It’s no secret that our media is almost entirely controlled by about half a dozen people, all of whom hate anyone and everyone who has ever clocked in for a shift at work. Most Americans already know this and feel the effects of it each and every day. And most also know that this fact has a huge bearing not only on how stories are presented and spun, but also on which stories are presented at all.

So it should surprise none of us that stories about Luigi Mangione have completely disappeared, and discussions about why he did what he did have disappeared as well.

And the “why” discussion is one that America really needs to confront.

That said, I’m not going to assume or simply state why I think Luigi Mangione allegedly shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. But why he did it, and why it is almost certainly going to happen again very soon … these are conversations we should have, and our corporate media is stealing them from us and inserting a Kardashian or a ballroom or a B-roll loop of a missile hitting a fishing boat to distract us.

Meanwhile, costs are going up, people are going broke, the recession is fully here for anyone who isn’t already independently wealthy, and all of it is getting monumentally worse by the hour. And the CEO class is responsible for all of it.

So rather than speculate, let’s talk about what we know. We know that roughly 68,000 people per year die simply because they cannot access healthcare in the wealthiest country in the history of history. And while healthcare insurance companies make money in a variety of ways, the single biggest driver of profit in the industry is the denial of care.

That’s right – the companies in charge of our health care make the most money when you and I have the least access to it. Denial is profit. Delay is more profit. Death is the absence of costs. All of these are windfalls for the industry, and they happen every day to people we know and love, and collectively, we sit by and let it happen.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s the actual business model. Collect revenue from insurance premiums, spend less than that amount when working people get sick, and keep the difference. That’s a very basic summary of a much more complex system, but it’s not inaccurate. Denial of care is the revenue generating cog in that system. Always has been.

And this is why the story must die, and why Luigi Mangione must simply be forgotten. If it were actually being covered in any meaningful way, certain questions would come up, questions that have knowable and obvious answers, but cannot be asked in public or else the system itself could come crashing down.

For example, we know denial of care is the model. We know denial of care causes mass death each and every day. And we know the people who make the decisions about who lives and dies are CEOs like Brian Thompson. So my question is: How many people did Brian Thompson kill before Luigi did what he did? And how many will die today because the next Brian Thompson is already in place and keeping the denial machine churning?

Who is the greater criminal – the man who kills one with a gun, or the man who kills thousands with a pen and a balance sheet?

Because one of these guys is in jail, and the other is probably on a yacht right now.

And you and I are not allowed to discuss it.

Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.

• Follow Brett on BlueSky by clicking HERE

• Send Brett an email by clicking HERE

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Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, and the Washington Post has spent months whining about the unbearable prospect of billionaires paying their fair share. The board’s go-to argument is that taxing the rich would “strangle America’s golden goose.” History and math both say that is propaganda.

We Have Already Run This Experiment

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More about Political Voices Network... It’s a big country, with lots of voices — and this is America’s audio and video platform representing them all. Political Voices Network is your source for all voices spanning the range of opinion in the political arena. Political Voices Network features some of political-talk’s most popular personalities, opinion-makers, and influencers – such as leading radio hosts Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, John Fugelsang, Glenn Kirschner, Julliana Forlano, Richard French Live, JoJo from Jerz, Tara Devlin and MORE. This is Political Voices Network, available at PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com.

Outside the Box with Ben Cominos” is a working class political show for the people that feel left behind by the 2-party system. Ben believes that we agree on 80% of the issues, but we are pitted against one another to prevent real change. The show’s about challenging mainstream narratives and finding common ground to unite communities for a common good.

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More about Political Voices Network... It’s a big country, with lots of voices — and this is America’s audio and video platform representing them all. Political Voices Network is your source for all voices spanning the range of opinion in the political arena.

Political Voices Network features some of political-talk’s most popular personalities, opinion-makers, and influencers – such as leading radio hosts Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, John Fugelsang, Glenn Kirschner, Julliana Forlano, Richard French Live, JoJo from Jerz and MORE.

