In September 2024, The Trump Organization founded World Liberty Financial—a crypto company. The Trump boyz—Eric and Don Jr.—own 60 percent of it, with other owners including Zachary Folkman—CEO of Date Hotter Girls (no, I did not make that shit up) with connections to Tel Aviv and the Caymans; Chase Herro—former entrepreneur of marijuana and colon cleanses (didn’t make that shit up either); and Zack Witkoff—son of Trump’s US Special Envoy, a fantastically unqualified real estate developer named Steve Witkoff.
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Trump’s post-election team included Vice President J.D. Vance—a bitcoin bull, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy—who holds more than $1 million in cryptocurrency and stock in several crypto companies, and Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent—who has half a million in BlackRock crypto.
American politics makes a lot more sense when you realize that the GOP is afraid of pissing off the GOP base, and the Dems are afraid of pissing off the GOP base, but neither party is afraid of pissing off the Dem base.
One of the most profound, effective and pervasive sites of de-risking is the gig economy, in which workers are not guaranteed any wages. By paying workers on a piecework basis – where you are only paid if a customer appears and consumes some of your labor – bosses can shift the risks associated with bad marketing, bad planning, and bad pricing onto their workers.
The US is the most medicalized country on Earth. Incentivized by profit, it spends roughly twice as much per capita on healthcare as other high-income nations, while simultaneously excluding millions from it and suffering – across all income levels – from far higher rates of preventable disease, disability and death. At the same time, public health scholars have long argued that medicine alone cannot fix what ails us at a population level. Instead, much more attention and public investment must be directed towards non-medical social care that is essential for preventing disease, lowering preventable healthcare needs and costs, and enabling medical interventions to be effective.
(Source: bsky.app)
The US economy has become one big bet on AI. It’s not just that investment in AI has led to the the emergence of a bubble – it’s that the bubble is driving wealth inequality, and billions of dollars of conspicuous consumption. In other words, we’re living in a new gilded age.
Progressive Democrats have done this before. Faced with mass disaffection during the Great Depression, the New Deal didn’t simply promise technocratic fixes. It mobilized millions in collective work, providing them with public jobs to build tangible infrastructure coupled with an intangible–and invaluable–ethic of shared purpose. The genius of that era wasn’t only economic; it was aesthetic and affective. It transformed diffuse anger, fear, and desperation into shared construction rather than divisive destruction.
Klein wants liberal cultural virtues–mutual regard, generosity, a widened circle of belonging–without investing in the public systems and human infrastructures that make such virtues possible and durable. Community isn’t a sentiment; it’s a deliberately built social environment. It needs institutions–public health and social care, housing, childcare, schools, debt relief, neighborhood jobs–that give people time, stability, and proximity to be able to care for one another.
Negative reaction to Zohran Mamdani’s victory has been racist, ridiculous, pathetic, and at times utterly bizarre. It’s a measure of how deep psychosis runs in the American political mind. It would be easy to blame this on stupidity, and there’s plenty of that, but a fair number of comments suggest more twisted perspectives.
The liberal international order or Pax Americana, the world order built by the United States after the Second World War, is coming to an end. Not surprisingly, this has led to fears of disorder and chaos and, even worse, impending Chinese hegemony or Pax Sinica. Importantly, this mode of thinking that envisages the necessity of a dominant or hegemonic power underwriting global stability was developed by 20th-century US scholars of international relations, and is known as the hegemonic stability theory (HST).