Much of the generic drug market represents a classic case of market failure. Public manufacture has to be part of the response. www.axios.com/2026/07/01/c...

I helped draft the policy for the redesign and expansion of this program that then became Brandon Johnson's most popular campaign platform. What's happened since is a case study in how synergistic US police and public health norms maintain a deadly status quo. www.chicagotribune.com/2026/06/28/c...

Survey data indicate that a requirement to produce proof of citizenship at time of voting will disenfranchise more GOP voters than Dems. If Trump’s bill is implemented as written, it hurts Republicans. But I suspect the real goal is just to provide cover for manipulating results.

In the AI age, most financially valuable venture is that which destroys all other forms of value. Reduce all to money. When use-value is drowned by exchange-value, the trillionaires can appear to have everything and to disappear the fact of all that they lack.

From a purely financial point of view, among the best investment strategies today seems to be to identify which ventures are most destructive for the planet and society, and which are tied to the most corrupt oligarchs, and to put your money there. We’ll live in hell, but with good returns.

SpaceX is losing $4B per year. Those who bought the obscenely overvalued stock just transferred $75B into the hands of a Nazi billionaire using that money for AI ventures to exert control over public information and politics. Some major buyers did it as a quid pro quo with musk.

When simply saying that it is wrong for Israelis to rape and murder Palestinians constitutes “antisemitism” within the deeply antisemitic Zionist German state, statistics like this do not remotely reflect what they purport to document.

Opposition to normativity in social science is a normative position that serves those who benefit from the status quo. That such debates persist in university discourse reflects how much professional-managerial-class interest rides on protecting a vacuous concept of objectivity.

One can, on good scientific bases, criticize widespread use of SSRIs and many other psychiatric drugs, but until we collectively address the absence of public systems for non-medical social care that pushes so many people to seek such medications, little useful change will come.

Most of the actually important work in society, which has increasingly little overlap with what capitalism rewards, is not interesting work. Yes, cultivate interest, feeling, and curiosity, but that doing something is often boring does not mean you shouldn’t be doing it.

Relevant US facts: -Billionaire wealth grew over 25% this last year. -The 1% hold $55T, more than the bottom 90%. -Billionaire avg effective tax rate is ~5%. Want to run on a popular, common-sense platform? Try a 5% annual tax on wealth over $100M and 95% exit tax with 1-year retroactive force.

The 500 richest people on Earth got $366 billion richer yesterday, the single biggest jump ever. This is what a global economy rigged for billionaires looks like.

In US healthcare, caustic interpersonal dynamics and financial obstructions to access––not doctors' gaps in scientific knowledge—are the most significant factors undermining clinical relationships, trust, and outcomes. AI tools can't fix those realities, and likely make them worse.

A SECOND person died of exposure last winter after DHS dumped them in the middle of nowhere, miles from their home, without notifying their family.

Given the liberal claim that public health is not/should not be political, announcing data centers, gun violence, housing, etc. a “public health crisis" is often ultimately a reactionary attempt to depoliticize injustice and reframe it on technocratic, rather than democratic, grounds.

I suspect insurance companies will soon require AI-generated transcripts and audits of appointments. The doctors uncritically embracing AI for 'efficiency' (ie, more profit) may find they've just ushered in surveillance and subordination of both themselves and their patients.

In a remotely just world, the ICC would have issued arrest warrants for both Biden and Trump for complicity with war crimes perpetrated by Israel in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, etc. Both should be unable to leave US territory without being arrested.

AI scribes as 'remedy' to imposed medical documentary bloat over the last three decades saves, this study shows, almost no time while increasing throughput demands that match or exceed whatever little time is 'saved.' Who could have predicted this? jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Are psychiatric residency programs using AI scribes? If their faculty are, then trainees almost certainly are too, and I don't know which use case is more appalling. As if psychiatric training needed to condition its subjects to be any more dehumanized and dehumanizing than it already does.

If your psychiatrist or therapist uses an AI tool to listen to and document your sessions, find a new one.

If US universities are so terribly "leftist," why is it that the most powerful people in them––the trustees who are dictating governing policies to their chosen presidents and deans––all seem to be extremely wealthy capitalists?

Rather than allowing the far-right takeover of US universities to provoke a retreat from critical calls to "abolish the university" as many now consolidate around defending institutional norms, we should be redoubling abolitionist projects as their necessity becomes increasingly obvious.

The progressive withdrawal––amid the precaritization of academic life––of careerist incentives to attach one's thought to university norms and hierarchies could be a great boon for invention, critique, language, and real intellectual community unbound from university discourse and its myopia.

Fighting to save US universities as centers of critical thought is a nice idea, except––despite exceptions among individual scholars and rare groups––they've never been that. Fighting to build communal resources for critique beyond the university's reach seems more worthwhile.

The collapse of US universities as trustees enforce far-right, anti-critical politics underlines that doctoral students ought to extract as much time, money, and opportunity as possible from universities while taking care not to make one's sense of value or financial future dependent upon them.

