a low standard of sexual morality is the main and underlying cause of the low and anti-social condition of the race at the present time. . . . The conclusion is warranted that it is merely a question of time when the actual downward course, that is, a decrease in the population will take place. In the meantime, however, the presence of the colored population is a serious hindrance to the economic progress of the white race.”

For those well-intentioned white people who wanted to help out the people who were a mere generation or two away from slavery, Hoffman and his colleagues had one simple bit of advice: Don’t even try.

In 1980, David Koch famously ran for vice president of the United States under the banner of the Libertarian Party, an organization founded a few decades earlier by big business to give an economic rationale and political patina to their simple theory that economics were more important than democracy, and the quality of life of working people should be decided in the “free marketplace” instead of by unions or through democratic processes via government regulation.

In this, Koch and his Libertarian friends were echoing Frederick Hoffman.

In his 1896 book Race Traits, Hoffman laid out his “scientific” assertion that when government steps in to help people, it invariably ends up hurting them instead. Not only should there be no government assistance given to help African Americans recover from three centuries of property theft, forced labor, and legal violence, but it is scientifically wrong to even consider the idea.

White people and government programs to better the lives of Black people, Hoffman wrote, deserve “the most severe condemnation of modern attempts of superior races to lift inferior races to their own elevated position.”

The damage done to Black people by offering them any sort of help, government assistance, or even a minimum wage, he wrote, is “criminal” behavior for a “civilized people.”

Hoffman pointed to Native Americans to prove his point:
“Few races have made such a brave struggle for their own preservation; few races can boast of so high a degree of aboriginal civilization. . . . An iron will can be traced upon the countenance of nearly every Indian of note.”

But it was government help, Hoffman wrote, that destroyed the American Indian.

It wasn’t “adulterated whiskey nor the frightful consequences of sexual immorality, spread around the forts and settlements of the whites,” that was “sufficient” to destroy Native Americans. It was charity.
“The most subtle agency of all,” he wrote, sounding like Ronald Reagan or David Koch, “governmental pauperism, the highest development of the theory of easy conditions of life, did what neither drink nor the poisons of venereal disease could do, and today the large majority of the tribes are following the Maories and Hawaiians towards the goal of final extinction.”

White Americans rationalized their brutality toward Native Americans and African Americans by saying that it was simple evolutionary biology: only the strong survive, and when the weak are allowed to propagate, it weakens the overall human race.
“Easy conditions of life and a liberal charity are among the most destructive influences affecting the lower races,” Hoffman concluded, “since by such methods the weak and incapable are permitted to increase and multiply, while the struggle of the more able is increased in severity [by the increase in taxes and regulation].”

And it’s not just charity.
“All the facts prove,” Hoffman wrote, “that education, philanthropy, and religion have failed to develop [among Black people] a higher appreciation of the stern and uncompromising virtues of the Aryan race.
“Instead of making the race more independent, modern educational and philanthropic efforts have succeeded in making it even more dependent on the white race at the present time than it was previous to emancipation.”

Free education — as any Libertarian can tell you — is more dangerous to the souls of people than slavery. And free healthcare is even worse.

Sounding like a modern-day acolyte of Ayn Rand, Hoffman wrote:
“Instead of clamoring for aid and assistance from the white race, the negro himself should sternly refuse every offer of direct interference in his own evolution. The more difficult his upward struggle, the more enduring will be the qualities developed.”

And, like Ayn Rand, David Koch, and Ronald Reagan, Hoffman believed that these were eternal truths independent of race:
“No missionary or educator or philanthropist extended aid or comfort to the English peasant class during its darkest days, to the earliest settlers on the coast of New England, or the pioneer in the forests of the far West. . . . [I]t is extremely rare to find a case where easy conditions of life or liberal charity have assisted man in his upward struggle. Self reliance . . . must be developed, and thus far have not been developed by the aid of charity or liberal philanthropy.”

This libertarian ideal is still pervasive in our modern fragmented healthcare system, and in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 it resulted in thousands of daily American deaths, disproportionately hitting racial minorities.

The “compulsory health insurance” (what today we’d call Medicare for All) movement of the early 20th century was as much (and possibly more) about getting paid sick leave as it was about covering doctor visits and hospitalization, because healthcare was so cheap that an unpaid week at work was a bigger hit to the wallet.

But workers wanted both.

The most successful effort of the era came out of an organization that a small group of progressive economists put together in 1905 and 1906, known as the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL).

Their initial efforts were directed at paid sick leave, workers’ compensation insurance, child labor laws, and workplace safety standards. To that last end, they were actively using the kinds of statistical analysis that Frederick Hoffman had both used and popularized to do everything from laying out his theories on race to showing an association between tobacco use and lung cancer.

Hoffman joined the AALL to promote their efforts…at least that was his claim.

A charitable reading of his motivations was that his statistical research on workplace phosphorus poisoning and lung disease overlapped with their efforts, and they were an organization that, at that time, was held in high regard. He did, after all, consider himself — and was, in a very real way — a major force for reform in public health and workplace safety arenas.

