South Korea

He wasn’t running to do anything. He was running to stay out of jail

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 9, 2024

The sudden collapse of the Assad regime in Syria yesterday took oxygen away from the airing of President-elect Trump’s interview with Kristen Welker of NBC’S Meet the Press. The interview told us little that we didn’t already know, but it did reinforce what we can expect in the new administration.

As Tom Nichols pointed out after the interview, when Donald Trump ran for the presidency this year, he “wasn’t running to do anything. He was running to stay out of jail. The rest he doesn’t care about.”

Nichols was reacting to the exchange that began when Welker asked the president-elect: “Do you have an actual plan at this point for health care?” Trump answered: “Yes. We have concepts of a plan that would be better.” “Still just concepts? Do you have a fully developed plan?” Welker asked.

The answer, nine years after Trump first said he would repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something cheaper and better, is still no. He went on to add, “I am the one that saved Obamacare,” although he spent his first term trying to weaken it.

Trump also reiterated his plans for revenge against those he perceives to be his enemies. He told Welker that when he is president, the Department of Justice should pursue and jail the members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, more commonly known as the January 6th Committee. He singled out committee leaders Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY).

But it was in his insistence on one specific lie that Trump was most revealing. He told Welker that there were “13,099 murderers released into our country over the last three years. They’re walking down the streets. They’re walking next to you and your family, and they’re very dangerous.”

This statement sets Trump up to be a strongman who will save America from great danger, but it is a lie that has been repeatedly debunked. It originated in a September 2024 letter from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to Representative Tony Gonzales (R-TX) listing 13,099 people convicted of homicide as being “non-detained.”

As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato blog explains, “non-detained” does not mean free to roam the streets; it simply means that those in prison for homicide are not currently detained by ICE. Once they have served their sentences, they go back onto ICE’s docket to be deported unless their countries of origin don’t have repatriation agreements with the U.S., a condition that affects a very small number of people. Releases of criminal migrants into the U.S. dropped during the Biden administration from the numbers released during Trump’s term. In addition, as Nowrasteh points out, the 13,099 figure covers at least 40 years.

Welker tried to correct Trump: “The thirteen thousand figure I think goes back around 40 years,” she said. “No, it doesn’t,” Trump insisted. “It’s within the three-year period. It’s during the Biden term.”

Trump was intent on making Welker and the television audience accept an egregious lie, despite the fact it has been thoroughly debunked. His insistence echoed his determination in January 2017 to make the American people accept his lie that his inauguration crowd was bigger than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama, although we could see with our own eyes that he was lying. He was demanding we reject our own experience and instead let him define how we see the country.

Trump built on a history of narrative shaping that ran through the Republican Party. In 2004 a senior advisor to President George W. Bush famously told journalist Ron Suskind that people like Suskind lived in “the reality-based community,” believing that people could find solutions to problems based on their real-world observations. But such a worldview was obsolete, the aide said. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

America’s right wing has been able to shape reality in large part because of the 1996 advent of the Fox News Channel (FNC), the brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Shows on the FNC used clear, simple messaging with colorful graphics that told a story of an America overwhelmingly made up of white, rural folks who hated taxes and an intrusive government, and would do fine if they could just get the socialist Democrats to leave them alone. To spread the new channel, Murdoch initially offered ten dollars per subscriber to each cable company that carried it.

That right-wing echo chamber has expanded until it is now so strong that nearly 70% of Republicans falsely believe Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite the fact that the FNC had to pay more than $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems for defamation after it lied to viewers about that election.

Trump has built on that Republican narrative to create a fantasy world that is badly out of step with reality. It is not easy to see how he will reconcile his vision with real-world events.

He and his supporters might try simply to tell voters that they have done what they promised, and hope that story sells.

When Trump threatened to put a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico until Mexico stopped undocumented migrants from crossing the border, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum told Trump that “encounters at the Mexico–United States border have decreased by 75 percent between December 2023 and November 2024.” Trump then simply told reporters that Sheinbaum had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border,” and his supporters trumpeted on social media that Trump had closed the border with one phone call.

But convincing people of an alternative reality might be harder with issues closer to home.

Trump has vowed to place a tariff wall around the U.S., for example, at the same time he has promised to bring down the price of consumer goods. “Economists of all stripes say that ultimately, consumers pay the price of tariffs,” Welker told him on Sunday. “I don’t believe that,” Trump answered. He might not believe it, but producers do: car manufacturers as well as major shopping chains have warned that tariffs will force them to raise prices.

