Monday, April 04, 2022

News: April 4

२०७४ सालको मतका आधारमा हुने बाँडफाँड अस्वीकार्य : डा. भट्टराई पुराना दलहरुले चुनाव जितेर आफ्ना मान्छेलाई ठेक्का दिने र भ्रष्टाचार मात्रै गर्ने गरेकाले अबको चुनावमा जनताले विकल्प खोज्नुपर्ने बताए
मस्क बने ट्विटरको सबैभन्दा ठूलो सेयरहोल्डर टेस्लाका अर्बपति प्रमुख कार्यकारी र विश्वकै धनी व्यक्ति एलोन मस्कले ट्विटरमा झण्डै १० प्रतिशत सेयर किनेका छन् । ..... मस्कले सेयर खरिद गरेको समाचारले ट्विटरको सेयरको मूल्य आकाशिएको छ । ..... मस्क ट्विटरको सबैभन्दा ठूलो सेयर होल्डर बनेका छ्न् ।

Elon Musk becomes Twitter’s largest shareholder.

Mr. Musk is putting his money where he mouths off.

........ a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, the social media platform where he has over 80 million followers. The purchase appears to make Mr. Musk Twitter’s largest shareholder, ahead of the 8.8 percent stake owned by the mutual-fund company Vanguard and dwarfing the 2.3 percent stake of Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former chief executive. ....... Despite his penchant for sharing everything on Twitter — from business ideas, insults and memes to, this past weekend, his experience at a famed Berlin nightclub — Mr. Musk was uncharacteristically mum on the purchase of the company’s shares, at least initially. ....... a “decentralized” version of Twitter, one of Mr. Dorsey’s last pet projects at the company. ....... Under that effort, Twitter would shift online power into the hands of its users and challenge behemoths like Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram. Twitter is funding an independent effort to build a so-called open protocol for social media, weaving cryptocurrency into its app, and opening up to developers who want to build custom features for Twitter. ........ In the last two months of last year, Mr. Musk sold around $16 billion of Tesla stock, equivalent to roughly 10 percent of his stake in the electric vehicle company.



Twitter Wants to Reinvent Itself, by Merging the Old With the New The company is undertaking a far-reaching effort to change how it works. For some, it is an echo of their early idealism and a vision for what the internet could have been. ...... It is funding an independent effort to build a so-called open protocol for social media. It is also weaving cryptocurrency into its app, and opening up to developers who want to build custom features for Twitter. ......... Twitter executives now believe that decentralizing the social media service will radically shift online power, moving it into the hands of users, and pose a fundamental challenge to the walled gardens of companies like Facebook. ........ “If Bitcoin existed before Twitter existed, I think we’d see very different revenue models,” Jack Dorsey, a company co-founder who stepped down as its chief executive in November, said in a recent Twitter audio chat. “We wouldn’t be so dependent on ad revenue models.” ....... Twitter also faces some doubts from the communities it hopes to unite: slighted developers, web3 acolytes and enthusiasts for open-source software. ...... The impulse to build decentralized systems is rooted in the foundation of the internet, with open protocols like the one Mr. Cook envisioned for Twitter at the heart of everyday technologies like email. Twitter is looking back at how the company started and how it strayed, and it is trying to tap into that old idealism for a new kind of business. ........ Mr. Dorsey said he was drawn to decentralized technologies like Bitcoin because they reminded him of the ethos of the early internet. “It had the same sort of energy, it had the weirdness, it had the punk aspect of it,” Mr. Dorsey said in the Twitter audio chat. ......... The Bluesky project would eventually allow for the creation of new curation algorithms, which would show tweets at the top of users’ timelines that differed from what Twitter’s own algorithm showed. It would give users more choice about the kinds of content they saw, Mr. Dorsey said, and could allow Twitter to interoperate with other social media services. ...... The project caught the attention of engineers at Reddit, who had preliminary discussions with Twitter engineers about how their sites might someday interoperate ........

“The crypto community lives on Twitter”

........ Twitter’s expansion of its tipping feature, allowing users to pay one another in cash or Bitcoin ...... In December, conversations about NFTs made up 1.2 percent of the entire conversation on Twitter, a company spokeswoman said. Users sent more than 220 million tweets about NFTs in 2021, making them a larger conversation topic than movies, which generated about 207 million tweets. .



