DL Open Thread Wednesday, May 22, 2024

Rehoboth Beach, the resort town of 1,100 year-round residents that gifted Delaware politics with Pete Schwartzkopf and Kathy McGuiness, is embroiled in a controversy that for once involves neither of them. The city, repeatedly turned down in its quest for a new city manager, hired a guy named Taylour Tedder on a pay-and-benefits package surpassed only by the presidents of the University of Delaware. His haul: a $250,000 base salary, a $50,000 allowance for moving expenses, and a $750,000 housing loan from the city that he won’t have to repay if he stays in the job for seven years. Residents, like six out of seven dwarves, are not happy.

A bioflick of Donald Trump’s early years as a New York real estate mogul and self-imagined playboy is the talk of Cannes, and the thin-skinned dotard has already promised to sue. Director Ali Abbasi sounded unimpressed. “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people,” he said. “They don’t talk about his success rate.”

The Biden administration announced it will erase another $7.7 billion in federal student loans, bringing the total debt canceled through various programs to $167 billion for nearly 5 million Americans, an average of $33,400 apiece. I didn’t read far enough into the article to learn why it’s bad news for Biden.

In the latest sign of our totally normal climate, a heat wave in Mexico’s Gulf Coast state of Tabasco had howler monkeys falling dead from trees.

Wildlife biologist Gilberto Pozo counted about 138 of the animals dead or dying on the ground under trees. The die-off started around May 5 and hit its peak over the weekend.

“They were falling out of the trees like apples,” Pozo said. “They were in a state of severe dehydration, and they died within a matter of minutes.” Already weakened, Pozo says, the falls from dozens of meters up inflict additional damage that often finishes the monkeys off.

Thom Hartmann says America’s oligarchs are dragging us toward civil war, and illustrates his thesis with some parallels to the antebellum period while debunking a recent capitalist talking point.

To the end of cementing their own oligarchy here, the billionaires who own the GOP are now actively promoting the same sort of revisionist history the Confederacy did, claiming that the Founders were all rich guys who hated taxes, wanted rich men to rule America, and wrote the Constitution to make that happen. It was a story popular in the South leading up to the Civil War, now part of the “lost cause” mythology. …

While there were some in America among the Founders and Framers who had amassed great land holdings and what was perceived then as a patrician lifestyle, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Bernard Bailyn suggests in his brilliant 2003 book, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders, that they couldn’t hold a candle, in terms of wealth, to the true aristocrats of England. With page after page of photographs and old paintings of the homes of the Founders and Framers, Bailyn shows that none of those who created this nation were rich by European standards.

As Kevin Phillips describes in his masterpiece book Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich: “George Washington, one of the richest Americans, was no more than a wealthy squire in British terms.” Phillips documents that it wasn’t until the 1790s—a generation after the War of Independence—that the first American accumulated a fortune that would be worth one million of today’s dollars.

The floor’s yours.