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First Draft: Getting Away With Epstein
Zeteo • 3 weeks ago

First Draft: Getting Away With Epstein

Why do people only get arrested over the Epstein files outside of the US? Plus, Trump stops trying to prosecute some of his enemies, while Republicans come for one of their own.

Survey Says: Go to Hell
34:20
I've Had It Podcast • 3 weeks ago

Survey Says: Go to Hell

Hilary Duff Has Spoken
Jezebel • 3 weeks ago

Hilary Duff Has Spoken

You could even say she is <em>coming clean </em>about the toxic mom group drama. Except not really, since it doesn't seem like it fazed her at all.

Chinese EVs can save Detroit
Semafor • 3 weeks ago

Chinese EVs can save Detroit

After rolling across Southeast Asia, Europe, and Latin America, the Chinese electric vehicle juggernaut is targeting the US.

The Epstein Scandal Reveals the Dark Side of Bipartisanship
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

The Epstein Scandal Reveals the Dark Side of Bipartisanship

Among the most staggering revelations in the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein document release are the details that have recently emerged about the treacly relationship between Epstein and attorney Kathryn Ruemmler. The emails between Epstein and Ruemmler range from the inexplicable to the inexcusable, with Ruemmler routinely referring to Epstein as “sweetie” and “Uncle Jeffrey,” and even advising him on “how to respond to tough questions about his sex crimes,” as The New York Times reported. Naturally, the most notable thing about their relationship is precisely who Ruemmler was. While hardly a household name, Ruemmler was widely considered one of the titans of the Democratic legal establishment. Serving most recently as Goldman Sachs’s top lawyer (until she finally stepped down last week), Ruemmler originally made her name in a different role: White House counsel for President Barack Obama, whom she served from 2011 to 2014. Ruemmler was viewed as such an important member of Obama’s inner circle that she nearly served as his attorney general—and by extension, the most powerful legal professional in both the Democratic establishment and the country writ large.So much for all that. Rather than overseeing the Department of Justice, Ruemmler is now a case study in how Epstein’s network spanned all partisan divides, snaking across the most prominent parts of the American political spectrum. Indeed, it’s almost breathtaking to consider just how wide Epstein’s network truly was: It somehow brought together everyone from Ruemmler, Bill Clinton, and Noam Chomsky to MAGA and Republican stalwarts like Donald Trump and Steve Bannon. As Anand Giridharadas, one of the most trenchant analysts of this kind of cross-partisan elite networking, said earlier this month, Epstein created a network that was “coast to coast, industry to industry, right to left—as far left as you can go, as far right as you can go.” All of it created, as Giridharadas said, a “diversity [that] masked a deeper solidarity” among all of these Epstein-connected elites. As academic Seva Gunitsky added, it paints a picture of a “borderless elite [who] profit from weak institutions and enjoy getting paid.”Giridharadas and Gunitsky have this precisely right. The files, and Ruemmler’s central place therein, have revealed that the bipartisanship so revered by the chattering class is fake and fraudulent. It’s all a masquerade, a play-act of elite Americans pushing nominally different policy prescriptions and strategic directions, while nonetheless embracing one another when they think no one is actually looking—all providing a duck blind behind which the levers of elite impunity are toggled. Epstein was a collector of confidants, yes—but he was also someone who, in a single tranche of emails, could reveal an American elite that had far more in common with one another than with the rest of us, even to the point of aiding and abetting monsters. This may be shocking for some Americans. But for those who’ve tracked how much of the American elite has made money servicing the most horrific regimes abroad, these revelations are hardly news.Look, for instance, at the foreign lobbying industry; specifically, at all those American elites who’ve spent years willingly signing up to work for the most ruinous, most tyrannical regimes on the planet. For decades, the American foreign lobbying industry—full of former members of Congress, former administration officials, and even the occasional former president—have sucked in billions of dollars, often from the most heinous dictatorships on earth. This practice has somehow become normalized, even though many of the regimes in question are responsible for, if it can be believed, even worse crimes that Epstein was accused of. This industry has hardly been the stock of only one political party alone. Republicans and Democrats alike have raced to lobby on behalf of despotic regimes around the world, from expansionist autocracies in places like Rwanda or Morocco to decades-long dictatorships in places like Tajikistan or China. Former presidents like Bill Clinton have willingly opened up their foundations to accept tens of millions of dollars from some of the world’s most horrific governments, while former GOP stalwarts like Bob Dole preferred to make money laundering the images of authoritarians, rather than ride off into retirement. And this isn’t even considering all of