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Debunking Corporate Media Propaganda: Americans Are NOT Wealthy. Here’s The Truth About The US Economy.

It is often said that the United States is the richest country on Earth. This is a myth.

It is certainly true that, in the United States, there are some very, very rich people, including the wealthiest billionaires on Earth, and the first ever trillionaire (Elon Musk).

However, when you look at the country as a whole, you see that the US is not a relatively prosperous nation.

This article will analyze a broad set of data, including several different indicators, that show how Americans are not wealthy compared to people in other advanced economies.

Americans are NOT wealthier than Europeans

US media outlets constantly promote a pernicious narrative, claiming that, supposedly, the United Kingdom is poorer than Mississippi, the poorest US state.

This misleading idea is especially common on the US right. Trump’s MAGA supporters often disparagingly refer to Europeans as “Europoors”.

Even some European media outlets have published articles claiming that “American families are so much richer than us”.

This is completely ridiculous — and, frankly, false.

UBS, the major Swiss bank, publishes an annual Global Wealth Report. The document is written primarily for rich investors, but it includes some interesting data that can be relevant to everyday people.

In the 2026 report, UBS calculated the wealth per adult in the 30 richest economies in the world. What was especially useful about this report was that it included both average wealth and median wealth.

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Democratic Congressman Under Ethics Committee Investigation for Alleged ‘Inappropriate Sexual Contact’

A California Democratic congressman who is the chairman of the Congressional Dads Caucus is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

On Monday, the Ethics Committee said it is “reviewing allegations that Representative Jimmy Gomez may have engaged in sexual misconduct in violation of the Code of Official Conduct or any other applicable standard of conduct, including engaging in inappropriate sexual contact with a House staffer in violation of clause 18(b) of the Code.”

“The Committee notes that the mere fact that it is investigating these allegations, and publicly disclosing its review, does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred,” its statement said.

Gomez admitted having extramarital relations but said it was all legal, according to Politico.

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Pentagon Weighing Permanent Smaller US Presence In Gulf (Just Don’t Call It Retreat)

Already US officials have signaled they may just abandon hard-hit bases in the Middle East altogether, in the wake of Iran’s retaliation as a result of Operation Epic Fury, and a conflict that’s dragged on for nearly six months.

On Tuesday The Washington Post reviews the damage control underway, as the Pentagon ‘evaluates’ its future military footprint. All of this is framed as if Washington has a choice and full control over the matter, when it seems that all along the Trump administration was woefully underestimating what an Iranian response would look like.

“The Pentagon is evaluating its military footprint in the Middle East in an early sign of the Iran war’s potential to transform the U.S. presence in the region, according to eight people, including officials and others familiar with the matter,” Washington Post writes.

“One of the key areas the Defense Department is assessing is whether to pull back troops from the Persian Gulf, where America’s large overseas military bases have been battered by months of Iranian strikes, two people familiar with the ongoing analysis said,” it adds, further calling this a “once-in-a-generation” chance for the Pentagon to alter its presence in the region.

The whole thing is being reported as if the ‘smart people’ are in the room and in control, and also as if the US hegemon in the region didn’t already take a massive reputational hit following ‘forever wars’ and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Over 20 years after the initial invasions, the Taliban remains in firm control of Kabul and Afghanistan, and Shiite pro-Iranian politicians run Baghdad.

And now a half-year into a war where the response should have been entirely anticipated (having been predicted by years and decades of Persian Gulf war-gaming and intelligence papers), this is where things stand:

“The war really did highlight the vulnerability … of U.S. forces in the region,” said Michael Ratney, a former diplomat who served as the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and the deputy chief of mission in Qatar.

Moving troops and equipment further west to Jordan, Israel or the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia could help alleviate some of the pressure, he argued, while noting the added distance wasn’t a “perfect solution to this problem.”

Iran has already demonstrated it can strike faraway targets in Jordan and Israel. Last month an Iranian attack on Jordan killed four U.S. service members.

Anyone with eyes to see knows that this is already happening. For months at this point, dozens of US refueling aircraft have clogged up Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport, for just one example.

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Debbie Wasserman Schultz Wins Florida Primary in District with Large Black Population Despite Blowback From Black Democrats

Longtime Democrat Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Tuesday evening won Florida’s US House 20 Democrat primary.

Earlier this year, Black Democrats lashed out at Democrat Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz for her decision to run for reelection in a district with a majority black population.

Wasserman Schultz was first elected to Congress in 2004 to represent Florida’s 25th District.

However, Wasserman Schultz was forced to run in Florida’s 20th Congressional District after Republican lawmakers redistricted and reshaped the map.

Wasserman Shultz ran in an area that was represented by Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a black lawmaker who resigned earlier this year after she was indicted on fraud charges.

Black Democrats lashed out at Wasserman Schultz and attacked her for running in a district with a large black population.

