Boar’s Head

It is never a good sign when your food company issues a food recall for its packaged products that runs into the hundreds of thousands of pounds. It is especially not good when that number rises to seven million pounds of food a few days later. It is really, really not good when reporters get ahold of the documents detailing what has been going on at the plant responsible and it contains stuff like this:

…the Agriculture Department reported "heavy discolored meat build up" on a hydraulic pump in the plant and on the motor of an inspection line on Aug. 8, 2023, and again reported "heavy meat buildup" on walls of a room in the plant on June 10.

When your food packaging plant resembles a level from Silent Hill it should indicate that something has gone very wrong with your sanitary processes. There were a lot of other violations (69 within the last year (nice)) at the Virginia plant, including:

Flies were found "going in and out" of pickle vats on June 10, and "small flying gnat like insects were observed crawling on the walls and flying around the room." The department reported a "steady line of ants" and "a presence of flying insects" in the same room, according to the documents.

[…]

A "black mold like substance" was discovered at the plant on Jan. 9, according to the documents, with some spots being "as large as a quarter." Inspectors reported four more instances of finding mold, and in one case mildew, in the plant in June and July.

Multiple leaks were reported throughout the plant in the months of inspection, including a puddle that featured a "green algal growth" on July 17, according to the documents.

On Feb. 21, inspectors reported "ample amounts of blood in puddles on the floor" in a cooler that also produced a "rancid smell," according to the documents.

I am not sure how one would measure an ‘ample’ amount of blood on the floor of a meatpacking factory, but I feel like an inspector knows it when they see it.

Now that we’ve detailed the literal house of horrors where millions of pounds of Boar’s Head meats are produced each year, we move on to - what the fuck? Nine people have died so far, and more than fifty have been hospitalized as a result of listeria contamination, but the question might be how it hasn’t happened sooner under these terrifying conditions.

Also, how many blood puddles and meat walls must be documented before the government takes action? Unlike the slaughterhouses Trump (and Biden) have allowed to self-inspect, these violations were caught by USDA and presumably should have warranted corrective action by Boar’s Head some time within the last year.

Boar’s Head has spent decades cultivating itself as the premium deli meat company, yet the company is privately owned, its operations shrouded in secrecy. More importantly, it has been allowed to behave like many meat and food processing companies in America, racking up dozens of serious violations until it inevitably sickens and kills consumers, because regulators are unable or unwilling to act.

A company that makes $1.2 billion dollars a year and is the sole option in many grocery stores around the country can afford to clean and disinfect its factories, and provide its employees with safe work environments. Instead, Boar’s Head cuts corners, and we’re only now finding out the ugly truth behind the fancy packs of ham and turkey.

Medicare Advantage

It is remarkable (but not surprising) how rapidly our health insurance giants have used Medicare Advantage to milk taxpayers for tens of billions of dollars.

In the late 2010s I had a front row seat to the shift towards direct-to-consumer marketing for Advantage plans, and since then their membership has exploded. At the time, those of us marketing these plans held the mistaken belief it was a good thing for millions of seniors to have access to low-cost Medicare coverage. We foolishly thought the government had a handle on costs for senior care, and that insurers would behave themselves.

Well! We should have taken a lesson from Rick Scott and the many other health insurance executives before him who perpetrated multi-billion-dollar frauds against the government. To these profiteers, Medicare is a piggy bank waiting to be cracked. As Advantage plans proliferated and insurers gained millions of new patients to exploit, they wasted no time, racking up $50 billion in phantom diagnoses in a mere three years, accounting for around four percent of all Advantage spending during that time. Nor were they particularly subtle about it:

Gloria Lee was perplexed when the phone calls started coming in from a representative of her Medicare insurer. Could a nurse stop by her Boston home to give her a quick checkup? It was a helpful perk. No cost. In fact, she’d get a $50 gift card.

After several such calls in 2022, Lee agreed. A nurse showed up, checked her over, asked her questions, then diagnosed her with diabetic cataracts.

But the retired accountant doesn’t have diabetes, her own doctor later said, let alone the cloudy vision sometimes caused by the disease.

[…]

The questionable diagnoses included some for potentially deadly illnesses, such as AIDS, for which patients received no subsequent care, and for conditions people couldn’t possibly have, the analysis showed. Often, neither the patients nor their doctors had any idea.

Insurers were spamming their enrollees with solicitation calls, so they could send nurses to perform ‘check-ups’ and diagnose fake illnesses, not even telling their doctors or adding to their charts, billing the government billions in the process. One can only imagine what it was like for the patients hearing these false diagnoses, if they were told at all.

Under normal circumstances, it could be a very good thing to send nurses on millions of home visits to check on the health of Medicare enrollees. But, instead, companies told nurses to focus on running bogus tests on vulnerable seniors to pad the books:

A Wall Street Journal investigation of insurer home visits found the companies pushed nurses to run screening tests and add unusual diagnoses, turning the roughly hourlong stops in patients’ homes into an extra $1,818 per visit, on average, from 2019 to 2021. Those payments added up to about $15 billion during that period, according to a Journal analysis of Medicare data.

