Sure, there’s a sucker born every minute, as P.T. Barnum allegedly said. But now we have a federal government that’s gone backward in providing protection from predators just as they adopt sophisticated technology to ply their craft.

Criminals now use AI to generate fake images and scrub their pitches of misspellings and odd English usage that would give away their origins in Africa and Southeast Asia. They set up slick websites with glib text hawking their investment swindles. Amazingly, they convince Americans, especially older ones, to wire their life savings to someone they’ve never met.

And to top off the cruelty, they follow up with “recovery scams,” portraying themselves as lawyers or even FBI agents able to get the money back. The dupes then wire money to the recovery scammers promising to recover the money they foolishly wired to the original crooks.

Lonely women lured online by potential romantic partners count among the saddest marks. Some stories are shocking: Women send thousands of dollars to help their phantom mates get out of legal trouble, pay for childcare or travel expenses — all sold as a means of furthering a meeting with the nonexistent lover. You know the end.

And we now have a Trump administration that’s actually grooming suckers to fall for the president’s investment offers. Shortly after leaving office in June 2021, Donald Trump was asked about Bitcoin, a type of cryptocurrency, on Fox Business Network.

“Bitcoin, it just seems like a scam,” he responded.

Complaining about a “scam” seemed a good tactic for later getting elected to a second term. Trump cleverly tacked on a patriotic message: “I don’t like it because it’s another currency competing against the dollar,” he said. The U.S. dollar should remain “the currency of the world” and Bitcoin should be regulated “very, very high.”

As a master scammer himself — recall Trump University and his saddling fans with stock in bankrupt casinos — you wonder how the voice in his head might have shifted at the thought of crypto as a scam. Was it “this must be stopped” or “hmmm”? We now know the answer.

Five years later, Trump is back in office, and guess what? He promises to make America the “crypto capital of the world.” And his family is up to their eyeballs in crypto while as president, he influences how it is regulated.

The latest reports have Trump vacuuming up $1.4 billion in crypto deals. His buyers are not doing so well. About two-thirds of the investors in his meme coins, $TRUMP and $MELANIA, have basically lost their shirts.

World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency company tied to the Trumps, was launched in 2024. One analysis found that 85% of investors who bought World Liberty’s $WLFI token after it began trading publicly are underwater. Trump-controlled interests, however, made $520 million last year from token sales.

It would be inaccurate to call his crypto deals “scams.” His lawyers’ fine print protects him from suits. For example, the website for the $TRUMP token specifically calls it an expression of support “not intended to be … an investment opportunity, investment contract, or security.”

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created in 2010 to protect ordinary folk from unfair, deceptive and abusive practices in the financial industry. Trump in his second term has been shrinking the agency to mouse size, dramatically cutting the watchdog agency’s power.

Americans, you’re on your own. Our freedom to be scammed has never been greater.

Written by Froma Harrop

Official website; https://twitter.com/FromaHarrop

According to the complaint filed in federal court, the plaintiffs did not seek monetary damages. Instead, they wanted officials to clear sidewalks of illegal drug dealers and fentanyl users, violent behavior, and tent encampments and to treat the troubled Tenderloin area as it would any other neighborhood where crime is not tolerated. “They demand an end to the rampant illegal street vending and from the squalor and misery that exists throughout their neighborhood because the city has decided that people in the throes of addiction can live and die on the Tenderloin streets,” said Matt Davis, one of the attorneys, in a prepared statement.

In downtown Los Angeles, Central City East, also known as Skid Row, remains a critical humanitarian and public safety crisis characterized by a massive concentration of 4,000 to 5,000 unsheltered homeless individuals across a 50-block area. Similar to the troubled Tenderloin section of San Francisco, Skid Row struggles with severe open-air drug markets, violent crime, daily emergency calls connected to drug overdoses, and untreated mental illness, leading to dangerous and unpredictable conditions, particularly after dark.

There have always been various degrees of poverty and poor people in our nation, but we didn’t always have large-scale and visible homelessness on the streets of our cities across America. While conservatives revere Ronald Reagan for how he transformed the conservative movement, the modern mass homelessness crisis in the U.S. emerged in the early 1980s and is tightly linked to policy and ideological shifts under President Reagan — especially cuts to affordable housing, social safety-net programs, and mental health services, combined with “Reaganomics” and deregulation that increased economic insecurity for low-income residents.

Before the early 1980s, older “skid row” districts comprised a relatively small homeless population–often single men in transient hotels or missions–rather than families, women, and children in large numbers. The rise in homelessness coincided with the election of Reagan and a conservative movement to roll back federal responsibility for social welfare. The Reagan administration advanced an individualist, anti- “big government” ideology that framed poverty and homelessness as personal failure rather than structural injustice. It aimed to cut domestic social spending, deregulate markets, and shift responsibility to states, cities, and private charity.

One of the most direct targets was the sharp reduction in federal funding for low-income housing. Federal housing assistance (construction and support for low-income housing) was cut by roughly 70 percent to 80 percent over the decade: funding fell from around $30 to $32 billion in 1981 to about $7 to $9 billion by the late 1980s, drastically shrinking new affordable housing production and subsidies. As older units aged or were demolished and with no comparable new stock being provided, poor households were pushed into an increasingly tight private rental market, with more people ending up in shelters or on the streets.

The policy of “Reaganomics” did not help people who were already living on the margins. It combined tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation, and a tight monetary policy that contributed to high unemployment in the early ‘80s, particularly in industrial and urban areas where many low-income people lived. At a time when wages stagnated or declined for low-wage workers, rent rose faster than incomes in many cities, creating an affordability gap that left more households one crisis away from losing the roof over their heads. The Reagan administration’s budget severely reduced funding for key safety-net and social services programs that were in place to guard poor households from homelessness. Programs affecting income support, health, and human services, including Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), food assistance, and other social programs—faced tighter eligibility requirements, making it harder for vulnerable families to stay housed. Local governments, also squeezed by federal cuts, struggled to expand shelters and services fast enough, leading to overcrowded emergency systems and more people left outside.

