In one of Jerry Seinfeld's episodes, Elaine discovers that she's dating a communist, and she finds it "cool". Old stuff becomes "cool" after it is abandoned for a while, like vinyl records and CDs. I think communism is going to be found increasingly "cool" by the younger generation as the decades roll on and as crude savage capitalists keep amassing enormous wealth they have no need for.
The US is probably the only country in the world that doesn't offer some kind of affordable healthcare to its people. Ironically, Donald Dumb is now barking at insurance companies for playing the corrupt brokers between US citizens and their healthcare. What? I never thought I'd see a savage capitalist like Donald Dumb attack insurance companies, the backbone of the United Scams of America.
"Privatization" has been a hallmark of savage capitalist societies in which services, both public and private, are handed over by the government to private intermediaries. This is a legal standard operating procedure in the US, but theoretically illegal in places like Lebanon where capitalism is even more raw and crude and corrupt to the bone. In Lebanon, official public institutions ought to serve the public directly (as in a Socialist system), but official public institutions are corrupt by tradition, not by law. Which means that a clerk or a functionary at any public service institution will not process a transaction (say, issue a birth certificate) unless there is a broker who adds a bribe to the cost of the transaction, a bribe that he then splits with the public servant.
Which means that the overwhelming infestation by the private sector of public services is akin to legalizing corruption.
Adding a kink (broker, insurance) in the chain of public services provision, legal (US) or illegal (Lebanon) does employ millions of people who otherwise would be unemployed. But by siphoning off some of the money flowing between citizens and their providers, the system becomes more expensive. For instance, doctors in the US charge exorbitant fees (e.g. $500 a visit) when an insurance company is involved between the doctor and the patient. Without insurance being involved, the average cost for a primary care visit is about $150 to $300 depending on factors such as location or level of specialization. The difference is therefore pocketed by the insurance companies.
Which is acceptable in principle. But insurance companies favor the bottom line over the welfare of patients. They, at will and often using mysterious mathematical formulas to determine risk, and hence potential cost, will deny coverage - seemingly arbitrarily for this or that disease, treatment or operation - according to rules they themselves impose (with very little government oversight), rules that change capriciously every enrollment season. I literally have to read hundreds of fine print pages that insurance companies send me in fancy glossy paper every season to learn what they will or will not cover this coming year. Will they cover only left knees, but not right knees? Will they cover coughing but not sneezing? You don't need to read Franz Kafka to learn the meaning of absurdity: just live in the US for a few years.
I am mostly talking about health care insurance, but the "game" is the same played by ALL insurance companies that claim to protect you against fires, floods, earthquakes.... I can understand why insurance companies, like a grocery store owner, would carry this or that product or no longer offer it depending on the season to minimize risks. But healthcare is not chewing gum. Leaving such critical services as healthcare to the whims of financial markets and to the bottom lines of companies is unethical, even though I admit that a company can only function and operate properly if it at least breaks even. But companies are not just looking to break even, they want to make more and more profits.
Which raises the question of why doesn't the US, the richest country on earth, follow the example of much poorer countries and offer universal healthcare to its people, without necessarily eliminating the option of choosing private insurance coverage? Let the private sector compete with the public service: Isn't that the premise of a free market? President Obama and Hillary Clinton tried to have private health insurance compete with public health insurance on equal terms, but the barbarian republicans refused the idea and Obama managed to extract a few minor concessions in his Affordable Care Act.
The answer is, unfortunately, an ideological one: The US does not want to offer public health insurance because it is stuck in a 18th century vintage conservatism that it refuses to let go of. Just like it did with slavery. Just like it still does with religion. The phenomenon is very interesting: On one hand, the US is way ahead in technology (thanks largely to the immigrant brain import that keeps rejuvenating its innovative spirit, mostly along the East and West coasts), while it is way behind in primitive ultra-religious conservative capitalism (thanks largely to the largely illiterate European peasant-stock rural middle America). You see why the country is divided between Democrats (the urban progressive modern cultured and educated coasts) and Republicans (the rural conservative backward illeterate middle and south).
Young people in America are facing a huge challenge: Which of the two models above should they embrace?
The answer is straightforward. Given fast-pace technological revolutions, the much better access to information, better education, better and faster communications with the rest of the world, it is hard to imagine young Americans hanging on to a peasant-like mode of thinking. Progress is inevitable, inexorable, unavoidable. Like the stock market, it fluctuates with frequent up and downs, but in the end the trajectory is always upwards, forward.
Right now we are witnessing the painful Mort du Cygne (Death of the Swan) of conservative America that fails to recognize that trajectory. From dictator Donald Trump to Fascist Turning Point USA and all the white supremacist backwood survivalists in between, who wax nostalgic of Marty Stouffer's life in a log cabin out in the middle of nowhere, they are gasping and wheezing trying to breathe in a world that keeps rejecting them.