The Bluesky project would eventually allow for the creation of new curation algorithms, which would show tweets at the top of users’ timelines that differed from what Twitter’s own algorithm showed. It would give users more choice about the kinds of content they saw, Mr. Dorsey said, and could allow Twitter to interoperate with other social media services.

‘S.N.L.’ Spends a Night at the Oscars With Will Smith The comedian Jerrod Carmichael hosted this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live,” which found several ways to address the Academy Awards incident in which Will Smith slapped Chris Rock. ....... “Oh my God, we’re right next to Will Smith?” Mooney exclaimed. “I gotta tweet this.” He glanced at his phone: “And he’s trending,” he said as he suddenly became unnerved. ....... “He was like, I think you need to talk about it,” he said. “He said the nation needs to heal.” ........ Intelligence officials are saying that Vladimir Putin is being misinformed by advisers about how badly the Russian military is performing in Ukraine. Which is kind of like Will Smith’s agent telling him, “You crushed it at the Oscars.” Will Smith — for those of you that don’t know — walked onstage during the Academy Awards and slapped Chris Rock after he made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith. Which I think was a disgraceful act that sets a terrible precedent for having to defend your wife at awards shows. ............ Asked by Che whether he sided with Smith or Rock, Thompson affably responded, “You know me — I hate conflict.” He also claimed not to understand Rock’s reference to “G.I. Jane.” When it was explained to him that it was a movie from the 1990s, Thompson replied, “The ’90s? Oh, I don’t remember nothing from the ’90s.” .

Pretending the Pandemic Is Over Will Not Make It So . A new Omicron subvariant, BA.2, is driving up coronavirus case counts in Europe and Asia, and experts predict it soon will account for the majority of new cases in the United States. The impact is uncertain. ...... roughly one-third of Americans have not completed their initial round of vaccinations, and more than 70 percent have not received booster shots. ........ States have received more federal aid in the past two years than they know what to do with; some state coffers are overflowing. .

Putin Had No Clue How Many of Us Would Be Watching . Almost six weeks into the war between Russia and Ukraine, I’m beginning to wonder if this conflict isn’t our first true world war — much more than World War I or World War II ever was. In this war, which I think of as World War Wired, virtually everyone on the planet can either observe the fighting at a granular level, participate in some way or be affected economically — no matter where they live. ....... “the big battle” between the two most dominant political systems in the world today: free-market, “rule-of-law democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy” ....... a watershed in the conflict between democratic and undemocratic systems. It is worth recalling that World War II put an end to fascism, and that the Cold War put an end to orthodox communism, eventually even in China ....... While estimates vary, it appears that between three billion and four billion people on the planet — almost half — have a smartphone today, and although internet censorship remains a real problem, particularly in China, there are just so many more people able to peer deeply into so many more places. ...... Anyone with a smartphone and a credit card can aid strangers in Ukraine, through Airbnb, by just reserving a night at their home and not using it. Teenagers anywhere can create apps on Twitter to track Russian oligarchs and their yachts. And the encrypted instant messaging app Telegram — which was invented by two Russian-born techie brothers as a tool to communicate outside the Kremlin’s earshot — “has emerged as the go-to place for unfiltered live war updates for both Ukrainian refugees and increasingly isolated Russians alike,” NPR reported. And it’s run out of Dubai! .............. Ukraine’s government has been able to tap a whole new source of funding — raising more than $70 million worth of cryptocurrency from individuals around the world after appealing on social media for donations. And the Tesla billionaire Elon Musk activated his SpaceX company’s satellite broadband service in Ukraine to provide high-speed internet after a Ukrainian official tweeted at him for help from Russian efforts to disconnect Ukraine from the world . .......... Commercial U.S.-based satellite companies, like Maxar Technologies, have enabled anyone to view from space hundreds of desperate people lining up for food outside a supermarket in Mariupol — even though the Russians have the town surrounded on the ground and have banned any journalists from entering. ....... “a popular Twitter account named ‘Anonymous’ declared that the shadowy activist group was waging a ‘cyber war’ against Russia.” The account, which has more than 7.9 million global followers — almost eight times as many as Russia’s whole army (including some 500,000 new Anonymous followers since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) — “has claimed responsibility for disabling prominent Russian government, news and corporate websites and leaking data from entities such as Roskomnadzor, the federal agency responsible for censoring Russian media.” ......... Russia and Ukraine are key suppliers of wheat and fertilizer to the agricultural supply chains that now feed the world and that this war has disrupted. A war between just two countries in Europe has spiked the price of food for Brazilians, Indians and Africans. ......... These regimes have become adept at using new surveillance technologies to control political opponents and information flows and to manipulate their politics and state financial resources to keep themselves ensconced in power. We are talking about