The first target of the Reagan administration was housing. The second was the safety-net programs, and the third was mental health policy. The shift away from large state psychiatric hospitals had begun earlier, but Reagan’s administration reduced federal support for community mental health centers and shifted responsibilities to states without providing sufficient resources. These unfunded mandates resulted in many people with serious mental health and substance-use challenges ending up homeless or cycling between streets, shelters, and jails rather than receiving stable treatment and housing. We cannot forget how the specific cuts and policy shifts under Reagan established a long-lasting affordable housing deficit and weakened the safety net that subsequent administrations have not fully reversed.

The current homelessness is not only a humanitarian and public safety crisis, but it is also threatening local tourism. Homeless encampments destroy tourism, warns George Lence of Nicholas & Lence Communications. When referring to New York, he stated that the city and state stand to lose $7.5 billion in tourism tax revenue.

Many people can easily forget how the Reagan administration brought us to this point. Now we are faced with the human fallout from Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The Band-Aid solutions don’t work. The encampment policy of removing tents from sidewalks is only optics when the tents return, or they show up one block away. Jurisdictions must decide whether they will continue to manage visible suffering through sweeps, temporary housing through hotels and fragmented service, or seriously reverse Reaganomics by accepting the political cost of building large-scale permanent housing along with expanding mental health and addiction treatment.

Written by David W. Marshall

Official website; https://davidwmarshallauthor.com/

One may purchase his book, which is titled; God Bless Our Divided America: Unity, Politics and History from a Biblical Perspective.

I have been voting since Carter, and I have watched this cycle spin around more times than I care to admit. Somebody rises. Cameras find him. He can preach, he can quote scripture and Baldwin in the same breath, and when he speaks at a funeral the whole country stops chewing for a minute. We gather up all our grief and hand it to him like a collection plate. Then we wait.

What exactly do we expect that man to do? Explain every crisis on Sunday morning television. Show up in whatever town the latest tragedy happened. Defend more than fifty million of us against whatever slander is trending. Sit across from senators and governors and somehow negotiate with a system that took three hundred years to build its defenses. A single human being. One phone, one calendar, twenty four hours.

Nobody survives that job description. Dr. King was thirty nine and exhausted and under federal surveillance the day they killed him. Jesse could not carry it in his prime either, and none of the ones who came after have managed the trick. Some get bought. Others turn bitter. A few get caught with their hand somewhere it should not have been, and cable news runs the footage for a week straight. Plenty simply burn down to the wick doing work that ten thousand hands should have been sharing.

Here is the part that stings. When our chosen figure stumbles, the whole thing goes quiet. Problems did not solve themselves; we simply never built anything underneath him. Rallies stop. Listservs go cold. Folks who drove four hours to hear him speak cannot name a single person on their county commission. We invested everything in a personality and got no equity in an institution.

Go back and read the history honestly. Montgomery did not happen because a young pastor gave a good speech. Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council had leaflets running off a mimeograph machine before most people knew what had happened to Rosa Parks. E.D. Nixon had been building labor and civil rights networks through the Pullman porters for nearly three decades. There were carpools, dispatch stations, insurance workarounds after the companies canceled policies on the cars. That boycott ran three hundred eighty one days on logistics, not eloquence. Preaching helped. Logistics won it.

Ella Baker understood this better than anybody, and she said it plain: strong people do not need strong leaders. Her organizing philosophy often pushed her to the margins, because the men around her were building a pulpit model in a moment that called for a network. Young folks in SNCC listened to her, though. They went into Mississippi with no cameras and no charisma to speak of, and they registered voters in counties where doing so could get you shot before supper.

Television changed our appetite. A movement of ten thousand quiet organizers will never be booked for a four minute hit, but one man in a good suit can. Social media took that appetite and put it on steroids. Now we measure influence in followers, and we mistake a viral thread for a base. A hundred thousand likes will not stop a school closing. Forty parents in a boardroom, showing up every month for a year, might.

Politicians love our arrangement, and you should understand exactly why. When a mayor wants cover, he does not have to answer to a thousand organized constituents with a written list of demands. He calls three reverends and a state representative, takes a photograph, and reports that he consulted the community. Consultation with a handful of individuals runs cheap. Accountability to an organized body costs something. Guess which one they prefer.

Political maturity begins the day a community stops confusing inspiration with organization. That confusion is comfortable. Inspiration feels like progress. You leave the auditorium with your chest full, you tell your cousin about it, you post the clip. Organization feels like nothing at all for a long time. It looks like a Tuesday night meeting with eleven people and bad coffee, arguing over whether to endorse in the district attorney race.

Yet the district attorney’s office has broad discretion over which cases get prosecuted and what charges are pursued in your county. School boards decide which buildings get renovated and which get shuttered. Local governing bodies and utility commissions approve water rates. Zoning boards and elected councils decide whether the warehouse goes up next to the elementary school. Far too many sheriff’s races across the South run unopposed. Those seats get filled by whoever bothers to show up, and for decades that has not been us in the numbers it could have been.

I am not dismissing the young folks doing mutual aid and bail funds and tenant work. Much of it is sharper than what my generation built. My caution is different. Horizontal structure without durable infrastructure has its own failure mode. Everybody talks, nobody decides, the group exhausts itself in eighteen months and the landlord is still the landlord. Distributed never meant unorganized. Somebody has to keep the membership list, file the paperwork, and answer the phone in year four when nobody is watching.