On other issues, Trump will have a vocal and established opposition. After his threat to go after the members of the January 6th committee, former representative Liz Cheney said in a statement: “There is no conceivably appropriate factual or constitutional basis for what Donald Trump is suggesting.“

“Here is the truth: Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 presidential election and seize power. He mobilized an angry mob and sent them to the United States Capitol, where they attacked police officers, invaded the building, and halted the official counting of electoral votes. Trump watched on television as police officers were brutally beaten and the Capitol was assaulted, refusing for hours to tell the mob to leave. This was the worst breach of our Constitution by any president in our nation’s history.”

Cheney called for the release of the evidence and grand jury material special counsel Jack Smith assembled “so all Americans can see Donald Trump for who he genuinely is and fully understand his role in this terrible period in our nation’s history.”

Nobel laureates generally try to stay out of politics, but today more than 75 of them in medicine, chemistry, economics, and physics wrote a letter to senators urging them not to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services. They object to Kennedy’s stand against the scientists and agencies he would oversee. They noted that he has no credentials or relevant experience and that he has opposed life-saving vaccines, promoted conspiracy theories, and attacked the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health.

Putting him in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, they write, “would put the public’s health in jeopardy and undermine America’s global leadership in the health sciences, in both the public and commercial sectors.”

There is also the chance that the Fox media empire will not effectively push a right-wing narrative much longer. The Murdoch family is in a struggle over control of that empire after the death of the 93-year-old Rupert. He and his eldest son, Lachlan, want to lock the company into its current political slant, but at least two of the three of Murdoch’s other children who are set to inherit the company do not share their father and brother’s politics.

Rupert has been trying to change the terms of the family trust to cement Lachlan’s control of the empire, but today a commissioner in Nevada ruled against him. Edward Helmore of The Guardian noted that the decision likely means that even if the children do not take the media empire in a different direction, divided leadership will weaken the right-wing message.

Almost 30 years after the Fox News Channel began to shape American politics with a fictional narrative, a different Fox media empire would almost certainly disrupt the right-wing bubble. A lawyer for Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch said they will appeal the decision.

Finally, Pennsylvania law enforcement officials today arrested a “strong person of interest” in the shooting of United Healthcare chief executive officer Brian Thompson. Tonight a court document shows 26-year-old Luigi Mangione has been charged with murder.

Growing fury over the power big business has over ordinary Americans’ lives

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 5, 2024

Yesterday a gunman assassinated the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, as he arrived at a meeting of investors in New York City. While authorities are still investigating, officials have released the information that the casings of the bullets that killed Thompson bore the words “deny,” “defend,” “depose,” all words associated with companies’ denial of health insurance, taken from the longer phrases “deny the claim,” “defend the lawsuit,” “depose the patient.”

While those clues could simply be a red herring, posters on social media have cheered what they seem to see as revenge against an abusive system in which people’s lives are at the mercy of executives who prioritize profits.

Health insurance companies have long been under scrutiny for their practices. For the past two years, ProPublica has run a long series exploring the different ways in which companies have developed systems to deny healthcare coverage to their policyholders.

UnitedHealthcare has been no exception either to such practices or to scrutiny. Its parent group UnitedHealth has a market valuation of $560 billion and was the eighth largest corporation in the world last year as measured by revenue. This year, UnitedHealthcare—Thompson’s unit—is expected to bring in $280 billion in revenue.

UnitedHealth is embroiled in a number of lawsuits. Andrew Stanton of Newsweek reported that on November 14, 2023, families of two now-deceased patients sued UnitedHealthcare over denial of coverage for Medicare Advantage patients for nursing home stays prescribed by their doctors. Medicare Advantage is the private insurance alternative to Medicare that receives a flat fee from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It’s an enormously profitable industry, and UnitedHealth controls almost a third of it.

The lawsuit alleges that UnitedHealthcare uses artificial intelligence to deny claims from Medicare Advantage policyholders. The lawsuit claims that the company knowingly uses an algorithm that makes errors 90% of the time because it also knows that only about 0.2% of policy holders will appeal the decision to deny their claims. Last month the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hammered UnitedHealth for dramatic increases in their denial rates for post-acute care between 2019 and 2022 as it switched to AI authorizations.

On the same day as the shooting, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance covering Connecticut, New York, and Missouri announced it would cover anesthesia during surgery or procedures only for a specific time period in order to make insurance more affordable by reducing overbilling.

After an outcry both from anesthesiologists and the public, the company today retracted its policy change, saying it had never intended to avoid “medically necessary anesthesia,” but meant simply to “clarify the appropriateness of anesthesia consistent with well-established clinical guidelines.” Their explanation might have calmed the news cycle, but its suggestion that the insurance officials rather than doctors should determine what anesthesia is appropriate for a patient during surgery echoed the argument in the UnitedHealthcare lawsuit.

Thompson’s murder seems to be a cultural moment in which popular fury over the power big business has over ordinary Americans’ lives exploded. Maureen Tkacik of The American Prospect noted, “Only about 50 million customers of America’s reigning medical monopoly might have a motive to exact revenge upon the UnitedHealthcare CEO.” The shooter, whose actual motive remains unknown, is fast becoming a folk hero.

