Tax The Rich
Business Insider
Charles: Business Insider has provided the best summary of everything that is wrong about America right now by listing the net worths of ten billionaires spending the most to defeat the most sensible ballot measure of 2026, Proposition 40, better known as the California Billionaire text. Written by two law professors and an economist, who were inspired by data proving billionaires pay a lower tax rate than middle class families, it would impose a onetime tax of 5% on every Californian’s wealth in excess of $1 billion.
Not including their real estate.
Since $1 billion is easily ten times the amount any single human should be allowed to accumulate, the goals of the proposition could hardly be more modest. But the reaction of the billionaires to the possibility of losing 5 percent of their wealth is genuinely out of this world.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, worth $82 billion, has already spent an eye-popping $81 million to defeat the ballot measure. He and the other billionaires listed by Business Insider are worth at least $423 billion.
And there are 203 other California billionaires who didn’t even make Business Insider’s list.
Sergey Brin
So far eleven billionaires have invested $131 million to defeat the measure at the ballot box
That is more than flour times the $31 million raised on the other side by the bill’s sponsor SEIU United Healthcare Workers West (UHW)
Last spring the union collected 1.6 million signatures in support of the tax, nearly double the 874,641 required to qualify for the November ballot.
Naturally faux-populist Governor Gavin Newsom is a strong opponent of the measure. One day after it qualified for the state ballot the SEIU said it would abandon the 5% wealth tax if Newsom would support a very modest 2% levy passed by the state legislature.
Newsom quickly rejected that compromise.
The SEIU thinks the measure could raise as much as $100 billion for health care programs, food assistance and public education.
Rather than writing so many big checks, the billionaires might do more for their longevity by studying the Reign of Terror in France at the end of the 18th Century.
That’s when more than 1200 aristocrats preoccupied with their bank balances got the chance to personally lubricate French guillotines.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
Charles:THKR constantly bemoans the carnage caused by the absolute power of money in our time. My brother David Kaiser points out that Balzac was preoccupied with the same problem in his last great novel, La Cousine Bette, one hundred and ninety years ago:
Honoré de Balzac in 1848
“This is the law of society. The confessor, the judge, and lawyer would be helpless if the spirit of the state did not tame the human spirit. . .We, [doctors], we have the pleasure of a successful cure, just as you have the joy of saving a family from horrible hunger, misery and poverty by finding it work; but what solace is there for the judge, the police commissioner or the lawyer, who spend their lives searching among the most heinous conspiracies of ambition, that social monster that knows the pain of failure but never feels repentance?”
“Whence comes this great evil?” asked the baroness.
“From the lack of religion,” he replied, “and from the rule of finance, which is nothing but pure egotism. Money in other times was not everything, one recognized other things of greater value. There was nobility, talent, and service to the state; but today the law makes money a universal standard of value and the basis of political power! Certain magistrates are no long eligible for it, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would not be eligible! The endless division of inheritances forces everyone to think only of himself from the age of twenty onwards. And the need to make one’s fortune leads easily to depraved schemes, because the religious spirit is lacking in France, despite the efforts of those working for a Catholic restoration. That is the opinion of all those who, like me, see into the bowels of society.”
The Farage Gambit: Resign, Seek His Seat Again in By-Election
The Times
Nigel Farage makes momentous announcement about his political future
Scott: For years, Nigel Farage has been the Teflon man of British politics. Corruption allegations that would have brought down your run-of-the-mill Tory or Labour politician bounce off Farage without obvious harm. And in part this is for the reasons that Hannah Arendt put forth in her study The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): voters who support fascist or similar authoritarian political movements are heavily motivated by hate targeting groups they see as “other,” dreams of a glorious past that never actually existed, and have a very cynical view of modern democratic politics. They’re sure (without any evidence) that the moderate politicians who govern them are all extremely corrupt and motivated by personal greed and avarice. Hence allegations that their own political leaders are corrupt are viewed as a matter of indifference, or even, as Arendt notes, as a sign of how clever they are, understanding how to milk the system.
Facing a torrent of revelations about the sources of funds that he and his party subsist off, and lacking any meaningful push back, Farage has picked an interesting distraction technique. He will resign, and then stand again in the by-election for his solidly Reform constituency of Clacton. He expects of course to be re-elected, and indeed the Tories, Lib-Dems and Labour have already called the move a “sham” and said they will not field candidates. And he will argue on the basis of the vote that whatever wrongs he might have done have been approved by the voters. Audacious. If successful, it will be another body blow to British democratic norms.
Nigel Farage said: “I thought about it hard, and I’ve decided today, I will resign as a member of parliament for Clacton-on-Sea, thereby forcing a by-election”.
