Aggregator

Better Off? How Generational Progress Slowed In The US

Zero Rss
1 month ago
Better Off? How Generational Progress Slowed In The US

Bettering yourself financially or at least giving your children the opportunity for a more prosperous future has driven people to emigrate to the United States for generations. But is the next generation still better off in this day and age?

The answer is yes, but not by that much.

At least, as Statista's Katharina Buchholz reports, this is the verdict given in a discussion paper published by the Federal Reserve Board of Washington D.C. in 2024. 

It concludes that millennials' median household income at 36 to 40 years old was still 18 percent higher than that of Generation X at the same age.

A millennial born in 1982 would have turned 40 in 2022, the last year the study looked at.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Gen X achieved a similarly low increase of median household incomes over Baby Boomers at 16 percent.

This is in contrast to the post-war generation, which at age 36-40 earned 27 percent more than the Silent Generation.

For this generation growing up during World War II, the number still stood at 34 percent on average.

Taking as a baseline the Greatest Generation, which was born between 1900 and 1927, the Silent Generation earned 34 percent more, while Boomers made a cumulative 70 percent more, Gen X took home 97 percent more and finally Millennials brought in 133 percent more than the Greatest Generation even when adjusted for inflation.

The data also shows that the Silent Generation worked 14 percent more hours than the generation before and Boomers worked another 14 percent more.

However, working hours have been relatively stable for generations since.

While the numbers show that average income wealth rose in the United States over time and that more people gained access to at least a middle-class life over the decades, this doesn't mean that everybody is necessarily making more than those who came before. 

A study published in 2017 and widely reported then showed that only 50 percent of people born in 1984 made more than their parents at age 30.

For those born in 1940 and turning 30 in 1970, this number had still been above 90 percent.

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/10/2026 - 05:45
Tyler Durden

The Men Who Own The Ukraine War Now Run It

Zero Rss
1 month ago
The Men Who Own The Ukraine War Now Run It

Authored by Thomas S. Karat via AntiWar.com

There was a time when the arms dealer waited in the corridor. He financed the campaign, endowed the think tank, took the general to dinner, and hoped the man inside the office would remember him when the contract came up. The wall between the money and the decision was thin, often corrupt, but it was there. Someone held the public trust, and someone else tried to buy it, and you could at least tell the two apart.

That wall is gone. The financier no longer waits in the corridor. He holds the office. He signs the checks. He is the buyer and the seller, the regulator and the regulated, the public interest and the private portfolio, fused into a single man in a single suit, and the arrangement is entirely legal, which is the whole problem.

Getty Images

One of these men may already be familiar from a previous article. His name is Friedrich Merz.

The chancellor was the warm-up act

From 2016 to 2020, Merz chaired the supervisory board of BlackRock’s German arm, the local office of the largest pool of private capital on earth – a fact confirmed, without embarrassment, by his own party's foundation. Then he climbed back into politics, and in March 2025, as chancellor-in-waiting, he drove through the outgoing Bundestag — deliberately before the newly elected parliament could convene – the constitutional amendment that exempted defense spending from Germany’s debt brake. The borrowing limit Germans had treated as sacred since 2009 was gone. German military spending rose 24 percent in a single year to $114 billion, the largest in NATO Europe, and BlackRock held stakes in the very contractors – Rheinmetall, Hensoldt – that the money would flow toward.

He broke no law. He simply spent four years learning, from the inside, how the machinery paid out, and then went and pulled the lever. The arrangement was a particular kind that no scandal quite captures, because nothing in it is hidden. It sits in plain view, in regulatory filings and procurement requests, and it works precisely because everyone involved can say, truthfully, that they broke no rule.

It reads as a German problem only until you cross the Atlantic. There the same face turns up in an American suit, several of them, installed not adjacent to the war machine but at its controls.

The banker who became the Navy

Consider John Phelan, who until March 2025 had no connection to the military beyond a seat on a charity board. His career was money: he co-founded MSD Capital, the private investment firm that managed the personal fortune of Michael Dell, and later founded his own firm, Rugger Management. He gave Trump’s joint fundraising committee $834,600 in April 2024. Months later he was nominated to run the United States Navy, and in March he was confirmed, handed a $263.5 billion budget and command of nearly a million sailors and Marines.

Before his confirmation, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to him about the obvious. He had recently earned over $5 million in capital gains from Palantir, a defense-software contractor that took in $541 million from the Pentagon in fiscal 2024 alone, and whose relationships Phelan’s own acquisition vehicle had once advertised. She asked him to divest his defense holdings and to recuse himself, for four years, from matters touching his former clients and employers, noting that a dozen Biden appointees had voluntarily gone beyond what the ethics laws required. Phelan declined to make the stronger commitment. He was confirmed anyway, 62 to 30, with eleven Democrats joining every Republican in the room.