Churches carried this load for generations, and some still do. But a congregation of two hundred with a food pantry and a van is doing charity, which is holy work and still a far cry from power. Charity feeds a family this month. Power changes who writes the budget that made the family hungry.

So what would it look like to grow up? Stop asking who the next great figure will be. Start asking what your organization can survive. Can it lose its founder and still function? Does it have money that does not come from one foundation with opinions? Are there folks under forty being trained to run it? Do you have a written agenda that a candidate can be measured against, so that endorsement means something more than fondness?

Build a bench, not a throne. Twenty capable heads in a county with real assignments will outlast any single voice, however golden. And when that voice inevitably says something foolish, gets indicted, or just gets tired, the work keeps moving because the work never belonged to him.

No savior is coming down that road. Never has been one. Everybody we canonized was a mortal doing their part inside a machine that thousands of anonymous hands were feeding every single day, and those folks are the reason anything changed at all.

We should stop looking for someone to follow, and get busy being somebody worth joining.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.

Resisting the separation and parceling out of her sisters and brothers, she decided, against all odds and advice, to quit school, get a job and take care of them. It was a sign of the commitment, courage and will that would carry her through and beyond the many difficulties and fierce opposition she would face. And she rose in the ranks of African American leadership through an extraordinary combination of intellect, strategic planning, insightful writing, hard work in critical areas, audacious self-assertion, admirable resiliency and an iron and resistant will.

Certainly, she lived in a critical period in Black history, the reversal of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, Caveman Charlie and “Beast-Lady Lynch,” savage White terrorism and the brutal burning of Black towns, and racist mob murder as a way of life. It is her work in the muck and mire of this racist South and compliant North that Ida B. Wells came into her own and taught us audacious African ways to walk, work, struggle and stand tall in the world.

Nana Ida was a tireless journalist, organizer, lecturer, teacher and activist in numerous organizations and had collaborated with the major leaders of her time. Her ideas foreshadowed and prefigured womanist, Black Power, armed self-defense, civil and human rights, and related discourse and initiatives in our contemporary conversations. In fact, she made a major contribution to Africana womanism which is clear in her commitment to self-definition, ethical grounding, male/female partnership in equality, family, community and social action. It is obvious also in her refusal to place in conflict the liberation of Black people and the liberation of Black women. Indeed, she insisted on joining the two in a total liberation of all, as exemplified in her work with her husband and partner in struggle, Ferdinand Barnett.

Embodying the self-defining womanist, she asked in an article on the mission and meaning of women, “What is or should be woman?” And she answered: “Not merely a bundle of flesh and bones, nor a fashion plate, a frivolous inanity, a boundless doll, a heartless coquette – but a strong, bright presence, thoroughly imbued with a sense of her mission on earth and a desire to fill it; an earnest, soulful being, laboring to fit herself for life’s duties and burdens, and bearing them faithfully when they come; but a womanly woman for all that …”

It is this stance as an aware, socially active, self-assertive, and “womanly woman,” willingly bearing the burdens and obligations at hand, that was a source of the inner strength that gave her courage to struggle for both racial and gender justice. These struggles were pursued in her work as an organizer, institution-builder, anti-lynching, civil rights and human rights advocate and in her collaborating with other leaders whose names we know and also honor – Nanas Douglass, DuBois, Garvey, Bethune, Terrell, Randolph.

Nana Ida was a “race woman,” uncompromisingly committed to the freedom and well-being of her people. Like Nana Marcus Garvey, whom she admired and who admired her, she was for “race first.” She argued there was no substitute for unity, self-help, self-reliance, and constant struggle. And she stressed strong community institutions, the essentiality of education and economic strength, constant vigilance and ceaseless struggle.

In an article, “Freedom of Political Action,” she criticized African Americans for being too tied to one party or the other without critical assessment. Prefiguring a similar position of Nana Malcolm X, she declared she was neither a Democrat nor Republican, but an African American seeking justice and freedom for her people.

Wells-Barnett also argued against uncritical allegiance to leaders and for critical assessment of leadership in terms of how it furthered the objective desired above all others: “the well-being of (Black people) as a race, morally, socially and intellectually.” And in another article on “Functions of Leadership,” she asked of leaders “how many of them are exerting their talents and wealth for the benefit or amelioration of the conditions of the masses?” Moreover, she asked “What material benefit is a ‘leader’, if he does not, to some extent, devote his time, talent and wealth to the alleviation of the poverty, and misery and elevation of his people?”

It is Nana Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s courageous, constant and uncompromising struggle against lynching which brought forth the best of her virtues and values, and reaffirmed her role as a leader of great merit and meaning. Clearly, she played a crucial and vanguard role in exposing the racist terrorism and savagery of lynching, traveling widely in the U.S. and speaking internationally. Her anti-lynching lectures and writings were vital witness against this brutal and barbaric practice. She defined lynching as a “national crime,” “a color-line murder,” and “the cold-blooded savagery of White devils under lynch law.”

Also, Wells-Barnett raised the issue of armed self-defense and argued that in other places lynching had been prevented by this strategy. She stated that “The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every Black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” Thus, long before Nanas Robert Williams and Malcolm X had argued the right to armed self-defense against murderous mobs in face of the failure of law, she had raised the option publicly.

Nana Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a towering woman and leader of her time, an extraordinary person which, as her Memphis Diary shows, was self-questioning, self-critical and caught up also in the ordinariness of life and living. And yet, she had a historic sense of herself and the moral meaning of the freedom struggle of her people. Her commitment, she said, was to constantly “trouble the waters” and transform the status quo. Indeed, an oppressor has no right to peace, if he dares to deny a people’s right to freedom and justice. And when we are attacked by the oppressor in our fight for freedom and justice, we are to remember her defiant words of wisdom: “with me it is not myself nor my reputation, but the life of my people which is at stake.”

