Glenn Greenwald's take on the media allegations of Trump's collusion with Russia.

"Over and over, major U.S. media outlets have published claims about the Russia Threat that turned out to be completely false — always in the direction of exaggerating the threat and/or inventing incriminating links between Moscow and the Trump circle. In virtually all cases, those stories involved evidence-free assertions from anonymous sources that these media outlets uncritically treated as fact, only for it to be revealed that they were entirely false. "

Where the Heartland goes for news....

Any chance this influences what Joe Sixpack thinks he needs?

Joel Whitney, whose book Finks is about the CIA’s subversion of US culture, talks about the scars left by the Cold War.

From the NYT Opinion page today.

A big excerpt:

Our database gave me the callers’ age, race, gender, date of hiring, spousal and dependent information, current coverage and hourly wage or salary. I developed a habit of crunching numbers to pass the time. A female caller made, say, $21,840 a year with a monthly premium of $225, leaving her with $19,140. Like me, she had injured her hip. Add up her deductible, co-payment, likely hospital bills, prescriptions, physical therapy and a few weeks of missed work, and she had less than $13,500 left over. I would be at my desk, thinking: “My rent is $685 a month. What’s hers?”

My next job was as a workers’ compensation claims examiner. Many claims had vague accident descriptions and no witnesses. I had one claimant, a data-entry clerk, file for wrist pain caused by carpal tunnel syndrome after having been employed for only a few days. When asked if she had experienced any symptoms before, she never wavered: “No.” Her surgeries were covered.

I was surprised, and not. I had been doing the math. It never added up. For many of these people, the only way they were going to get the care they needed was to feign being injured at work.

In workers’ comp, doctors were passive, employers were punitive, employees juiced the system, and I had to close cases. I found a physician at an independent medical examination company who almost always signed off on my cases, as long as they included appropriate leading data. I referred to him as “Dr. Fixed and Stable.” (“Fixed and stable” basically meant a patient had received sufficient treatment; it was the magic term that allowed me to close a claim.) I never met this doctor, but I sensed he was down with the game. We paid him a few hundred dollars a pop, and my cases got closed.

In 2007, I decided to give college a shot. I needed a flexible work schedule, but because of my pre-existing condition, I couldn’t let my insurance lapse. I found a job with benefits at a smoking cessation company, working nights and weekends.

Funded mostly by the ’90s tobacco settlements, the stop-smoking hotlines helped everyone, not just those with insurance or those who could manipulate the system. But luck still played a role. Radio commercials would air promising free samples of patches and gum. The phones lit up, but the samples soon ran out. I thought: Why is acquiring health care like visiting a casino? Why does it feel as though you have to win to get it?

Then Barack Obama was elected. He spent his presidency building and defending the Affordable Care Act. It was ambitious legislation, but I was concerned. The employer-driven insurance industry had no clue how to provide sufficient health care to the people who were already insured. Now we needed to include the uninsured, too?

In 2012, I had the hip replacement — a $44,000 procedure. Thankfully, I had kept my insurance coverage, as the A.C.A. wouldn’t prohibit pre-existing condition exclusions until 2014. I am still amazed that losing insurance for two months could have excluded me from medical care forever. I was proud that America would no longer be a country where a 19-year-old wondered if a lapse in insurance would leave him crippled.

Also thanks to the A.C.A., I began buying my insurance through my state’s health care exchange website. Like the healthcare.gov site, it had a rocky start and was widely panned, but I loved it. It was an actual marketplace and not a shadowy industry where brokers and H.R. departments hammered out deals. I had several insurers offering me coverage, with transparent plan information and pricing. It was almost as if they were competing.

This guy nails it.  Will anyone listen who matters?

In Towns Hit by Factory Closings, a New Casualty: Retail Jobs

Business Day feature story @ NYTimes.com, June 25

Thousands of workers face unemployment as retailers struggle to adapt to online shopping. But even as e-commerce grows, it isn’t absorbing these workers.

[....] Small cities in the Midwest and Northeast are particularly vulnerable. When major industries left town, retail accounted for a growing share of the job market in places like Johnstown, Decatur, Ill., and Saginaw, Mich. Now, the work force is getting hit a second time, and there is little to fall back on.

Moreover, while stores in these places are shedding jobs because of e-commerce, e-commerce isn’t absorbing these workers. Growth in e-commerce jobs like marketing and engineering, while strong, is clustered around larger cities far away. Rural counties and small metropolitan areas account for about 23 percent of traditional American retail employment, but they are home to just 13 percent of e-commerce positions.

E-commerce has also fostered a boom in other industries, including warehouses. But most of those jobs are being created in larger metropolitan areas, an analysis of Census Bureau business data shows [....]

By Olga Khazan @ TheAtlantic.com, June 24

On an average day, 93 Americans are killed with guns—more than in any other developed country. National reforms, such as closing loopholes around background checks, might help curb that, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival. But those types of changes aren’t likely to make it through a Republican-led Congress. So instead, Murthy pointed out some initiatives individual communities can take on to reduce gun deaths at the local level.

Murthy specifically highlighted programs focused on reducing stress and isolation, and that promoted positive social connections. One impactful example, Murthy said, is “the Chicago ‘Becoming A Man’ program — a one-year intervention, over 32 or so weeks, where kids met with a mentor once a week to develop social connection, to develop skills on how to handle conflict and adversity. In one year compared to a control group they had a 44 percent reduction in violent arrests.”

Indeed, as the Chicago Sun-Times reported, the program focused on attempting to teach teen boys in violent areas of the city how to react to stressful situations in non-violent ways [....]

While Donald Trump backs the Saudi-led ultimatum, the state and defense departments are openly critical – a mixed message that could worsen the crisis

By Julien Borger in Washington for TheGuardian.com, June 24

[....] While Donald Trump has declared himself wholeheartedly behind the blockade on Qatar, the state and defense departments have been sharply critical of the move, in private and in public.

The defence secretary, James Mattis, rushed to assure Doha of continuing support, mindful that US air operations in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan fly out of the al-Udeid base, just outside the Qatari capital. Six days after Trump joined Riyadh in denouncing Qatar as a “funder of terrorism at a very high level”, Mattis signed a $12bn arms deal with the Qataris.

The state department issued a stinging rebuke of the behaviour of the Saudis and their Egyptian, Emirati and Bahraini allies, with the secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, warning them to make their demands on Qatar “reasonable and actionable”.

Now that the list of 13 demands has been presented and Qatar has been given 10 days to comply, much will depend on what is seen as being reasonable and actionable [....]

It was curious to observe how much of Jeremy Corbyn’s successful campaign to rebuild the Labour Party was about foreign policy. Wars, he said, make us less safe, not more. Agreeing with him were: the obvious facts of the matter, voters in opinion polls, and apparently voters in their votes.