This is Political Voices Network, available at PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com.

If you like what you see, and if you’re tired of the same old corporate talking heads feeding you corporate talking points, consider supporting independent media by subscribing to The Political Voices Network.

Funny, quirky, honest… Check out Stephanie Miller’s entire show on PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

More about Political Voices Network... It’s a big country, with lots of voices — and this is America’s audio and video platform representing them all. Political Voices Network is your source for all voices spanning the range of opinion in the political arena.

Political Voices Network features some of political-talk’s most popular personalities, opinion-makers, and influencers – such as leading radio hosts Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, John Fugelsang, Glenn Kirschner, Julliana Forlano, Richard French Live, JoJo from Jerz and MORE.

This is Political Voices Network, available at PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com.

If you like what you see, and if you’re tired of the same old corporate talking heads feeding you corporate talking points, consider supporting independent media by subscribing to The Political Voices Network.

But nobody’s talking about why he’s bringing the Presidential Fitness Test back, and why it was killed in the first place. Once you know why it was killed, this isn…

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Political Voices Network

It’s a big country, with lots of voices — PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com is America’s audio and video platform representing the entire range of popular personalities, opinion makers, and influencers.

Political Voices Network is the Exclusive home for Stephanie Miller on YouTube! Get Stephanie Miller’s take on the day’s news, events, and other noteworthy topics. Funny, quirky, honest… Check out Stephanie Miller’s entire show on PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com.

More about Political Voices Network... It’s a big country, with lots of voices — and this is America’s audio and video platform representing them all. Political Voices Network is your source for all voices spanning the range of opinion in the political arena. Political Voices Network features some of political-talk’s most popular personalities, opinion-makers, and influencers – such as leading radio hosts Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, John Fugelsang, Glenn Kirschner, Julliana Forlano, Richard French Live, JoJo from Jerz, Tara Devlin and MORE. This is Political Voices Network, available at PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com.

Outside the Box with Ben Cominos” is a working class political show for the people that feel left behind by the 2-party system. Ben believes that we agree on 80% of the issues, but we are pitted against one another to prevent real change. The show’s about challenging mainstream narratives and finding common ground to unite communities for a common good.

Subscribe now

More about Political Voices Network... It’s a big country, with lots of voices — and this is America’s audio and video platform representing them all. Political Voices Network is your source for all voices spanning the range of opinion in the political arena.

Political Voices Network features some of political-talk’s most popular personalities, opinion-makers, and influencers – such as leading radio hosts Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, John Fugelsang, Glenn Kirschner, Julliana Forlano, Richard French Live, JoJo from Jerz and MORE.

This is Political Voices Network, available at PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com.

If you like what you see, and if you’re tired of the same old corporate talking heads feeding you corporate talking points, consider supporting independent media by subscribing to The Political Voices Network.

Funny, quirky, honest… Check out Stephanie Miller’s entire show on PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

More about Political Voices Network... It’s a big country, with lots of voices — and this is America’s audio and video platform representing them all. Political Voices Network is your source for all voices spanning the range of opinion in the political arena.

Political Voices Network features some of political-talk’s most popular personalities, opinion-makers, and influencers – such as leading radio hosts Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, John Fugelsang, Glenn Kirschner, Julliana Forlano, Richard French Live, JoJo from Jerz and MORE.

This is Political Voices Network, available at PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com.

If you like what you see, and if you’re tired of the same old corporate talking heads feeding you corporate talking points, consider supporting independent media by subscribing to The Political Voices Network.

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Not a “disruptor,” not an “unconventional leader” — a clinical, malignant, sociopath whose only loyalty is to his own black hole of need and greed and whose only governing principle is whether something has his name on it in fourteen-foot letters.

Tara Devlin

Tara Devlin hosts the unapologetically liberal "Tarabuster" on the Progressive Voices app & Youtube. Liberals created America & made the working class the middle class. We have to save the Grand Experiment - again. We stick together we win!

