Panel awards $3.8m to ‘mom and pop’ investors whose risky investments tanked
Source: US news | The Guardian · Bias: Center Left
Summary
Florida investors featured in Guardian investigation claimed they lost most of their life savings after a financial adviser put their money into ‘alternative’ assetsIn a victory for everyday investors, arbitrators have awarded $3.8m to 13 Florida seniors who claimed a financial adviser squandered their retirement money by plowing it into risky investments.The award comes after the Guardian highlighted these investors’ losses as part of an investigation into dangers that so-called “mom and pop” investors face at a time when the Trump administration has thrown its support behind Wall Street’s efforts to sell them more higher-risk “alternative investments”. Continue reading...
Panel awards $3.8m to ‘mom and pop’ investors whose risky investments tanked
Center Left
Florida investors featured in Guardian investigation claimed they lost most of their life savings after a financial adviser put their money into ‘alternative’ assetsIn a victory for everyday investors, arbitrators have awarded $3.8m to 13 Florida seniors who claimed a financial adviser squandered their retirement money by plowing it into risky investments.The award comes after the Guardian highlighted these investors’ losses as part of an investigation into dangers that so-called “mom and pop” investors face at a time when the Trump administration has thrown its support behind Wall Street’s efforts to sell them more higher-risk “alternative investments”. Continue reading...
President Donald Trump is drawing a great deal of criticism from a combination of Democrats and Never Trump conservatives for mixing the federal government with his private business ventures — which, detractors say, is a blatant conflict of interest. And a CNN panel went off the rails on Thursday night when Trump supporter Ben Ferguson went out of his way to defend the president.Ferguson argued, "We have a president that was really wealthy when he came in, and keeps doing business with his family. There's nothing wrong with it."But host Abby Phillip and others on the panel pushed back against Ferguson's argument.Phillip told Ferguson, "You would have been fine with the so-called Biden crime family if Biden had just been transparent — if Hunter Biden had just been transparent? If he had just been transparent and said, 'I'm using my dad's name to make money,' you would have said, 'Totally above board?'"Ferguson, however, doubled down on his defense of Trump, saying that "Burisma was massive corruption" and insisting that Hunter Biden's business activities couldn't be compared to those of President Trump or his son Donald Trump Jr. Ferguson also mentioned stock trades made by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California). But when CNN's Bakari Sellers jump into, he argued that Ferguson was jumping through hoops to defend the Trumps while making a point of demonizing Democrats.Sellers told Ferguson, "You ask, what did he do that was unethical or illegal? And I wanted to answer that plain and simply. I take…. yoga, and I feel like you're doing a little yoga too for that pretzel that you got yourself into…. To utilize your phrase, the president makes $400,000 a year. This quarter, he's made over $1 billion — $1.2 to $1.4 billion — on crypto alone…. What I want to tell you that's unethical is the fact that when you make 3500 trades in one year, and you go up and you invest in a company, and then you sit in the Oval Office and you tell people, 'Wow, this company is great. This company is going to do X, Y, Z' or you ease regulations on this company and you trade and purchase stock in that company. That fundamentally is unethical. You can call it what you want."
The mother of a boy at the center of a landmark Supreme Court Decision is being blasted for an article she wrote that neglected to mention a shocking detail about her son.
The post Mom Neglects to Mention a Chilling Detail in Glowing Article About Her Trans Child, Who was at the Center of Landmark Supreme Court Case Involving Boys in Girls’ Sports appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
OpenAI may give the U.S. government a 5% stake in the company, per the Financial Times. The proposal is in very preliminary conversations, according to a person familiar with the matter.Why it matters: If the overture is taken up by the Trump administration, that would mean the government would have a vested interest in weighing whether or not to limit the release of an OpenAI model. Catch up quick: OpenAI views the potential government stake as a way to give the general public a share of the upside of AI, and CEO Sam Altman has previously shared with Axios his interest in some sort of public wealth fund.The goal is to include other AI labs giving over a similar stake.This could look like including shares in Trump accounts or some other vehicle that would give American households exposure to investments in AI, for example. Anthropic supported similar policies in a recent paper, arguing for "universal pre-distributive capital accounts" with "priority given" to those with jobs exposed to AI disruption. Zoom out: The potential investment comes as the White House is still deciding when OpenAI can release its most powerful models widely, through a regulatory process that Altman has said isn't quite "optimal." Altman proposed on Wednesday a U.S.-led international forum to establish AI regulatory standards, which could be a way to allow the government to invest without having as heavy a hand in regulation.Between the lines: Investors tell Axios that the idea of giving a stake reads like a PR stunt aimed at making it seem as if the public could benefit from the AI boom just as the technology threatens their jobs.Yes, but: The government's 9.9% stake in Intel, taken last August, appears to have paid off.Its shares are up nearly 400% since then, although it has also come amid a broad rally for chip stocks. Friction point: The Intel stake was acquired under the CHIPS Act. A deal with the AI labs would likely require an act of Congress.It's also unclear what a government stake would accomplish, other than giving the AI labs a closer relationship to what is currently one of their biggest hurdles: the government. An investor in Anthropic and OpenAI tells Axios that the proposal reads more like a "political move" to gain favor with the administration than something that would actually create a shared benefit for the American public. What they're saying: A government stake would be a "troubling milestone" that hurts competition between the labs, " David Sherman, AI and financial inclusion strategist at io.net, a decentralized cloud network, said via email.It "gives one AI company a government stamp of approval whilst millions of developers, researchers and businesses are locked out by skyrocketing token prices and endless GPU queues," he added, referencing the challenge in accessing AI at current costs or chips at current supply levels.It comes amid broader concern about whether the government is already curbing the competitive edge of U.S. AI labs compared with China by putting guardrails around model release timelines.And if the goal is to share the financial benefits of AI, there are other ways to do that. Some have suggested that AI companies share a percent of pre-tax income or that the government impose a tax on all tokens. Kevin Bankston, an AI governance advisor, wrote "JUST. TAX. THEM." on X.Bill Gates proposed an automated robot tax in 2017 that could slow down automation, suggesting they should be taxed the same way human employees pay income tax. The bottom line: "The labs develop the technology, but citizens and their elected representatives must make the rules," Altman wrote in the Financial Times earlier this week.