Written by Dr. Maulana Karenga

Official website; https://www.maulanakarenga.org/

The selections are entirely based on performance on a 4-hour test in English and math, for which these incoming freshmen literally study for years. Proponents of the testing regime argue that it is entirely merit-based; opponents point to the results and argue that there is more to future success than can be measured by a 4-hour test, and that the test itself is racially discriminatory.

I’ve always been a great fan of tests and merit systems, as I was a kid from a middle-class background with no special connections who was very good at taking tests and writing papers. Let the preppies inhabit their elites; I had better grades. My mother was a secretary, but I got into Harvard. I bartended my way through law school, but I made Law Review president. Merit, or what passed for that, got me the scholarships I desperately needed. They opened doors that otherwise would have been closed to me.

Asians make up 19% of all public-school students and 69% of those offered places at Stuyvesant. I celebrate those Asian families, many with first-generation children who study long hours to take their places at schools, which will open more doors to them. I don’t want to take away a system that rewards their incredible accomplishments and drive.

But I do want to spread it around, and that’s the problem. Are New York’s leaders of tomorrow really going to learn what they need to in classes with — at most — three blacks in them? Won’t their educations be poorer as a result? And what of the opportunities these schools provide, not only for college, but for future success? Can anyone really be comfortable with the disproportionate denial of those opportunities based on numbers that correlate with race? We need more Blacks and Hispanics moving up the ladder, and so do they.

Mayor Mamdani, a graduate of one of those schools, Bronx Science, who at one point before he ran for Mayor said the test should be abolished, now says the issue is a “struggle” for him. Mamdani’s two predecessors both condemned the test — Bill de Blasio called it a “monumental injustice,” and Eric Adams called it “a Jim Crow school system — it’s the state legislature that would have to change it. The alumni groups are reportedly fierce in their opposition and have spent millions on lobbying efforts. They are full of people like me, and who am I to tell them they’re wrong?

And yet there’s something very wrong with the result — some things rather — and if we don’t dare talk about them, they will never change.

Written by Susan Estrich

Ten years ago, the Treasury Department announced that Harriet Tubman would replace Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill. After years of delays, the Trump administration has now put the Tubman redesign on ice. At the same time, Republican lawmakers and Trump administration officials are promoting a new $250 bill bearing Donald Trump’s likeness. Congress has not authorized the denomination, and current federal law permits only deceased people to appear on American currency.

The contrast could hardly be more offensive.

Harriet Tubman was born enslaved and escaped to freedom, then repeatedly risked her life to return south and lead others out of bondage. She served the Union as a nurse, scout and spy. In 1863, she helped lead the Combahee River Raid, which liberated hundreds of enslaved people. Later, she advocated for women’s suffrage. She gave her life to the proposition that freedom was worth fighting for, even when the fight brought her neither wealth nor comfort.

Donald Trump, meanwhile, is a billionaire president who has repeatedly blurred the line between public power and private enrichment. He has put his name on buildings, products and public institutions. Now his image is being proposed for a new denomination meant to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary.

This is more than vanity. It is the currency of oligarchy.

Oligarchy is what happens when wealth buys political power, political power protects and multiplies wealth, and public institutions are bent toward the glorification of people who already possess both. In a democracy, money is a public instrument. In an oligarchy, even public money becomes another surface on which the ruler may write his own name.

The Tubman $20 would tell a different story.

A $20 bill is not a rare commemorative object locked in a collector’s case. It is ordinary money. It passes across grocery counters and restaurant tables. It is slipped into church collection plates and handed to grandchildren. It pays for haircuts, prescriptions, school supplies and rides home. It is folded into a child’s birthday card by an auntie who wants the child to have “a little something.”

Imagine Harriet Tubman making those journeys.

Imagine a child opening that birthday card and asking who the woman on the bill is. Imagine generations of Americans encountering Tubman not only during Black History Month, but every day—at the ATM, the corner store and the kitchen table.

That is why representation on currency matters. It is history placed into circulation.

Andrew Jackson, whose portrait remains on the $20 bill, was an enslaver whose policies drove Native people from their lands. Tubman, who liberated enslaved people and served this nation, was supposed to take his place on the front. Earlier plans even retained Jackson on the reverse. Yet even that modest adjustment to our national memory has proved too much for those determined to preserve the old racial hierarchy.

Tubman was not merely an inspirational figure. She challenged an economic system. Enslavement was not only racial terrorism; it was coerced labor that created enormous wealth for white people while treating Black people as property. Each time Tubman led another person to freedom, she stole labor away from enslavers and disrupted the economics of bondage.

That makes her especially appropriate for American currency.

She also understood that freedom without economic power is fragile. After the Civil War, despite her service to the Union, she struggled for years to receive adequate compensation and a pension. The nation benefited from her courage more readily than it paid its debt to her.

That pattern is painfully familiar. Black people build, serve, sacrifice and create. The country applauds us symbolically while withholding material justice. Tubman is praised in speeches while being kept off the money. Meanwhile, a president who converts attention, office and access into personal advantage may receive a denomination designed around his image.

The issue is not merely whether one likes Donald Trump. It is a question of ownership. Does American currency belong to the American people? Does it reflect a shared history, including the people who expanded the boundaries of freedom? Or is it another possession of a president who treats public institutions as extensions of his personal brand?

Harriet Tubman belongs on the $20 bill because she represents the best of this nation—not the nation as it was, but the nation generations have struggled to make it become. She chose liberation over submission, collective freedom over personal safety and service over self-enrichment.

