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Trump And His Family Are Enriching Themselves
I do not know if the numbers on the Forbes chart below are correct but it is quite obvious that Trump and his family are using their positions to enrich themselves.
biggerSom relevant current headlines:
Trump sons to take stake in Kazakh miner that won $1.6bn US backing (archived) – FT
The Trump family last year netted more than $1bn in pre-tax profits from their various cryptocurrency projects and have continued to pile into AI, drones and critical minerals companies that have won lucrative US government contracts
Trump family-backed drone firm signs weapons deal with US – Bloomberg via MSN
The US Air Force agreed to buy an undisclosed number of interceptor drones from a company backed by President Donald Trump’s sons, according to the firm, deepening the military’s ties to defense contractors linked to the first family as the US war with Iran enters its third month.
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Democrats in Congress have asked the Pentagon for more information about other defense contractors and technology firms with ties to the president’s family. In addition to Powerus, Eric Trump backed a reverse-merger deal between Israeli drone maker Xtend and JFB Construction Holdings, a publicly listed construction company.
Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff and the Profitable Business of Peace (archived) – NY Times
For the time being, the board’s logo stands for little more than the idea that the politics of peace can be married to capital interests and the belief that this alignment stands to benefit everyone involved. Kushner and Witkoff’s fellow executive board members include Martin Edelman, a corporate lawyer with extensive ties to the upper echelons of the United Arab Emirates, and Marc Rowan, the chief executive of Apollo Global Management. In May 2025, Apollo invested $100 million in the Witkoff Group; Edelman is the general counsel of G42, an A.I. company controlled by the U.A.E.’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan. A New York Times investigation found that Tahnoon was involved in a deal that netted $2 billion in 2025 for World Liberty Financial, the crypto company owned by Trump’s and Witkoff’s sons.
In his January executive order establishing it as a public international organization, Trump wrote that the Board of Peace is covered by the International Organizations Immunities Act, which prohibits employees or agents of an international organization (and their immediate family members) from being sued for “official work.” But that same law defines an international organization as an entity that results either from a treaty or from an act of Congress — neither of which is true of the board.
Previous presidents have also benefited financially from their time in office. Joe Biden’s ‘care’ for his family was legendary. But none has been so unashamed about it like Trump.
If only there would be an opposition party in Congress using its power to do something about this.
All Americans belong to the Epstein class.
This seems like an outrageous claim, but let me explain.
It was out of kindness to Americans that I’ve chosen to ignore the weakest argument—“Africans were the first to enslave other Africans”—most often presented by Americans in defense of racial chattel slavery. But I am working hard on excising what little remaining good will I have for Americans.
It wasn’t a Brit who set in motion the system of Africans being enslaved for life- it was an African.
I hate to break it to the racist white hater, AUF, but that’s what happened. The 1619 Project forgot to mention it.
Posted by: wagelaborer | May 2 2026 20:42 utc | 213
Africans enslaved other Africans, but they did not enslave them for life.
As explained in the Smithsonian Magazine article “The Horrible Fate of John Casor, The First Black Man to be Declared Slave for Life in America” that wagelaborer linked to, slavery originally had term limits. America’s newly invented “racial chattel slavery,” however, made slavery a permanent and inheritable condition. Hooray for American innovation!
Slavery in Africa:
Slavery existed in Africa, but it was not the same type of slavery that the Europeans introduced. The European form was called chattel slavery. A chattel slave is a piece of property, with no rights. Slavery within Africa was different. A slave might be enslaved in order to pay off a debt or pay for a crime. Slaves in Africa lost the protection of their family and their place in society through enslavement. But eventually they or their children might become part of their master’s family and become free. This was unlike chattel slavery, in which enslaved Africans were slaves for life, as were their children and grandchildren.
Shifting the responsibility by saying that it was Africans who were enslaving Africans first doesn’t work. It ignores the fact that the concept of “race” was invented by White people to justify the wholesale persecution of Black people, and that Africans didn’t see themselves as a singular “race.”
The invention of “race” allowed for America to invent “racial chattel slavery.” All forms of slavery are bad, but American slavery was particularly vile, not just from the perspective of us living in the present, but also those living back then, like John Wesley and James Madison (slave owner, liberal and Founding Father of America) himself:
Hence slavery in its most radical form triumphed in the golden age of liberalism and at the heart of the liberal world. This was acknowledged by James Madison, slave owner and liberal (like numerous protagonists of the American Revolution), who observed that ‘the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man’ power based on ‘mere distinction of colour’ was imposed ‘in the most enlightened period of time’.