“I think, for sure, it was a bad move by the congresswoman to run in this district. It was selfish and all about her, her career, and not about the community. She failed to do any meaningful dialogue with the community before announcing her run, and it comes off as a hostile takeover of the district,” said Elijah Manley, a 27-year-old Black Democrat and progressive organizer running against her in the primary.

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Mark Walter Probe Puts Wall Street’s Insurance-Private Credit Machine Under DoJ Scrutiny

An ongoing federal investigation into billionaire Mark Walter’s business empire is raising alarm bells about Wall Street’s use of insurance capital to finance private credit and other illiquid investments. 

Bloomberg reported that Walter’s TWG Global holding company said in a filing that it will wind down its exposure to affiliated businesses by up to $6.5 billion after the transactions drew scrutiny from federal investigators. This comes after the Department of Justice homed in on loans that should’ve been marked as affiliated transactions. 

Walter’s TWG Global holding company will buy up to $6.5 billion of affiliated assets from Delaware Life Insurance Co. in exchange for an equal amount of unaffiliated investments. Clear Spring Life and Annuity Co., another TWG-controlled insurer, separately reduced related-party transactions by $90 million.

The moves begin unwinding more than $20 billion of loans and investments that the insurers acknowledged should have been classified as affiliated transactions. 

“Tripping over these requirements can constitute fraud,” said Derek Reisfield, co-founder and former chairman of MarketWatch, as well as a former McKinsey consultant, who was quoted by The New York Post. 

Reisfield said that heavy exposure to businesses connected to an insurer’s owner poses a very high risk. 

“The risk is that concentrated loans to related parties go south, and the insurance companies and their policyholders can’t be made whole,” Reisfield said, adding, “It’s bad risk management and leaves the companies vulnerable.”

Last week, Walter agreed to sell the Los Angeles Lakers to Josh Kushner and Bob Iger at a record $12.5 billion valuation, and earlier this week, a report stated that he is mulling over selling his stake in Chelsea Football Club to the majority owner, Clearlake Capital. 

Insurance companies are allowed to do business with related parties, but such dealings must be disclosed and properly labeled to ensure that owners do not put their interests ahead of those of policyholders. 

The investigation into Walter’s empire is a major wake-up call about Wall Street’s use of insurance capital to finance private credit and other illiquid investments. 

Walter was one of the earliest adopters of the strategy of acquiring insurers and investing their long-term policyholder capital in higher-yielding private assets. A number of other asset managers, including Apollo, KKR, and Brookfield, have followed suit by building out insurance operations. Private-capital firms now manage more than $1 trillion of insurance assets.

“We have always acted in good faith, and insinuations that we have in any way attempted to circumvent our obligations are simply false,” a TWG spokesman told The Wall Street Journal. 

More problems: Walter, CEO of Guggenheim Partners, saw a financing entity tied to the investment firm report a sharp decline in second-quarter earnings, driven by the delayed recognition of advisory fees. The disclosure sent the entity’s term loan tumbling below 80 cents on the dollar.

To sum up, the affiliated transactions were not inherently illegal, provided they had regulatory approval. That appears to be where the process broke down in Walter’s case.

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Terror-Linked CAIR Urges Officials to Arrest James O’Keefe and Cam Higby For “Using Fake Muslim Identities, Accents and Religious Stereotypes” in Undercover Voter Sting

Terror-linked Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) is now calling for a criminal investigation into James O’Keefe and Cam Higby for dressing up as Muslims and using fake Middle Eastern accents during an undercover sting.

James O’Keefe and Cam Higby went undercover in Muslim garb to expose Minnesota’s insane ‘voter vouching’ system.

O’Keefe and Higby used hilarious fake Arab accents during their undercover sting.

The election worker told James, “You’re the ID,” when he asked if he could vouch for other people.

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AI causes higher interest rates

AI companies have borrowed so much money this year that they’re pushing up interest rates for the entire economy. Nomura estimates tech borrowing alone now equals 25% of what the US Treasury issues in bonds, five times more than last year. Bank of America says the surge has added about 0.3 percentage points to the 10-year yield.

Bond managers are selling Treasuries to buy AI corporate debt instead because it pays more. My Take AI companies are now competing with the US government for the same pool of lenders, and the lenders are picking the corporate bonds. Alphabet’s 30-year pays 6.4%. A Meta data center bond pays over 7.5%.

At those rates, a 5.2% Treasury loses the fight for capital every time. That’s one of the reasons long-term rates have stayed so stubborn even as the Fed tries to bring them down. JPMorgan expects $5.5 trillion in AI infrastructure spending through 2030, and most of it will be borrowed. That borrowing raises the cost of money for everyone, the government, your mortgage, small businesses trying to get a loan.

The AI buildout has reached the scale where it moves rates for the whole economy, and most people paying higher borrowing costs have no idea that a data center arms race is one of the reasons why. 

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White British Students Set to Become a Minority in UK Schools Within 10 Years, MP Warns

An analysis of public data conducted by a Member of Parliament has found that White British students are set to become a minority in UK classrooms within a decade.