Turkey, Myanmar, China, North Korea, Peru, Brazil, the Philippines, Hungary and several Arab states

. ........ Kyiv’s burning aspiration, though, was not to join NATO but to join the European Union ....... Putin was never going to let a Slavic Ukraine become a successful free-market democracy in the E.U. next door to his stagnating Slavic Russian kleptocracy. The contrast would have been intolerable for him, and that is why he is trying to erase Ukraine. .



Putin Is Losing in Ukraine. But He’s Winning in Russia. . a month of Ukrainian valor and Western support has dealt his ambitions a devastating blow. ........ Putin is not losing, however, in the battle for Russia. From the start of hostilities, the Western answer to his maximalist ambitions — not an official goal, but a hope that informs policy and punditry and slips out of Joe Biden’s lips in excited moments — has been regime change in the Kremlin, a failed war toppling Putin and bringing a more reasonable government to power. ......... This was always a thin hope, but despite military quagmire and unprecedented economic sanctions, it appears even thinner now. In polling and anecdote alike, Putin appears to be consolidating support from the Russian public, rallying a nation that feels itself to be as he portrays it — unjustly surrounded and besieged. ........

His approval ratings, according to Russia’s main independent pollster, look like George W. Bush’s after 9/11.

......... even in the wider circle of Russian elites, the war so far has reportedly generated more anti-Western solidarity than division. ........ Yes, failed wars sometimes bring down authoritarian regimes — like the Argentine junta after its misadventure in the Falkland Islands. But externally imposed sanctions, economic warfare, often end up strengthening the internal power of the targeted regime. In the short run, they supply an external scapegoat, an obvious enemy to blame for hardship instead of your own leaders. In the long run, the academic literature suggests, they may make states more repressive, less likely to democratize.......... The people suffer, the regime endures. ......... any leadership change is more likely to resemble Nicolás Maduro succeeding Hugo Chávez than it is the revolutions of 1989. ....... sustaining support for the Ukrainian military is our most important policy, with sanctions playing only a supporting role. ....... even absent open war, Russia will remain a generational enemy to peace in Europe and a generational threat to American interests ........ if we intend to make economic war on Russia for a generation, we should be cleareyed about the calculus. In the hopes of making a dangerous great power as weak as possible, we will make it more likely that Putinism rules for decades, and that Russia remains our deadly enemy for as long as anyone can reasonably foresee. .