Donald Trump does not need another monument to himself. The man who lives in the house that enslaved people built has already had far too much access to the nation’s power, attention and money.

The last thing we need is his face on it.

Written by Julianne Malveaux

Official website; https://www.juliannemalveaux.com

Somehow, this has yet to sink into the national consciousness.

The precise timing is a projection. The cuts are not. They’re activated automatically following the law: Once the trust fund is empty, Social Security can pay out only what it collects. And the zero hour keeps moving toward us. This year’s trustees report pulled the projection forward a full year. The program has promised to pay out roughly $30 trillion more than it will take in over the next 75 years.

Yet few candidates are talking about this in any serious way. It pays to say nothing. Evidently, lots of legislators believe that the political cost of telling voters the unhappy news today exceeds the cost of letting the cuts occur tomorrow. That’s how we ended up just one term from disaster.

When politicians do raise the issue, they make the fix sound easy. Sens. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) want you to believe that eliminating the cap on payroll taxes would fix the problem. That solution fails on its own terms.

Using data from the Social Security Administration’s own actuaries, my colleague Jack Salmon demonstrates that scrapping the taxable maximum closes only 58% of the gap. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru noted last month that it would push the federal marginal rate on top wages to an untenable 49.4%, and overall rates would climb past 60% in high-tax states like California and New York.

The senators aren’t alone in wanting to tax our way out of this problem. In one recent survey, 89% percent of Americans aged 65 and older favored protecting current retirees’ benefits even if doing so requires higher taxes on younger workers.

That position is popular only because it rests on the image of retirees living off nothing but Social Security. That image, partly an artifact of bad data, fails to capture the situation.

In a March 2025 government survey, 24% of seniors reported that Social Security supplies 90% or more of their income. But when Census Bureau researchers matched responses with IRS filings and benefits records, they found that retirees frequently omitted their 401(k) and IRA withdrawals, making the real figure only about 14%. Meanwhile, 58% of retirees draw less than half their income from the program.

The remaining 42% are the retirees that Social Security reform of any kind should protect. They already receive a raw deal under the current formula, which does a much better job of protecting wealthier seniors.

As the Cato Institute’s Romina Boccia and Ivane Nachkebia documented last month, seniors aged 65 to 74 had a median net worth of $410,000 in 2022, compared with only $135,600 for those aged 35 to 44 (who pay a significant share of the taxes). Roughly 34% of Social Security dollars go to filers with adjusted gross incomes above $100,000. Too often, Social Security is less a need-based program than a transfer of wealth from the young and unpropertied to the old and comfortable.

A March 2026 paper from the Committee for a Responsible Budget puts it plainly: Despite facing large deficits, Social Security now pays the wealthiest couples roughly $100,000 in annual benefits, more than five times the poverty threshold for a retired household. “In inflation-adjusted terms,” it adds, “the maximum couple’s benefit has doubled since 1990 and is projected to double again around 2070. By that point, the wealthiest couples will receive $200,000 in combined benefits.”

The best reform is one proposed by Boccia: Return Social Security to a mission of poverty prevention. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that giving new beneficiaries a flat benefit at 125% of the poverty level (roughly $1,660 a month) would erase the entire 75-year deficit while raising benefits for the lowest earners.

Next, index eligibility ages to longevity and allow workers to own compounding assets through personal accounts rather than relying on a political promise that the next generation must be conscripted to keep.

Many people will dislike reading this, I’m sure, and wonder why we can’t just borrow to pay for the benefits. The answer is that between Social Security, Medicare and interest payments, we’re short by $115 trillion over 30 years. The moment Congress commits to that much borrowing, the likelihood of a historic inflation burst increases. Even this painful hike in the price level would not manage to devalue enough debt to save us, since Social Security benefits are indexed to inflation. The obligation would survive; retirees’ bond portfolios and other assets would lose value.

The senators we elect this year will not be able to avoid these decisions. Don’t let them avoid the question, either.

Written by Veronique de Rugy

Official website; http://twitter.com/veroderugy

How could anyone sue an entity he controls and derive a benefit from the amicable resolution of such a lawsuit at the expense of others who are not parties to the lawsuit?

Here is the backstory.

During President Donald Trump’s first term in office, an IRS employee unlawfully released the tax returns of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers, among which was Trump’s. The employee pleaded guilty to this crime and served a lawfully appropriate portion of his five-year sentence.

Trump was furious at the revelation, as anyone would be who reasonably expected federal employees to comply with the laws they are sworn, and legally obliged, to uphold.

All those whose rights have been violated by the criminal acts of a government employee have a cause of action against the government seeking to compensate them for the demonstrable harm the government employee caused them.

Congress and the federal courts have insulated the federal government from liability for the consequences of its ordinary, rational, good-faith enforcement of federal laws — but not from the harm caused by the crimes committed by its employees.

Much of this immunity has unleashed extreme violence on its victims — the recent murders of fishermen on the high seas by the Department of Defense unlawfully purporting to engage in domestic law enforcement and the on-street murders of innocents by ICE agents in American cities purporting to enforce immigration laws come to mind.

The government killings of innocent persons are objectively criminal, but due to the Department of (Political) Justice dragging its feet on the revelations of its investigations and excluding state prosecutors and investigators, we await a judicial determination.

In the case of Trump suing the IRS — an entity that he controls, and which is represented by the DOJ that he also controls — we wait no longer.

Earlier this week, the U.S. District Court in Miami excoriated both Trump’s present personal lawyers and his former lawyers who now run the DOJ for engaging in a false cause of action.

What is a false cause of action?

