• Why are so many doctors being forced to take out payday loans to make ends meet?
• @Optum is now running a Payday loan business targeting medical practices to which @UHC fails to issue timely payments, denies + delays. Genius!
  Optum Pay Advance is a short-term loan offered by Optum Bank®, a subsidiary of Optum Financial, Inc.

Regarding Ukraine, there could be nothing further than truth https://youtu.be/7gxssycoxz0

NATO expansion:

• George Washington Univ., 2017: NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner
• Orinoco Tribune, 2022: Former German Chancellor Merkel Admits that Minsk Peace Agreements Were Part of Scheme for Ukraine to Buy Time to Prepare for War With Russia
• Al Mayadeen, 2023: Zelensky admits he never intended to implement Minsk agreements
• Jeffrey Sachs, 2023: The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace
• Jeffrey Sachs, 2023: NATO Chief Admits NATO Expansion Was Key to Russian Invasion of Ukraine

.
NATO in general:

• The Intercept, 2021: Meet NATO, the Dangerous “Defensive” Alliance Trying to Run the World
• CounterPunch, 2022: NATO is Not a Defensive Alliance
• Noam Chomsky, 2023: NATO “most violent, aggressive alliance in the world”
• Thomas Fazi, 2024: NATO: 75 years of war, unprovoked aggressions and state-sponsored terrorism
• Gabriel Rockhill, 2020: The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It

.
Maidan coup & fascist attacks on Eastern Ukraine:

• Reuters, 2014: Leaked audio reveals embarrassing U.S. exchange on Ukraine, EU
• Leaked recording between Nuland and Pyatt: audio | transcript
• Counterpunch, 2014: US Imperialism and the Ukraine Coup
• BBC, 2014: Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict
• Human Rights Watch, 2014: Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians
• Consortium News, 2015: The Mess That Nuland Made Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland engineered Ukraine’s regime change without weighing the likely consequences.
• The Hill, 2017: The reality of neo-Nazis in Ukraine is far from Kremlin propaganda
• The Guardian, 2017: ‘I want to bring up a warrior’: Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp – video
• WaPo, 2018: The war in Ukraine is more devastating than you know
• Reuters, 2018: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem
• The Nation, 2019: Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in Ukraine
• openDemocracy, 2019: Why Ukraine’s new language law will have long-term consequences
• Al Jazeera, 2022: Why did Ukraine suspend 11 ‘pro-Russia’ parties?
• Jacobin, 2022: A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War
• Consortium News, 2023: The West’s Sabotage of Peace in Ukraine Former Israeli Prime Minister Bennett’s recent comments about getting his mediation efforts squashed in the early days of the war adds more to the growing pile of evidence that Western powers are intent on regime change in Russia.
• NYT, 2024: U.N. Court to Rule on Whether Ukraine Committed Genocide

As for Israel the problem is more that it isn’t a lapdog, it looks like US is Israel’s lapdog. As it looks like Israel does whatever it wants even if it is against US interests, and US still supports it.

The tail is not wagging the dog. The US would shut it down if Israel ran up against US interests enough. But Israel doesn’t run up against US interests; it’s in line with them. Israel is the US’ unsinkable aircraft carrier in West Asia. As Biden has said throughout his career, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”

Will no one rid me of this turbulent oligarch?

That didn’t work at Nuremberg, either, and it’s not so uncommon for the CEO to be on the board.

It’s a big club and you ain’t in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder

After the December 2024 killing of UnitedHealth Group CEO Brian Thompson, an opinion piece by New York (magazine) Intelligencer argued that the company’s policies and practices related to denying coverage for essential medical treatments fall under the concept of social murder, also noting that it could have potentially contributed as a motive for the attack. As they put it in their piece, “UnitedHealthcare does not pull a trigger and shoot its victims in the street. Instead, they suffer and may die of cancer, or of heart disease, or of some other treatable condition”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Condition_of_the_Working_Class_in_England

Too bad you sheepdogged your mass movement back to the bog-standard neoliberal Democrats, not once but twice.

Not only do I not get it, but I had to look up “prison wife”: not an imprisoned married woman but a woman whose spouse is imprisoned.

If I believed in a deep state (which I categorically do not)

It’s very real, it’s just not anything like what far-right conspiracy theorists think it is[1][2][3].

For most of us it began with a bang, for a few the test tube.

The greatest trick the Times ever pulled was convincing the world it had a left-leaning bias[1].

If he had been an ally, he wouldn’t have signed it.

can’t imagine Joe Biden signing a law like that

Bringing up 2024’s Biden is a non sequitur. We already went over this: no mid-20th century Western state was a gay ally.

If you look at my posting history, you’d see that you’re preaching to the choir.

But that doesn’t change the fact that adventurism isn’t going to get the goods. It’s a symptom of how bad things have gotten, but it’s not a solution. You can’t overthrow the largest global imperial hegemon in history that way. We haven’t even managed to pause a genocide in our name, never mind house, feed, and care for everyone.

Did you see who just won the popular vote? Many of these folks are as likely to cheer on the assassination of a socialist or trans person or an immigrant as a CEO. There isn’t a mass of class conscious proletarians organized for revolution right now. There is virtually no organized labor right now.

An alternative is the same as it’s always been, and it’s the only one that’s proven successful so far: organize, educate, and agitate a mass labor movement, and develop a vanguard party that’s backed by that labor movement.

All of that is true. But random CEO assassinations by lone wolves will only get us an expanded police state.

Violence will be unavoidable, but not just any old violence will do.

“‘I’d like to correct two things,’” Mangione said after the prosecutor finished speaking, according to CNN’s Danny Freeman, “‘I don’t know where any of that money came from—I’m not sure if it was planted. And also, that bag was waterproof, so I don’t know about criminal sophistication.’”

Given his education, you’d think he’d know to STFU.

under Stalin’s rule

You are still speaking from the cold war framing of Stalin being a dictator and not an elected official who tried to step down multiple times.

Joseph Stalin was elected as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU in April 1922 during the 11th Congress of the Party. Between then and until his death, he asked to be relieved of his duties as General Secretary a total of four times — all of which were rejected.

“Maybe if we just explain it to them more cogently, they will come to their senses.” This sounds like a Sorkin-esque West Wing perspective on how things work. They are not dimwitted or confused. They can see just fine.

Western states have long known that their backdoors will inevitable be accessed by others. They want access to your data, and they don’t especially care if that means other states will also get access.

They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you. At all. At all. At all.

Why did “they” build Mt. Rushmore or the Lincoln Memorial?