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Ted Turner’s accomplishments are many, but he is perhaps best known as the flame throwing do-gooder who created cable news in the hopes that it would allow him a chance, quite literally, to save the world.

“Part of the reason America had so many problems, he believed, was because his fellow Americans were so ill-informed,” former CNN journalist Lisa Napoli wrote in “Up All Night,” a book about the creation of CNN.

“With a news channel, he could quite possibly help save the world.”

When I first heard that the founder of cable news passed, I couldn’t help but ask myself whether or not the creation of cable news itself could still be claimed as an accomplishment. After all, we spend much of our time here on PVN warning Americans about the perils of corporate media and the dangers of the never-ending news cycle. We have watched over the years as Ted’s creation has devolved from a truly inspirational attempt to inform the entire globe, into a cesspool of partisan hackery that has turned the 24-hour news cycle into a single hour of sensationalist slop repeated 24 times a day.

In the end, I settled on a simple solution to my dilemma. I decided that what we did to his creation, with our greed and our reality TV needs, that’s on us. Ted gave us something bold, something incredibly ambitious and risky, and something that was created as a tool to move America, and perhaps all of humanity forward. It was pure once, and Ted Turner gave us that.

So when everyone else in the business rushed to publish highlights and goodbyes in the hours after his death, I sat with my thoughts for a bit. Ted Turner’s death was not just the next news cycle to me; it was a time to reflect on the state of his creation and how far it has deviated from Turner’s original and aggressively noble intent.

In short, the tribute is a day late, but for all the right reasons. Now is perhaps the perfect time to jump off the informational gerbil wheel for a day and give some real thought to how we inform ourselves about the world around us, and how we can make a positive impact on that world.

It was pure once, if only for a moment, but it could be again. Ted Turner’s life, seen through this lens, is both a warning about greed and corporate power, and also an inspiration to the next media mavericks who may just be able to set things right again.

And when that happens, I want to be one of them. Just like Ted Turner.

Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.

• Follow Brett on BlueSky by clicking HERE

• Send Brett an email by clicking HERE

  This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Want more from Political Voices Network? Check us out on Substack!

Political Voices Network

It’s a big country, with lots of voices — PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com is America’s audio and video platform representing the entire range of popular personalities, opinion makers, and influencers.

Political Voices Network is the Exclusive home for Stephanie Miller on YouTube! Get Stephanie Miller’s take on the day’s news, events, and other noteworthy topics. Funny, quirky, honest… Check out Stephanie Miller’s entire show on PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com.

More about Political Voices Network... It’s a big country, with lots of voices — and this is America’s audio and video platform representing them all. Political Voices Network is your source for all voices spanning the range of opinion in the political arena. Political Voices Network features some of political-talk’s most popular personalities, opinion-makers, and influencers – such as leading radio hosts Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, John Fugelsang, Glenn Kirschner, Julliana Forlano, Richard French Live, JoJo from Jerz, Tara Devlin and MORE. This is Political Voices Network, available at PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com.

Outside the Box with Ben Cominos” is a working class political show for the people that feel left behind by the 2-party system. Ben believes that we agree on 80% of the issues, but we are pitted against one another to prevent real change. The show’s about challenging mainstream narratives and finding common ground to unite communities for a common good.

Subscribe now

More about Political Voices Network... It’s a big country, with lots of voices — and this is America’s audio and video platform representing them all. Political Voices Network is your source for all voices spanning the range of opinion in the political arena.

Political Voices Network features some of political-talk’s most popular personalities, opinion-makers, and influencers – such as leading radio hosts Stephanie Miller, Thom Hartmann, John Fugelsang, Glenn Kirschner, Julliana Forlano, Richard French Live, JoJo from Jerz and MORE.

This is Political Voices Network, available at PoliticalVoicesNetwork.com.

If you like what you see, and if you’re tired of the same old corporate talking heads feeding you corporate talking points, consider supporting independent media by subscribing to The Political Voices Network.