the related think tanks and policy shops, across the political aisle, who’ve willingly opened themselves to dictatorial cash—and to servicing those dictators’ needs, regardless of American interests. All of these elites and related institutes have lined up to help the modern-day fascists and tyrants topping regime after regime around the world. Dictatorships like the UAE, currently responsible for inflaming genocide in Sudan, have managed to find friend after friend across the American political elite. So too have nearby regimes like Saudi Arabia, inking agreements with former GOP and Democratic policymakers and congressmen—despite all of Riyadh’s rank anti-gay, anti-woman, and antidemocratic crimes. Hereditary dictatorships like Azerbaijan even managed to not only bankroll secret trips for Democrats and Republicans alike, but allegedly recruited current members of Congress, as seen most recently in the charges against Representative Henry Cuellar. When Trump dropped the charges against Cuellar, he earned a plaudit from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries—just a couple of buddies doing the ruling class’s work.Time and again, regimes have found friends among America’s elite, regardless of political affiliation. As Epstein well knew, and as regime after regime has discovered, America’s leaders could be bought with surprising ease. All it took were a few trips, a few small payments, and a few choice words—and America’s rotten elite would be there with bells on. Perhaps a more specific example will illuminate things further. Take a look at who preceded Ruemmler as one of Obama’s White House counsels: Gregory Craig. Like Ruemmler, Craig was never known widely outside of policy circles. But in Washington, few compared in the early 2010s to his reach, his reputation, and his record of policy success, especially on the Democratic side of the ledger.Which is precisely what Paul Manafort, perhaps the most infamous lobbyist in American history, wanted when he recruited Craig to aid a budding Ukrainian autocrat named Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort’s story—how he spent years helping entrench Yanukovych; how it all blew up in Ukraine’s 2014 revolution; and how Manafort then raced to help launch Trump to the White House in 2016—is at this point well-known. It’s a story of just how impactful a single American lobbyist can be in aiding the demolition of a country’s democracy, and just how dangerous a foreign lobbying industry left unchecked can truly be. But Manafort’s story was something else—something far closer to Epstein’s, at least when it came to highlighting just how quickly America’s elite could align with a brute. Despite the Ukrainian leader’s obvious authoritarianism, Manafort managed to recruit a remarkably cross-partisan class of supporters for Yanukovych. On the Republican side, there was Rick Gates, a lobbyist fresh from running John McCain’s 2008 campaign. And on the Democratic side, there was Tad Devine, a prominent Democratic pollster and Bernie Sanders’s future 2016 campaign manager. So too was there Tony Podesta, a leading Democratic fundraiser and brother of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager. And then there was Craig. As federal filings later detailed, Craig left the White House and soon began helping Manafort to help spin Yanukovych’s regime. Working with the Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom law firm, Craig helped create an “independent” report analyzing Yanukovych’s move to toss a key political rival in prison. Unsurprisingly, the report itself effectively absolved Yanukovych of authoritarianism, contending that his efforts to target political opponents were hardly draconian, and would have been upheld in American courts. But it wasn’t just publishing the report; as later filings made clear, Craig also discussed the report’s rollout with Manafort, including calls with American journalists, especially at The New York Times. As Skadden saw it, if they could get the Times to repeat the report’s findings, their job—and Manafort’s efforts to keep Yanukovych in power—would be complete.Which is precisely what happened. The New York Times wrote that, according to the report, Yanukovych’s effort to jail his opponent “was supported by the evidence,” and that there was “no evidence” to any of the claims that it was political persecution. Manafort could not have asked for more. As he wrote later to Craig. “People in Kiev are very happy. You are ‘THE MAN.’” Manafort, of course, spoke too soon; less than a year later, protests against Yanukovych’s regime began, quickly curdling into a democratic revolution that overthrew the regime, sparked Russia’s initial invasion, and opened a new chapter in geopolitical history. And it also resulted in the eventual conviction and jailing of Manafort himself, as well as a multimillion-dollar settlement from Skadden (though Craig was eventually acquitted of related charges). The model that Manafort highlighted—a bipartisan, elite sprint to aid autocrats, creating a “vivid picture of the ruling class at its avaricious worst,” as the Times recounted—still resonates, over a decade later. It’s a model that Jeffrey Epstein would have well recognized; the smiley face glued atop greasy corruption. And it’s a model that everyone from convicted sex criminals to kleptocrats of the world have all taken advantage of—democracy, decency, and even American interests be damned.