A less charitable motivation is posited in Daniel T. Rodgers’s 1998 book Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Rodgers wrote:
“On the AALL social insurance committee, he became the [Prudential] company’s mole. . . . Hoffman took credit for blocking the drafting of any resolutions at the AALL’s social insurance conference in 1913. During the framing of the association’s model health insurance bill, he dragged his feet, obstructed, pressed in vain for company initiatives in the medical insurance field, and informed his employers — more and more certain that public health insurance was ‘distinctly pernicious and a menace to our interests.’”

Despite Prudential and Hoffman’s efforts, government-funded health insurance was gaining popularity in America (and being adopted across Europe).

In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt made a third-party bid for the presidency, forming the Progressive Party (with its Bull Moose logo), and called for “the protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance.”

Jane Addams (Hull House founder), dressed in suffragette white, seconded Roosevelt’s nomination to wild cheers and applause; Roosevelt rallies routinely drew tens of thousands of people, and more than 200,000 people showed up in Los Angeles to support him and the party.

Roosevelt’s endorsement of “social insurance,” including health coverage, both reflected and reinforced a growing national sentiment, and in 1915 the AALL called for every state to support a program of health insurance. Prudential hadn’t yet gotten into the business of insuring health (they would in 1925), but they could see the writing on the wall.

In 1916, the AALL endorsed health insurance provided through a network of local and statewide mutual companies and called for those policies to also provide a small death benefit to cover funeral costs, which would have competed directly with the funeral coverage that was Prudential’s main cash cow.

Hoffman wrote to the company, “We, of course, cannot compete with Compulsory Insurance, including a death benefit of, say $100.” He then resigned “in disgust” from the AALL and begin a campaign, sponsored by Prudential, to stop state-funded health insurance.

Hoffman and Prudential weren’t alone in their concern: the Insurance Federation of New York told their members:
“This is only the entering wedge; if once a foothold is obtained it will mean attempts to have such State Insurance of all kinds...”

The AALL produced model legislation that was taken up in 1916 by eight states, including California and New York, the former via a ballot initiative and the latter in the New York legislature. In addition to calling for policies that would pay all costs of healthcare, the AALL’s legislation called for up to 26 weeks of paid sick leave.

Picking up steam, the American Medical Association endorsed the AALL’s model legislation as well. The battle was joined.

Hoffman’s Prudential-sponsored campaign to prevent any state from adopting a statewide nonprofit health (and death benefit) insurance program went into overdrive through 1916–1920. He traveled to Germany several times to chronicle, in minute detail, the failings of the kaiser’s system that had been operating since 1885.

Prudential, in 1905, had been swept up in New York’s Armstrong Investigation, and so, as historian Beatrix Hoffman (no relation to Frederick) wrote, “[b]ecause of their industry’s public image problems, insurance executives knew their opposition to compulsory health insurance would be perceived as brazen self-interest.”

They needed a front man, and the guy who was famous for discovering the causes of numerous public health crises was perfect. Thus, Frederick Hoffman became the most well-known face of a massive, multiyear effort to stop the AALL’s campaign. He was remarkably effective.

In the years between 1916, when he resigned from AALL, and 1920, when nonprofit state-funded health insurance finally died, Hoffman wrote numerous pamphlets trashing the German single-payer government health system, “exposing” corruption in the British efforts at a National Health Service, and arguing that America’s healthcare system would be thrown into chaos and crisis if the AALL’s programs were adopted.

His work was widely distributed, as historian Daniel Rodgers noted: “The Prudential saturated the state capitols with his pamphlets.”

His 1917 pamphlet Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, and the subsequent More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance, published two years later, were his most widely cited and most consequential writings.

Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote that the Facts pamphlet “resembled Race Traits and Tendencies in its impressive presentation of statistics and graphs alongside passionate polemics.” Frederick Hoffman refuted every figure the Progressives used in defense of their plan, from “Misleading Data on German Longevity” to “Misleading Estimate of Cost” and “Disregard of Actuarial Methods.”

Appealing to the Daniel Boone mythos of rugged, independent individualism that didn’t require assistance from government, Frederick Hoffman wrote in More Facts and Fallacies of Compulsory Health Insurance:
“The ever-present menace to democracy and liberty is the perversion of the legislative function [toward providing health insurance].”

Hoffman’s writing and speeches shook America’s political systems, particularly as this German-born “man of science” warned of the dire consequences to American liberty and democracy represented by universal health insurance.

In 1918, John R. Commons — one of the AALL’s cofounders — wrote that almost all the nation’s anti–compulsory health insurance propaganda “originates from one source; all of the ammunition, all of the facts and statistics that may come across, no matter who gives them to you, will be found to go back to the Prudential Insurance Co. of America, and to Mr. Frederick L. Hoffman.”

Prudential paid to transport Hoffman all across America, from media events to congressional hearings to a trip to England to document the horrors of their National Health Service system, which had gone into effect in 1911.

He wrote from London, in a widely read paper, that because of the British National Insurance Act, “The fine spirit of the English working classes, at one time the finest people of that type in the world, is gone, entirely gone.”