State courts are courts of general jurisdiction. They can hear any matters that in which the litigants have minimum contacts with the state. Many state courts can hear claims under federal law, and all can hear claims under the U.S. Constitution. Some state courts can even render judicial opinions of legislative or executive behavior in the abstract — before and without any complainant alleging harm.

But federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction. They can only hear cases that arise under the Constitution and federal laws, or where expressly authorized by Congress or where there is diversity of citizenship — meaning, a cause of action between citizens of different states where more than $75,000 is in dispute.

But the trigger for all cases in federal courts is the existence of a case or controversy. The Case or Controversy Clause of the Constitution was insisted upon by James Madison so as to limit the power of federal judges to the resolution of real, genuine disputes; prevent the courts from becoming a super legislature; and prohibit the use of federal courts for collusive litigation wherein both sides secretly seek the same result.

When both sides seek or purport to negotiate for the same result — here the liberty of the plaintiff Donald Trump to file any tax returns he wishes without fear of audit, and the defendant who works for the plaintiff agrees — there is no real case or controversy because there is no adversity, the lawyers involved acted in bad faith, and their agreement to resolve the case is a nullity.

To avoid the Constitution’s case or controversy requirements, Trumps’s lawyers – his personal lawyers who filed the lawsuit against the IRS and his former personal lawyers now running the DOJ — entered into a settlement agreement before the DOJ filed an answer to Trump’s complaint.

Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, if parties to federal litigation reach an amicable resolution — a settlement — before the defendant files any responsive pleadings, the court has no role to play, except in the case of a manifest injustice.

Trump’s complaint demanded $10 billion in damages from the IRS. His DOJ lawyers agreed to give his personal lawyers a fund of $1.776 billion from the federal Treasury to disburse to Trump’s supporters at Trump’s personal discretion; and his IRS lawyers agreed that neither Donald Trump personally nor his family or closely held corporations could ever be audited by the IRS.

The $1.776 billion was not expressly authorized by Congress. Theoretically, it came from a fund used by the DOJ to settle legitimate — not collusive — litigation in which bona fide, demonstrably provable claims were made or monetary judgments were judicially entered against the federal government.

According to the DOJ, none of the $1.776 billion has been spent and the fund is now dormant.

The federal court to which the case was nominally assigned would have none of this. In a blistering ruling, the court found that there was no case or controversy here because there was no true adversity between the parties. The DOJ lawyers and the IRS lawyers were all seeking to please their boss, who is the plaintiff in the case.

The court found that the lawyers involved in this subterfuge, the lawyers who handled this case and crafted its purported resolution, did not act in good faith. Thus, Trump’s present personal lawyers and his DOJ and IRS lawyers have been referred to their state licensing authorities for disciplinary proceedings.

Lawyers in litigation have a duty of zealous advocacy and unimpeachable loyalty to their clients. They cannot secretly or openly aid their client’s adversary. If they are morally or personally or legally conflicted, they must withdraw from the case.

What about Trump’s legally legitimate claim against the IRS for the criminal revelation of his personal tax returns? Had he sued as a private citizen and asked the court to shelve his case until he leaves office, he’d have had a real claim. Now, that claim is gone.

What a legal mess. Trump effectively sued himself and lost! And he grievously jeopardized the legal careers of those who sought to please him. No Trump pardon can help these lawyers. They are now at the not-so-tender mercies of the state entities that issued their licenses to practice law.

Written by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

Official website; https://twitter.com/Judgenap

The Baton Rouge rapper, whose legal name is Torrence Hatch, handed over six hundred thousand dollars to a couple of Washington operators who swore up and down they could carry a presidential pardon right to Donald Trump’s desk. The paper never showed up. Now Boosie is fighting to claw back half of what he spent, and according to text messages reviewed by NOTUS, the two men he trusted with that money claimed their firm was effectively bankrupt and could not give it back. Their firm disputes that it ever agreed to refund half of the fee.

Sit with that number a minute. Six hundred thousand. That is more than a whole lot of hardworking folks will see across ten years of honest sweat. He put it on the table because he was staring down a federal gun conviction and did not want to see the inside of a cell.

Here is how it went sideways, according to the reporting from NOTUS. Late last September, Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman, running a shop called JM Burkman and Associates, pitched Boosie hard. He told reporters they talked like they had the president on speed dial. They dropped big names, waved around their so-called connections, and made the man believe a clean slate was practically already signed. On New Year’s Eve, one of them texted that Trump had it “in hand and is ready to sign.” A day later, on New Year’s Day, Boosie’s lawyer got a call saying the deed was done. Trump had supposedly signed the pardon. Time to celebrate.

Except it was not done. When his people checked with the court and the prosecutors, there was nothing. According to Boosie’s lawyer, a White House aide later said officials had not seen a pardon application for him at all. A White House official also told NOTUS that the clemency team had never heard from Wohl or Burkman and warned that their involvement could hurt an applicant’s chances. Boosie’s lawyer later filed a separate application directly with the White House, which acknowledged receiving it and said it was under review.

The kicker is that Boosie avoided additional prison time anyway. A federal judge sentenced him in January to 10 days of time served, three years of supervised release, 300 hours of community service and a $50,000 fine, no thanks to the men he paid. So all that money bought him disputed promises, a pardon that never appeared and a refund fight he is still trying to settle.

Now, before I go further, let me back up for the young folks who never had to think about any of this.

A pardon is an act of mercy from the president. When a man is convicted of a federal crime, the president has the power to forgive the offense, relieve federal punishment and remove certain legal disabilities caused by the conviction. It does not declare the person innocent or erase the conviction from his criminal record. That power sits right there in the Constitution, Article Two, Section Two. The framers borrowed the idea from old England, where kings called it the prerogative of mercy, a custom that goes back more than a thousand years to the seventh century. Alexander Hamilton is the one who argued for putting it in the hands of one man, the president, so somebody could soften the law when justice and cold rules pulled in different directions.

