Americans love and cherish the Statue of Liberty. There's a difference between Donald Trump and Americans.

Someone might want to let Connor know the Federal Mediation Service is being closed by Trump. And tell those Starbucks workers to get back to work! They already earn above average wages and benefits for their industry.

It truly was shameful when enraged and entitled white mobs prevented first responders from saving Antonio Mays life. I wish his family the best in their lawsuit. I hate saying it, but Seattle's taxpayers must pay up for the pathetic cowardice displayed by their Mayor at the time.

Americans (who remember) greatly appreciate France's support during our Revolution. That being said, they can go straight to hell for asking for the Statue of Liberty back. Who does that? It's so declasse.

Hint for the Hamas supporters out there - don't travel back to the Middle East or you may find your Visa is subject to review and cancelation at any time. Smart policy.

As you eat your corned beef and cabbage, remind yourself that the American pharmaceutical companies all defected to Ireland and their 12.5% corporate tax rates. We should probably consider reducing our own corporate tax rates so we can get that business back.

"Seems bad: The US stock market lost over $5 trillion in value in just three weeks."

Why?

The Stranger has advocated for more wealth and income equality. The more wealth and income wiped out for the well-off the less inequality there will be.

@1: see @2. not so much.

Even criminals carrying a firearm illegally retain the civil right to self-defense with that weapon.

That does not mean they are immune from being convicted of other criminal acts not related to self-defense.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/man-acquitted-in-seattle-shootout-pleads-guilty-to-gun-drug-charges/

He is a killer, not a murderer. He is getting what is coming to him for crimes seperate from his non-criminal acts of killing.

@5 Who the fuck are you talking to? You are the definition of “old man yells at cloud.”

The secret sauce to an increase in ridership is frequent ridership? Tautology alert!

@2: “We should probably consider reducing our own corporate tax rates so we can get that business back.”

Wait, I thought the tariffs were going to bring all the businesses back? And also make the stock market go up? Hello? 😂🤣😂🤣

@6

ah,
that's
just Mr.
Magoo who
Lost his Glasses and
Don't know Where tf to find them

We
always
just Say
'ah, magoo
looks like you've
Stepped in it, yet Again!'

& move on

"Remember the teen killed during CHOP?"

Which one?

"A King County Superior Court judge sentenced 22-year-old Marcel L. Long to 14 years in prison for the shooting and killing of 19-year-old Lorenzo Anderson about three years ago inside the Capitol Hill Organized Protest (CHOP) area." (https://www.thestranger.com/news/2023/06/30/79059051/man-sentenced-to-14-years-in-prison-for-chop-killing)

My only question is: who will pay the freight charge to ship the statue of liberty?

@3 Wait... do you seriously think everyone who has stocks is... well off? There are a lot of retired people with money in the stock market and a whole lot of working people with stocks in their current company as well as plenty of middle class people who have stocks.

@3:

Apparently you haven't been in the workforce for a few decades or else you would have known that many average folks have a significant chunk of their retirement savings invested in the stock market. This isn't because they WANT it that way, but because corporations decided they'd rather pay a couple percent of their employees' salaries into a "defined contributions plan" (401-K), rather than into a "defined benefits plan" (pension). So, now anyone with a 401-K is seeing their potential retirement savings evaporate. The problem of course is that, even if the markets plunge into recession-level indices, the ultra-rich will STILL be ultra-rich, just somewhat less so, while the rest of us will be contemplating a future where we eat tinned cat food instead of fresh chicken, because that's all we can afford on what's left of our savings.

@10: this was the 2nd teen.

the one in a stolen jeep that had been shooting at the encampment in the park. when they came around for a 2nd pass someone in the camp 2nd amendmented the SUV, and so far, no one in the camp has snitched.

@14: Yes, we all know two teenagers had been killed in the CHOP. I was noting the Stranger’s implication that only one had been killed there.