One test in particular, a device claiming to screen for peripheral artery disease, allowed insurers to bill another $2,500 per visit. Problem was, the device was sketchy at best:

But [Nurse Shelley] Manke didn’t trust the device. She had tried it on herself and had gotten an array of results. When she and other nurses raised concerns with managers, she said, they were told the company believed that data supported the tests and that they needed to keep using the device.

Home visits like these accounted for around thirty percent of the overbilling by insurers. Some, like UnitedHealth, took it to extremes:

United maintained a unit dedicated to house calls, and pressured its nurses to make phony diagnoses. The company generated new diagnoses for conditions no doctor was treating on sixty percent of its home visits, compared to second place Humana with a mere forty.

It is obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain that Medicare Advantage, in its current state, is nothing but a 10-figure handout to private insurers, who are misdiagnosing seniors at an alarming rate, interfering with their care rather than improving it. The government needs to act immediately to cut off this blatant profiteering and steer Medicare funds back to their intended purpose, preventive care and treatment of actual illness.

Politics

It has been a busy few weeks in the greasy swamp we call American Politics. There was the story last month about whether Trump took $10 million from the Egyptians to fund his campaign in 2016. That same day, an audit of the Eric Adams campaign found all sorts of finance violations, including sham donations and fundraising events with mystery sponsors. Adams has already had the homes of his aides raided and his (many) phone(s) taken by the FBI, so it comes as little surprise his campaign had accounting troubles.

Oh, and one of his aides who acted as an undisclosed agent for Turkey is cooperating with investigators, increasing government scrutiny on the mayor’s links to the country. Aaaaand, literally as I was writing this, two more Adams aides had their homes raided by the FBI. Some of us wondered whether Adams would survive his first term, which ends next year, and it’s looking like an increasingly safe bet.

Elsewhere in New York, a former aide to governors Cuomo and Hochul were arrested for being agents of China:

Federal prosecutors said Sun, at the request of Chinese officials, blocked representatives of the Taiwanese government from having access to the governor’s office and shaped New York governmental messaging to align with the priorities of the Chinese government, among other things.

In return, her husband got help for his business activities in China — a financial boost that prosecutors said allowed the couple to buy their multimillion-dollar property in Manhasset, New York, a condominium in Hawaii for $1.9 million, and luxury cars including a 2024 Ferrari, the indictment said.

For years, Sun worked to influence New York governors to make statements beneficial to China, like removing mentions of Taiwan from speeches or not referencing the country’s oppression of the Uyghur people. In the end, Sun and her husband may have drawn the attention of authorities by having networks of shell companies, million-dollar homes and cars, and no explanation for how they paid for it on a public servant’s salary. As you do.

It is not a great look when both the mayor and governor are wrapped up in foreign influence scandals, but it’s also not surprising, given our porous campaign finance laws, a judiciary determined to make bribery legal, and a political set who’s never met a foreign government they wouldn’t accept gifts and favors from.

Speaking of, it came out this week that Russia had been funneling millions of dollars to a network of right-wing YouTubers and influencers to put out pro-Trump and anti-Biden/Harris propaganda:

KALASHNIKOV, AFANASYEVA, Founder-1, and Founder-2 worked together to mask U.S. Company-1's true source of funding—i.e., RT—by falsely portraying to Commentator-1 and Commentator-2 that U.S. Company-1 was sponsored by a private investor named "Eduard Grigoriann." In truth and in fact, Grigoriann was a fictional persona.

The ‘Founders’ are the two right-wing operatives behind Tenet Media, and the ‘Commentators’ are YouTubers like Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, two prominent online MAGA voices. The Tenet founders claim they didn’t know the money was coming from the Russian government to spread propaganda, but that’s a tough sell:

On or about February 15, 2024, AFANASYEVA (as "Helena Shudra") shared with U.S. Company-1 a video of a well-known U.S. political commentator visiting a grocery store in Russia. AFANASYEV A posted the video in the Producer Discord Channel. Later that day, Producer-1 privately messaged Founder-2 on Discord: "They want me to post this" - referencing the video that AFANASYEVA had posted - but "it just feels like overt shilling." Founder-2 replied that Founder-1 "thinks we should put it out there." Producer-I acquiesced, responding, "alright I'll put it out tomorrow."

As of now, the DoJ has not charged Tenet’s founders, perhaps fearing backlash from Trump and his allies, but it’s a good reminder that whether it’s a mayor, a governor, or an online media company, foreign money and influence is just about everywhere in this country, because there are an endless number of people eager to accept it.

