Saturday Report 11/8/25 — Health insurance prices are exploding: where is all that money going?

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— Donald Trump calls our concern over the cost of living a “con,” but the real con is being foisted on working Americans by the billionaires and corporate monopolies that bankroll him. For forty years, wages have flatlined while profits and CEO pay soared and Trump’s tax cuts, deregulation, and corporate handouts only supercharged that inequality. He brags about a cheaper Walmart Thanksgiving while ignoring that those “savings” come from poverty wages and taxpayer subsidies — and the fact that Walmart has made their “example basket” considerably smaller and gotten rid of brand-name products. This isn’t affordability, it’s exploitation fueled by pure BS. The truth is, Trump’s America works great for the morbidly rich and their gilded ballrooms and private jets, but for everyone else it’s a rigged game where corporations set prices, crush unions, and call it “freedom.” The real “con” is pretending that helping out billionaires helps people like you and me.

— Consumer confidence collapses in the face of Trump’s incoherent economic and tariff policies that seem driven more by threats he can use to get bribes from foreign dictators than what’s best for America and American citizens. The Financial Times headline yesterday afternoon says it all: “US consumer sentiment sinks to second-lowest level on record.” FT author Claire Jones notes: “The poll also showed people’s expectations of inflation a year from now soared from 6.5 per cent to 7.3 per cent — its highest level since 1981…. Longer-term inflation expectations also edged up from 4.4 per cent to 4.6 per cent…” While only a small percentage of Americans actually follow the news, pretty much everybody knows what they’re paying at the grocery store, and inflation is still running hot (see the FT quote) and, according to corporate sources, we’ve lost around a million jobs since Trump was sworn into office. Trump travels the world threatening leaders with tariffs if they don’t give his sons billions for their crypto businesses or let him open a new hotel (at no expense or risk to him; he gets a “licensing fee” percentage of the profits), but — like Reagan’s promises about massive tax cuts for the morbidly rich — the benefits never seem to “trickle down” to the average workers.

— Nothing, it seems, gives “Whiskey Pete” Hegseth a bigger hard-on than threatening war and bloodshed (and sharing it with friends and family on an insecure Signal chat). Unless, of course, it’s beating up a woman, as his former sister-in-law alleged in a sworn affidavit. Pete’s latest threat was posted yesterday, writing: “We’re not building for peacetime; we are pivoting the Pentagon and industrial base to a wartime footing. Building for victory should our adversaries FAFO.” He’s already ordered 70 poor fishermen murdered in international waters, claiming they’re the mailmen delivering drugs to Trinidad (even if true, how is that our problem?). Clearly, the days of Teddy Roosevelt — a “real man” and genuine warrior — are over and we’ve descended into the bizarro world of Fox “News” bluster. Is Whiskey Pete trying to help out with the GOP’s “distract from the Epstein Files” project that ‘Lil Mikey Johnson is so deeply immersed in, or does he really get off on the idea of shedding blood and putting American soldiers’ lives on the line? Or was he just drunk again? Inquiring minds want to know…

— The election was bigger than we thought: we even won school boards in Texas! Democrats kicked ass from coast to coast, border to border in this week’s elections, terrifying Trump and the lickspittles around him. While a few are still chest-thumping, Steve Bannon is openly worrying about going back to prison again and elected officials — Marjorie Taylor Greene is the most conspicuous example — are starting to back away from him. They’ve watched his sagging face, his falling asleep during press conferences, and the White House folks having to put an “Oval Office” sign outside the Oval Office so a certain orange fellow won’t get lost as he wanders by (see: Japan), and they’re figuring out that he’s probably not the hottest pony to lay their career bets on. Right now, a few Republicans are starting to inch away from the wannabe emperor, but within the next four or five months, as the 2026 races start to firm up (including primaries — every single member of the House and a third of the Senators are up for re-election) expect this trickle to turn into a tsunami. The big question now: will Republicans try to tack back to the center and reject Trump and his neoNazi fellow travelers, or will they double down on turning America into a police state so they can nail down next year’s elections? While Trump’s clearly rooting for the latter, betting on the end of the American experiment may be more dicey than he and his billionaire tech bro backers thought.

— Health insurance prices are exploding: where is all that money going? Dr. Rachel Madley writes, over at the Health Care un-covered Substack newsletter, that the amount of profits the big insurance companies are squeezing out of us — the half-trillion-dollars they hung onto just since 2014 — could have gone a long way toward eliminating the need for private insurance altogether and simply funded a good single-payer healthcare system for America. Even the industry’s executives are in on the scheme to drain our wallets and retirement funds dry, shoveling out over $146 billion in stock buybacks, which only serve to increase executive and shareholder compensation and assets while doing nothing whatsoever for the nation’s health. As I noted last week, this is a huge issue and Democrats should center it in next year’s elections.

— ICE agents dragged off a Portland green-card holder — a legal resident of the US — in front of his wife and three children, ignoring his screams that he had documentation and was in the country legally. He’s still missing in their byzantine prison system weeks later. This story is so grotesque I’m not even going to try to recount it here beyond that brief description: you really should hop over to the Dissent in Bloom newsletter and read it yourself. Nobody, it appears, is safe anymore, at least so long as their skin isn’t white (he was from Nigeria). Meanwhile, Trump is inviting white South Africans — and only white people from South Africa — to relocate here as refugees. Are we woke yet?

— How New York City is quietly preparing for a possibly violent Trump takeover. Politico is reporting that “a wide range of New York’s most prominent civic leaders” from New York’s Governor Hochul to folks in city hall and below are strategizing and working out plans to resist an invasion by Trump’s masked secret police. They’ve seen the chaos and bloodshed his stormtroopers have brought to Chicago, LA, and Portland, and really don’t want the same in their fair city. Trump, for his part, is calling the newly elected mayor a “communist” and making veiled “And so it begins…” threats. But has he been so crippled by the election losses this week that he’ll find it harder to make his threats stick? Stay tuned…

— U.S. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson published a scathing dissent after six bought-off right-wingers on the Court issued a ruling trashing trans rights. For over 30 years, people who’ve undergone gender reassignment surgery have been able to put their new gender on their passports; the six corrupt Republicans on the court ended that right, apparently just out of spite to make Trans people’s lives miserable. This is as sick and twisted as it gets, and KBJ was so right to call them out. Yesterday they also debated in private session whether or not to hear arguments about ending the federal right to gay marriage. So much for the separation of church and state…