Americans Are Dying Early. There’s a Way to Fix It.
New Republic • 3 weeks ago

Americans Are Dying Early. There’s a Way to Fix It.

Last month, headlines announced that U.S. life expectancy has finally recovered from the pandemic. A new report from the National Center for Health Statistics showed national life expectancy at a record high, and this news has been greeted with cautious optimism.But that news reflects only one side of the story. Other estimates, such as model-based work from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, or IHME, show that even with this rebound, the United States has suffered one of the most severe peacetime declines in longevity among wealthy nations and continues to lag far behind its peers. Taken together, the data suggests that while life expectancy has recovered relative to recent American history, the U.S. is experiencing the most dramatic peacetime decline in longevity when judged against other high-income countries.According to IHME’s newest projections, the United States is expected to plummet from forty-ninth in global life expectancy rankings in 2022 to sixty-sixth by 2050. We now trail Cuba, Estonia, and Saudi Arabia. We’ve already lost more than 2.5 years of life expectancy in a single decade—an unprecedented collapse that would have been unimaginable just a generation ago. The only comparable situation in modern times is the decline in longevity after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, when men’s life expectancy plummeted by six years, driven by sudden massive increases in poverty and inequality.While our peer nations continue extending the lives of their citizens, the U.S. is moving in the opposite direction. And we’re barely talking about it.Public health researchers have a name for what we’re losing: the “missing Americans.” A 2023 study by Jacob Bor, an epidemiologist at Boston University School of Public Health, and his colleagues examined international mortality databases and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics for every year from 1933 to 2021, comparing America’s mortality rates with the average of those of Canada, Japan, and 19 Western European nations. What they found, said Bor when I interviewed him for my recent book, “was shocking.”If the United States had mortality rates comparable to other wealthy nations, we would have prevented more than one million deaths in 2020 and 1.1 million deaths in 2021, according to Bor’s findings. These aren’t deaths at the end of long lives—about half occurred in people under age 65, those who should be in the prime of their lives, raising families, contributing to communities, building careers. In 2021 alone, Bor and his colleagues noted, these preventable early deaths represented more than 25 million years of lost life.To put that in perspective: We’ve created the statistical equivalent of wiping out a city the size of Austin, Texas, every single year.And that doesn’t include the years preceding these deaths, when people were hobbled by disabilities, illness, and despair that stopped them from fulfilling their potential and robbed us as a society of what they might have contributed. There is a ripple effect across communities and generations—the effects these early deaths have on children who grow up without a parent; families that become mired in poverty after the untimely death of their primary breadwinner. We’re talking about millions of missed soccer games, high school graduations, camping trips, and anniversary celebrations: all the unrealized milestones of fully lived lives.The disparities are staggering. Life-expectancy gaps among American populations have nearly doubled since 2000. Native Americans in the Western U.S. now have life expectancies below 64 years—on par with Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Black and Native Americans bore a disproportionate share of these excess deaths. But the real surprise in Bor’s research was how poorly white Americans are doing too: In 2021, they comprised 70 percent of those missing Americans. In that year, young white Americans died at three times the rate of their counterparts in wealthy nations, according to Bor and his coauthors’ calculations, while death rates for young Black and Indigenous Americans were five times and eight times higher, respectively.This reveals something we’ve been missing. “Using the experiences of white Americans as a benchmark in studies renders the trends in the white population invisible,” Bor said in a recent interview. “In addition, it woefully underestimates the grim circumstances of Americans of color, in terms of their mortality shortfalls, because the baseline you’re using is already substandard.”The inescapable fact is that millions of white Americans are dying too young, their lives cut short by the same policies and institutions that are killing Black, Latino, and Indigenous populations. As Bor puts it, we’re all frogs boiling in that pot of water—it’s just that