Social media has exploded with users writing things like “[t]his claim for sympathy has been denied”; songs featuring the words “deny, “defend,” and “depose”; and recorded commentary condemning the healthcare insurance industry. UnitedHealth Group posted its sadness about Thompson’s death on Facebook yesterday about 1:00 p.m.; 36 hours later the post had 65,000 laughing emojis under it.

Security expert Charlie Carroll expressed surprise to Josh Fiallo of the Daily Beast that Thompson did not have a security detail. “We’re living in a world where people are extremely disgruntled,” Carroll said. “When people lose trust in the system, you start seeing more kidnappings and assassinations because they feel like they have to take matters into their own hands.”

In the wake of the shooting, UnitedHealthcare and several other insurance companies took down from their websites the names and photographs of their officials.

Billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were on Capitol Hill today where they met with lawmakers to explain their vision for the Department of Government Efficiency, the group designed to cut the U.S. budget. Neither they nor the lawmakers shared much with the press, although Fox Business played a video of Representative Ralph Norman (R-SC) saying that “nothing is sacrosanct,” and “they’re going to put everything on the table,” including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Representative Tom Tiffany (R-WI) told Just The News that cuts to the budget “don’t have to be just the discretionary spending. We can get at some of the mandatory spending also…food stamps, some of those things.” He continued: “There may be more bang for the buck in terms of growing our economy…making regulatory changes, get the impediments out of the way, let those job creators and entrepreneurs really be able to go to work.”

In view of today’s news about healthcare, it’s probably worth remembering that Musk has called for the elimination of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and that Project 2025 has called for making Medicare Advantage—the privatized Medicare in which UnitedHealth specializes—the default enrollment option for Medicare. This would essentially privatize Medicare for the 66 million people who use it, but since Medicare Advantage costs taxpayers about 6% more than Medicare, this would not create the savings Musk is supposed to be finding.

Andrew Perez of Rolling Stone reported today that election financial disclosures filed yesterday revealed that Elon Musk was the secret funder of the “RBG PAC,” a Super PAC created just before the election that claimed Trump had the same position on abortion as the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Although Trump has bragged about overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing the constitutional right to abortion and the 2024 Republican platform supported the far-right idea of “fetal personhood”—which would apply all the rights protected by the Fourteenth Amendment from the moment a human egg is fertilized—the RBG PAC ran ads promising that Trump would not support a national abortion ban.

Ginsburg’s granddaughter called the comparison of Trump and her grandmother “nothing short of appalling.”

The super PAC was created so late that it avoided disclosure before November 5. It was funded by Musk with an injection of $20.5 million.

Bridget Bowman, Ben Kamisar, and Scott Bland of NBC News reported tonight that Musk spent at least $250 million to get Trump elected. In addition to the $20.5 million to the RBG PAC, he put $238 million into the America PAC. Musk also supported Trump through free advertising and commentary on his social media platform X.

Today provided a snapshot of American society that echoed a similar moment on January 6, 1872, when Edward D. Stokes shot railroad baron James Fisk Jr. as he descended the staircase of New York’s Grand Central Hotel. The quarrel was over Fisk’s mistress, Josie, who had taken up with the handsome Stokes, but the murder instantly provoked a popular condemnation of the ties between big business and government.

Fisk was a rich, flamboyant, and unscrupulous man-about-town, who was deeply entwined both with railroad barons like Jay Gould, Daniel Drew, and Cornelius Vanderbilt and with New York’s Tammany Hall political machine and its infamous leader, William Marcy Tweed. Tweed made sure the laws benefited the railroads and, the papers noted, snuck into the hotel to say goodbye to his friend in the hours it took for him to perish.

After the Civil War, most Americans applauded the nation’s businessmen for the support their growing industries had provided to the Union, but by 1872 the enormous fortunes the railroad men had amassed had tarnished their reputation. At the same time, big operators were starting to squeeze smaller enterprises out of business in order to control the markets, and popular anger simmered over their increasing control of the economy.

Stokes’s shooting was the event that sparked a popular rebellion. Newspapers covered every minute of the event and Fisk’s demise, while sensational books about the murder rolled off the presses.

Together, they redefined late nineteenth-century industrialists, with one painting Fisk as a representative businessman who with just “an hour’s effort,” could “gather into his clutches a score of millions of other people’s property, impoverish a thousand wealthy men, or derange the values and the traffic of a vast empire.”

Both those covering the murder and those reading about it rejoiced in Fisk’s misfortune.