Historian Beatrix Hoffman wrote:
“His agitation was tireless, his influence widespread. . . . His reputation as an expert allowed Hoffman to participate in the deliberations of the health insurance commissions of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Connecticut, and to successfully persuade commission members to vote against the plan.”

In 1920, in large part because of Prudential’s efforts and Hoffman’s warnings, California’s voters resoundingly turned down a voter initiative in that state to provide health insurance, and, although New York’s Senate passed the bill, it died in committee in the Assembly.

While the AALL continued to campaign for state-funded health insurance until their dissolution in 1946, they never again gained enough traction to get their proposal before any state legislatures or the US Congress.

Having succeeded in killing state-funded health insurance, Hoffman, in the later 1920s, turned his attention back to his theory that Black people would eventually die out, joining the Eugenics Research Association (whose work was later used by Hitler to justify racial separation and his “final solution”).

In 1929, Hoffman asserted, in the African American publication Opportunity, that “the white race is almost solely responsible . . . for the health progress which the South has made during the last generation” and that Black people moving in large numbers into cities would “lead to a thoroughly unwholesome state of affairs which unquestionably will express itself in course of time in a lower birth rate and a higher death rate.”

Hoffman’s influence lasted long past his death in 1946 (which satisfied his stated desire to live long enough to see FDR out of office). As late as 1984, according to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, Prudential was still collecting premiums from African Americans that were “in some instances more than a third higher” than those paid by whites.

We even see an echo of it in the opposition of southern white racist Senators to Medicare in 1965, arguably leading to the 20% hole in that system that requires MediGap policies to fill.

Were it not for “scientific racism,” America would have long ago joined the rest of the developed world with a competent and efficient national healthcare system. Instead, we’re stuck with for-profit health insurance giants sucking our blood like giant leeches attached to our backs.

Billionaire newspaper owner slaps major new restrictions on anti-Trump editorials: report

Brad Reed
December 17, 2024 

Patrick Soon-Shiong. Photo by NHS Confederation/Creative Commons.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, has reportedly implemented even more stringent rules against running editorials criticizing President-elect Donald Trump.

An internal memo signed by LA Times opinion page staffers and obtained by journalist Oliver Darcy claims that Soon-Shiong has barred op-eds that are critical of Trump unless the paper runs a separate editorial that gives the "opposite view" of the president's rhetoric and actions.

The staffers who signed the memo expressed concern that this policy could violate the paper's own ethics policy and damage the newspaper's reputation.

“We understand that Dr. Soon-Shiong has a role in shaping the tone and direction of the editorial board and Opinion section, but we are still bound by the core values and ethics of journalism, including a duty to be transparent and act in service of the public,” the memo said. “We believe we have an obligation to report these under the ethics policy, which states that ‘the primary goal always should be to protect The Times’ integrity.’”

This is not the first time that Soon-Shiong has meddled in the newspaper's editorial process, as he axed the LA Times' endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris shortly before the 2024 election.

These policies have also led to some high-profile resignations from the paper's editorial board.

'It was a mistake': Former Obama official admits key error that led to Trump's rise

Obama administration's failure to punish the Wall Street CEOs whose reckless greed crashed the American economy in 2008 

Brad Reed
December 17, 2024 

RAW STORY

Obama on not visiting border: 'This isn't theater. This is a problem'

Rahm Emanuel, the former White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama, made a revealing admission about a key mistake he and his one-time boss made that he thinks led to the rise of Donald Trump.

Writing in the Washington Post, Emanuel acknowledged that the Obama administration's failure to punish the Wall Street CEOs whose reckless greed crashed the American economy in 2008 led to a major disillusionment with the American political establishment that allowed someone like Trump to slide into the picture offering an alternative.

"Not only was no one held accountable, but the same bankers who engineered the crisis were aggrieved at the suggestion of diminished bonuses and government intervention," Emanuel wrote. "It was a mistake not to apply Old Testament justice to the bankers during the Obama administration, as some had called for at the time."

That said, Emanuel also believes that Trump's cozy ties to big business and his zeal for shoveling out more tax breaks to the ultra-wealthy provide Democrats with an opportunity to regain public trust as the party of genuine economic populism.

"Far from draining the swamp, Trump and his administration will soon be bathing in it," he argues. "We need to reveal the populist Trump as a plutocrat. The hypocrisy will be there in the upcoming tax legislation and slashed regulations for the powerful — all paid for by the middle class.

"With everyone from Big Oil to Big Pharma lining up for their share of the spoils, we will need to be strategic in how we strip away Trump’s populist veneer. By returning to our roots as the voice of the middle class, we can unite both moderates and progressives in a fight against the well-heeled and well-connected."

Read the whole piece here.

Trump handed basic math lesson as Nobel prize winner takes apart policies

Brad Reed
December 17, 2024 
RAW STORY

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump delivers remarks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., December 16, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman warned on Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump's promises to the business community could send inflation soaring back upward in the coming years.

Writing in his personal Substack page, Krugman dissected Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son's recent announcement that he plans to invest $100 billion into the United States in the wake of President-elect Donald Trump's victory.