The man overseeing the Navy’s shipbuilding budget was, weeks earlier, a private investor with money in the companies the Navy buys from. Nobody hid it. It was printed in his disclosures and read aloud at his hearing, and it changed nothing.

The private-equity takeover of the Pentagon

Phelan is the modest case. The full expression of the thing sits one floor up, in the office of the deputy secretary of defense, where Stephen Feinberg runs the day-to-day of the entire department.

Feinberg co-founded Cerberus Capital Management and led it for thirty-three years; in his own sworn testimony to the Senate he put the firm’s portfolio at over $65 billion. He was a major Trump donor, and by the time he was confirmed in March 2025 he was, at a listed minimum net worth of $2 billion, the wealthiest official in the administration. What he has built since is not influence over the Pentagon. It is ownership of its investment arm.

Feinberg has surrounded himself with a circle of advisers drawn from his old firm. The group includes former Cerberus managing director John Gallagher and a deal team led by Cerberus alumnus George Kollitides – who was, until 2015, chairman and chief executive of Remington, the gunmaker Cerberus owned. Industry executives nicknamed the squad “Deal Team Six,” a joke on the SEAL unit that killed bin Laden, and Kollitides told a Milken Institute audience he found the name both fun and fitting while explaining that economic warfare has been a part of all successful nations for thousands of years. A Stanford professor watching this described it plainly: private equity has just acquired its largest organization.

The organization it acquired writes checks the size of nations. Under Feinberg, the Pentagon stopped merely buying weapons and began buying companies. It took a $400 million preferred-equity stake in the rare-earth miner MP Materials, enough to make the United States government the firm’s largest single shareholder at roughly 15 percent – ahead, as it happens, of BlackRock. It put $1 billion into an L3Harris rocket-motor unit slated to go public in 2026. Stakes in Trilogy Metals, Vulcan Elements, and ReElement Technologies followed, a portfolio that a group of House members warned was locking federal policy to the fortunes of individual firms – picking winners, and by definition creating losers.

Whose companies get the contracts

Here is where the fusion stops being abstract... Feinberg signed an ethics agreement before confirmation. He would divest from Cerberus and recuse himself from matters involving the firm. But the fine print left the door open: he could transfer his Cerberus holdings into trusts benefiting his adult children, a maneuver legal under conflict-of-interest law but one ethics experts say hollows out its purpose, and he could keep contracting with Cerberus for administrative services. That contract was meant to end in April 2026. In January, he reversed course and extended it with no end date. The financial relationship between the deputy secretary of defense and the private equity firm he used to run now continues indefinitely.

Meanwhile the department began handing out contracts for Golden Dome, Trump’s missile-defense shield, a program that has already ballooned to an estimated $185 billion. The Pentagon at first refused to name the companies winning the work. When it finally released a list, at least four of the winners turned out to be owned or partly owned by Cerberus: North Wind, Stratolaunch, Red River Technology, and NetCentrics. The department still will not disclose what those contracts are worth, and by law is required to announce only those above $9 million.

Does Feinberg personally pick the contractors? The department says he has no direct responsibility for Golden Dome acquisitions. But the general who runs the program, Michael Guetlein, described his own chain of command without ambiguity: I report to the deputy secretary and only to the deputy secretary, he said. He is the only official who can tell me no. The man who can say no to the entire missile-defense program is the man whose old firm owns the companies being paid to build it, and whose family may still profit from that firm’s returns. No single email needs to be produced. The architecture does the work.

The recruiting pitch says it out loud

For anyone wondering how normal this has become, the sales brochure settles it. To staff its new investment operation – an “Economic Defense Unit” meant to deploy up to $200 billion over three years – the Pentagon hired the headhunting firm Heidrick & Struggles, whose recruiting deck went hunting for bankers at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Bank of America.

The pitch promised recruits unmatched access to top-level government officials and privileged information flow — whatever you need, you can get. It offered salaries reaching $600,000 through a government-aligned nonprofit, against a federal average near $100,000. And it described the job not as public service but as a two-year secondment leading to exceptional exit opportunities, including the chance to launch a new fund with members of the team. Come into the government, use the access, leave richer, on the strength of relationships built on the public payroll. This is not a leak of something embarrassing. It is a document written to attract people, on the assumption that the merger of private profit and public office is the perk.

A former assistant director on the White House technology-security staff, reading the same deck, warned that an effort this size has the potential to distort national-security-critical industries in ways he did not think anyone had seriously contemplated. There is, he added, obvious potential for truly egregious corruption. But corruption is almost the smaller point. Corruption implies a rule being broken. What is happening here is a rule being dissolved.

The same men, both shores

Line them up. Merz chaired an asset manager and then commanded the German rearmament that manager profits from. Phelan ran a billionaire’s money and then took command of the Navy that buys from the companies he held. Feinberg ran a private equity empire and then took the Pentagon’s second chair and filled the building with his former partners. Different countries, different uniforms, one profession and one move: from owning the assets of war to commanding the state that pays for them.