@14: And in doing so convinced untold legions of interested observers that the oft-repeated promises of replacing the police with some kind of community-based enforcement body was a pipe dream, and the answer to the question "what do you envision replacing the police department after you've abolished it?" was "vigilante justice, with zero accountability, enforced by untrained trigger-happy True Believers."

@12, It’s even dumber than that: he thinks the stock market is isolated from the rest of the economy and investors are the only people who suffer when it crashes, when the wealthy not only suffer the least but stand to gain from the fire sale that follows. Market crashes don’t fix inequality, they accelerate it.

I think it is Social Security Administration, not Association.

@13, You wrote:

"So, now anyone with a 401-K is seeing their potential retirement savings evaporate."

Doesn't having more people without savings promote more equality as more people have the same absence of savings?

The Stranger's utopian world is one with perfect income and wealth equality. One way to do that is to ruin the economy equally for everyone.

In this case we are ruining the economy progressively. The more you rely on stocks or savings the more disproportionately you are hit. The Stranger should be cheering, consistent with their desire for income and wealth equality above all else.

Charles should be throwing a party.

WereBack dear, no company in their right mind would want to relocate to this country. The recent elections show that we're a nation of belligerent idiots, and now DOGE is attacking the university system, and the bible-addled nitwits are curtailing the medical schools.

An idiotic country may suit you, but normal people want nothing to do with it.

@18, Do you think the economy just crystallizes after the market crashes and everyone’s wealth stays put like we just wrapped up a game of monopoly? Or do you think people carry on buying, selling and trading? What do you think happens to the money that’s left on the table when the only people left standing are already super wealthy?

Sorry that’s for @19

Long story, I'll try to make it short: Once, I believe it was actually a Christmas Eve, I was in a hurry to punch out and go home. But I was a union steward and I had to make a quick trip to the office all the way across the shop floor & back.....a couple hundred yards. As I was leaving the Motor Vehicle office, the secy stopped me and asked if I wanted to take a ride on an airplane. The short version is she wanted to know if I wanted to get in on a Ponzi scheme. She didn't seem to know that's what it was so, though I was in a hurry, I stopped to try and explain to her what she was getting into......esp as this was a Federal Govt facility and participating in a Ponzi scheme could get you summarily fired. No grievance. No appeal. You're just gone. (That's one difference between eMail & Snail Mail: You steal eMail, you might get fired. You steal US Mail, you go to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200. That's also the difference between being a worker and a Trump: The workers get summarily fired for having ANY money business connected to ANY branch of the govt. It's in your training materials. But the bosses are the ones who enforce that rule so those humps can grift all they want & as long as they give their higher ups a taste, they're safe.)

Anyway, after trying to explain things to her for 15min that I didn't have, I could see the dollar signs in her eyes & I decided there was no help for her so I split to run my errand. But I was frustrated. There's just no help for an idiot or a drunk. You've got to just let them hit bottom so they can find out for themself. When I got to the union office I was fuming and I commented to another steward, "We're wasting out time trying to help people. We need to just let management screw the crap out of them until they learn." I didn't really mean that, but I was just pissed.

Come to find out days later, when the Ponzi scheme blew up and everyone was scrambling to give everyone back their money before they all got fired, it turned out that the office secy wasn't getting conned into the Ponzi scheme......SHE WAS RUNNING IT!!!!!!!!! How pissed do you think I was when I found THAT out?

The moral of this story is, how many children of the bumpkins need to die or get disfigured from the Measles rash before the rubes figure out that it's about a Million times more dangerous to forgo vaccines than it is to just take the shot? I don't wish any suffering on a child. But the parents.......
And how many children need to die or get disfigured before the bumpkins figure out that RFK Jr is vaccinating his own children while writing books about not getting your own children vaccinated? Talk about a warm place in hell being reserved for someone.