According to Krugman, the Softbank announcement is being vastly overhyped and is almost certain to underdeliver on its CEO's promises.

"As news reports mostly seem to acknowledge, this appears to involve investments Son was already planning to make before the election, which he and Trump are now presenting as a response to Trump. The same thing happened in 2016," he writes.

"Second, that last round of investments turned out miserably. A lot of it went to WeWork. Remember them? Nobody can be sure how many people ended up with new jobs thanks to Son’s money last time, but it probably wasn’t many."

Krugman then pivots to argue that Trump's enthusiasm for the Softbank investment will clash with his other stated priorities.

"We’re now seeing a perfect example of the arithmetic problem I pointed out the other day," he wrote. "Trump wants to reduce the U.S. trade deficit; he also wants to attract more foreign investment into the United States. But he can’t, as a matter of sheer accounting (which, I know, has a well-known globalist/Marxist bias):Trade balance + Net inflows of capital = 0. If more money flows into America, that must mean a bigger, not smaller trade deficit."

Krugman then predicts that a widening trade deficit could lead Trump to pressure the Federal Reserve to drastically slash interest rates, which would likely reignite inflation.

"I don’t think markets are properly pricing in the likely inflationary consequences of Trump’s coming war on arithmetic," he concludes.

'Don't believe him': Conservative warns Trump 'distraction' could destroy U.S. economy

Matthew Chapman
December 17, 2024

Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during his rally in Saginaw, Michigan, U.S., October 3, 2024. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

President-elect Donald Trump is planning a huge new array of tariffs on foreign goods, in particular from China, Canada and Mexico — and he argues the charges are a "reciprocal" scheme, raising taxes on other countries' goods in retaliation for taxes they raised on ours.

But "don't believe him," conservative analyst Ramesh Ponnuru warned for The Washington Post.

In truth, said Ponnuru, many of Trump's tariffs weren't in response to anything but his own petty grievances — and, in any case, the whole idea of "reciprocal" tariffs is not as fair or productive as it sounds.

"Trump’s premise — that we practice free trade while other countries tax our products — is false," Ponnuru wrote. "Scott Lincicome, a policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, points out that dozens of countries have lower average tariffs than the United States does. Former senator Patrick J. Toomey (R-PA), writing in the Wall Street Journal recently, noted that Canada, Britain and Europe 'all impose lower taxes on American manufactured goods than the [United States] imposes on comparable imports.'" For instance, the U.S. taxes European trucks at 25 percent, while Europe only taxes U.S. trucks at 10 percent.

Moreover, he wrote, there's history behind that. The U.S. imposed that 25 percent tariff in retaliation for a European tax on U.S. chicken products.

"There are a few takeaways from that history. One is that 'bargaining chip' tariffs have a way of sticking around long after everyone has forgotten their supposed point. Another is that Trump’s enthusiasm for tariffs is not limited to retaliatory ones: When he talked about our high tax on imported trucks in 2018, he was praising it."


The simple fact is, Ponnuru wrote, "the man just likes tariffs" — he doesn't need a real grievance about unfair trade practices to support jacking them up. And that's bad news, as economists almost universally believe Trump's tariff plans are going to skyrocket the prices of energy and consumer goods.

Already, Canadian officials are threatening to cut off their oil to our markets.

The issue of whether tariffs will truly enrich our country and make the balance of trade fairer "is something nearly all economists doubt, but that’s a debate we can have," Ponnuru concluded. On the other hand, he said, "'Reciprocity' is a distraction: Trump doesn’t take it seriously — and neither should anyone else."

Trump’s tax cuts expire soon − study shows devastating effect they had on many

The Conversation
December 17, 2024
By Beverly Moran, Professor Emerita of Law, Vanderbilt University

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a set of tax cuts Donald Trump signed into law during his first term as president, will expire on Dec. 31, 2024. As Trump and Republicans prepare to negotiate new tax cuts in 2025, it’s worth gleaning lessons from the president-elect’s first set of cuts.

The 2017 cuts were the most extensive revision to the Internal Revenue Code since the Ronald Reagan administration. The changes it imposed range from the tax that corporations pay on their foreign income to limits on the deductions individuals can take for their state and local tax payments.

Trump promised middle-class benefits at the time, but in practice more than 80% of the cuts went to corporations, tax partnerships and high-net-worth individuals. The cost to the U.S. deficit was huge − a total increase of US$1.9 trillion from 2018 to 2028, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. The tax advantage to the middle class was small.

Advantages for Black Americans were smaller still. As a scholar of race and U.S. income taxation, I have analyzed the impact of Trump’s tax cuts. I found that the law has disadvantaged middle-income, low-income and Black taxpayers in several ways.

Cuts worsened disparities

These results are not new. They were present nearly 30 years ago when my colleague William Whitford and I used U.S. Census Bureau data to show that Black taxpayers paid more federal taxes than white taxpayers with the same income. In large part that’s because the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow and structural racism keeps Black people from owning homes.

