He was the 30-year old Dutch historian who became a viral sensation at Davos by saying that the way to prosperity is not through philanthropy but with higher taxes, not something the attending oligarchs wanted to hear. He says that he had become irritated by all the billionaires at the meeting patting each other on the back for thinking they were improving the world by talking about “participation, justice, equality and transparency” but really they were deflecting attention away from the fact that they are a big part of the problem because of their tax avoidance that results in them not paying their fair share.
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It is incredible how much attention that billionaire former CEO of Starbucks Howard Schultz has got for his vanity project of running as an independent for president. He portrays himself as a ‘centrist’, the label that politicians like to adopt. These right-wing oligarchs like to use that term vaguely, to mean anyone who is not a far-right lunatic. Surely any normal definition of centrism would have some resemblance to supporting positions that the majority of people favor, such as Medicare for All, higher marginal tax rates on income and wealth, and living wages? He is vocally opposed to such measures..
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I came across this story about a white Detroit police officer Gary Steele who stopped a young black woman Ariel Moore, 24, because her car license tags had expired. He then had her car towed and forced her to walk home in the bitter cold that had gripped Detroit on Tuesday, all the while driving alongside her and filming her misery and posting it to his Instagram account.
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Whatever one might think about the merits of Donald Trump’s erratic claims of wanting to pull US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan, it has made the War Party that spans both Democrats and Republicans go into a tizzy. The Republican party and its leader Mitch McConnell have been slavish in their devotion to Donald Trump, refusing to defy him even during the shutdown votes and utterly unwilling to criticize him for pretty much anything, however outrageous. But they are willing to defy him on the troop withdrawals, showing that when it comes to supporting the war machine, the senate can act with unusual speed and bipartisanship.
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I wrote earlier how pleased I was to see a competition to find ways to raise taxes on the wealthy, that in addition to congresswoman Alexadria Ocasio-Cortez’s plan to raise the marginal income tax on incomes over $10 million to 70%, senator Elizabeth Warren proposed a tax on wealth in which a 2% annual tax would be levied on all household net worth above $50 million, with an additional 1% surtax for above $1 billion in income.
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A new report from ProPublica says that Purdue Pharma, a major manufacturer of opioids such as OxyContin that was founded by the Sackler family, aggressively marketed them in ways that led to addiction and is now also trying to profit from drugs that seek to combat addiction or reverse the effects of overdoses. In other words, they want to benefit both ways from addiction, first by causing it and then selling treatments for the problem that they continue to cause. This information came from a filing in a case against the company
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