AMERIKANA: Trump, Murdoch and Luigi Mangione

??? Trump: Person of the Year

?? Murdoch: Succession drama

?? CEO-killer: A hero

Good morning from Brookyln.

Three men – yes, they are all men – are making the headlines in the weeks before the holidays: Trump, Murdoch and Luigi Mangione? the presumed killer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

?? Donald Trump: Person of the Year

• Trump couldn’t be happier. After winning the election, he has not only been elected “Person of the year” by Time magazine – for the second time in his life. On Thursday he has also been allowed to ring the morning bell on Wall Street - for the first time in his life.

• And while he was ringing the bell next to his wife, his daughters and his vice president JD Vance part of the crowd shouted “USA, USA, USA”.
• The man of the people morphed into the man of Wall Street promising a booming economy. But the investors of Wall Street didn’t celebrate. They were worried about inflation.

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?? Rupert Murdoch: First setback in his succession drama

The Newscorp and Fox media patriarch Rupert Murdoch has suffered a first setback in his trying to secure the conservative leadership of his media empire.

Murdoch is in front of a court in Nevada, because he wants to change the terms of his family's trust to ensure that his conservative son Lachlan would be his successor upon his death. His other 3 older children are all more on the political leftish side and could change the leadership of the media empire, which controls among others Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and ?The Times” in the UK.

So far Murdoch hasn’t had much success: Nevada commissioner Edmund Gorman concluded in a decision that Rupert Murdoch and his eldest son, Lachlan, who is the head of Fox News parent Fox Corp and News Corp, had acted in "bad faith" in their effort to amend the irrevocable trust.

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??Luigi Mangione: The Robin Hood of the rejected patients

The American public is celebrating the CEO killer Luigi Mangione as a hero, which might be disturbing to watch

This shows just how frustrated Americans are with their health care systems. The US spend 16.6 per cent of their GDP for healthcare. And still millions are not covered. And even if they are they might not get the coverage they were expecting.

After the murder tens of thousands of United Healthcare clients shared their stories of rejected chemotherapies or ambulances for their children – some of them resulting in death. They did not feel compassion for the United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson who made 10 million dollar a year, who introduced AI to decide requests and had the highest rejection rate in the industry and who was under investigation for insider trading..

I myself am indirectly a client of United Healthcare. Just to give you an example: I had a pretty serious accident being run over by an E-Scooter and was stitched up in the Emergency Room of the hospital in August. I just got a call this morning from the hospital that United still hasn’t paid all the bills. Also the bills of my visit at the Urgent Care Center to have my stitches and staples removed from my head and another visit which found out that my big toe was broken have been rejected by United Healthcare (s. document above).

Luckily I have my German insurer who will hopefully take care of this.

Murder is never right. But the anger and frustration of millions of Americans are real.