The federal income tax is full of advantages for home ownership that many Black taxpayers are unable to reach. These benefits include the ability to deduct home mortgage interest and local property taxes, and the right to avoid taxes on up to $500,000 of profit on the sale of a home.

It’s harder for middle-class Black people to get a mortgage than it is for low-income white people. This is true even when Black Americans with high credit scores are compared with white Americans with low credit scores.

When Black people do get mortgages, they are charged higher rates than their white counterparts.

Trump did not create these problems. But instead of closing these income and race disparities, his 2017 tax cuts made them worse.

Black taxpayers paid higher taxes than white taxpayers who matched them in income, employment, marriage and other significant factors.

Broken promises, broken trust

Fairness is an article of faith in American tax policy. A fair tax structure means that those earning similar incomes should pay similar taxes and stipulates that taxes should not increase income or wealth disparities.

Trump’s tax cuts contradict both principles.

Proponents of Trump’s cuts argued the corporate rate cut would trickle down to all Americans. This is a foundational belief of “supply side” economics, a philosophy that President Ronald Reagan made popular in the 1980s.

From the Reagan administration on, every tax cut for the rich has skewed to the wealthy.

Just like prior “trickle down” plans, Trump’s corporate tax cuts did not produce higher wages or increased household income. Instead, corporations used their extra cash to pay dividends to their shareholders and bonuses to their executives.

Over that same period, the bottom 90% of wage earners saw no gains in their real wages. Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO, a labor group, estimates that 51% of the corporate tax cuts went to business owners and 10% went to the top five highest-paid senior executives in each company. Fully 38% went to the top 10% of wage earners.

In other words, the income gap between wealthy Americans and everyone else has gotten much wider under Trump’s tax regime.

Stock market inequality

Trump’s tax cuts also increased income and wealth disparities by race because those corporate tax savings have gone primarily to wealthy shareholders rather than spreading throughout the population.

The reasons are simple. In the U.S., shareholders are mostly corporations, pension funds and wealthy individuals. And wealthy people in the U.S. are almost invariably white.

Sixty-six percent of white families own stocks, while less than 40% of Black families and less than 30% of Hispanic families do. Even when comparing Black and white families with the same income, the race gap in stock ownership remains.

These disparities stem from the same historical disadvantages that result in lower Black homeownership rates. Until the Civil War, virtually no Black person could own property or enter into a contract. After the Civil War, Black codes – laws that specifically controlled and oppressed Black people – forced free Black Americans to work as farmers or servants.

State prohibitions on Black people owning property, and public and private theft of Black-owned land, kept Black Americans from accumulating wealth.
Health care hit

That said, the Trump tax cuts hurt low-income taxpayers of all races.

One way they did so was by abolishing the individual mandate requiring all Americans to have basic health insurance. The Affordable Care Act, passed under President Barack Obama, launched new, government-subsidized health plans and penalized people for not having health insurance.

Department of the Treasury data shows almost 50 million Americans were covered by the Affordable Care Act since 2014. After the individual mandate was revoked, between 3 million and 13 million fewer people purchased health insurance in 2020.

Ending the mandate triggered a large drop in health insurance coverage, and research shows it was primarily lower-income people who stopped buying subsidized insurance from the Obamacare exchanges. These are the same people who are the most vulnerable to financial disaster from unpaid medical bills.

Going without insurance hurt all low-income Americans. But studies suggest the drop in Black Americans’ coverage under Trump’s plan outpaced that of white Americans. The rate of uninsured Black Americans rose from 10.7% in 2016 to 11.5% in 2018, following the mandate’s repeal.

The consumer price index conundrum

The Trump tax cuts also altered how the Internal Revenue Service calculates inflation adjustments for over 60 different provisions. These include the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit – both of which provide cash to low-wage workers – and the wages that must pay Social Security taxes.

Previously, the IRS used the consumer price index for urban consumers, which tracks rising prices by comparing the cost of the same goods as they rise or fall, to calculate inflation. The government then used that inflation number to adjust Social Security payments and earned income tax credit eligibility. It used the same figure to set the amount of income that is taxed at a given rate.

The Trump tax cuts ordered the IRS to calculate inflation adjustments using the chained consumer price index for urban consumers instead.

The difference between these two indexes is that the second one assumes people substitute cheaper goods as prices rise. For example, the chained consumer price index assumes shoppers will buy pork instead of beef if beef prices go up, easing the impact of inflation on a family’s overall grocery prices.

The IRS makes smaller inflation adjustments based on that assumption. But low-income neighborhoods have less access to the kind of budget-friendly options envisioned by the chained consumer price index.

And since even middle-class Black people are more likely than poor white people to live in low-income neighborhoods, Black taxpayers have been hit harder by rising prices.

What cost $1 in 2018 now costs $1.26. That’s a painful hike that Black families are less able to avoid.

The imminent expiration of the Trump tax cuts gives the upcoming GOP-led Congress the opportunity to undertake a thorough reevaluation of their effects. By prioritizing policies that address the well-known disparities exacerbated by these recent tax changes, lawmakers can work toward a fairer tax system that helps all Americans.