@2, "asking for the Statue of Liberty back. Who does that? It's so declasse."
.......More déclassé than being a Presidential asshole?
@3, Now that's just plain stupid. You think the rich will tip the plebes better when the rich lose money? See @12, 13. @17, thank you. @ 18, thank you.
@16, The line, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" is from the 1st or 2nd century and it was an old problem back then. There is no way to MAKE police (or politicians) honest: either they are or they are not.

"One way to do that is to ruin the economy equally for everyone."
God, I can't even fathom how stupid that is.
One of the best lines ever delivered by a movie politician was Travolta in Primary Colors: "Any fool can burn down a barn." (and it never applied more to anyone than it does to Trump.) (The meaning is, it's takes brains to build something.)
(This is all akin to why gambling is evil & should be illegal: When people start hoping to win the lotto as the solution to their financial needs....vacation, retirement, house, car.......the society is in the dumper, job wise.)
Financial equity doesn't come from using a bulldozer. It comes from recognition that hoarding money or obsession with money is a mental disease.
Probably the greatest period of prosperity in this nation was in the postwar boom 1950-1970. Even the level of union membership back then probably didn't matter as much as the fact that marginal (MARGINAL) tax rates were above 90%. That's what we need today. If you don't know what marginal rates are, look it up. Everyone paid the same tax on the first dollar. It was only the last dollar that was highly taxed. Do you think Musk, Bezos, Gates, Zuck care how much money they PERSONALLY have in the bank? Everything they do is related to or paid for by their businesses. They'd live the same, have the same perks, if their personal income was totally confiscated by a 100% tax. The only difference is that they couldn't use so much corporate money to buy elections. The whole problem with all that personal wealth is, esp people like Trump et al, is they believe their own press. They actually believe that they are that rich because they are that smart, or good, or famous, or whatever stupidity they have convinced themselves of. And because so much of what they have and so much of their corporate equity is personal, that's why people like Trump & Putin can threaten them personally. If it all belonged to 10 Million stockholders, they'd be more immune to threats.
Here's a suggestion that should illuminate this for you: If you need to lose a few pounds, how about if you jumped off the top of the Columbia Tower? That would help you splatter around a few pounds. A good thing, no? That's what you're suggesting.

Normally, I find Catalina Vel-DuRay to exercise unimpeachable good judgment. So it is with some trepidation that I feel compelled to respond to her comment @20 simply to say, DFTT.

Having gotten that off my chest, her comment does bring to mind one of the defining aspects of MAGA, the burning desire to purge our society of non-stupid people, dire economic consequences be damned. This brought back a vague recollection of the Cambodian genocide. And sure enough, I found this passage in the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide#Classicide

"The Khmer Rouge regime frequently arrested and executed anyone whom it suspected of having connections with the former Cambodian government along with anyone whom it suspected of having connections with foreign governments, as well as professionals, intellectuals, the Buddhist monkhood, and ethnic minorities. Even those people who were stereotypically thought of as having intellectual qualities, such as wearing glasses or speaking multiple languages, were executed out of fear that they would rebel against the Khmer Rouge.[89][better source needed] As a result, Pol Pot has been described as 'a genocidal tyrant' by journalists and historians such as William Branigin.[104] The British sociologist Martin Shaw described the Cambodian genocide as 'the purest genocide of the Cold War era'.[105] The attempt to purify Cambodian society along racial, social and political lines led to purges of Cambodia's previous military and political leadership, along with business leaders, journalists, students, doctors, and lawyers."

@6 TheTourGuide and @9 kristofarian (re @2 Baby Doofus and @3, @5, and @19 Mr. Magoo):
I am convinced that these two trolling idiots live deeply up inside Mu$k's Mein Trumpf's cavernous butt-KKKrack. How else would they have so much shit between their ears?
And yet they stupidly keep asking for it. 'Thank you, Mass-sewer! May I have another?' O, the butt-hurt!
MAGAts = the Elon Mu$k's Mein Trumpf University's own OMAGA Delta Fraternity of 2016, 2020, and 2025: Fat, drunk, and stupid. They'll be just as broke, homeless, and starving like everyone else when the world's economy crashes and burns. Retired economist Paul Krugman warned us consistently for the last ten years.
My prediction for 2026, if not sooner: The rest of this rapidly dying planet (including Vladimir Putin---he's THAT evil, but as usual MAGAts don't bother reading memos), including all nations who USED to be our global allies, will say 'fuck it' and aim all guns at US.