Inside Putin’s circle — the real Russian elite As the west focuses on oligarchs, a far smaller group has its grip on true power in Moscow. Who are the siloviki — and what motivates them? ........ a remark by John Maynard Keynes about Georges Clemenceau, French prime minister during the first world war: that he was an utterly disillusioned individual who “had one illusion — France”. ........ Something similar could be said of Russia’s governing elite, and helps to explain the appallingly risky collective gamble they have taken by invading Ukraine. Ruthless, greedy and cynical they may be — but they are not cynical about the idea of Russian greatness . ........... In the time of President Boris Yeltsin, a small group of wealthy businessmen did indeed dominate the state, which they plundered in collaboration with senior officials. This group was, however, broken by Putin during his first years in power. ....... Three of the top seven “oligarchs” tried to defy Putin politically. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky were driven abroad, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed and then exiled. The others, and their numerous lesser equivalents, were allowed to keep their businesses within Russia in return for unconditional public subservience to Putin. ......... The force that broke the oligarchs was the former KGB, reorganised in its various successor services. Putin himself, of course, came from the KGB, and a large majority of the top elite under Putin are from the KGB or associated state backgrounds (though not the armed forces). ........ This group have remained remarkably stable and homogenous under Putin, and are (or used to be) close to him personally. Under his leadership, they have plundered their country (though unlike the previous oligarchs, they have kept most of their wealth within Russia) and have participated or acquiesced in his crimes, including the greatest of them all, the invasion of Ukraine. They have echoed both Putin’s vicious propaganda against Ukraine and his denunciations of western decadence. ........... Putin has said that at one stage he was reduced — while still a serving lieutenant colonel of the KGB — to moonlighting as a freelance taxi driver in order to supplement his income. ........ Putin and his top elite continue to see themselves in this light, as the backbone of Russia — though Putin, who is anything but a revolutionary, appears to identify much more strongly with the security elites of imperial Russia........ An interesting illustration of this comes from Union of Salvation (Soyuz Spaseniya, 2019), a film about the radical Decembrist revolt of 1825, made with the support of the Russian state. To the considerable shock of older Russian friends of mine who were brought up to revere the Decembrists, the heroes of this film are Tsar Nicholas I and the loyal imperial generals and bureaucrats who fought to preserve government and order against the rebels......... As Putin’s autocratic tendencies have grown, real power (as opposed to wealth) within the system has come to depend more and more on continual personal access to the president; and the number of those with such access has narrowed — especially since the Covid pandemic led to Putin’s drastic physical isolation — to a handful of close associates........ In his first years in power, Putin (who was a relatively junior KGB officer) could be regarded as “first among equals” in a top elite of friends and colleagues. No longer. Increasingly, even the siloviki have been publicly reduced to servants of the autocrat ........... These men are known in Russia as the “siloviki” — “men of force”, or perhaps even, in the Irish phrase, “hard men”. A clear line should be drawn between the siloviki and the wider Russian elites — large and very disparate and disunited congeries of top businessmen, senior officials outside the inner circle, leading media figures, top generals, patriotic intellectuals and the motley crew of local notables, placemen and fixers who make up the leadership of Putin’s United Russia party.......... If there is no peace agreement and the war drags on into a bloody stalemate, the economy declines precipitously and the Russian people see a steep fall in their living standards, then public unrest, state repression and state attempts to dragoon and exploit business will all inevitably increase radically, and so will the unhappiness of the wider elites.......... The Duma, or lower house of Russia’s parliament, was succinctly described to me by a Russian friend as “a compost heap full of assorted rotten vegetables”. ....... while the military will not itself move against Putin, it is also very unlikely to move to save him. ........ The siloviki, however, are so closely identified with Putin and the war that a change in the Russian regime would have to involve the departure of most from power, possibly in return for a promise that they would not be arrested and would retain their family’s wealth (this was the guarantee that Putin made with his predecessor Yeltsin)........... I think one reason [the siloviki] steal on such a scale is they see themselves as representatives of the state, and feel that to be poorer than a bunch of businessmen is a humiliation, even an insult to the state .. A senior former Soviet official .......... The siloviki have been accurately portrayed as deeply corrupt — but their corruption has special features. Patriotism is their ideology and the self-justification for their immense wealth. ........ “in Soviet days most of us were really quite happy with a dacha, a colour TV and access to special shops with some western goods, and holidays in Sochi. We were perfectly comfortable, and we only compared ourselves with the rest of the population, not with the western elites. ....... “Now today, of course, the siloviki like their western luxuries, but I don’t know if all this colossal wealth is making them happier or if money itself is the most important thing for them. I think one reason they steal on such a scale is that they see themselves as representatives of the state and they feel that to be any poorer than a bunch of businessmen would be a humiliation, even a sort of insult to the state. It used to be that official rank gave you top status. Now you have to have huge amounts of money too. That is what the 1990s did to Russian society.” .......... The disaster of the 1990s, in their view, embraced not just a catastrophic decline of the state and economy but socially destructive moral anarchy — and their reaction has been not unlike that of conservative American society to the 1960s or conservative German society to the 1920s. ....... In this, Putin and the siloviki have the sympathy of very large parts of the Russian population, who remain bitterly resentful — both at the way they were betrayed and plundered in the 1990s and what they perceive as the open contempt shown towards ordinary Russians by the liberal cultural elites of Moscow and St Petersburg. ........ One of the worst effects of this war is going to be deep and long-lasting Russian isolation from the west. I believe, however, that Putin and the siloviki (though not many in the wider elites) welcome this isolation. They are becoming impressed with the Chinese model: a tremendously dynamic economy, a disciplined society and a growing military superpower ruled over with iron control by a hereditary elite that combines huge wealth with deep patriotism, promoting the idea of China as a separate and superior civilisation. ........ Above all, for deep historical, cultural, professional and personal reasons, the siloviki and the Russian official elite in general are utterly, irrevocably committed to the idea of Russia as a great power and one pole of a multipolar world. If you do not believe in that, you are not part of the Russian establishment,

just as if you do not believe in US global primacy you are not part of the US foreign and security establishment.