He said: “I’ve decided that the people of Clacton should be the judges of my actions.
“This will be a people versus the establishment by-election. It’s a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment to frankly tell them where to go, and that is why I will be putting my name forward to stand in this by-election.”
He said: “I will fight to win. I will fight to continue the political revolution that Reform has started, and I would say this to you, the voters of Clacton: if I win, you win, because if I lose, they win, and we will never, with the two old parties, get the type of fundamental change that we need to fix broken Britain.”
Nigel Farage’s decision to resign will not change the fact that the standards investigation into him can go ahead.
Parliamentary rules say that if a person ceases to be an MP the standards commissioner “will suspend their investigation until the member is re-elected”, meaning if Farage returns to the Commons it would restart. He could then face sanctions and even potentially a second by-election.
The commissioner can also continue the investigation and make conclusions over whether he broke the rules even if Farage loses, although in that scenario sanctions would not apply.
Knowledge is Power
Scott: I believe passionately that one of the really poor items in media coverage in the United States is science reporting.
I am routinely pulling things out from major science journals that are significant news in themselves but haven’t really been covered as news.
Try getting the news you need from Charles and me for two weeks.
Le Pen’s Embezzlement Conviction is Affirmed on Appeal, But the Way is Cleared for Her Run for President Next Year
Le Monde
Marine Le Pen exits the hearing room at the Paris Court of Appeals as a decision is handed down affirming her embezzlement conviction, but granting her the right to seek to be president just the same.
Scott: A plurality of American voters tapped Donald Trump to be president notwithstanding a series of fraud judgments against him, including 34 felony convictions and an adjudication that he had raped a woman (now upheld on appeal to the Supreme Court). And now a senior appellate court in France has defied expectations by holding that French voters will be entitled to make Marine Le Pen, a convicted embezzler of public funds, their president next year if they should choose to do so.
Marine Le Pen’s conviction of embezzlement was upheld on Tuesday, July 7, in the appeals trial over her party’s misuse of European Union funds intended for parliamentary assistants. She was sentenced to three years in prison, including two suspended and one to be served at home with an electronic bracelet, a 45-month ban on standing in elections, including 30 months suspended, and a fine of €100,000.The ruling marks the culmination of the Rassemblement National’s fraught relationship with the justice system since Le Pen took over the party from her father in 2011. Beyond this case, the past 15 years have seen a series of judicial investigations involving either the party or its leader. While the RN leadership has consistently accused the justice system of being weaponized for political purposes, the cases have led to several convictions and serious charges.
UPDATE: On Tuesday evening in Paris, Le Pen announced her candidacy for the French presidency next year and her intention to seek a further appeal of her embezzlement conviction.
Arriving at NATO Summit, Trump Announces His Admiration of Fellow Kleptocrats and Contempt for Democracies
Wall Street Journal
Trump deplanes in Ankara from his newly refurbished Qatari luxury liner, a personal gift to him, as Turkish Padișah Recep Tayyip Erdoğan waits on the tarmac below. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP
Scott: In the lead up to the NATO Ankara summit, we learned that Peter Hegseth planned to set the tone by announcing a massive draw down of US forces from European NATO bases, but White House staff and Marco Rubio, concerned about how Republican NATO supporters would react to this, put the kibosh on this initiative. But Trump has arrived with an array of bouquets and brickbats. Bouquets for Turkish leader Erdogan, who sits only one ped below Trump in the FT’s line up of living kleptocrats, and whose brutal imprisonment of democratic opponents fills Trump with inspiration—agreement for sales of a fleet of F-35s, notwithstanding the objection of Benjamin Netanyahu. Brickbats for Denmark for being obnoxiously successful as a wealthy, happy democracy, which refuses Trump’s demand that it gift to him the island of Greenland… insisting instead that this was a decision for the Greenlanders. NATO will surely survive Trump’s summitry, because it will be so incompetent, but he’s assuredly found a way to confuse things and make the NATO institutions weaker. That is why Europe, the UK and Canada are busily forging a NATO minus Trump in the background.
America’s allies are rushing to find workarounds and replacements for the bombers, warships and other forces the U.S. recently told other NATO members they could no longer rely on in a crisis.
But filling all the holes left by the American pullback—including midair refuelers that are in short supply and long-range strategic bombers that only the U.S. has—is proving challenging for the military alliance and risks leaving its European members, in particular, exposed to rising threats from Russia.
European leaders are set to take up the problem at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s planned annual summit in Ankara, Turkey, this week, where allied leaders will strive to maintain a veneer of unity despite divisions over the U.S. war with Iran and the Pentagon’s determination to shift assets to the Pacific.