@9 kristofarian, @13 COMTE, and @20 Catalina Vel-DuRay: +3 For the WIN!!! :)

Thanks, Nathalie, for sharing two oh-so-appropriately spot on clips. Monty Python and U2 rock the house! :)

@24, Keep depressing asset values until they are zero. Then you have no wealth disparities. We will have arrived at The Stranger Utopia. Charles and commenters can have a party.

@24,

This ongoing quest of yours to accuse stranger writers as being guilty of ideological inconsistency or hypocrisy based on some ridiculous technicality is childishly fucking stupid. They ultimately, and incredibly obviously to anyone but the most childish of trolls, want the lowest and most traditionally marginalized factions of society to have equal access to basic necessities like housing and healthcare. And the most obvious and efficient manner by which to achieve this would be by reducing inequality and redistributing those excess funds to those most in need.

If you want to make the case that there's some superior method to achieve such an outcome have at it, but absolutely nobody benefits from a market crash and your suggestion that one would align with stranger writers ideologies is just stupid as fuck. You're utterly pathetic, get a life.

*ugh, meant for @27, obviously

@28,

"the most obvious and efficient manner by which to achieve this would be by reducing inequality and redistributing those excess funds to those most in need"

Take the 2 billion people on the planet living on less than $2 per day. Raise that to $10 per day by seizing all the net worth of all the world's billionaires. With that amount of money how many days could they get $8 per day given to them?

About 440 days. That's it. Then what do you do for those folks the day after the money runs out? What do you do with the now equally poor former billionaires?

Doing the math shows your statement to be false. You can't address the needs you admirably want addressed through redistribution.

You.can address it by providing education, skills training, access to capital, and access to markets for those 2 billion people.

The tragic thing about Trump's tariff tantrums (they aren't consistent enough to be a coherent policy) is that they will bar those 2 billion from access to markets where they can sell their skills and goods to rise from poverty.

We have raised over 2 billion other people out of extreme poverty in the last 25 years through free(er) trade. More people out of extreme poverty than at any point in history. Trump is bring that to end while The Stranger wines about middle class homeowners having more than people who rent and about people with second homes having more than people who have only one.

Fuck Trump and fuck the equality fascists who want to make everyone equal by making those above them equally poor without improving the standard of living of those at the bottom.

I've no real interest in delving into @30's math and trying to determine if planet earth generates enough wealth to meet the basic needs of it's inhabitants on an ongoing basis, though I will note that google suggests we had a collective net worth of 454 trillion dollars in 2022. Hell yeah, Earth! I bet if the Mariners had a $454 trillion payroll they could probably make the playoffs more often than once every quarter century.

@30 "You can't address the needs you admirably want addressed through redistribution. You can address it by providing education, skills training, access to capital, and access to markets for those 2 billion people"

You can't really think giving a person who makes $2 a day "access to markets" will do anything at all to better their circumstances. They may not have clean drinking water but if they save up for a year they can buy 0.000000000001 shares of a Bitcoin ETF!

@31 they would still limit their payroll. We only need to win 54%.

@31: "I've no real interest in delving into @30's math..."

How about you support your statement, which he quoted at the start of @30? Have you any real interest in that?

@32: 'You can't really think giving a person who makes $2 a day "access to markets"...'

No, he doesn't. That's why he clearly wrote, "...by providing education, skills training, access to capital, and access to markets..." The "access to capital" part addressed your specific issue. (He used the term "access to markets" solo to explain just one thing -- of many -- wrong with Trump's tariffs.)