........ Even otherwise calm and reasonable members of the Russian establishment have snarled with fury when I have dared to suggest in conversation that it might be better for Russia itself to let Ukraine go. They seem prepared, if necessary, to fight on ruthlessly for a long time, and at immense cost and risk to their regime, to prevent that happening. .



A Private War: Why PTSD Is Still Overlooked Experts say millions of people are affected by trauma, which has become a buzzword and a meme. So why aren’t more of them being treated? ......... When she returned home from the hospital, Ms. Méndez-Booth said she felt as though she had “arrived from Mars”; she got lost in her own apartment building. She oscillated between numbness, vivid paranoia — she worried the police would arrest her for her son’s death — and bursts of anger. Her kitchen cabinets became loose because she would bang the doors together, over and over, looking for a way to let out some of her rage. ........ “I would just think to myself, Who in their right mind experiences four different, incredibly intense mental states in the span of 15 minutes?” ........ She couldn’t differentiate between the past and the present; she kept flashing back to the delivery table. She thought she was experiencing a psychotic break, but later, she found out she was experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. ........ it is highly common for the disorder to go undetected. Pervasive misconceptions about who develops PTSD, and confusion over its complex cluster of symptoms, can prevent people with the disorder from seeking treatment — or realizing they have it at all. “You’re talking about millions” of people suffering from PTSD without a diagnosis ........ PTSD entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980 as an official diagnosis, in response to symptoms that Vietnam War veterans were exhibiting, and today, people in combat still report high rates of the disorder. ....... between 11 and 20 percent of veterans who served in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom have PTSD in a given year ........ The trauma most likely to cause PTSD is rape, with combat trauma as a “close second” ....... about 70 percent of adults in the U.S. experience at least one traumatic event ....... an experience “marked by a sense of horror, helplessness, serious injury or the threat of serious injury or death.” ....... But only 6 percent of the population will develop PTSD at some point in their lives ....... the bulk of whom are women ........ Intrusive thoughts hijacked her brain; she would go for a walk with her toddler and imagine a car slamming into both of them. When her husband didn’t pick up the phone, she imagined he had died. Everything seemed like a risk. The stress was so intense that her period stopped. ........ “Hearing I had PTSD — it felt like I didn’t earn it,” said Natalia Chung, 30, who was diagnosed with the disorder in 2016 after ending an abusive relationship. “Because I didn’t go to war,” she said. ......... Many people like Ms. Chung start therapy for PTSD only after years of struggling with the disorder, straining to navigate symptoms that, with earlier treatment, may never have developed in the first place. ........ Part of the reason people delay treatment is because “avoidance is the hallmark of PTSD” ....... The disorder hard-wires people to ignore reminders of trauma — they make their lives smaller and smaller to block out any evidence of what happened . ........ For Michelle DiMuria, 39, the splatter of rain against her window can trigger an episode. It was raining the day she was raped in 2015, and the weather tugs her brain back to the attack. She can’t stop picturing her attacker’s face. ........ She watches football and shouts at the screen, trying to find an outlet for the surges of aggression that sometimes come with PTSD. ....... Emotional fluctuation is typical for people with the disorder, Dr. Wright said. “They feel like they’re going crazy,” she said. “They don’t often identify it as PTSD until, ideally, a well-trained therapist says that this is actually a really normal response to an abnormal event.” ........ And the disorder is especially hard to treat because it is so often linked to other mental health concerns: addiction, depression, anxiety. Unless clinicians are specifically trained to ask about trauma, they might struggle to identify PTSD as the root issue in a patient......... and PTSD means more than wrestling with the aftermath of an upsetting event. ....... Traditional talk therapy isn’t the only treatment option, though. Prolonged exposure — a cognitive intervention that involves patients describing a traumatic event in precise detail — has been shown to ease PTSD symptoms in nine to 12 sessions. .

Thomas Piketty Thinks America Is Primed for Wealth Redistribution . returns on capital historically outstrip economic growth ..... The rich get richer, while the rest of us stay stuck in the mud. ....... his prescriptions for remedying our current corrosive wealth disparities. (In short:

Tax the rich.