“Do more, faster, together—we don’t have the luxury of time,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte told the summit in his opening speech Tuesday. “We need capabilities now to make sure we are ready.”
Moscow is pouring almost half of its national budget into its war machine, he added, and NATO must turbocharge its trans-Atlantic defense-industrial base in response.
“Europeans are already backfilling what the U.S. cannot any longer promise,” the secretary-general said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal ahead of the summit.
Trump and the FIFA Debacle
Financial Times
Donald Trump and Gianni Infantino, twins separated at birth? Photo: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post
Scott: The North American World Cup was conceived as an opportunity to showcase the ability of the three North American powers to work collectively to put on a good show. But for Trump that, of course, was a terrible idea. Canada needed to be his 51st state and Mexico was just a source of disease, drugs and nasty brownskinned people. The World Cup thus quickly morphed into a symbol of something else, something very Trumpian: namely the ability of Trump, through mob-style coercion, to achieve whatever he liked. Ed Luce recounts the latest chapter from this tale of moral hazard.
Call it the anti-Midas touch. Donald Trump loves gold. Yet so much of what he handles, from reflecting pools to US alliances, seems to turn into something else. His latest foray was into the Fifa World Cup. A tournament that was proving an unexpected success went sour after Trump called Fifa, which then overturned the one-game ban on America’s star player, Folarin Balogun. The US lost 4-1 to Belgium in any case.
Compared with his ceaseless drive to multiply his family’s wealth, and acts of war or peace, Trump’s Fifa intervention might qualify as a footnote. It is a fair bet, however, that it was among his most noticed actions on the global street.
Footballers are accustomed to debatable calls by referees. The last time a red card was overturned in a World Cup because of pressure from on high was in Chile in 1962, years before the birth of Fifa’s current president, Gianni Infantino. Trump is the first leader since Benito Mussolini in 1934 to intervene publicly in his team’s favour (then-fascist Italy was host and won the cup).
Global opinion has also taken note of Infantino, who is Trump’s world sports doppelgänger. An advocacy group has launched a class-action-style complaint against Fifa for breaking its own rules on staying politically neutral. The Swiss-Italian Fifa president turned up to Trump’s inauguration, rented offices in the New York Trump Tower, awarded him the first Fifa Peace Prize — having lobbied fruitlessly for Trump to win the Nobel — and has been involved with Trump’s Board of Peace. No other sports figure was invited. Infantino appeared at that body’s first meeting in a red Maga hat.
Their most prominent shared quality is a preference for autocrats and bad relations with more law-based societies. Just as Trump prefers dealing with family-run nations, especially in the Gulf, Infantino runs in similar circles. Trump was given a $400mn Boeing plane by Qatar. Infantino flies around the world on a plane supplied by the sheikhdom…
Trump has badly damaged US soft power. But to the rest of the world, this outrage is business as usual. America has always done what it can and smaller nations have suffered what they must.
NGC 6188: Dragons of Ara
Image Credit & Copyright: Rod Prazeres
Explanation: Where can you find dragons fighting in the night sky? In the southern constellation of the Altar: Ara. The dragons are, of course, actually made of suggestively shaped gas and dust. The celestial home of the mythological battling beasts is cataloged as NGC 6188 and located about 4,000 light years away near the edge of a large molecular cloud. Massive, young stars of the embedded Ara OB1 association were formed there only a few million years ago, sculpting the dark shapes and powering the nebular glow with stellar winds and intense ultraviolet radiation. Joining NGC 6188 on this cosmic canvas, visible toward the lower right, is unusual emission nebula NGC 6164, also created by one of the region’s massive stars. This impressively wide field picture, captured from Queensland, Australia, spans over 2 degrees (four full Moons).
Your Moment of Online Zen
The Ballad of Easy Rider
Easy Rider was produced by Peter Fonda, directed by Dennis Hopper and written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern.
It cost $400,000 to film plus $1 million for the rights for the soundtrack.
It grossed $60 million worldwide and changed the trajectory of the film business in the 1970’s.
It opened in New York City on July 14, 1969.
Its final scene and final song were the first and most prescient elegies for the ‘60’s.
But we didn’t know that then.
Fonda wanted Dylan to write its theme song, a fact I learned for the first time last night. Dylan said no, but then he scribbled this on a napkin:
“The river flows, it flows to the sea/Wherever that river goes, that’s where I want to be/Flow, river, flow.”
“Give this to [Roger] McGuinn,” said Dylan. He’ll know what to do with it.”
And Roger did.
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When Dylan saw a private screening of Easy Rider and realised that he had been credited as co-writer of the film’s theme song, he telephoned McGuinn and demanded that his name be removed from both the film’s closing credits and all subsequent releases of the song.[3