As a psychiatrist, I would not recommend seeing a psychiatrist who you would not also trust as your psychotherapist. Most US psychiatrists—trained and incentivized primarily as diagnosticians and medication managers—are poor psychotherapists. But, as huge placebo effects...

There's much ongoing debate about long Covid. Not all of it is very useful for addressing suffering. A basic shared starting point toward use-value should be acknowledging what's now referred to as "long Covid" by various parties is often not a reference to the same thing.

The push to ostensibly "destigmatize" mental illness – and illness in general – by insisting on biological causes cut off from history, subjectivity, and difficult questions of collective or individual responsibility strikes me as one of the most pernicious arms of biomedical social engineering.

It's true that US physicians have been––and remain––a reactionary professional group that's fought for its own interests at the expense of the general welfare. It's also true that widespread dislike for doctors is now being used by right-wing populists to distract from government responsibility...

Wrote this long essay a year ago, and then put it aside to focus on finishing a book project... might now be time to return to it.

Ebola again spreads, and the disastrous white fantasy of apartheid intensifies yet further.

The US continues killing thousands in Cuba via economic warfare. The UN General Assembly has voted, every year since 1992, to condemn the embargo. In Oct 2024, it voted 187 to 2 — the US and Israel alone against the world in their devotion to murdering Cubans. www.counterpunch.org/2026/05/21/s...

Many psychiatric patients report that they weren’t warned of medication side effects. If your psychiatrist isn’t warning you in advance of signs of common side effects and reasons to consider stopping a medication, then you should get a new doctor. This is an elementary clinical responsibility.

The convergence of blonde blood and soil politics, popular media, and psychiatric survivorship that we are seeing play out in the US right now warrants many essays and books exploring its structural overdeterminations and historical precedents.

The uncontrolled current Ebola outbreak is a direct consequence of obscene levels of stupidity by RFK Jr and Bhattacharya, who should never have been appointed to their positions. They should be held accountable for the harm they have done and be immediately dismissed.

If you’re worried this would mean no more American billionaires, I assure you they’d be just fine. Their wealth has grown by about 13% each year on average over the last decade. They—as a class—would survive paying some taxes, unfortunately.

If the richest 1% of the US population paid a 5% annual wealth tax, it would generate more revenue than the $2.6 trillion currently brought in by all individual taxes. The US government could abolish federal income taxes tomorrow if it chose to do so—if it actually taxed the obscenely rich.

Ebola outbreaks today are a product of profound global inequalities and are caused most of all by the effects of colonial and now-ongoing-neocolonial economic violence. That should be front and center in journalistic coverage and epidemiologic discourse.

The media line that “there’s no treatment for this species of Ebola” is very misleading for general audiences because it naturalizes African deaths. There is no specific treatment, yes, but with the supportive treatment available in all rich countries, case fatality is near 0%.

The contrast between the number of media requests I got when rich people on a cruise were facing a deadly, but contained outbreak versus now that some of the poorest people in the world are facing a deadly and devastating epidemic is just so so stark and it just really annoys the hell out of me.

But how many have experience in investment banking or real estate – the real business of many elite US universities today.

"Only about 12 percent of trustees at American colleges & universities have professional experience in higher education. If it seems odd to imagine 88% of the directors at, say, investment banks having no particular expertise in investment banking, that is the situation in the field of higher ed."

We stop Ebola by building care systems and trust, not colonial “containment” without real care. In a US hospital, Bundibugyo expected case fatality with early presentation is about 0%. Case fatality in Sept 2025 Bundibugyo outbreak in DRC? 70%. That’s what neocolonialism does.

Reparations are in fact possible… for white oligarchs.

Ebola kills a small fraction of people who contract it—if they are provided proper supportive care like that which is available in US hospitals. The narrative of almost inevitable case fatality obscures the political realities behind how and why Africans are simply left to die for “containment.”

We stop Ebola by building care systems and trust, not colonial “containment” without real care. In a US hospital, Bundibugyo expected case fatality with early presentation is about 0%. Case fatality in Sept 2025 Bundibugyo outbreak in DRC? 70%. That’s what neocolonialism does.

Training—and legally compelling—clinicians to respond to any indication of suicidal thoughts or fantasies like police officers rather than listeners and caregivers has not been a very effective strategy for either cultivating trust and effective response or for preventing harm.

Want to address medicalization and overuse of psychiatric medications? Then you have to confront this structuring reality: Millions of people look to psychiatric medications in response to their suffering not because they believe they are likely to be the most effective remedy but because…

🧵Political economy is essential for understanding psychiatric politics and RFK’s agenda. About 99% of SSRI scripts filled in the US are now of generic meds with small profit margins. That’s not where the money is anymore. So, where is it? Follow Trump’s train of corruption and wellness profiteering.

For decades, the psychiatric survivor movement has done essential labor to protect people against psychiatric abuse and to provide real care via mutual aid. None of this means that it can't now abet violence against our most vulnerable neighbors by aligning with a fascist.