A stage panel plunged toward dancers rehearsing for President Donald Trump's Freedom 250 July 4th celebration on the National Mall, narrowly missing them.Video of the incident, posted to X at 3:18 PM Thursday by independent journalist Aaron Parnas, showed the panel falling from the arched stage structure as dozens of dancers performed below."The stage is falling apart at the rehearsal for Freedom 250's July 4th celebration," Parnas wrote."This is incredibly dangerous stuff," journalist Ryan Grim wrote on X."Trump cutting safety corners with stage building is the kind of thing somebody can genuinely be prosecuted for if someone dies," Grim added. Under criminal law, causing a death through reckless safety failures can result in prosecution even without intent to harm."This equipment is deadly when falling from those heights," he wrote.Since Freedom 250's Great American State Fair opened on the National Mall on June 25th, the event has been plagued by power outages that melted ice cream, a 110-foot Ferris wheel that repeatedly broke down, and plywood booth facades painted to look like marble columns, Forbes reported. Freedom 250 is a public-private partnership created by Trump to organize the nation's semiquincentennial celebrations, operating separately from America250, the nonpartisan organization Congress created for that purpose."MAJOR BREAKING: Trump's Freedom 250 stage collapses in the midst of a rehearsal for the July 4 performance," political commentator Brian Krassenstein wrote on X."People literally could have died," he added.Trump is scheduled to deliver a speech at the National Mall celebration at 9:45 PM on July 4th, two days away, according to WTOP.
A CNN panel had a good laugh as a GOP pundit twisted himself in a "pretzel" defending the Trump family.While discussing recent revelations about how much money Trump and his family made since returning to office last year, conservative podcaster Ben Ferguson had everyone around him in stitches.Ferguson, the host of "The Ben Ferguson Show," argued that the Trump family isn't corrupt for its involvement in billion-dollar ventures involving cryptocurrency and tungsten mining because they were engaged in "actual business."CNN anchor Abby Phillip, who described the Trump family as "real estate developers," shot back by asking, "What do the Trump sons know about mining rare earth minerals? What do the Trump sons know about robotics?"Ferguson's response was, "A lot, clearly, they made a lot of money off of it because they actually invest in it."The panel around him, which included political analyst and attorney Bakari Sellers, former Biden White House staffer Yemisi Egbewole, and former Bush White House official Ashley Davis, could be heard laughing together as Ferguson responded.Sellers chimed in by remarking, "I do hot yoga, and I feel like you're doing a little hot yoga too for that pretzel you got yourself in," which led to Egbewole and Davis laughing more."The president makes $400,000 a year," Sellers pointed out. "This quarter, he's made over $1 billion on crypto alone...that fundamentally is unethical. You can call it what you want."While Sellers mentioned Trump's presidential salary, Ferguson threw in one more defense: "he gives it all away," which also caused laughter around the table.