Beverly Moran, Professor Emerita of Law, Vanderbilt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

End of the Dubai dream for Europe’s drug lords?


By AFP
December 16, 2024

A luxury yacht is pictured off the Dubai Marina Beach. — © AFP Karim SAHIB
Arthur CONNAN in Paris with AFP bureaus in Madrid, Brussels, Marseille, Dublin and The Hague

Drug lords like Sean McGovern, a top lieutenant of the Kinahan cartel, and Faissal Taghi — son of the infamous head of the Dutch-Moroccan Mocro Maffia — used to hang out and party in Dubai’s glitzy hotels and restaurants without a care in the world.

Until their arrests — and the smashing of a massive Russian-run money laundering operation based there this month — the Gulf emirate was a haven for some of Europe’s biggest drug traffickers.

For years major drug barons have brazenly run their operations out of the city’s skyscrapers and luxury villas without fear of extradition. Limited judicial cooperation from the local authorities meant they had little to fear, European investigators and magistrates told AFP.


Sunny Beach, located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. — © Digital Journal

Europol described the city as a “remote coordination hub” for Europe’s drugs trade, where traffickers live openly and launder their money through luxury goods and real estate.

Far from the European ports like Antwerp, Rotterdam and Le Havre where their drugs transit, police say the barons pull the strings from the comfort of Dubai, ruling by fear and extreme violence from one of the safest cities in the world.

Ironically, Dubai’s low crime rate means they can operate there in security, doing deals and networking with other global narcotics players in the city’s cafes and shisha bars.

However, the tide may now be turning.

In October, McGovern — the right-hand-man of Irish drugs lord Daniel Kinahan — was arrested on an extradition warrant from Dublin, accused of murder and being a leader of a criminal organisation.

The US Treasury calls the Kinahan cartel a “threat to the entire licit economy”, with Washington slapping a $15-million bounty on the heads of its three leading members.

McGovern’s arrest in Dubai followed the extradition in July of Faissal Taghi to the Netherlands on drug trafficking and murder-related charges. Belgian drug lord Nordin El Hajjioui was sent back in handcuffs to Brussels in March.


Atlantis Resort in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. — © Digital Journal

“The UAE is committed to working with all its international partners to disrupt and deter all forms of global illicit finance,” a government official told AFP.

– ‘Total impunity’ –

A crossroads linking Europe and Asia, Dubai has one of the world’s busiest ports and airports — and is a favourite winter sunspot for sports stars and influencers.

But for more than a decade, it has also been home to a rogue’s gallery of European crime figures.

Cartel boss Kinahan and “El Tigre”, the Spanish cocaine kingpin Alejandro Salgado Vega, are among the most notorious to have settled there.

Kinahan’s associate, Ridouan Taghi — Faissal’s father — was also a longtime Dubai denizen till the fearsome gangster was jailed for life for a string of hits in February after a mega trial in a high-security Amsterdam court known as De Bunker.

Many other big-time drug dealers are also openly living it large there.

“They don’t hide. They are not like refugees with false papers,” said Francisco Torres, head of Spain’s elite Guardia Civil unit which tackles organised crime.

“They live a luxurious life in front of everyone with total impunity,” he told AFP.


Interpol has issued red notice arrest requests for a long list of suspects thought to be in Dubai. — © AFP

Abdelkader “Bibi” Bouguettaia is a case in point. A French-Algerian trafficker wanted by Interpol, he lives in luxury apartments near the Palm Jumeirah home of the British celebrity couple David and Victoria Beckham.

Bouguettaia had already fled when France sentenced him to nine years for smuggling 599 kilos of cocaine and he is suspected of orchestrating a vast 2.5-tonne shipment through Marseille.

Investigators say he drives high-end cars and enjoys dining at such celebrity hangouts as Salt Bae’s Nusr-Et Steakhouse, where a gold leaf filet can set you back more than $2,000.

A crossroads linking Europe and Asia, Dubai has one of the world’s busiest ports and airports. — © AFP

Fellow French fugitive Tarik Kerbouci, known as “The Bison” — wanted for a 3.3-tonne cocaine shipment — also loves his luxury. But he likes speed even more, coming second in the Gulf Radical Cup championship series in his own fluorescent yellow racing car.

– ‘Super cartel’ –

Recent arrests may have called Dubai’s reputation as a haven for global crime syndicates into question.

But its appeal remains strong, with its unique combination of luxury, strategic location and local legal loopholes that make extradition difficult and money laundering relatively easy.

The UK-based Centre for the Study of Corruption said in August that there has been “a large-scale shift in the global epicentre of dirty money networks to Dubai and Hong Kong”.


A yacht sails before the skyline of the Emirate of Dubai. — © AFP/File Daniel ROLAND

One anti-money laundering expert based in the emirate told AFP that it is a perfect safe space for crime groups.

“Organisations can plan an operation… in Dubai and never see each other again afterwards,” he said.

“They hang out at the Five resort on the Palm Jumeirah where there are lots of prostitutes, at the Cafe de Paris or in the shisha bars in the marina.”

