"First, ignore billionaires when they threaten to take their marbles and go home. The big money always responds to threats of tax hikes, or even mere verbal criticism, by threatening to go all Ayn Rand and move to Galt’s Gulch. In reality, they won’t even move to Florida."

#EconomicElites #Mamdani #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge
/3

And as Will Bunch reminds us, the Epstein cover-up is part and parcel of this story of the overweening power and arrogant immunity of the grossly rich:

"I don’t know if the emails, so far, are enough to take down Trump, but the president should be even more worried — and he probably is —" (continued in /8)

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge #Epstein
/7

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/epstein-emails-trump-summers-elites-20251116.html

"It would be funny if it weren’t so perfectly tragic. The dopey-ist son of a fake billionaire (pre-crypto scams) turned fake president, who likes Gatsby parties and golden toilets, go on oligarch-tv to lecture the struggling masses about how easy it is to move half a billion dollars. While sipping Merlot."

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge
/6

"And now, we’ve arrived at the logical conclusion of all this—Eric Trump, the barking embodiment of dumb-son nepotism. A laughable lout with inherited intellectual necrosis and the empathy of a Terminator wrapped in designer smugness."

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge
/5

Pointing to Eric Trump as the "patron saint of the stupid rich," Cliff Schechter says,

"Hello Second Gilded Age.

An era where a reality-show President with the wit of a drunken walrus would actually fight in court to starve Americans. Yes, Trump argued in court that food our laws required him to give people—so they don’t die—should be denied. So they do."

#Trump #EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge
/4

https://www.blueamp.co/p/end-stage-democracy-has-a-mascot

"First, ignore billionaires when they threaten to take their marbles and go home. The big money always responds to threats of tax hikes, or even mere verbal criticism, by threatening to go all Ayn Rand and move to Galt’s Gulch. In reality, they won’t even move to Florida."

#EconomicElites #Mamdani #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge
/3

Paul Krugman features two headlines from a little more than a week apart re: the (empty) threats of the super-rich to leave New York City if Mamdani won the election:

"The reaction of plutocrats to the Mamdani campaign — histrionic freakout before the election, with promises to flee the city if he won, followed by a big 'never mind' when he did — can teach us a couple of things."

#EconomicElites #Mamdani #wealth #EconomicDisparity #SuperRich #GildedAge
/2

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-plutocrats-who-cried-commie

Paul Krugman features two headlines from a little more than a week apart re: the (empty) threats of the super-rich to leave New York City if Mamdani won the election:

"The reaction of plutocrats to the Mamdani campaign — histrionic freakout before the election, with promises to flee the city if he won, followed by a big 'never mind' when he did — can teach us a couple of things."

#EconomicElites #Mamdani #wealth #EconomicDisparity #SuperRich #GildedAge
/2

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-plutocrats-who-cried-commie

"Yesterday Arian Campo-Flores of the Wall Street Journal reported that the net worth of the top 0.1% of households in the U.S. reached $23.3 trillion this year, while the bottom 50% hold $4.2 trillion."

~ Heather Cox Richardson

#EconomicElites #wealth #EconomicDisparity #WealthDistribution #SuperRich #GildedAge
/1

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/november-16-2025-190

" #Epstein’s human trafficking organization depended entirely on the wealth management industry (WMI). It was how he obtained the capital to build it, and it was how he hid his activities from the authorities. And none of this was an abuse of the industry; it is precisely how the WMI is designed to work. Nor is it an abuse of the law, because both American and international law has been carefully designed to accomodate the WMI."

#USPol #Politics #Wealth #Capitalism

https://jacobin.com/2025/11/epstein-trafficking-law-taxes-capitalism

" #Epstein’s human trafficking organization depended entirely on the wealth management industry (WMI). It was how he obtained the capital to build it, and it was how he hid his activities from the authorities. And none of this was an abuse of the industry; it is precisely how the WMI is designed to work. Nor is it an abuse of the law, because both American and international law has been carefully designed to accomodate the WMI."

#USPol #Politics #Wealth #Capitalism

https://jacobin.com/2025/11/epstein-trafficking-law-taxes-capitalism