Are the rich good for anything at all?

It used to be considered that the wealthy had some use because they would benefit society via philanthropy by supporting the arts, funding libraries, cultural centers, charities, and so on. It was a kind of trickle down mentality, that they would use some of their surplus wealth to benefit the broader community, if not out of a sense of altruism, at least to head off potential resentment and anger.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes in a review of a book by Italian historian Guido Alfani that the new billionaire class does not have the social function that they were once considered to have .and are now increasingly becoming seen as a menace as inequality increases.

In the past generation, the ranks of the super-rich have grown dramatically. Between 1990 and 2020, the number of billionaires in the U.S. increased ninefold. In China, the growth of the super-wealthy has been more explosive still: in a single year, between 2020 and 2021, that country’s billionaire count grew by sixty per cent. Private fortunes of this scale are fundamentally transnational and less moored to individual nations that might make demands of them.
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The courtroom sketch artists at the Trump trial

The trial of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) in New York does not allow live TV coverage of the proceedings and photographers have only been allowed to take photographs before the day’s proceedings begin. There have been complaints by the media that the public has a right to know what is going on in high-profile cases like this and that a live video feed should be allowed in the public interest.

While there would undoubtedly have been considerable interest (even though much of court proceedings are routine and boring), I am not convinced that allowing TV cameras and photographers is a good idea. A trial is not an event aimed at the general public. The only audience that matters are the jurors and the goal should be to give them the best experience of the case. When TV cameras are present, it might subtly distort that behavior of all the participants, and photographers vying for the best shot could also be distracting.
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Sunak’s puzzling election gamble

Many observers were taken by surprise at UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to dissolve parliament and hold general elections on July 4th. Elections were not due until January and he himself had repeatedly said that he wanted to wait until later in the year, which observers had interpreted as October or November. So why move things up suddenly?

The reason to hold elections early is either because things are looking very good for you right now or because you think things will get worse as time goes by. The former seems unlikely to be the reason since both the Conservative party and Sunak personally are polling badly, with the party over 20 points behind that of Labour. So it must mean that he felt things might get even worse. But it is not clear why he thought that. Furthermore, by calling for an early dissolution, he has shut the door to getting things passed in parliament that he had promised to do when taking up the position, giving him even fewer accomplishments to run on.
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The schisms in the Michigan GOP

In Sri Lankan politics, one of the tendencies was for parties to splinter and become increasingly fragmented. On the right end of the spectrum, the parties tended to split due to factions centered around individuals while on the left they tended to split along ideological lines, as factions argued that the party had failed some purity test on one or more issues. Once started on this road, further splintering occurred along new ideological fault lines, until there were many tiny leftwing parties that no longer had much influence on politics but engaged in squabbles among themselves. That left an opening for more extreme parties to fill the vacuum.

I was reminded of the latter when reading Andy Kroll’s deep dive for ProPublica into what is going on in Michigan, one of the key states that both Biden and serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) seek to win. It is a fascinating read for those who like to see how Republican politics plays out at the local level, with splintering occurring repeatedly. It is also worth following closely considering how important a role that state plays.
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Rishi Sunak’s election campaign gets off to a soggy start

The British prime minister announced that parliament will be dissolved next week and elections for a new parliament will be held on July 4th. This came as a bit of a surprise since it had been expected that he would hold off until later this year because his party is polling poorly at the moment and it was felt that more time was needed for things to improve.

As is the practice in the UK when the prime minister makes a major announcement like this, a small podium was placed outside his residence in Downing Street for him to speak. This is a quaint custom but risky in a country notorious for its rainy weather and while he was speaking there was a heavy downpour that soaked him and everyone present who did not have an umbrella. Added to that was the loud presence of perennial troller Stephen Bray who blasted out loud music from his portable device. When Boris Johnson announced his resignation, Bray blasted out Yakety Sax. Such things tend to take away from the gravitas of the situation.

Conservatives have been in power for 14 consecutive years and no doubt Labour is hoping to sweep them out, and even the Liberal Democrats are hoping to make gains at their expense.

The nice thing about UK election campaigns is that they are short, unlike in the US where they are pretty much a permanent feature of the political landscape.

As expected, Trump chickens out of testifying

Serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) said that he wanted to testify at his trial but that the gag order prevented him from doing so. That was false, of course, and after the judge told him so, he said that he would testify but few believed he would have the guts to open himself up to cross-examination.

Sure enough, the defense rested their case today without him testifying. The judge scheduled closing arguments for the coming Tuesday after which the case goes to the jury.

It will be interesting to see if SSAT gives any reason for not testifying.

A big legal win for consumers

Before she became a Massachusetts US senator and while she was still an academic, Elizabeth Warren proposed the creation of a watchdog government agency that would look after the interests of consumers when it came to financial matters. That agency, known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, became a reality in 2010 during the Obama administration in the teeth of fierce opposition from business interest and the Republican party.

The CFPB was meant to ensure that people would be treated fairly by “banks, credit unions, securities firms, payday lenders, mortgage-servicing operations, foreclosure relief services, debt collectors, and other financial companies”. In order to ensure greater independence, the legislation creating the CFPB required that it be funded through the Federal Reserve and not through annual Congressional appropriations, where it could be eliminated during the budgetary process.
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More evidence that Rudy Giuliani is an idiot

A grand jury in Arizona recommended indictments against Rudy Giuliani and 17 other people for their involvement in the fake electors scheme they concocted to try and overturn the 2020 election.

Among the defendants in the Arizona case are 11 Arizona Republicans who submitted a document to Congress falsely declaring that Trump won in Arizona in the 2020 presidential election — including a former state GOP chair, a 2022 US Senate candidate and two sitting state lawmakers. The other defendants are Mike Roman, who was Trump’s director of election day operations, and four attorneys accused of organizing an attempt to use fake documents to persuade Congress not to certify Biden’s victory: John Eastman, Christina Bobb, Boris Epshteyn and Jenna Ellis.

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Senator Robert Menendez must be really stupid

On The Daily Show, Jon Stewart looks at the corruption trial of New Jersey senator Robert Menendez and his wife Nadine on charges that in his capacity as a senator, he did favors for individuals in exchange for bribes. Officials who raised their home found gold bars and stacks of cash all over the place.

As Stewart says, this shows that Menendez is kind of stupid to indulge in this kind of cartoonish corruption when he could learn from his colleagues in Congress how to make much more money such as using their access to inside information to make highly profitable stock trades with no risk of being arrested.