) ...... We have become much more equal societies in terms of political equality, economic equality, social equality, as compared with 100 years ago, 200 years ago. This movement, which began with the French and U.S. revolutions, I think it is going to continue. ....... Of course there are structural factors that make it difficult: the system of political finance, the structure of media finance, the basic democratic institutions are less democratic than they should be. This makes things complicated. But it’s always been complicated. The Supreme Court for decades made it impossible to create a progressive income tax. They were fine with the racial segregation, but having a progressive income tax was unconstitutional. In the end, it took 20 years to change the Constitution, but then it happened and contributed to reduced inequality.1 ........... in 1990 there were 66 U.S. billionaires. Now there are more than 700 ........ Over the last 40 years or so, chief-executive pay is up more than 900 percent, even accounting for inflation. The average worker’s pay over the same period is up only 12 percent. ...... if you look at opinion polls about a billionaire tax in the U.S. — among Democratic and also Republican voters — you have huge approval ....... The lesson from history is that when the political system is rigged, at some point you have a reaction, you have a mobilization.......... Sweden until 1910, 1920 was one of the most unequal countries in the world, with a special sophistication in the way inequality was organized. ....... All wealth is collective by nature in the sense that it relies on the work of hundreds, thousands, millions of engineers, technicians, the accumulation of knowledge. Then, private property is a social construction that we invent in order to organize economic and social relations. It’s a very useful social invention as long as you keep under control how much you can accumulate, how much power you can concentrate, etc. But none of these assets are their assets. They are a product of a collective process. No one invented anything by himself or herself. ....... we have an institutional setup where you accumulate wealth by using public infrastructure, public education, the health system, and then once you have accumulated the wealth, you push a button and you transfer it somewhere else ........ the period of maximum prosperity of the U.S. economy in the middle of the century was a period where you had a top income-tax rate of 90 percent, 80 percent ........ income gaps of 1 to 100 or 1 to 200 are not necessary for growth. ........ The key reason the U.S. economy was so productive historically in the middle of the 20th century was because of a huge educational advance over Europe. In the 1950s, you have 90 percent of the young generation going to high school in the U.S. At the same time, it’s 20 to 30 percent in Germany, France, Britain, Japan. The story that Reagan tried to tell the country in the ’80s, which is basically forget about equality, the key to prosperity is to let the top become richer and richer — it doesn’t work. ........ the dominant ideology has been moving toward the view that we’ve gone too far in terms of market liberalization, in terms of globalization without regulation and the superrich getting richer. The problem is that we’re still stuck with institutions that were set up in the ’80s and ’90s in terms of limited tax progressivity, free capital flows without any common collective regulation ....... There are many dramas we associated with Trump, but part of the drama is that he has been able to tell the middle class and lower middle class, “Look, we are going to continue with tax dumping, but I’m going to protect you in another way by protecting you against Chinese and Mexicans, the Muslims.” He was able to be elected on an ideology where you don’t redistribute between the rich and the poor but rather you protect Americans, especially white male Americans, against anybody who looks foreign. The risk is that neoliberalism is replaced by this form of neo-nationalism in order to avoid redistribution. .......... The U.S. oligarchs have less control of the political system than the Putin clique in Russia, that’s for sure. ....... Many Russian oligarchs bought the right assets at the right time, resold it. This is business life. ......... To me, maybe the best comparison between the U.S. is not so much with Russia today but with Europe and the Belle Époque before 1914: a system which is nominally democratic but where the concentration of wealth is so high and lacking proper rules about political finance, political influence, that the democratic system is not enabled to have a common-sense reaction to this excessive level of inequality that, in the long run, is not good for U.S. prosperity. ............. when other countries get more educated than the U.S., then its economic leadership will be gone forever. U.S. economic leadership came from mass education, not from a small elite of billionaires. They have never been the source of U.S. prosperity, and they will never be. ........... the key in history is not the big catastrophes but the positive political construction of an alternative, and this process started with the French Revolution, the U.S. revolution. ...... I remember in 2014 having a public discussion with Elizabeth Warren in Boston. I was talking about a progressive wealth tax with a rate of 5 percent per year or 10 percent per year on billionaires. She looked at me like, Wow, that’s too much. Joe Biden today, a centrist Democrat — who voted for the Tax Reform Act of 1986 — is coming in with a wealth tax. Things can change pretty fast. .

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