This is not new, and it is not small. George Washington himself used it in 1795 to pardon two men convicted of treason following the Whiskey Rebellion. Gerald Ford used it in 1974 on Richard Nixon, and that decision was so unpopular it may have helped cost Ford the next election. Jimmy Carter granted unconditional pardons to people who violated the Selective Service Act during the Vietnam era, though his action did not cover military deserters. Ronald Reagan forgave the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Bill Clinton, on his very last day in the White House, forgave his own brother Roger along with a fugitive financier named Marc Rich, and folks are still arguing about that one to this day. And Barack Obama leaned on the power more than almost anybody, granting 1,715 commutations and 212 pardons. Many of those commutations went to ordinary people buried under harsh federal drug sentences who never had a famous name or a lobbyist working the phones for them. He also commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the soldier who leaked government files. Different presidents, different reasons, but every one of them shows the same thing.

So the office of mercy has a long, heavy history, some of it noble, plenty of it ugly. Presidents have used it to heal a divided nation and they have used it to take care of friends. That is the honest truth of it.

And yes, this president has handed out relief to famous men in the music world. Lil Wayne got a full pardon in Trump’s final days back in 2021. NBA YoungBoy got one in 2025 after federal firearms convictions. It is easy to see how Boosie might have looked at those cases and figured he was next in line if he just spent enough. That right there is where his thinking went crooked.

Because here is the part I want every rich and famous person reading this to burn into memory. Fame and money solve a certain kind of problem. When you have a hit record and a bank account, there is always a manager, a fixer, a lawyer, or an accountant who can make trouble disappear. You throw money at it, and it goes away. That is the world these stars live in, and it teaches them a dangerous lesson: that everything, including a man’s freedom, is for sale to whoever writes the biggest check.

Washington does not run on that arithmetic. Not the honest part of it, anyway. A grant of mercy from the president is not a product on a shelf. It is a personal decision by one man, filtered through a process that no lobbyist can force. You cannot buy it any more than you can buy the sunrise. What you can buy, if you are not careful, is a couple of slick talkers who noticed you were scared and cashed in on it.

And look at who Boosie handed his trust to. These two are not statesmen. They are political operators who pleaded guilty in Ohio over an illegal robocall campaign that targeted Black voters. They later agreed to pay up to $1.25 million in a New York settlement, while the Federal Communications Commission imposed a separate fine of more than $5 million. Let that sink in. A Black man from Louisiana paid six figures to the very same characters who had already been convicted over a scheme targeting Black folks at the ballot box. If that is not a warning wrapped inside a warning, I do not know what is.

Even one of Trump’s own loud supporters, Laura Loomer, told him plain when he tagged her online. She said you cannot pay for this, and she asked who told him that is how it works. Boosie, to his credit, thanked her for the honesty. But by then the money was already gone.

I do not write this to laugh at the man. I have some sympathy for anybody scared of losing his freedom, reaching for any hand that promises to pull him out. That fear is real, and men with money are targets precisely because they can pay. The predators know a frightened rich man is the easiest mark alive.

The lesson is bigger than one rapper and one bad contract. It is this. When you step out of the recording booth and into the halls of government, the rules you grew up with do not apply anymore. The people who whisper that they have the president’s ear are usually selling you a door that does not open. Real access is not something a stranger can hand you for a fee, and any grown man who tells you otherwise is measuring you for a con.

Boosie may survive this pardon mess, but his legal troubles are not finished. He avoided additional prison time in January and returned to performing, but federal authorities are now seeking to revoke his supervised release over allegations that he violated its conditions in May. That matter has not been resolved. Whatever happens next, six hundred thousand dollars remains a hard way to learn that some doors in this country do not have a price tag. They have a lock, and the key is not for sale.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.

He said it plain opening night, and the line has been rattling around my skull ever since. The record that sold 43,000 copies its first week had just filled 45,000 seats, and culture always wins. Chew on that one. Reasonable Doubt did not kick the door down back in ’96. It seeped in slow, moved hand to hand, got quoted in the barbershop and studied like scripture by folks who understood what they were holding. Three decades later the same body of work sold out a ballpark. Nothing about that is luck. That is what a real songbook does once you give it a little time.

Hov did not throw a regular concert either. He built a trilogy. Friday belonged to Reasonable Doubt turning thirty. Saturday honored The Blueprint at twenty five. Then Sunday, billed as Extra Innings, turned loose a decades deep run through the whole discography. Think on the nerve that takes. Half the artists walking around today could not hold a crowd for one honest hour with material people actually want performed front to back. Brooklyn’s own gave entire evenings to single projects, and he could do it because those projects still stand up beat for beat, verse for verse, all these years down the line.

Now set that next to how the game runs today. It spins on the feed. A snippet catches a little fire on the app, fifteen seconds get looped a few million times, and for about a month some young fella is the hottest thing walking the planet. Then the trend rolls on and the numbers scatter like roaches when the kitchen light flips on. I am not knocking anybody’s come up. Go get your money. But ask yourself honest who in this new crop is making something a grown man will pay real dollars to hear performed live in the year 2056. That is a whole different question, and the honest answer thins the room out quick.

Saturday is where the argument got its loudest witness. That night belonged to The Blueprint, and you need the context to feel the weight of what happened. The entire record, front to back, carries exactly one guest feature. One. In a time when a rapper will cram eight features onto a project just to juice the streaming counts and borrow somebody else’s audience, Jigga built a stone classic and handed the microphone to precisely one outsider. That outsider was Eminem, on “Renegade,” and Saturday he walked back out to run it live for the first time in nearly sixteen years.