"The Ugly American" does a great job of demonstrating, via a modern fairy tale, the difference between teaching skills, providing access to resources (including startup capital), and just giving people money. It's still worth a read, and you can even have a chuckle at the (severely) dated parts.

@28/32 Pop quiz, what happens to the price of something if you flood the market with an abundance of it? You think taxing Jeff Bezos for his wealth will magically translate into the same number? Unless your plan is to just take his stock and give it to all those people you want to help (which of course won't help them because they can't use stock to buy anything) then the minute you start to liquidate his wealth so you can redistribute it the stock price will plunge. You will never ever collect the amount of "wealth" that he actually has on paper because as the market has shown so far this year its not tangible until you sell it. Someday progressives really honestly need to learn the difference between wealth and income. One has tangible value and the other is a just a number on a piece of paper until you do something with it.

“You can't address the needs you admirably want addressed through redistribution”

The fuck you can’t. The GI bill was the greatest wealth redistribution program in the history of this country. It built the middle class and it was funded with top marginal tax rates that ranged from 70-90%. That money funded higher education, skills training, etc, because no one is giving those things away for free and the money to pay for it needed to come from somewhere.

reinvest in America
or take the
Skim?

A. defund
the irs.

@36 barth: +1 Amen.

@37 kristofarian: I'm all for defunding Elon Mu$k, its Mein Trumpf and Jackass Vance sock puppets, as well as the entire GOP crime syndicate. The best way to hurt these shitwipes is to make 'em into poor people.
Then true justice will finally be served.
Grab 'em by their fetid lil 'shrooms!

@36: “The GI bill was the greatest wealth redistribution program in the history of this country. It built the middle class and it was funded with top marginal tax rates that ranged from 70-90%.”

As American wealth redistribution programs go, the GI Bill doesn’t even crack the top ten. Nor was a top marginal tax rate of 70-90% necessary to fund the GI Bill.

America still has the GI Bill. In fact, today’s GI Bill is more generous than previous iterations, in that today’s GI Bill now includes a monthly housing stipend, paid in cash to the student-veteran, on top of the free in-state tuition that the GI Bill has always provided. (Here in Seattle, the monthly GI Bill cash stipend is $3,061 per student per month.) Today’s top marginal tax rate is something like 37%, yet even today’s lower tax rate is more than enough to fund today’s more-generous GI Bill.

So that must mean the American middle class is stronger than ever, right? lol, perhaps not. 😛 I think you are vastly overestimating not only the financial cost but also the social impact of the GI Bill. 😉

cressona dear, I think that it's very important to "feed" the trolls. Silence is acquiescence and lends tacit legitimacy.

I used to just write off Our Dear Werebackbaby as a bored and lonely person looking for attention, but I now think they are a naive young person who is perhaps in their Ayn Rand phase.

@40

feed them?
stuff them like
Sausages & have
'em for Breakfast.

@36: Thanks for demonstrating nicely the difference between public investment in education, and just giving people money. One leads to the production of much greater wealth in future, while the other just causes inflation. (As a political bonus, higher taxes for education are much harder to oppose than straight-up wealth redistribution.)

@35, You're right. Which is why, when the real one gets to be over $10Million, we need to tax it at a rate of 90+%. Otherwise the meglomaniac will take that excess, buy himself a few politicians, buy himself a few elections, buy himself a few supreme court judges, and screw up life for the 99.9% rest of us.

@36, GI Bill, Head Start, Social Security, SNAP, WPA, New Deal, War on Poverty, Great Society........whatever you want to call it, it works. It makes life better for 100% of the people. Even for the rich megalomaniacs.
Only allowing diseased minds to stuff their money in a mattress called Citibank makes things worse.

@40 Catalina Vel-DuRay and @41 kristofarian: +2 For the WIN!!!

@43

FUCKING
BRAVISSIMO.