In 2022, Europol’s Operation Desert Light revealed the existence of a mostly Dubai-based “super cartel” headed by six figures including Daniel Kinahan that controlled a third of the cocaine coming into Europe.

“Bibi” Bouguettaia coordinated tonnes of what came through Le Havre, France’s biggest port.


Dubai’s marina, a favourite haunt of exiled drug barons who live there. — © AFP/File Giuseppe CACACE

AFP has seen the transcript of the police interrogation of one of his suspected foot soldiers who explained how the operations worked.

“Bibi” is allied with a Dutch drug baron, and runs cocaine into Paris and Antwerp, Europe’s second largest port.

He has a strong hold on Le Havre, the man told police. “Dockers, the people who look after port security, he pays them.”

Everything is run over the phone, the witness said, with the threat of violence ever-present.

When someone refuses a mission or responds too slowly, a picture of a family member would be sent to them as a silent threat.

– Buying luxury homes –

Dubai’s other big attraction is its cash economy, where criminals can quickly get rid of dirty money that would be hard to spend in Europe.

The emirate’s ancestral “hawala” banking system, which allows cash to be transferred without money actually moving, has allowed drug lords to invest heavily in property and other high-end businesses there with little trace.


Dubai, home to the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa. — © AFP Giuseppe CACACE

“A building sells within 15 minutes,” a money laundering expert in the UAE told AFP, with skyscrapers and gated communities popping out of the sand as fast as they can be built. Drawn by its low taxes and light-touch regulation, nine out of 10 of the city’s population are expatriates.

While Dubai is less rich in oil than its neighbours, transactions in its booming property market hit a record 132 billion euros ($139 billion) in 2022.

With homes in its glitziest neighbourhoods selling for more than $10 million, Tarik “The Bison” Kerbouci set himself up as an “estate agent”, according to a French judicial source.

Based on leaks of a property register, the Washington-based Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) said he owned at least a villa and an apartment in the Al Barsha and Al Hebiah areas.


Dubai. — © AFP MOHAMMED ABED

It was also able to establish that Daniel Kinahan and his wife Caoimhe Robinson owned several properties including one near the Palm Jumeirah and another bought for six million euros in Emirates Hills that is now reportedly worth twice that.

– ‘Absurd’ legal obstacles –

The glacial nature of the extradition process had also helped keep top criminals living there.

Arrested in Dubai in July 2022, Kerbouci was freed 40 days later, the deadline for official reception of his extradition request having passed.

Bouguettaia benefited from the same slowness after he was arrested in October last year before being released in January. “El Tigre” is again living in total liberty in Dubai, his lawyer said, after being held in 2022.

The UAE signed extradition treaties with France in 2007, with Spain two years later, with Belgium and the Netherlands in 2021 and Ireland this year.

But only a small handful of major drug dealers have been extradited.

“We have identified some 30 priority targets in Dubai,” French foreign ministry official Jean-Noel Bonnieu told lawmakers earlier this year. “None of these traffickers have been extradited, although some have been arrested.”

Of the 20 or so people wanted by Belgium, only four have been returned since 2021, according to official figures.

The French authorities complain of the “extreme strictness of the UAE’s interpretation of the documents needed and the time window in which they must be sent”.


Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah artificial island has homes owned by Bollywood stars and by footballers David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo. — © AFP

Torres, of Spain’s Guardia Civil, said Dubai’s demands were often “absurd” and “impossible to meet”, such as having to send all the original documents with each page signed by a judge.

– Criminal exodus? –

But this year there has been progress on judicial cooperation.

A French magistrate with organised crime experience has been sent to neighbouring Abu Dhabi, with Belgium in October appointing a judge to liaise directly with the UAE.

The same month, the then Irish deputy premier Micheal Martin hailed its new extradition treaty with the UAE as “an important step”.

Since then “Bibi” Bouguettaia has again been arrested along with one of Belgium’s top traffickers, Othman El Ballouti, whom Brussels has been trying to extradite for years, official sources told AFP.

The UAE has also been trying to show it has been cleaning up its act since being put on the “grey list” by the international Financial Action Task Force (FATF) in 2022.

Tougher surveillance of the flows of cash through the Emirates meant it was taken off the list in February.

But a French judicial source told AFP that Dubai has never seized “any assets for any foreign financial authority” despite a major influx of Russian business figures since the war in Ukraine started nearly three years ago.

Even so, some say Dubai’s criminal elite may already be looking for their next bolthole. “With all the attention on Dubai… eyes are turning to Turkey as another possible centre for international criminal activities,” a Dutch judicial source told AFP.

“Some big names are looking to North Africa, Indonesia and Bali,” according to a French specialist in money laundering.

“The Bison”, Tarik Kerbouci, has already left and gone on the run. He is probably living elsewhere in the Middle East or North Africa, European sources say, under a false identity.

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Elite schools accused of financial aid scheme that saw students overpay by $685M

Sarah K. Burris
December 17, 2024 

RAW STORY

Students celebrate their graduation. (Shutterstock)

A lawsuit is accusing a number of the country's leading universities of overcharging students to the tune of $685 million in a “price-fixing” scheme.