All economic systems do work, including capitalism and communism, as long as people play by rules that ensure fairness and justice. Capitalism implies blindly transferring the rules of biological darwinism to social and economic policies (which is ironic because fundamentalist capitalists often reject Darwinian evolution in favor of a loving creator whose teachings they violate). Communism is essentially the ideology of the 1st-4th-century Jewish sect known as Christians (share everything, do not pursue wealth, do not care fo the morrow...), but its implementation beginning late 19th century was marred by dictatorial repressive political regimes. In theory, communism is theoretically not mutually exclusive with basic personal freedoms.
Capitalism restrained by fairness, solidarity and justice rules becomes Socialism as it is practiced in various versions all around the world, including among America's allies in Europe. Communism that allows regulated free entreprise to thrive also becomes a form of Socialism, like in China. Could Socialism be in effect the compromise between raw crude capitalism and dictatorial communism?
The human species has been very successful in its evolution. It controls much of the earth and all the other species. But its unlimited demographic growth requires more and more abusive exploitation of the resources. In Malthusian terms, this is bound at some point to lead to a disaster of wars, diseases, famine, etc. the early signs of which we might be witnessing right now, particularly if the changing climate keeps changing to the worse.
Raw Communism is dead. Even China's Communist Party has turned soft-capitalist or socialist. Raw Capitalism is still alive in a few places like the US where it survives thanks to ideological ultra-religious dinosaurs known as "Republicans".
As artificial intelligence replaces people's jobs, as the human species keeps growing in numbers, where are all these people going to find jobs with which to live? One hundred years ago, raising children was qualitatively difficult but effectively and quantitatively simple: Have ten children, only three of whom survive who start working at an early age, who are not a burden on their parents and who don't need a smart phone, a car, a television in their room, fancy dance lessons or multiple expensive school activities, university costs.... Nowadays, having one child is a huge financially draining investment whose outcome is far from certain. Which is why young people are not marrying and are either delaying child-rearing or eliminating altogether from their plans.
Hence, government intervention - to the chagrin of neanderthal republicans - is more likely to increase significantly in the coming decades. Like all other nations, the US will be compelled to adopt more and more "socialist" policies: universal salaries, free health care, higher taxes, free education.... Maybe then, the US will start ranking at the top of the "happiest" peoples on earth. Right now, Americans are perhaps the angriest and more despondent, disgruntled and irritable people on earth. They are told they live in the "Greatest nation" with the "best healthcare system" and every other superlative you can slap on any measure of life, yet they look around them and find nothing in their daily lives that matches these qualifications. On the other hand, they see a handful of crude capitalist billionaires ruling them, screwing with them, profiting at the expense of their private information and data, and enjoying pedophilic tourist packages on remote fancy islands.
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Billionaire Peter Thiel warns if you ‘proletarianize the young people,’ don’t be surprised they end up communist
Jason Ma
Sun, November 9, 2025
Peter Thiel during a news conference in Tokyo, Japan, on Nov. 18, 2019. (Kiyoshi Ota—Bloomberg via Getty Images)
PayPal cofounder and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel doubled down on his worries about generational conflict and the future of capitalism after a similar warning he issued in 2020 proved eerily prescient.
After Tuesday night’s election victory of democratic socialist Zoran Mamdani as New York City’s mayor, an email Thiel sent five years ago went viral.
In the correspondence to Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen and others, he warned that “When 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why.”
Thiel expanded on those concerns in an interview with the Free Press that was published on Friday, saying strict zoning laws and construction limits have been good for boomers, who have seen their properties appreciate, but they have been terrible for millennials, who are having an extremely hard time buying homes.
“If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist,” he explained.
While Thiel, who backed Donald Trump’s re-election, disagrees with Mamdani’s answers to New York’s housing affordability problems, he credited the lawmaker for talking about the issue more than establishment figures have been.
He also said he’s not sure if young people are actually more in favor of socialism or if they have become more disillusioned with capitalism.
“So in some relative sense, they’re more socialist, even though I think it’s more just: ‘Capitalism doesn’t work for me. Or, this thing called capitalism is just an excuse for people ripping you off,'” Thiel added.
Affordability politics
While Mamdani’s victory highlighted voters’ shift away from Republicans, moderate Democrats also won with campaigns that focused on the cost of living.
The off-year election results were a “wake-up call” for both parties to tackle the affordability crisis, according to polling expert Frank Luntz, who distinguished it from inflation.
Thiel expressed some sympathy for voters seeking bold ideas to solve daunting problems like student debt and housing costs, which previously have been addressed with “tinkering at the margins.”
