Inequality.org

Trump's coin has made bribing the president easier than ever.

This week's Petulant Plutocrat is: Alex Karp, the 58-year-old chief executive of Palantir Technologies, an enterprise software provider — now deep into AI — that he co-founded with, among others, Peter Thiel, the ultra-secretive billionaire right-wing activist investor.

What has Karp sour: any hint that he doesn’t rate as a deep thinker.

Karp as a young man actually studied with one of our last century’s deepest thinkers, Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher who died this past March at age 96. Habermas, notes a just-published New Yorker profile, won world renown championing “a feisty, principled public sphere” that can “draw attention to economic inequality, ecological crisis, civil rights, and technological threats.”

Leading voices within Germany’s current far-right cheered Habermas’s passing. One deemed him “dangerous.” But an “equally obnoxious obituary,” the New Yorker observes, came from Alex Karp’s “billionaire pen.” Karp, after waving away Habermas’s cosmopolitan ideals, declared that our public discourse must take root in a more “traditional — and indeed national and cultural — source.”

The last word: Karp’s perspective, sums up the New Yorker’s Alex Ross, essentially just mirrors “the language of MAGA.”

This degree of wealth concentration inevitably warps democracy.

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The absurd resources dedicated to Trump's passion projects should be spent elsewhere.