America's Pre-Existing Condition: Corporate Greed and Cruelty

This week illuminates the festering sickness of corporate greed that has corrupted our health care, political, & media institutions that exist to profit the powerful at the expense of the majority.

In this week’s episode of Democracy-ish, Danielle Moodie and I diagnose the unfettered greed and voracious capitalism of our broken healthcare industry that profits off our collective sickness and misery. Investigators are still engaging in a nationwide manhunt for the killer who targeted and murdered UnitedHealthCare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City.

The response to this murder has been both alarming and illuminating, ultimately reflecting the majority’s rage at health insurance companies and the 1% that care more about their bottom line than the well-being of Americans who are increasingly sick, overworked, exhausted, and burdened by medical debt. Their “thoughts and prayers are out of network.”

I’ve been without insurance before and I paid out of pocket when I was a single, independent writer. I had a near-death experience that left me in the emergency room where they defibrillated me three times. I later had a minor heart surgery, an ablation, at the age of 31 to make sure I didn’t make an early appearance at the pearly gates. A few years ago, my daughter, who was 2 at the time, was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer. Thankfully, she is now cancer-free and we had insurance through my wife. Even then, it wasn’t enough. I had to raise at least 100K through a GoFundMe page to care for my family for the next year.

Now imagine all of our fellow Americans who don’t have such a privilege, or a community willing to donate, or access to healthcare. How do they live? Many of them don’t, and unfortunately, it will all get worse under Trump’s broligarchy where billionaires will pillage our social services to pay for their tax cuts.

To avoid any subtlety, last night Donald Trump appointed another South African billionaire - the pro-Putin, casually racist David Sacks - to be the “Czar of AI and Crypto.” (I’m not even making this up, folks.) His billionaire bro Elon Musk has his white nationalist fingerprints all over the new Trump Administration. Meanwhile, Fox host Pete Hegseth allegedly has his hands over women without their consent and on one too many beer bottles. Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense is being bombarded with scandalous revelations about sexual, financial, and moral impropriety, but he’s a White Christian nationalist and a MAGA “crusader” whose ultimate loyalty is to Donald Trump, so it’s all kosher.

This is the selfish, shameless, and sinister mindset of the group of people who will assume power next month. Instead of resisting such cruelty and vulgarity, we are cursed with a corporate media that handsomely pays Joe and Mika, the co-hosts of Morning Joe, who are slithering to irrelevance by proactively bending the knee to Trump. They apologized to Fox for conservative contributor David Frum’s accurate takedown of Hegseth on their show, and then they tried to gaslight their audience.

Our American institutions are increasingly corrupt and sick. Thankfully, Danielle and I are independent so we don’t bend the knee or bow down to power. We also take our vitamins. It gives us the ability to call out the bullshit and air some dirty laundry.

Give us a watch and let us know your thoughts below.