"Slow Pay, Low Pay or No Pay": Blue Cross Approved Surgeries Then Refused to Pay

Because people are desperate for something to change. The status quo is literally killing people.

I'm not saying I agree with their voting decision, but I can, in part, understand their frustration.

You can never doubt that things can get a lot worse, no matter how bad they currently are. This is what we're finding out now.

So they vote for the party that eviscerated the ACA and defends the medical insurance industry.

Look at Trump’s talking points. It’s all about immigrants, foreigners and wokeism that are coming to get what you have.

The US is a wealthy, prosperous nation, and I think even lower income segments of the US population are aware they’re night and day better off than people in the same economic segment in the countries immigrants come from. Wanting more is part of it, but it’s mainly about not sharing what Americans have, even though it’s not actually under threat. That doesn’t matter, people still feel threatened.

I’m a Brit. My mother is a wealthy middle class retired woman in a safe idyllic bit of countryside, but she is utterly obsessed with foreigners coming to rape and steal and destroy British society. They’re all coming to get us. She reads in the papers (The Daily Mail) and sees it on TV (GB News) every day.

I see this tactic exploited to the maximum by foreign state propaganda machines.

In my country which was targeted to the max by Russian propaganda, they are using the same playbook as in the US right now.

1. take any real complicated issue and blow it out of proportion so people think that it is a life and death situation.

2. heavily promote the most unfit person for the job

3. blame the worsen outcome to the predecessor

Rinse and repeat and you'll see the country drown in chaos and everyone blames everyone.

You can always argue that it is the real people, but if you look really close to the systems of promoting the divisive content - the powerhouse of it is always bot networks only followed by real people.

I think that the most of the division in western societies have to be studied from the perspective of foreign influence.

But in fact the candidate who pretends to be the alternative is supported by the very same vested interests that the voters hate. Wall Street and healthcare CEOs spent big on Trump.

This is a great achievement of the American media environment: people vote for the status quo fully believing they’re voting against it. And somebody ending up in a prison in El Salvador is the sacrificial lamb that is needed to make this equation work.

The primary reason why Russia can exploit the failures of the system is that those failures exist. Western political elites are locked into old alignments and captured by special interests groups. They became more opportunistic and less values-driven, ignoring modern challenges and demographic changes and becoming less competent in general. This is why in Europe, which is more democratic than USA, we see significant changes in political landscape with new parties emerging on the right and on the left and getting visible share of votes. USA has a major flaw that doesn’t allow the country to escape bipartisan system, so it’s going to agonize in its current state until it finally breaks. Foreign influence here is really a secondary matter.

“Big pharma” spent nothing on Bernie Sanders because healthcare execs hate him and he doesn’t take money from corporate PACs. Individual, low level employees donated to him for the same reason they donate to any other politician. This has been widely known and understood since the baseless false equivalency was raised months ago and that you still repeat it just demonstrates the depths of the bad faith.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/fact-check-rfk-jr-misrepresented-...

Ironically the fix for this is quite simple. Use score voting instead of first past the post.

Score voting is simple: It's the voting system the judges use in the Olympics. Voters give each candidate a score. Highest average (i.e. the one who would get the gold) gets the seat.

The flaw in first past the post is that it gives any viable third party the powerful incentive to merge with the major party they're most similar to, because otherwise they split the vote and both lose. So you get a two party system. Score voting doesn't have that, you don't have to change any other part of the system to make it work, and then the two party system everybody hates goes away.

It is absolutely the same playbook in Europe, with an increased complexity that you cannot target Europe as a whole, since every country has its own issues (and politics, and culture, language, etc.).

For example I see on the Irish social media the misplaced efforts of Russian propaganda which doesn't make much traction because of the lack of deeper understanding of the issues and just copy-pasting the rage baits from other countries.

However, I expect that it is temporary, until more budget is allocated to it.

I would encourage everyone to study what is open from the Russian KGB archives to understand that it has a century of experience of influence, supercharged by social media, access to paid influencers and now AI.

  Big Pharma spent big on Bernie Sanders 

How did you come to this conclusion?

Proportional system may work better, because it will guarantee that a political party will be represented by its best candidates and it is not affected by gerrymandering. I do not see though how one of them could happen in USA.

One of the best things about score voting is that it eliminates primaries. Each party just runs all of their candidates in the general election, and then the voters decide who is the best one.

PR puts the party instead of the voters in control of who gets the seats or otherwise requires the voters to support a party when they want to support a specific candidate.

Score voting also thwarts gerrymandering because you can't make two 55% districts for your party and one 90% district for the other party or the districts for "your" party would go to a moderate party instead.

Did you study anything from there (and can provide references) or just use your imagination?

KGB failed to prevent catastrophic dissolution of USSR and you suggest that they are some sort of masterminds who excelled in propaganda. That’s quite an exaggeration. Since 1990s both the West and Russia have lost their expertise in each other’s affairs. Russia may still have some influence in Central and Eastern Europe, but their conservative ideological drift limits significantly what they can achieve. A lot of local political mess there is basically local politicians shooting in the leg.

They really, really wanted it to be true.

"Corporations themselves cannot donate directly to federal candidates, but they can make donations through corporate PACs. The owners of companies and their employees also can make individual donations. For donations that exceed $200, campaigns are generally required to ask for information about the industry in which the contributor works, and they are required to disclose that information if provided.

In the 2019-20 Congressional funding cycle, Sanders received more money from people employed in the field classified by OpenSecrets as "pharmaceuticals/health products" ($1.4 million) than any other member of Congress. He also received roughly $400,000 from people employed in "pharmaceutical manufacturing."

This does not mean he received nearly $2 million from "the pharmaceutical industry," — it means the money was from people employed, in any capacity, in that field." So pharmaceutical companies cannot donate money directly to candidates, so they fact check it as false, saying it was the employees donating the money and not Pfizer directly, but acknowledging he did receive $1,400,000 from people that work in pharmaceuticals/health products, and $400,000 from people working in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Are we to presume that there is no strings attached when Bernie Sanders is receiving the money? Or are we supposed to offer the benefit of the doubt you wouldn't offer to a Republican politician who said that he didn't receive 1.4 million dollars from the NRA, but employees of the NRA, and a further $400,000 from people in Firearm Manufacturing

I am from Ukraine, and we have KGB archives opened for a while now.

It is a massive amount of information and it is studied rigorously by a lot of researchers. Unfortunately, most of the information I consumed are in Ukrainian. For example there is a book in Ukrainian released just few years ago from one of those [0]. But basically any researcher can get access to the whole archive and domestic ones wrote a lot of material. I am sure that it will get more popular on the west as well, while people will get understanding of the systems at work.

As far as I know Timothy Snyder is well known for his researches into Russia in his books such as [1]. However I've read only excerpts from it as we have better material in Ukrainian.

West generally doesn't understand Russia, it overestimates its military power and underestimates its propaganda influence. It also completely misunderstands its culture. Also west have a history to dismiss the voices of countries who do know Russia very well. But it is changing bit by bit.

[0] https://www.yakaboo.ua/ua/arhivi-kgb-nevygadani-istorii.html

[1] https://a.co/d/6kMHDnJ

This would be like saying the gun rights activists are only doing what the NRA tells them. Does the NRA have employees in the same numbers as the entire pharmaceutical+ industry? In your hypothetical though, in those numbers, it would be weird to think all the donors were paid intermediaries for the lobbyists and CEOs. I have trouble believing that the people invested in the industry and supporting sanders were paid intermediaries as well. That is fairly conspiratorial barring evidence otherwise.