A grotesque amount of money for any one human to hold

I finished the book The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen. I didn’t realize until after I bought it that it’s a graphic novel. And it’s a beautiful one. The author and artist is the child of Vietnamese immigrants. The story is about Tiȇn, who is 13, and his mother Helen. He speaks mostly English and she speaks mostly Vietnamese and her name is the Anglicized version of her birth name. To help his mother learn English he reads fairy tales to her. The boy is gay, but doesn’t know the Vietnamese words to explain it to her. The first fairy tale featured in the story is Cinderella as told by German sources (which explains the images of Neuschwanstein Castle (the original on which Disney castles are modeled). Images here. The story isn’t exact, but does feature a beautiful woman attending a dance, meeting the prince, and leaving before he can know who she is. The second is a Vietnamese version of Cinderella in which the Stepmother is a lot nastier. Instead of a fairy godmother the story features a talking fish. The third fairy tale in Anderson’s Little Mermaid. Again the ending is changed. In all three the artwork is beautiful. The girls in the center of the stories are shown in wonderful gowns. I highly enjoyed and recommend it. At the end of the book the author says he sees the Little Mermaid story as an immigrant story. A person of one place tries to live in another place and doesn’t seem to fit. My Sunday viewing wasn’t a movie and wasn’t on Sunday. On Saturday evening I went to the Fisher Theater in Detroit to see lesbian comic Fortune Feimster. Her opening act was a gay guy with the last name Tower. I didn’t catch the first name. Both were quite funny, though definitely not PG, and I needed the laugh. Since both are queer, and their queerness is a part of their act, the audience was also quite queer. I very much enjoyed the evening. I’ve mentioned this before and Emily Singer of Daily Kos reported on the full story. Elon Musk, because of the initial public offering for his company SpaceX, is now a trillionaire, the world’s first.

That’s a grotesque amount of money for any one human to hold—made worse by the fact that it’s Musk, who has proven that he won’t use his fortune for good.

Some of the reasons Musk makes it worse: He has been spending big on Republicans. Through DOGE he has made government worse – less able to do the things Congress budgeted for and harming children and seniors. He destroyed USAID (US Agency for International Development), worsening health and hunger around the world. And he didn’t save the government any money.

Musk is a menace to society, and the fact that he’s now the world’s first trillionaire is a disgusting failure of public policy. “Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire,” Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote on X Friday. “The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk’s level of wealth. We need a wealth tax.”

Vyan of the Kos community discussed recent reports documenting the damage from Musk’s destroying USAID. Vyan suggests “Google ‘Deaths due to DOGE Cuts.’” The results, which Vyan quoted, looks like output from AI, though it does include links to specific articles. The current death toll is between 300,000 and 750,000 and is projected to “lead to more than 14 million additional preventable deaths by 2030, including over 4.5 million children under the age of five. That implies Musk, according to Vyan, is a mass murderer. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) proposed that a one-time 5% tax on Musk’s wealth would bring in enough money to fund “universal child care for every family.” That brought on a feud of words between Khanna and Musk with Musk hurling insults and Khanna referencing research. Vyan described Musk as “a perfect example of predatory capitalism.” Then he quoted a tweet from DogeDesigner:

USAID was a criminal organization that funded bioweapons, censorship & global coups with your tax dollars. It was never about helping the poor. It was a viper’s nest of radical-left corruption, waste, and anti-America operations.

The tweet then listed some places where USAID money supposedly went. I have no trust that any of those statements are true and dispute USAID was never about helping the poor – if it prevented millions of deaths it was very much about helping the poor. Musk threatened to sue Khanna for lying. Vyan tweeted, “Go ahead and sue; discovery will be an absolute bitch.” Also ABC News has verified Khanna’s claim. Tim Henderson, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos, discussed the current state of American inequality.

The richest 1% of Americans held nearly a third of the country’s total wealth at the end of 2025, the largest percentage the Federal Reserve Board has recorded since it started monitoring the numbers in 1989. In 1990, the share was 22.5%. The latest percentage, 31.9%, is likely the largest since the end of World War II, possibly heralding a return to the extreme wealth inequality of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it is likely to balloon further as a result of President Donald Trump’s tax cuts and other pro-business policies. Today’s top 1% consists of about 1.4 million households with at least $12 million in net worth, holding a total of $55.9 trillion in wealth. The bottom 50% consists of 67.7 million households with less than $264,000 in net worth.

