Democrats see Elon Musk's trillion dollar fortune as a problem to be taxed. They're missing the bigger picture.
Just as the 'poverty line' determines what's required for basic living, we need a 'wealth line' to show when extreme wealth becomes harmful, says economist and philosopher Ingrid Robeyns
As expected, President Trump’s White House UFC celebration sent liberals into meltdown mode, with the women of “The View” hysterically calling the event a “desecration” of the White House.“We are talking terminal cases of Trump derangement syndrome all across the country with the libs,” BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales says before playing a clip of the angry hosts.“I don’t know how MMA or cage fighting is emblematic of our country,” Sunny Hostin said to the rest of the panel. “I just don’t understand how that sort of reflects American culture.”“This doesn’t feel like a sport. This feels like you’re trying to show us who we’re supposed to be,” Whoopi Goldberg chimed in, before Ana Navarro added that it was evidence of the "continued desecration of the White House.”“They’re concerned about the desecration of the White House because they believe that the White House should be respected, is what I’m hearing,” Gonzales says, pointing out that under the Biden administration, they had no issues with Biden essentially turning the White House into a Pride flag.“You guys are prancing trannies around on the White House lawn. You want to talk about desecrating the White House? Give me a break,” she continues. “How about Joe Biden desecrating Easter Sunday, calling it Trans Visibility Day and hosting the event at the White House?”Gonzales illustrates her point with a clip of a transgender woman on the White House lawn, pulling down his shirt to flash his fake breasts to the camera.“That’s what happened on the White House lawn under Joe Biden’s tenure,” she says. “I’m not going to be lectured by these people. I’m not going to listen to these people claim that they care about desecration of the White House because it’s just such an esteemed place.”Want more from Sara Gonzales?To enjoy more of Sara's no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.
The SpaceX IPO has made him a trillionaire, for now. But he’s not ‘hoarding’ wealth.
As of next month, the U.S. will have made it 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but according to a new survey reported on by The Hill, a shockingly large portion of Americans have a grim prediction for how things will go over the next 250 years.Reporting Tuesday on the findings from a new Reuters/Ipsos poll surveying Americans about the state of the country and its future, The Hill noted that over a third of respondents, 38 percent, predicted that the U.S. will not survive to its 500th anniversary in 2276, instead suggesting that it will have broken up into multiple separate nations by then. The remaining 62 percent predicted that it would be able to endure.The pessimism was more acute for Democratic respondents, with 40 percent predicting that the U.S. would not survive another 250 years. Only 26 percent of Republicans chose the same answer."The poll comes amid heightened political tensions in the U.S., with multiple instances of political violence in the last few years and increasingly heated rhetoric," The Hill explainedThis fatal forecast comes on the heels of worsening political polarization in the U.S. over the last few decades, with opposite ends of the American political spectrum holding views that are increasingly incompatible with each other. This has lead to some grim predictions for the nation's future, with some suggesting that a new civil war is imminent, and others suggesting that it will inevitably "balkanize" into two or more separate countries. Former GOP congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has been among the most prominent proponents of the latter idea, repeatedly suggesting over the years that a "national divorce" is necessary. The rest of the findings from the Reuters/Ipsos poll did little to suggest that Americans have much confidence in the health of the country overall."The Reuters/Ipsos poll also found that 30 percent of respondents said the U.S. is the world’s best country, a decrease from 38 percent who thought so when asked in November 2017," The Hill detailed. "In the more recent survey, 48 percent said the country is among many excellent countries, 13 percent said the U.S. isn’t great in any way and 8 percent did not answer the question or were unsure."It continued: "In other recent polling, Americans have also expressed little faith in their country’s leadership and governmental structure. An early June poll from Quinnipiac University found more than half of Americans saying that the system of democracy was not working in their country. President Trump, a polarizing figure himself, was sitting at a 40.30 percent approval rating in a polling average from Decision Desk HQ on Tuesday morning, with his disapproval rating at 56.8 percent."
Green algae have proliferated amid warm weather after Lincoln Memorial pool renovation turning water greenDonald Trump’s $14.2m attempt to turn the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool from what the US president described as a “filthy” and “dirty” site into a “beautiful” monument has encountered a hitch.The water is green again. Continue reading...
Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman is in Belfast, where several days of racist riots have targeted immigrants and ethnic minorities with violence, threats and property destruction. It is the third consecutive summer of organized mob violence against immigrants in Northern Ireland, with roots in the extant paramilitary structures that remain there after decades of sectarian warfare. Our broadcast from the Northern Ireland capital features guests Sinéad Marmion, an immigration lawyer, and Patrick Corrigan, the Northern Ireland director of Amnesty International UK. Both were among the tens of thousands who attended a recent rally in Belfast condemning racism and standing in solidarity with immigrants. “The vast majority of people in Belfast, as across Northern Ireland, are antiracist and very welcoming to the people who have come here to make their lives from around the world,” says Corrigan. “We wanted to send, most importantly, a message to them, to say, 'You are welcome. This is your city. This is your home, just as much as it is ours.'” As mob violence drives residents from their homes and leaves many fearing for their lives, “it’s the community that has picked up the pieces. It’s women in the community, it’s migrant women in the community, that have organized and mobilized the response. And our authorities have been left wanting,” says Marmion. “We have political parties that are stoking the flames and encouraging what they call a 'legitimate concern on immigration,' … and the conversation, resultingly, is always toxic.”
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire last week, and now a prominent economist is warning that his unprecedented wealth poses a grave threat to human freedom in the US and across the globe.In a column published by The Guardian on Tuesday, Paris School of Economics professor Gabriel Zucman argued that Musk’s enormous fortune is fundamentally at odds with a democratic system of governance because it gives him “the power to stifle competition, the power to shape public discourse, the power to influence policymaking, the power to buy elections, the power to stall social progress,” and much else.Zucman noted that wealth concentration is even greater now than it was during the original Gilded Age, as the top 0.00001% now have fortunes large enough to “buy 14% of everything produced in a given year in the US.”The economist added that while Musk—whose infamous destruction of the US Agency for International Development is projected to kill millions of people in the coming years—makes a particularly compelling villain, trillionaires would be a major problem for democracy even if they were of a more benevolent variety.“No one should want to live in a society where one single individual can be worth $1 trillion, no matter their personal virtues,” Zucman emphasized. “Such levels invariably skew power, distort markets, and sap our democratic ideals.”The best solution to this crisis, Zucman said, is to “create an unavoidable minimum tax on their wealth” that will “make it impossible for the super-rich to pay less tax than middle-class workers—a matter of basic equality before the law.”“It is time to break decisively with the perverse logic in which retirees, the poor, or immigrants are expected to balance the budget,” Zucman concluded, “while the rich are to be allowed to live tax-free in their own parallel society. There cannot be a law more lenient for the rich and powerful than for the rest of us. If ever there was a time to act, it is now.”Zucman’s thoughts on extreme wealth and democracy were echoed by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who on Tuesday published an essay on his Substack page where he likened President Donald Trump’s White House cage-fighting matches to the kinds of spectacles put on by Roman emperors before noting ominous similarities between the US today and the Roman Empire.“While the causes of the decline of republican government and Rome’s eventual transition to one-man rule were doubtless complex,” Krugman wrote, “there is broad consensus among historians that a key factor was the emergence of extreme inequality. A handful of men became incredibly wealthy from the spoils of Rome’s eastern conquests, and their wealth and power eventually became too great for the rules of constitutional, republican government to contain. Sound uncomfortably familiar?”Gautam Mukunda, a professor at the Yale School of Management, similarly warned that Musk’s newly minted trillionaire status was bad news for American self-governance.In a Monday column published by Bloomberg, Mukunda pointed to the vast sums of money being spent by billionaires in US elections, which he noted “dwarf what candidates can raise themselves.”And like Krugman, Mukunda saw disturbing parallels between the US today and Ancient Rome.“Marcus Crassus was the richest man in ancient Rome,” he explained. “So rich that, by Plutarch’s account, he thought no man truly wealthy unless he could pay an army from his own purse. He spent that fortune bankrolling Julius Caesar and building the triumvirate that sidelined the Senate and, in fact if not in name, overthrew the republic.”
A judge dismissed a lawsuit from Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI accusing a rival of trying to steal trading secrets — three days after Musk became […]