"of the more than $120 million in public funds funneled toward the anniversary celebrations, over $100 million has been "funneled" directly to projects, events and entities with ties to the Trump administration."
Trump and his team – including billionaire Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick – “won an agreement from the Kazakh leader to give a little-known American company access to one of the world’s largest untapped reserves of tungsten, a metal that the United States desperately needs for the production of missile warheads, fighter jets, computer chips and other critical goods.”
Ahead of the deal’s completion last September, according to the Times, the Trump administration “approved preliminary applications for as much as $1.6 billion in federal financing for the American company, now called Kaz Resources, which plans to break ground on the project in rural Kazakhstan.”
Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., along with Lutnick’s sons Brandon and Kyle, are poised to benefit from the project. “Within weeks of the St. Regis negotiations, investors with a firm called Dominari Securities, which is housed at Trump Tower in New York and partly owned by the president’s two eldest sons … joined with other partners to take a 20% stake in a corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project,”
"According to Buttigieg, a Michigan State Police officer and a child protective services worker came to his home after receiving an anonymous report alleging he posed a danger to his children. He said authorities arranged forensic interviews for his twins and instructed him not to be alone with them until the interviews were complete.
The following day, Buttigieg said investigators told him the anonymous caller claimed he had confessed years earlier to violent crimes during a chance meeting in Alabama. Buttigieg said he had never been to the town where the meeting allegedly occurred. He said police told him the allegation would not be referred to prosecutors, while Child Protective Services found nothing to substantiate the report."
“The world's richest centi-billionaire oligarch used his power to change the rules, so he could dump his garbage company (which is cartoonishly overvalued, unprofitable, and incinerating cash) on retail investors, using trillions of dollars in retirement funds as exit liquidity, all in order to become the first trillionaire,”
Keystone Kash will do anything except his job.
"...I’m not proposing that people lose their right to speak online. The real issue is whether giant social media corporations should have the unlimited right to use their top-secret algorithms to pour gasoline on hate, racism, antisemitism, homophobia, misogyny, and political violence just because outrage keeps people clicking and that drives engagement/ad-views and thus profits.
That’s not free speech in any meaningful human sense: it’s just a democracy-destroying business model.
Thus, one obvious reform is to separate hosting speech from amplifying it. If somebody wants to post something vile but lawful, that’s allowed under the First Amendment. But when a corporation’s software algorithm identifies that vile content as profit-promoting and shoves it into millions of feeds, that’s no longer passive hosting: it’s active promotion. And active promotion can be regulated."