There are also other elephants in the room that Americans will struggle to address:
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Why buy slaves in the first place if the desire to enslave others did not exist?
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Why capture escaped slaves—in other words, re-enslave free humans—if you find the practice of slavery so abhorrent?
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Why go out of your way to enslave Native Americans? You’re going to say Native Americans enslaved other Native Americans first, aren’t you? And as a good American, you just can’t say no to an excellent deal on a lightly used slave with a good amount of mileage left in it, right?
A powerful assumption undergirds all these actions taken by Americans: slaves are property, not fellow humans. The essence of private property relations is to dispose of property as one pleases. That is the political economy of America: capitalism.
“I paid (for) you, I own you now!” the American asserts.
Native American enslavement also bears closer examination because it’s often overlooked.
The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism:
Roughly two to four million Native Americans also were enslaved and traded by European settlers in the Americas, English and Scots not least.
From the advent of Columbus to the end of the nineteenth century, it is possible that five million indigenous Americans were enslaved. This form of slavery coexisted roughly with enslavement of Africans, leading to a catastrophic decline in the population of indigenes. In the Caribbean basin, the Gulf Coast, northern Mexico, and what is now the U.S. Southwest, the decline in population during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was nothing short of catastrophic. Population may have fallen by up to 90 percent through devilish means including warfare, famine, and slavery, all with resultant epidemics. The majority of the enslaved were women and children, an obvious precursor, and trailblazer, for the sex trafficking of today.
The United States is the inheritor of the munificent crimes of not only London but Madrid, too. When Hernando De Soto crossed what became known as the Mississippi River in the 1530s, he had in tow enslaved indigenes, as he helped to clear the land for what later became comfortable suburbs.
There it is—the link between sex trafficking and the enslavement of Native Americans and Black people—the link to the “Epstein class” that Americans love to throw around in an accusatory manner without realizing that they themselves belong to that group.
Enslaved people being responsible for their own enslavement was exactly b’s defense of Epstein: the girls were “willing.”
I had to explain to b and the rest of MoA how the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was engineered by America, led to an economic apocalypse and consequently a rise in prostitution as women struggled to make ends meet:
Some prostitution existed before the break-up, but the problem has escalated tremendously in the post-Soviet period, when “women are plundered like the precious metals … of the former Soviet Union,” she said.
At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, women were educated and employed in the work force. “Women were able to become an integral part of the Soviet economy,” Shelley said.
But the post-Soviet period brought with it the impoverishment of women.
Further adding to the impoverishment of women was the loss of the social safety net. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, they lost all their social benefits such as childcare, summer camps and other programs, she said.
“Women had few economic alternatives left,” Shelley said. They “retained a sense of responsibility to provide for their families, and they were therefore vulnerable to financial offers from the traffickers.”
“Women had no property, no employment, the only thing they had were their bodies,” she said. In the post-Soviet period, they became “commodities rather than contributors to economy.”
She discussed the story of a woman who had been crowned Miss Azerbaijan, who had been duped into going to Turkey for what she thought was a pageant celebration. Instead, her passport was taken and she disappeared into the trafficking trade.
Many of Epstein’s “willing” victims are from the former Soviet Union. Two of Trump’s wives (out of three), coincidentally, are also models from Eastern Europe. Trump’s marriage with another American was the shortest.
Americans may be aware of the precarity of being forced to do anything just to earn a wage to pay for the basic necessities for life, hence their love for the term “wage slavery,” but instead of fighting to end all forms of slavery, the Americans instead choose to defend slavery. It’s because Americans are the bourgeois proletariat (whipcrackers) who dream of one day joining the rank of bourgeoisie (slaveholders), which is why Americans will never voluntarily revolt against the practice of slavery itself.
In summary, wagelaborer’s argument is that slavery is fine so long as those people are doing it to themselves first. The Native Americans were willingly enslaving their own people first, the Africans were willingly enslaving their own people first etc.
Let’s take wagelaborer’s argument to its logical conclusion then.
Dear MoA commenter wagelaborer, will you buy a child sex slave who takes the initiative and willingly offers to sell herself to you?
Death to America
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Marg bar Âmrikâ
Posted by: All Under Heaven | May 3 2026 3:59 utc | 256
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