Because of this inequality and the problems it brings a dozen states have passed or proposed new taxes on the wealthy. Californian has a one-time tax on billionaires on the November ballot. This year at least 12 billionaires have left the state and new wealth has created 23 more. Nationally,

The combined effects of the tariffs and the tax and spending law will help households with the top 10% of incomes most and hurt 70% of households between now and 2034, according to a June 1 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank that drew on information from the Budget Lab at Yale University.

The divide also affects views on inflation. The lower classes are hurt by it and the rich are unaffected. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, included a tweet by millesini that includes a half-minute video:

Albanians have begun to push construction crates downhill, in protest of the Kushner and Trump families’ plans to take over and island. Well done.

Kos community member xaxnar quoted from Timothy Snyder’s Substack about his discussion of “Utopias of Violence.” The opening:

The war in Iran began with a dream of violence. The question now is whether the nightmare that followed returns to the United States. The use of force does not magically lead to the outcome you want. You can think that firing some missiles and dropping some bombs will end Iran’s nuclear program, overturn its government, and lead to a victory that makes you feel grand about yourself; and then you can find that you no longer have any leverage over the nuclear program, that you have strengthened the power of the regime, and that you are paying hundreds of billions of dollars of reparations as the world draws conclusions from your capitulation.

Big proponents of the idea that might makes right and that the US military can’t lose are the nasty guy, the vice nasty, and the war nasty. Will they turn their violence on Americans? They tried it in Minnesota and it didn’t produce the results they wanted.

Trump, Hegseth, and Vance have not thus far shown themselves to be people who recognize basic social realities; they do not question their own utopias of violence, but only the motives of anyone who notes their folly. Just as they were overcome by strong feelings that violence would change Iran the way that they wanted, they will likely have strong feelings that violence in America will change America the way they want. This is very unlikely to be true; the utopianism, the faith in feelings, puts the republic in danger. But Trump and Hegseth (and Vance) are unlikely to see matters that way.

In the pundit roundup for Kos for last Wednesday Greg Dworkin quoted the International Crisis Group:

The war’s ambiguous end carries a clear lesson: wars of choice, launched based on inflated threats and wishful thinking, are far more likely to deepen than to solve the problems they purport to address. The specific lesson regarding Iran is also difficult to escape. After years of deploying every available coercive tool, from suffocating sanctions to military force, diplomacy remains the only approach that has delivered positive results. That reality argues for taking it more seriously this time round, not less.

Dworkin included a tweet from Politics and Poll Tracker with results from a CNN poll. As of May 27% of those polled said they were a Democrat, 26% said they were a Republican. They are quite evenly matched, likely within the margin of error. And 47% said they were independent. That’s almost half and the highest in a decade. The accompanying chart shows Independents showing a steady rise from 35% and Democrats showing a steady drop also from 35% starting about 2021. Republicans started their decline about 2022. Voters are disgusted that both parties are beholden to the rich and aren’t doing anything about why they are getting screwed. In last Sunday’s pundit roundup, down in the comments is a variation of a meme posted by exlrrp. I’ve mentioned several other variations. The original shows a woman walking down the street towards us. A man walking the other way turns to look at her. A second woman, presumably the man’s wife or date looks at him with annoyance. Each of the three people is named or described in some way. In this new variation the woman walking towards us is replaced by the supreme leader of Iran. The man doing the looking is the nasty guy. The one annoyed at his gaze is Netanyahu. Last week Thursday Singer reported on the state of the Reflecting Pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in the center of Washington. Barely a week after the pool was “repaired,” painted by a nasty guy crony, and refilled, it became green with algae. Hydrogen peroxide was poured in to get rid of the algae, though not enough to actually make a difference there, but it was enough to cause the new paint to peel in chunks and float to the surface. That disaster is bothering the nasty guy, who blamed the mess on vandals on the nasty guy. That line of attack was taken up by conservative commentators, such as Grant Stinchfield. That prompted Singer to respond:

Hey Grant, if Democrats were so powerful enough to cause the biggest algae bloom in years in the reflecting pool just hours after it was refilled, they wouldn’t have lost the 2024 election. The real reason the pool is once again green is science, as algae thrives in hot water. But I guess we shouldn’t expect a halfwit like you to understand that.

The water is hotter because the dark “American Flag blue” absorbs more heat than the bare concrete. Democrats are using this mess to say the nasty guy is spending all his time on disastrous vanity projects and not on the cost of living. Instead of draining the Washington swamp the nasty guy has made it worse. In the comments of today’s roundup David Michigan posted a tweet by Edwin Heathcote that shows the green water of the Reflecting Pool with the words, “I saw this referred to as the Strait of Warm Ooze. Very good.”