Assorted Characters

Elsewhere, it has been a bad couple weeks for some of our recurring batch of scumbags. RealPage was hit with a federal antitrust lawsuit in addition to the civil suits they were already defending themselves from, which increases the stakes for the embattled rent-fixing company. The DoJ has obtained reams of documents and has wide investigative power, which should make the folks at RealPage very nervous, given how open they were about their intentions. This comes amid government scrutiny of the price fixing tools hotels are using, but it’s notably the first enforcement action targeting algorithmic antitrust. Hopefully it’s nowhere near the last.

Remember Jacob Wohl? Last we talked about him, he had been convicted of fraud after running a ham-handed robocall scam during the 2022 midterms. Well! He and his bumbling partner Jack Burkman are back, running an ‘AI’ ‘lobbying’ firm out of DC. The whole thing is so extremely Wohlian:

In his role as a founder and CEO of the new firm, Wohl uses the name “Jay Klein,” according to the former employees and emails obtained by POLITICO. Burkman uses the pseudonym “Bill Sanders,” the former employees said.

Unfortunately for them, employees figured out the founders’ true identities and either quit or ran to the press with the information. Additionally, many of the ‘clients’ LobbyMatic claimed on their site and in screenshots had never heard of the firm.

Normally, we could laugh and wave off these two goons, but it’s worth remembering what they’ve tried to do over the years, successful or not:

Wohl and Burkman drew attention a few years ago by trying to frame multiple public figures, including former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and current Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, for sexual assaults. They conducted other outlandish smear campaigns, including hiring a woman to say that Anthony Fauci had assaulted her and allegedly stealing a USAID employee’s phone to send out tweets blasting the foreign aid agency as “anti-Christian.”

Among the conspiracy theories that Wohl has pushed include saying in 2020 that Biden had tested positive for Covid and would die in 30 days, that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had a relationship with a former Marine and that Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t eligible to run for president in the 2020 cycle.

Listen, it is a free country, and free speech laws do protect dumbasses like Wohl from telling lies on the Internet or whatever, but for every Wohl, there are many other, more competent actors (and YouTubers) seeking to spread dangerous conspiracies and disinfo among the American public.

Speaking of free speech, Elon Musk has antagonized a Brazilian judge to the point of getting Twitter banned in the country, one of its largest markets. All Elon had to do to comply with Brazilian law was have a legal representative in the country, and block seven right-wing accounts accused of breaking local laws - a thing he’s been more than happy to do for strongmen in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and India. Musk refused, then escalated the battle by posting about it, and now the Brazilian Supreme Court and the country’s president have dropped the hammer.

In response, Musk is using his personal and Twitter-created accounts to publish the Alexandre Files, a data dump of confidential court orders sent to the company by judge de Moraes, which surfaced private information about the right wing accounts in question, including their tax ID numbers. Musk is probably too dense to realize it, but by ordering his staff to publish this data and engaging in an aggressive disinfo campaign, he could open himself to liability beyond the US laws that protect social platforms against content created by their users.

In a move that US regulators should pay attention to, the judge also ordered assets of Musk’s other company Starlink frozen while he remains in violation of the order - SpaceX had originally refused to block Twitter on its satellite service, but capitulated when faced with having 23 of their datacenters seized by authorities.

This is perhaps the first time Musk has faced any sort of consequences for his petulance, and while the financial impact on his already cratering social media business will probably be minimal, it’s an embarrassing black eye and an important reminder that there are hundreds of other countries in the world not named the United States that don’t have to tolerate the shitty behavior of feckless rich guys.

Those countries should also pay close attention to the open threats against Brazilian government officials Musk is all too eager to spread and amplify on his platform - it’s an escalation in his disregard for the law, and one that could prove dangerous as he cozies up to authoritarian strongmen and dictators around the world.

Lastly, the CEO of Steward Health says he won’t testify before the Senate, because he’s worried it will make him look bad. Which, in a just society, should be the least of his worries.

Short Cons

AP - “A former deputy chief of staff to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul was charged Tuesday with acting as an undisclosed agent of the Chinese government, federal prosecutors revealed in a sprawling indictment.”

WSJ - “So far, Angermayer has helped Tether invest roughly $1.5 billion into two companies where he already holds stakes. He also earned commissions on some of the transactions. The companies they invested in have frequently lost money.”

Bloomberg - “Jonathan Braun, the loan shark freed from prison by former President Donald Trump, was arrested on charges of punching his wife and his 75-year-old father-in-law.”

Drop Site - “But as U.S. negotiators have worked to placate Netanyahu, the Israeli leader has waged a relentless two-month campaign aimed at thwarting a deal and Hamas has denounced the process and asserted that the U.S. framework it agreed to in early July should be respected.”

Inquirer - “The effort — which prosecutors say was run by a close ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin and colloquially referred to as “Doppleganger” — covertly targeted residents in swing states, including Pennsylvania, with misinformation made to look like it came from legitimate news sites or had been organically spread over social media.”