The line worth repeating from Merz’s own story turns out not to have been about Germany at all. The buildup manufactures the danger it claims to answer. Every European budget hardens Moscow’s conviction that it is being encircled, which justifies the next budget, around and around, while the men who profit count their dividends and call it security. That was true of one chancellor. It is true of an entire class of men who have stopped seeing daylight between the public interest and their own book, because across their whole careers there never was any.

The old fear, the one Eisenhower named in 1961, was that the military-industrial complex would acquire unwarranted influence over the government. That fear is quaint now. Influence is what you need when you are standing in the corridor. These men are not in the corridor. They are behind the desk, and the desk has a checkbook with no ceiling, and the recruiting brochure is on the table telling the next banker that whatever he needs, he can get.

Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/10/2026 - 05:00
Tyler Durden

Europe Votes Against Thought-Policing 'Chat Control', Brussels Passes It Anyway...

Zero Rss
1 month ago
Europe Votes Against Thought-Policing 'Chat Control', Brussels Passes It Anyway...

On Thursday in Strasbourg, 314 Members of the European Parliament voted to reject the return of "Chat Control," the legal regime allowing tech companies to scan the private messages of roughly half a billion Europeans.

Illustration via proton.me

Only 276 voted to keep it.

So naturally, the scanning regime won - thanks to a 'quirky' voting procedure in Brussels that allowed legislation to survive even though most MEPs who cast a vote opposed it. That should alarm anyone who still believes the word "parliament" is supposed to mean something.

Losing by Winning

The vote took place at second reading, under an urgent procedure pushed through just two days earlier by Parliament's largest bloc, the centre-right European People's Party.

At second reading, the arithmetic is rigged toward passage. Rejecting or amending the text does not require a majority of votes cast. It requires an absolute majority of all 720 MEPs: 361 votes.

That means every absent MEP and every abstention effectively counts in favor of the law.

This is how “DEMOCRACY” works in Europe:

⛔️ 314 vote AGAINST mass surveillance.
✅ 276 vote FOR it.

MASS SURVEILLANCE WINS.

Then the same bureaucratic hypocrites travel the world lecturing everyone about democracy and their so-called “European values.”

WELCOME TO THE EUSSR. https://t.co/5OiJPMmg8i pic.twitter.com/zOM4OnLqkv

— Dr. Simon (@goddek) July 9, 2026

On Thursday, 607 members voted: 314 to reject, 276 to proceed, and 17 abstained. Another 113 were not in the chamber. The rejection therefore fell 47 votes short of the required threshold. A clear majority of voting MEPs opposed the measure - and the measure became law again anyway. Not coincidentally, the vote was scheduled for the final sitting day before Parliament dispersed for its summer recess, when absenteeism is at its annual peak.

The path to this outcome is as important as the result. Parliament had already rejected an extension of these same rules on 26 March. The regulation then expired on 3 April. In any functioning democratic system, that would have been the end of it. Instead, the Council returned on 2 July with essentially the same text, repackaged as a new proposal. Then, on 7 July, the EPP secured an urgency procedure by a narrow 331-to-304 vote, bypassing committee scrutiny and setting up Thursday's vote under second-reading rules.

Marketa Gregorova, the Greens/EFA negotiator on the file, accused the EPP of violating Parliament's own rules of procedure and abusing its position to force a re-run of a question the chamber had already answered. She was right to do so.

This is actually quite unbelievable.

Did you know that Nazis never won an over-whelming majority? They gained rule through such exceptions.

Evil finds its way. https://t.co/YOKnH2RStA

— Tuomas Malinen (@mtmalinen) July 9, 2026

When a legislature can be made to vote on the same question repeatedly, under progressively worse rules, until it produces the desired answer, the word "vote" begins to look decorative.

What was revived on Thursday is "Chat Control 1.0" - the ePrivacy derogation first adopted in 2021 - not the broader permanent proposal commonly known as Chat Control 2.0.

The revived regime permits, rather than requires, providers such as Meta, Google and Microsoft to scan private messages, emails and uploaded images on unencrypted services for child sexual abuse material. It will now run until April 2028, unless permanent legislation replaces it first.

Parliament did manage to push through two concessions. Amendments exempting end-to-end encrypted services passed with 369 and 362 votes, carried by an unusual coalition spanning liberals, the left and parts of the right. That matters: Parliament is now formally on record against breaking encryption.

But as civil-rights campaigner Patrick Breyer notes, the victory is partly symbolic. Providers cannot meaningfully scan end-to-end encrypted content in the first place without undermining the encryption itself.

The more revealing vote was the one that failed. An amendment to restrict scanning to individuals actually identified as suspects by the judiciary won a clear plurality, 322 to 255. But because it also needed 361 votes, it died.

In other words, a majority of voting MEPs wanted scanning limited to actual suspects.  Europe got suspicionless scanning of everyone instead.

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/10/2026 - 04:15
Tyler Durden

zero rss