white people are boiling a little slower. Yet somehow, they are led to believe they’re better off, and we continue to muddle through this metastasizing crisis without doing anything about it.How did we get here? This crisis began more than 40 years ago, when our peer countries recovered from World War II and began surpassing us in building social safety nets, providing universal health care, and enacting policies that protected their most vulnerable citizens. We went in the opposite direction. Our mortality numbers began to diverge sharply from those of other wealthy countries in a downward slide that coincides with the dismantling of the social safety net that began in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s and 2000s, according to Bor and colleagues.The chief culprits are familiar: structural racism, economic inequality, lack of access to quality health care, a bloated-broken national health care system, and chronic underinvestment in public health and social safety net programs. People die because of gun violence, traffic accidents, heart disease, diabetes, suicide, substance abuse, and drug overdoses. A wave of deregulation left working-class Americans vulnerable to unhealthy foods, workplace dangers, environmental toxins, and the unchecked spread of guns and opioids.Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton identified one critical piece of this puzzle in their landmark 2015 paper on the so-called “deaths of despair.” They found that working-age white men and women without four-year college degrees were dying at astonishing rates—more than 600,000 excess deaths between 1999 and 2017 among Americans aged 45 to 54. Death rates from suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related illnesses were directly correlated with chronic joblessness in regions hit hardest by globalization; communities set adrift by the export of once-stable jobs in mining, manufacturing, and heavy industry.The pandemic merely accelerated an already widening gap. As science journalist Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic, “COVID simply did more of what life in America has excelled at for decades: killing Americans in unusually large numbers, and at unusually young ages.” The numbers behind this, as he noted, are stark: “From 2019 to 2021, deaths among working-age Americans increased by 233,000—and nine in 10 of those deaths wouldn’t have happened if the U.S. had mortality rates on par with its peers.”Now, at precisely the moment when we should be mounting an aggressive response to this mortality crisis, the current administration is moving in the opposite direction. Proposed cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs will strip health care and nutrition support from millions. Attacks on the Affordable Care Act threaten to eliminate coverage for tens of millions more. The dismantling of public health agencies and the sidelining of scientific expertise leave us more vulnerable to the next pandemic and less equipped to address ongoing health threats.This isn’t happening in a poor country with limited resources. This is happening in the wealthiest nation on earth, one that spends more on health care per capita than any other country. Yet 66.5 percent of all bankruptcies are tied to medical issues, and every year, 530,000 Americans file for bankruptcy due to medical bills.Other wealthy nations have proven that a different path is possible. Countries with strong social safety nets, universal health care, investments in public health infrastructure, and policies that reduce inequality consistently see their citizens live longer, healthier lives. They spend less on health care and get better results. The solutions aren’t revolutionary—they’re already working elsewhere.What’s needed now is the political courage to acknowledge that America’s mortality crisis is neither normal nor inevitable, and the collective will to demand better. We need health care as a right, not a privilege. We need robust public health systems with the resources and authority to protect communities. We need policies that address the root causes of premature death: poverty, racism, violence, and environmental degradation. We need to strengthen labor protections and ensure living wages. We need to measure national success not by GDP growth or stock market performance, but by how long and how well our people live.Every year we wait, another million people die who shouldn’t. Another 25 million years of human potential—of birthdays and graduations, of art and innovation, of love and laughter—vanish. These aren’t statistics. They’re our neighbors, our colleagues, our families. They’re us.We can accept this slow-motion catastrophe as the price of American exceptionalism, or we can recognize it as the moral emergency it is. The question isn’t whether we know how to save the missing Americans. We do. The question is whether we care enough to try.

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