President Donald Trump’s corruption — from awarding no bid contracts to cronies to having his sons make tungsten mining deals with Kazakhstan — is so brazen that “he’s making everybody chumps,” according to a panel of experts.“I think it’s so unprecedented that our laws don't really contemplate a level of corruption at the presidential level like this,” Brendan Ballou, the former Special Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, Antitrust Division, told MS NOW anchor Nicolle Wallace on Wednesday. “So we really have to develop laws around unjust enrichment, civil RICO, and so forth, in order to be able to attack some of this stuff.”Ballou added that Trump’s corruption, in addition to occurring in plain sight, has had important consequences in terms of US policy.“You think about the picture of the new Qatari-gifted jet that he received — it's now Air Force One,” Ballou said. “Well, shortly after he received that gift, he made a unilateral security guarantee to Qatar. So it's entirely possible that American soldiers might fight and die in defense of a country that has gotten an enormous benefit shortly after giving a private jet to the President.”He added, “Similarly, you know, the UAE — so much of this money coming from crypto, they invested 500 million dollars in Trump's crypto business, a business that, as far as I can tell, provides no value whatsoever. But after investing half a billion dollars, Donald Trump approved the sale of 35,000 extremely rare, extremely expensive AI chips. So if you're wondering why the cost of technology, microchips, and computers in the United States is going up, in part you can potentially thank this investment from the UAE and what the President saw. So it's so unprecedented, to such an extent, that our legal infrastructure didn't even contemplate that this could occur.”Wallace then discussed a recent Wall Street Journal report that Trump earned $263 million connected to the sale of equity in his cryptocurrency business, World Liberty Financial. After the deal was signed, the UAE was granted access to tightly guarded American AI chips.“The challenge you've got here is: Donald Trump is presumably going to pardon himself on his last day in office, and we have a Supreme Court that is extraordinarily solicitous to this President,” Ballou told Wallace. “So we need to be figuring out — okay, how can we get justice, and how can we stop this stuff from happening while he's still in office? What we really need to be thinking about is: who are the people harmed by these extraordinary instances of corruption?”He continued, “If you are, for instance, an AI researcher who is now paying more for your chips because of the UAE's potential investment in World Liberty Financial, you need to be bringing a lawsuit to try to enjoin this, so that these people are not getting the fruits of their corrupt actions. And if we can stop people from getting the benefits of corruption, they're going to have fewer incentives to be corrupt in the first place — not Donald Trump, but the people trying to influence him.”Wallace then pointed out that, whereas Trump had scandals during his first term, during his second the scandals are bigger because they inflict economic pain on all Americans, including his own voters. She added that Trump’s indifference is evident by referring to a bipartisan affordable housing bill on Tuesday as a “yawn.”“The mechanisms of accountability — the Republican Party, the larger media apparatus, in this case Fox News and the right-wing echo chamber — his media apparatus, they're protection rackets,” Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, a nonprofit media watchdog, told Wallace. “They've basically said, ‘We're not going to just turn a blind eye here — we're going to actively make sure you don't face any accountability for this.’ The Republicans who have spent years complaining about Hunter Biden have said nothing. They don't talk about this. We know what it looks like when they're making noise about things that even whiff of corruption when it's in their political interest. But in this case, he is doing something so brazen, so explicit, so transactional, so corrupt that we can't even really paint a picture — we can't even come up with an evocative response to it, because it's on such an industrial scale. It's like thinking about the universe — it's hard to imagine because of how big it is — so we can't even get the right response out of people. And part of the mechanisms of accountability said, ‘You know, we're going to be a protection racket.’”Carusone added, “He is making everybody chumps. He's not just doing the corruption — he's doing it in such a brazen and explicit way, and he's not even sharing the wealth. A lot of people who do this at least share it with a couple of people close to them — the people participating in it.
Tragedy struck Senatobia, Mississippi, when police were called to Walmart for a shoplifting call. When police confronted a pair of adults, one allegedly drove a car toward the officers, who then shot at the car — killing 1-year-old Kohen Wiley.“They are arguing that they weren’t running their car into the police and there was no reason for the police to shoot into the car,” BlazeTV host Jason Whitlock says.However, regardless of what the truth is, Whitlock has found the mother’s reaction tragic as well.The mother, Vellesiya Wiley, posted photos of herself at the funeral, fanning out a stack of cash and holding a stuffed animal.“The mother looks like a child. That looks like a teenage mother. That looks anywhere from age 15 to 20 years old to me, is what this mother looks like. But this is at the funeral,” Whitlock says. “What are you doing?”“I have some sympathy because she’s a child, the mother seems to be. And so she’s reacting like a child,” he adds.Attorney Ben Crump didn’t waste time chiming in on the devastating news, writing in a post on X that he “will be commissioning an independent autopsy for baby Kohen Wiley because this family deserves the truth.”“We are calling on the Senatobia Police Department to release the body camera footage now. Kohen Wiley will never get the chance to grow up. His mother will carry this pain for the rest of her life. There must be full transparency and accountability in this case,” he continued. “Justice for baby Kohen!”“Ben Crump, the ambulance chaser. The illiterate ambulance chaser that barely has command of the English language,” Whitlock comments.“There doesn’t seem to be much disagreement. The child was shot. What’s the autopsy going to show?” he asks, before pointing out that regardless, “one of the major takeaways” should be, “Don’t use your child if you’re planning on committing any sort of crime.”“Don’t take your child with you if you’re planning on shoplifting. If you’re planning on doing anything illegal, leave your child with a babysitter at home. Don’t carry your child. And if you decide to get in your car and drive away as police try to detain you, really don’t have your child involved,” he continues.“But we’ve created a society and a mentality and a culture that says, ‘No, other people are responsible for my safety’ ... This is a toxic, poisonous, deadly mindset and culture that we’ve created that too many black people have fallen for,” he adds.Want more from Jason Whitlock?To enjoy more fearless conversations at the crossroads of culture, faith, sports, and comedy with Jason Whitlock, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