Neil O’Brien, the Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston and Shadow Minister for Policy Renewal and Development, has noted that the impacts of decades of mass migration into Britain are set to have significant impacts on the demographic makeup of the country, and are likely to accelerate.

The lawmaker revealed his findings in an extended essay post analysing public data on jobs, births, and schools, in a bid to fill in understanding gaps that grow during the decade-long interim between national censuses and inform the debate in a country where compared to some European nations, government data on immigration and demographics can be poor.

According to O’Brien, Department of Education data shows that 2026 became the first year on record in which White British students represented fewer than 60 per cent of all pupils in UK state-funded secondary schools for the first time in history at just 59.4 per cent.

Extrapolating the trend lines, O’Brien’s model predicted that by the year 2036, White British students would become a minority in their own schools.

The MP noted that the rapid pace of change means that students who are starting their education this year will still be in school as foreigners overtake them as the majority.

This could have potentially dire consequences for such students, given that White working class students are already the most systematically disadvantaged of any group in the country.

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Trump DOJ to Deploy RECORD 1,000 Federal Monitors to Polling Places Nationwide for Midterms

The Trump Justice Department is preparing to flood polling places across America with a record 1,000 federal monitors for the November midterm elections, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon announced this week.

Dhillon told Bloomberg the deployment will be “probably going to be a historic number for a Republican administration.”

The Civil Rights Division has long sent monitors to ensure compliance with federal voting laws, but the scale under President Trump’s second term marks a sharp escalation in the fight for clean elections.

“We just did it in the primary. We will do it to the tune of approximately 1,000 election monitors in the November election. This is something that DOJ does,” Dhillon said during a Monday interview on Bloomberg’s Balance of Power, according to Bloomberg Law.

The monitors will observe whether elections are conducted fairly, looking at language access issues, disability access barriers, and places “where there may be voter fraud issues.”

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NSA Blocked Reports Of China Interference In US Elections From Reaching Trump: Declassified Docs

Newly declassified intelligence emails reveal that decisions were made by National Security Agency (NSA) leadership to block reports of Chinese influence in American elections from reaching President Donald Trump.

Four pages of emails, all dated March 13, 2020, were released on Aug. 18 by the White House Government Transparency Task Force.

According to one email—written by an unidentified NSA employee following a meeting about intelligence reporting foreign efforts to target the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections in the United States beginning in 2014—internal concerns were raised about the agency’s suppression of the reports.

“We did not know why we were here, trying to defend the election and identify threats to it, if we were unable to actually report what those threats were because of issues like this,” the NSA employee wrote.

According to another email, NSA analysts had proposed releasing the reports in 2018.

Task force officials are digging through files to determine why evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to influence the elections was not passed on to the president, Congress, and some intelligence leaders, including then Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, now CIA director.

Certain aspects of the reports on the Chinese election influence were censored because “it was judged that some of the details regarding the 2016 election were ‘sensational’ and so required a limited distribution [redacted],” an NSA analyst wrote, noting that colleagues tried for 16 months to get the information published.

“People higher in the chain than us—including but not limited to people at ODNI [Office of the Director of National Intelligence]—time and again failed to make real decisions in a timely manner,” they said.

Intelligence officers were told in February 2020 that the office approved the report, and analysts prioritized its delivery, but the NSA deputy director blocked its release, according to the documents.

George Barnes served as NSA deputy director from 2017 to 2023.

“[The deputy director] explained that he was concerned that releasing the [redacted] at this time—in the current political climate, with an acting [director of national intelligence (DNI)] who had been tasked … to ‘clean house’ in the intelligence community, and with an administration that is suspicious of the [intelligence community] and aggressive in removing anyone who stand in their way—would damage NSA’s credibility,” the analyst wrote, referring to Trump appointee Richard Grenell, who became acting DNI on Feb. 20, 2020.

The analyst said the deputy director was concerned that releasing the information could be viewed as political in nature because of the two-year delay.

“I lacked the courage to point out that we, [redacted], had processed the information in a timely manner, and the delay in releasing it was due in part to decisions and inaction on the part of people in the room,” the analyst wrote.

According to the analyst, the deputy director also sought to keep the NSA’s reputation separate from the CIA, FBI, and ODNI—agencies he perceived “had been tarred as hosting or being part of the ‘deep state.’”

The analyst said the deputy director thought publishing the report would “destroy that trust.”

“He felt the questioning of NSA that would ensue would have ramifications on the credibility of NSA reporting overall and would result in morale problems among the broader NSA workforce, a la when the [redacted],” the analyst wrote.

Other elements of the gathered intelligence were excluded from reporting because it would have been impossible to conceal the identity of members of Congress, the analyst said. Such cases require special approval, as dictated by the “Gates Procedures,” established by Robert Gates, former director of Central Intelligence, in 1992.

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