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TRUMP’S BILLIONAIRES WILL ACCELERATE AMERICAN DECLINE.

DR. RICHARD WOLFF EXPLAINS HOW.

“The road we are on [as] a declining empire, becoming more and more unequal… you don’t need rocket science to understand that’s not sustainable. That situation is going to blow up, and it’s not going to be pretty.” JANUARY 28, 2025

TOPSHOT – Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gestures as he speaks during the inaugural parade inside Capitol One Arena, in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025. Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

There’s an old scene that comes to my mind to explain this. It’s in the cowboy movies we all saw when we were younger. It’s when the sheriff can’t prevent the bad guys from riding into town and robbing the bank. And there he looks. The useless sheriff didn’t stop it. So he says, with great bravado, round up the usual suspects. He wants to look like he’s tough because that’s better than looking like the failure he was.

**Stephen Janis: **That’s a really good point.

**Dr. Richard Wolff: **[Crosstalk] Trump has been the president before. Let me assure you, during his time as president, inequality in the United States, by all its measures, got worse. Now I don’t want to be unfair — They got worse under Biden too, and they got worse under Obama too, so he is not outstanding. But did he stop it? Not at all.

The tax cut that he gave in December of 2017, the first year of his office, was the worst blow to equality we could have had — Made the government bankrupt because it didn’t have all the revenue that corporations and the rich no longer had to pay. So the government had to borrow, growing the deficit. And who did it borrow from? The corporations and the rich. The money they didn’t have to pay in taxes, they turned around and lent to the government instead, which means we the people are on the hook to repay all that money plus interest because our leader, Mr. Trump, gave them that tax cut. Instead of being shamed, he goes around celebrating it. And we live in a country — And this scares me, this is what’s scares me —
https://therealnews.com/trumps-billionaires-will-accelerate-american-decline

Signal president rejects “mass surveillance” UK law | Fortune

Meredith Whittaker, president of encrypted chat service Signal, doubled down on her criticism of proposed British online safety legislation, calling the government’s plan to require a special back door to access encrypted messages “mathematically impossible” and vowing to exit the U.K. market if it becomes law.

“They would order us to implement it. We would not,” Whittaker said at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Deer Valley, Utah, this week.

In an on-stage conversation with Roy Bahat, the head of Bloomberg Beta, Whittaker said one of her primary missions is to prevent the dangerous trend of socially accepted surveillance.

(https://fortune.com/2023/07/13/signal-president-mass-surveillance-uk-law/)