Such incremental attempts haven’t worked, spurring voters to warm up to proposals outside the typical political discourse, including “some very left-wing economics, socialist-type stuff,” Thiel said.
As a result, he’s not surprised that voters have gravitated toward Mamdani, even though he doesn’t think his ideas will work either.
“Capitalism is not working for a lot of people in New York City. It’s not working for young people,” Thiel said.
‘Old people’s socialism’
He also observed that the growing popularity of socialism among younger Americans comes amid a “multi-decade political bull market.”
This era of increased political intensity comes as people have started looking more to politics to fix their problems, according to Thiel, who leans more libertarian.
Part of that is due to a huge mismatch between people’s hopes and reality, with that chasm growing bigger than ever.
“There are some dimensions in which the millennials are better off than the boomers. There’s some ways our society has changed for the better,” Thiel said. “But the gap between the expectations the boomer parents had for their kids and what those kids actually were able to do is just extraordinary. I don’t think there’s ever been a generation where the gap has been as extreme as for the millennials.”
But when asked if a revolution is on the horizon, he said he thinks that’s hard to believe, given that communism and fascism are “youth movements.”
At the same time, America’s aging demographics are marked by fewer young people, who are not having as many children.
“And so, we have more of a gerontocracy. Which means that if the U.S. becomes socialist, it will be more of an old people’s socialism than a young people’s socialism, where it’s more about free healthcare or something like that,” Thiel added. “The word ‘revolution’ sounds pretty high testosterone and violent and youthful. And today, if it’s a revolution, it’s 70-something grandmothers.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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Trump team is secretly handing out massive tax breaks to wealthy American corporations: report
The Trump administration has been giving additional massive tax breaks to uber-wealthy corporations through under-the-radar notices, according to a report.
Through proposed regulations, the Treasury Department has offered tax relief to private equity firms, crypto companies, foreign real estate investors, and other large corporations, the New York Times first reported.
For example, in October, the IRS issued new proposed regulations that would provide breaks to foreign investors in U.S. real estate. In August, the IRS proposed a rollback of rules to prevent multinational corporations from dodging taxes by claiming duplicate losses in multiple countries.
The notices have not made headlines, but have been flagged by accounting and consulting firms.
“Treasury has clearly been enacting unlegislated tax cuts,” Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow at the think-tank American Enterprise Institute, told the Times. “Congress determines tax law. Treasury undermines this constitutional principle when it asserts more authority over the structure of the tax code than Congress provides it.”
The recent IRS tax notices tack on to the tax relief laid out in President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act, which included the extension of the so-called “Trump tax cuts” from 2017 that the Congressional Budget Office estimated would reduce tax revenue by $4 trillion in the next decade.
The Independent has contacted the Treasury Department for comment.
Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” provides more than $1.5 trillion in tax cuts for the top 5 percent of Americans, the Center for American Progress found.
The proposals target former President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which ensured profitable corporations paid a minimum tax to combat inflation and reduce the federal deficit. That law generally required corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to pay 15 percent of the adjusted financial statement income.
A 2022 study suggested that only about 80 corporations would be subjected to this requirement. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the act would bring in $200 billion in revenue over the course of a decade.
In September, the IRS released notices regarding the 2002 minimum tax, issuing interim guidance that allows corporations to “disregard gains and losses that are unrealized for regular tax purposes” on its holdings of digital assets when calculating its adjusted financial statement income.
Strategy Inc, a crypto firm, announced it “no longer expects to become subject to” the minimum tax in light of the interim guidance, the company said in a SEC filing. Also citing the September guidance, natural gas exporter Cheniere Energy announced last month it was entitled to a refund of the previously paid minimum tax; the refund is worth $380 million, the Times reported.
Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ would reduce tax revenue by $4 trillion in the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office found (Getty Images)
A Treasury Department spokesperson told the Times the proposed regulations were “a practical approach that supports American investment and competitiveness” and were meant to replace the Biden administration’s “compliance maze that would have buried taxpayers in red tape.”
However, some experts have expressed concerns that the Treasury’s proposals could be contributing billions to the federal deficit — and could be exceeding its authority, as Congress is responsible for enacting federal tax laws.
Proposing regulations through the Treasury rather than passing laws through Congress means “you can just give away the goodies to one group, without having to take back anything from another,” Daniel Hemel, a law professor at New York University, told the paper. It’s a route that “that previous administrations have exploited and which the Trump administration is exploiting more aggressively,” Hemel said.
Trump has recently leaned on his wealthy allies to fund a $300 million ballroom in the White House. Tech giants Amazon, Apple, Google, HP and Microsoft are among the corporations and donors chipping in to the project.
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