If you know the history, you know why the place nearly came apart. Slim Shady did not simply rap on that song. He produced it, wrote his two verses, and cut so sharp that Nas built a whole bar in “Ether” around the claim that Em had murdered Hov on his own record. People have been arguing that point in comment sections and cyphers for going on twenty five years now. So when the two of them stood up there together in the Bronx and ran it back, it was not some nostalgia routine. It was two grown legends leaning into a debate that never needed a winner, since both men already came out rich and revered. Em snatched the mic when they finished and hollered for the crowd to make noise for one of the greatest to ever touch a microphone, then wrapped Jay up in a hug. And he did not leave. He stayed out there and detonated “Lose Yourself,” the anthem that carried him out of a trailer and onto an Oscar stage. Two bodies of work colliding on one field. Neither one built for a fifteen second clip. Both built to outlive every soul still arguing about them.

That is the entire thesis in a single number. Blueprint had one feature. One. And that one feature still packs a stadium a quarter century on, because the album was made to be lived with, not skimmed past.

Sunday, the night they called Extra Innings, is where the case closed itself, and Rihanna was the exclamation mark. Rewind the tape a ways. Back in the mid 2000s, when Carter was running Def Jam as its president, a teenager from Barbados walked into that building, auditioned for him, and signed with the label after hours of negotiations. He heard it. The same ear that built his own catalog pointed itself at somebody else, and it grew into one of the largest careers this century has produced. So when she strolled out Sunday, it was not just a guest spot. It was the seed and the tree standing on the same stage.

And understand what it took to get her there. She does not do this anymore. She has been off building a beauty empire and raising her babies, and she had not given a public performance in this country since the 2023 Academy Awards. Rusty, she called herself, laughing about it. Then she slid onto the hook of “Run This Town” like not a single day had passed, ran clean through her own “Bitch Better Have My Money,” and told the crowd how bad she had missed it. The whole place lost its mind. You do not coax somebody that far out of hiding for a viral snippet. You do it for a man whose work laid part of the ground you are standing on.

That right there is the thing about a real catalog. It does not only fill seats. It builds people. It launches careers, cuts checks for decades, and pulls the folks it lifted back out of the shadows when it is time to stand up and be counted. The feed cannot do that. An algorithm never signed a teenager and turned her into Rihanna.

Even the smaller surprises spoke the same tongue. Slick Rick strolled out Saturday and gave them “Children’s Story,” and if you were paying attention you caught the thread he was pulling. Long before hooks got chopped down for the app, the Ruler was building whole films inside a single verse, beginning, middle, body count, and a moral at the end. Hov studied at that man’s feet, and a good half of what makes his best work stick to your ribs is that he can actually tell you a story, set a scene, make you see the block breathing. Standing Rick up there was Jigga nodding straight at the root of the tree.

Run the rest of the names and the message only swells. Nas, the old enemy, sharing a stage instead of trading rounds. Beyoncé and their girl Blue Ivy. Alicia Keys. Pharrell pulling Clipse out with him. Usher, Jeezy who reportedly scrapped a Vegas date to fly in, Swizz Beatz, Jermaine Dupri, Teyana Taylor, Fat Joe, Jadakiss. These were surprise guests, not announced opening acts. People rearranged their own livelihoods to stand beside the man for a verse or two. When your work commands that kind of respect three decades in, you are not a hitmaker anymore. You are an institution.

And the ugliest stretch of the weekend ended up making the cleanest point of all. Sunday’s show got shoved back the better part of four hours after hundreds of people with no tickets rushed the entrances and forced the venue into a full lockdown. Jay-Z later said roughly ten thousand people were still outside after the gates closed. Sit with what that means. Thousands of folks stood outside in the dark with no way in, just trying to breathe the same air as it. Nobody storms a gate over a trending snippet. They do that for songs that scored a first heartbreak, a first set of car keys, a grandmother’s repast. The app can rent you attention by the hour. Only the work earns you devotion cut that deep.

Down here where I was raised, we know this in the bone. The music that lasts in the South, the stuff still knocking out of trunks a decade on, screwed and slowed, spun at the cookout and the funeral both, is always something somebody built with real care. Never the flavor of a random Tuesday. A hit fades out like a station going out of range on the interstate. A great record becomes furniture in your actual life. You keep it. You hand it down to your children.

So here is what the man reminded everybody packed into that ballpark until three in the morning. Those numbers on the app are weather. They swing by the hour and not a soul remembers last week’s forecast. A real body of work is climate. It shapes a whole region for a generation and then the one coming up behind it. He proved a fella can go near silent for the better part of ten years and still shut down his own hometown off the pure strength of what he already made, because he made it to last. And with his wife buzzing his hair to open the weekend and Pharrell telling the crowd he had his helmet on and was heading back to work, it surely sounds like Jigga is about to stack another chapter on the pile.

The young cats out here manufacturing one viral flash after another would be wise to write this down somewhere they will not lose it. Flashes come cheap now. Anybody with a phone and a lucky week can grab one. What separates a legend from a trending topic is whether people are still paying good money to hear you long after the app that raised you is dead and buried and forgotten. Eminem did not fly in for a snippet. Rihanna did not come out of hiding for the feed. They showed up for a catalog. Culture always wins, Shawn Carter said it plain, then spent three nights in the Bronx showing every last person exactly what those words meant.

Staff Writer; Jamar Jackson

This brother loves poetry, music, and the culture that raised him… His words come from somewhere honest, and they speak to everyday Black folks just living their lives… Reach him at JJackson@ThyBlackMan.com.