The Washington Post reported a list of top schools the lawsuit claims colluded to limit the amount of financial aid paid to lower-income students.

The Post specifically cited accusations against Georgetown University. The lawsuit claims the school president compiles a list of about 80 applicants he wants accepted regardless of transcripts, recommendations, test scores or personal essays.

Almost all applicants were accepted purely based on their parents' wealth and past donations, the lawsuit claimed.

Also Read: The real reason Republicans oppose efforts to cancel student debt

"Documents and testimony from officials at Georgetown, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Pennsylvania, MIT and other elite schools suggest they appeared to favor wealthy applicants despite their stated policy of accepting students without regard for their financial circumstances," said the Post, citing the lawsuit.

A policy called "need-blind" is designed to protect applicants who might require financial aid. Federal laws allow schools to see a student's financial information for planning purposes, but "need-blind" prohibits it being used for admission decisions.

The plaintiffs in the case claim that the schools used the information for acceptance offers. They also allege that the schools intentionally limited financial aid packages.

"A coalition of highly selective universities, formed in the late 1990s and known as the 568 Presidents Group, collaborated on aid formulas under a 1994 federal antitrust exemption," the report said. "The exemption applied only if schools engaged in need-blind admissions."

There are 17 "elite" institutions named in the lawsuit, most from Ivy Leagues.

While the students are seeking damages of $685 million, under U.S. antitrust laws, that amount would automatically triple to $2 billion.

The universities have sought to have the cases dismissed, saying they've spent millions in financial aid on students.


Read the full report here.

'Not going to cooperate': Border state sheriffs throw wrench in Trump’s deportation plan

Carl Gibson,

 AlterNet
December 17, 2024 

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

President-elect Donald Trump's advisers have been hoping county sheriffs in border states will assist with the incoming administration's mass deportation campaign. But several sheriffs are already publicly promising to not lift a finger.

According to a Tuesday report in WIRED magazine, Trump's top immigration advisors like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller have been having conversations with several far-right sheriffs who have expressed an interest in helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement remove immigrants from the United States.

But that effort is unlikely to pick up traction, both for legal reasons and because other sheriffs have said they already have their hands full and don't want to take on more work.

Currently, ICE's 287(g) program allows for state and local law enforcement to collaborate with ICE in its efforts "to protect the homeland through the arrest and removal of noncitizens."

However, this does not include sheriffs themselves rounding up and detaining undocumented immigrants. Additionally, no federal funding has been appropriated to any sheriffs' offices that help ICE, meaning just 125 out of 3,081 sheriff's offices in the U.S. have signed up.

And Yuma County, Arizona Sheriff Leon Wilmot told WIRED that the Supreme Court has already established that enforcing immigration law is outside the jurisdiction of local police departments and sheriffs' offices.

READ MORE: 'Quickly get into problems': These 3 obstacles could slow down Trump's mass deportations

"[T]hat's not our realm of responsibility," Wilmot said. "If we wanted to do immigration law, we would go work for Border Patrol."

The push for sheriffs to assist the incoming administration has been led by retired sheriff Tom Mack, who is the head of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. Mack told WIRED he's been exchanging voice and text messages with Homan about getting more sheriffs involved with deportations.

Homan has previously promised to build "the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen." But Wilmot said "no one listens to" Mack, that he "hasn't been a sheriff in a long time" and that he "pushes his own agenda."

Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway, who is a Democrat, told WIRED that he wasn't invited to an event Homan hosted in his state last month, even though Hathaway's jurisdiction includes some of the nation's biggest ports of entry. He added that he would refuse any calls to help the Trump administration deport immigrants, as it would hurt his standing in his county.

"I'm not going to cooperate, because 95 percent of the residents of the town where I live, where my county is, are Hispanic,” Hathaway said. “I'm not going to go checking the documents of practically every single person in my county to determine their immigration status, because that would create distrust between law enforcement and all the people in my community."

READ MORE: 'Wait until 2025': Trump's former ICE chief makes chilling promise at far-right conference

The sheriffs bucking calls to assist with mass deportations even include some of Trump's biggest supporters in the law enforcement community. Livingston County, Michigan Sheriff Mike Murphy — who hosted a pro-Trump rally in a building owned by the sheriff's office — told the outlet that he isn't interested in using county resources to help with federal immigration law enforcement.

"I still have a county to do police work in,” Murphy said. “Just because the president says, 'Hey, go out and round them up,' that is not all of a sudden gonna move to the top of my priority list. If somebody's house is getting broken into, that's my priority. If somebody's involved in an injury crash and they're laying on the side of the road, that's my priority. I've got cases that are open.”

Other border state sheriffs who have come out against calls to help the Trump administration round up migrants include Val Verde County, Texas Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez and Brewster County, Texas Sheriff Ronny Dodson. According to Dodson, the incoming Trump administration giving sheriffs the authority to jail migrants could "break" county law enforcement.

"I’m not gonna let the government tell me what to do in my job," Dodson said.

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