South Korean people react to coup attempt: “How dare the military come here!”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

Dec 3, 2024

For an astonishing six hours today, South Korea underwent an attempted self-coup by its unpopular president, Yoon Suk Yeol, only to see the South Korean people force him to back down as they reasserted the strength of their democracy.

In an emergency address at nearly 11:00 last night local time, Yoon announced that he was declaring martial law in South Korea for the first time since 1980, when special forces under a military dictatorship attacked pro-democracy activists in the city of Gwangju, leaving about 200 people dead or missing. South Koreans ended military rule in their country in 1987, writing a new constitution that made South Korea a republic.

Yoon claimed he had to declare martial law because his political opponents were sympathizing with communist North Korea. It was a thin pretext.

A member of the conservative People’s Party, Yoon was elected to a five-year presidential term in 2022 after a misogynistic campaign fueled by young men who saw equal rights for women— whose average monthly wage is 67.7% of that a man, according to the BBC’s Laura Bicker—as reverse discrimination that is taking away their own rights and opportunities.

Before his election, Yoon had no experience in the National Assembly, and once he was in office, his popularity slid to record lows. In legislative elections held last April, voters crushed Yoon’s party, giving opposition parties 192 of 300 seats in the National Assembly. The legislature fought with Yoon over his budget and launched a number of corruption investigations into Yoon’s allies as well as his wife.

And so, Yoon declared martial law, bringing the media under his control and banning political activities, “false propaganda,” “gatherings that incite social unrest,” and strikes. Police officers formed a blockade around the National Assembly, and helicopters landed on the roof to prevent lawmakers from getting inside to overturn Yoon’s declaration.

The South Korean people reacted immediately. Reporting from Seoul, John Yoon of the New York Times recounted the story of a real estate agent who watched President Yoon’s speech, got in his car, and drove for an hour to get to the National Assembly. The man told journalist Yoon, “I thought, ‘The end has come,’ so I came out. The president of a country has exerted his power by force, and its people have come out to protest that. We have to remove him from power from this point on. He’s in a position where he has to come down.”

Editor of The Verge Sarah Jeong, who works out of the U.S. and does not cover South Korean politics, happened to be working in Seoul this week and was on site after a night of drinking, giving an informed and honest account of what she was seeing. “[T]he crowd is a pretty even mix of young people and the older folks (mostly men) who would have been young during the dictatorship…. I heard tanks were here but I haven’t seen one yet. [O]ld men swearing “how dare the military come here.”

Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Washington Post Tokyo/Seoul bureau chief, reported that the National Assembly managed to pull together a majority of its members—190 of 300—in about two and a half hours to participate in a unanimous vote to overturn Yoon’s emergency declaration of martial law. That vote included members of his own party.

Political commentator Adam Schwartz shared a video taken by the leader of South Korea’s Democratic Party, Lee Jae-myung, as he climbed over the wall of the National Assembly to vote against Yoon’s martial law declaration. Other videos showed people in the streets boosting legislators over the walls for the vote.

Yet another video showed South Korean soldiers trying to get into the National Assembly during the voting thwarted by people wielding a fire extinguisher and flashes from cameras.

While the law said Yoon had to abide by the legislators’ vote, it was not clear whether Yoon would do as the law required. About six hours after he had declared martial law, Yoon bowed to the National Assembly and the popular will and lifted his declaration.

Yoon has been widely condemned, and South Koreans from all parties, including his own, are calling for his resignation or impeachment. Raphael Rashid of The Guardian reported today that on the morning after the attempted coup, South Koreans are bewildered and sad. “For the older generation who fought on the streets against military dictatorships, martial law equals dictatorship, not 21st century Korea. The younger generation is embarrassed that he has ruined their country’s reputation. People are baffled.”

For the rest of the world, though, South Koreans’ immediate and aggressive response to a man trying to take away their democratic rights is an inspiration. Among other things, it illustrates that for all the claims that autocracy can react to events more quickly than democracy can, in fact autocrats are brittle. It is democracy that is determined and resilient.

The events in Seoul also cemented the shift in social media from X to Bluesky, where news was breaking faster than anywhere else, in a way that echoed what Twitter used to be. Since Twitter was a key site of democratic organizing until Elon Musk bought it and renamed it X, that shift is significant.

And finally, the events in South Korea emphasize that for all people often look to larger-than-life figures to define our nations, our history is in fact made up of regular people doing the best they can. Journalist Sarah Jeong found herself entirely unexpectedly in the middle of a coup and, recognizing that she was in a historic moment, snapped to work to do all she could to keep the rest of us informed. “I’m f*cking blasted and hanging out in the weirdest scene because history happened at a deeply inconvenient hour,” she wrote on Bluesky. “[S]o it goes.”

When she finally went home, Jeong wrote: “I expensed my cab ride home. I’m tired so I put ‘korea coup’ down in the expense code field.”