Lutnick is paid $250,000 a year as commerce secretary, and has a net worth in the $2-4 billion range.
I can guarantee that he has (A) never lived paycheck to paycheck, and (B) would raise an unholy stink if the government “forgot” his salary one month even though that $20K would be a mere drop in the bucket for him.
And I bet he’s committed far more fraud in his life than everyone dependent on social security checks combined.
Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the courage to brawl for the working class
Bernie Sanders is not running for president. But he is drawing larger crowds now than he did when he was campaigning for the White House.
The message has hardly changed. Nor has the messenger, with his shock of white hair and booming delivery. What’s different now, the senator says, is that his fears – a government captured by billionaires who exploit working people – have become an undeniable reality and people are angry.
“For years, I’ve talked about the concept of oligarchy as an abstraction,” Sanders, an independent who votes with Democrats and twice sought the party’s presidential nomination, said in an interview after a joint rally in Tempe, Arizona, with the New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Vermont senator recalled Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the three wealthiest people on the planet – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – were seated in front of his cabinet nominees in what many viewed as a shocking display of power and influence.
“You gotta be kind of blind not to understand that you have a government of the billionaire class, for the billionaire class, by the billionaire class,” he said. “And then, on top of all that, you’ve got Trump moving very rapidly toward an authoritarian form of society.”
Two months after Trump was sworn in for a second term, Democratic activists and an increasingly vocal chorus of voters say they are terrified, angry and desperate for leadership. In something of a third act, the 83-year-old democratic socialist is stepping in to fill the void.
But his aim is not only to revive the anti-Trump resistance movement – he wants a bottom-up overhaul of the American political system.
“It’s not just oligarchy that we are going to fight. It’s not just authoritarianism that we’re going to fight,” Sanders told an arena full of supporters at Arizona State University on Thursday night. “We will not accept a society today in which we have massive income and wealth inequality, where the very rich have never done better while working families are struggling to put food on the table.”
For weeks, voters have been showing up at town halls to vent their alarm and rage over the president’s aggressive power grabs and the Musk-led mass firings of federal workers. But they are also furious at the Democratic leadership, charging that the party that spent an entire election season warning of the threat Trump posed to American democracy, and yet now appeared either unable or unwilling to stand up to him.
At the rally in Tempe, several attendees demanded more defiance.
“Them just holding paddle boards up and staying quiet or wearing pink blazers is not enough,” said Alexandra Rodriguez, 20, of Mesa, referring to the Democrats’ acts of protest during Trump’s address to Congress earlier this month. “I think they do need to be willing to go to extremes.” …
Hell yes they do. A big reason Tramp had (and still has) so much support is because he’s “extreme.” He comes across, and is now acting like, the proverbial China-shop bull. If Dems acted more like that, they too would gain more support, and more than Tramp has, especially because as opposed to Tramp and Co., they’re not spouting a constant stream of lies. I mean, DUH!
(excerpt) On the side of a highway leading to some of the most coveted slopes in the world, in a parking lot covered in snow, a form of affordable housing has emerged.
Here in cars, trucks and vans, behind foggy windshields and zipped in sleeping bags, those who serve the vacationers who come to enjoy the snow tried to fall asleep on a recent night…
What Ms. Litchfield and the more than two dozen others sleeping in their vehicles that night really needed — the requirement for the right to sleep in the subzero cold in a landscape that looks like a snow globe — was a local pay stub.
As homelessness soars to the highest level on record, parking lots like this one have opened from coast to coast, offering a refuge to those who no longer have a house to sleep in, but still have a car.
“Affordable housing” ?!?
Right? What are they thinking, a car is waaaay more lux than a cardboard box.
/s
The local rich: “That would create a permanent solution that would only encourage nonessential lowlifes to invade our sacred space. Our domain can take on only a certain number of serfs and servants, thank you.”
today I learned about Devil Corps, which I have actually briefly worked for in the 90s
Beside the point I know, but that makes me wonder why Norway is (I’ve heard) so very expensive.
I don’t know, but perhaps for the same reason that Alaska is, again despite the oil wealth: you can’t grow or make most things in such a cold environment, so everything has to be brought great distances.
On the plus side, salty licorice and fermented fish is pretty cheap though, right?
The average price of a home in Britain is about half that of Australia (A$560,000; £270,000), while homes in Canada will, on average, set you back about A$763,000 (C$680,000), according to the Canadian Real Estate Association.
Canada is facing similar challenges to Australia, Dr Fotheringham said, but the UK is markedly different as it has more council estates and social housing in the mix.
I would have assumed that housing is more expensive in Britain, it being a smaller piece of land.
