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"Do you know how many working families are chased out of New York City every day because they can't afford housing, they can't afford groceries, they can't afford groceries?" said the Democratic senator.
Before joining New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani at an event focusing on childcare in the largest city in the U.S., Sen. Elizabeth Warren appeared on CNBC where she feigned concern for New York's richest residents—those who aren't being centered in Mamdani's campaign focused on making housing, groceries, and other essentials more affordable for the city's working class.
"Oh dear, are you worried that billionaires are going to go hungry?" the Massachusetts Democratic senator asked anchor Dan Faber when he inquired whether raising taxes on the richest residents is how Mamdani's far-reaching economic justice initiatives should be funded.
Faber responded that rich New Yorkers will leave the city if Mamdani becomes mayor and succeeds in establishing city-owned grocery stores and universal childcare by raising the corporate tax rate to 11.5%—the rate that already exists in neighboring New Jersey and that would raise $5 billion—and instituting a 2% tax on households earning above $1 million annually.
"Do you know how many working families are chased out of New York City every day because they can't afford housing, they can't afford groceries, they can't afford groceries?" Warren asked Faber.
She later added that billionaires have repeatedly threatened to leave the city at various times. Real estate brokers have expressed doubt that wealthy New Yorkers like Gristedes magnate John Catsimatidis and hedge fund manager Bill Ackman will follow through on their threats, and state tax data has shown that recent shocks like the coronavirus pandemic and tax code changes have not pushed the rich away.
Data also backs up Mamdani's warnings that more and more families in New York are having an increasingly hard time affording life in the city, with Columbia University and the anti-poverty group Robin Hood reporting earlier this year that 1 in 4 New Yorkers can't afford essentials like housing and food.
"You want to have a workable city?" asked Warren. "You want to have a city that's vibrant, you want to have a city where the streets are full, where there are things for sale 24 hours a day, then you need people who can live here and work here."
Warren's comments preceded her appearance with Mamdani, currently a state assemblymember who represents parts of Queens, at the headquarters of District Council 37, the city's largest public employees union, where they spoke about childcare challenges for families in New York. Parents in the city pay nearly $3,000 per month on average for full-time childcare, and more for an infant.
"We know that it is our responsibility to move beyond the broken politics of the past, of our city and our state, and start to offer an alternative across this country to what it could look like to be a people that fight for the families that raise us," said Mamdani at the event.
The progressive candidate has pledged to make childcare free for all New York City families with children aged 6 weeks to 5 years.
Warren said at the event that following Mamdani's surprise victory against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary in June, the city "is the place to start the conversation for Democrats on how affordability is the central issue, the central reason to be a Democrat, and that delivering on it in meaningful, tangible ways that will touch working families is why we're here."
The senator endorsed Mamdani days after his primary victory—a step that powerful establishment Democratic figures in the assemblyman's home state, such as U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and Gov. Kathy Hochul—have yet to take.
"The way I see it, Zohran ran a campaign that inspired people, that actually got people on their feet," said Warren on Monday. "And the issue he focused on? Affordability."
Mamdani's primary success, said Warren, raises the question: "Why are billionaires and Wall Street CEOs pouring millions of dollars into a race to stop Zohran?"
In an article in Rolling Stone, the senator noted that Mayor Eric Adams—who is running as an independent and is currently in fourth place in general election polls, with just over 12% of the vote compared to Mamdani's 35%—"raised $1 million in a single night from donors with ties to big law firms, commercial brokerages, and big real estate developers who could lose their iron-fisted grip on New York in a Mamdani administration."
Ackman has also played Cuomo and Adams against each other, she wrote, holding "back-to-back meetings" so the candidates could "tap dance for the 'hundreds of millions of dollars' he has said he will spend" to defeat Mamdani.
"In a democracy, billionaires should not be able to buy our elections and control our politicians," wrote Warren. "Elected officials should work for their constituents, not use their government offices to hand out favors to a well-connected few."
Mamdani, she said in a video posted on social media, is "not afraid to take on the billionaires and the giant corporations to make New York more affordable."
Trump’s Congo-Rwanda Peace Accord is an affront to Congolese human rights and sovereignty.
After the signing of the so-called peace agreement between Rwanda and Congo on June 27, U.S. President Donald Trump took a victory lap. “This is a Great Day for Africa and, quite frankly, a Great Day for the World! I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for this... but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me!” he posted. The agreement, heralded as a breakthrough ending more than three decades of violence in Congo, was quickly praised by powerful institutions in the West, including the United Nations and the European Union.
There’s no question that peace in Congo is a desperately needed goal. Since 1996, war in the country has killed nearly 6 million people and displaced over 7 million. More than 21 million require humanitarian assistance, and in 2023 alone, the U.N. recorded over 133,000 cases of sexual violence, almost certainly a significant undercount.
However, while world leaders and celebratory headlines applaud the deal, violence continues to rage in the eastern Congo. The deal will not end this suffering; instead, it prioritizes Western private interests over peace, justice, and dignity for the Congolese people, serving as a blueprint for resource extraction and continued violence in the country rather than a true diplomatic success.
The deal, while ostensibly aimed at ending hostilities, places a heavy emphasis on mineral exploitation, leading Congolese civil society to question its true purpose. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Dr. Denis Mukwege has denounced it for “legitimizing the plundering of Congolese natural resources,” a concern supported by the agreement’s inclusion of a clause committing signatories to “launch and/or expand cooperation on… formalized end-to-end mineral value chains… with the U.S. government and U.S. investors.” Upon the release of the Declaration of Principles that laid the deal’s foundations, the International Crisis Group noted that the deal reads “partly like a framework for ending a conflict and partly like a commercial memorandum.”
It is highly unlikely that the deal will bring a just and lasting peace to Congo. Though a potential cease-fire was announced between the Congo government and M23, the conflict’s largest rebel group, experts say that M23 has already broken the agreement while serious implementation challenges remain. M23 has left withdrawal—and, thus, a true and lasting end to the conflict—out of the question, telling reporters they “will not retreat, not even by one meter.” Meanwhile, over 100 other armed groups continue to fight in the east. On July 23, the U.N. condemned three recent deadly attacks by groups not party to the agreement.
More troublingly, the deal grants Rwanda a green light to continue looting Congolese resources, furthering a central driver of the conflict. By backing M23, Rwanda has taken control of Congolese mines, and committed widespread human rights abuses. Up to 90% of its coltan exports are believed to be illicitly smuggled from eastern Congo, funding armed groups. The accord, which invites Rwanda into a “regional economic integration framework,” legitimizes this theft and proxy warfare.
Rwandan President Paul Kagame doesn’t seem ready to scale back this influence. Just days after the agreement was signed, he cast doubt on the peace process, telling reporters, “If the side that we are working with plays tricks... then we deal with the problem like we have been dealing with it.”
Today, the Congolese people endure violence not only from armed conflict but also from systemic exploitation, through forced labor, environmental destruction, and land seizures. The scramble for Congo’s mineral wealth has forced tens of thousands of children into dangerous mines, polluted and devastated ecosystems, and displaced entire communities from their homes.
A recent policy brief by the Oakland Institute lays bare how, through handing over Congolese mineral wealth to a web of U.S.-aligned corporate actors and billionaire investors, Trump’s peace deal will deepen the ravages of the country’s mining industry, leaving the Congolese people to pay the price.
The list of the deal’s likely beneficiaries is a veritable who’s-who of Trump-linked billionaires: Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz, among others. Also on it are mining giants like Ivanhoe Mines, Rio Tinto, and Glencore.
The accord threatens to entrench this cyclical poverty and violence in service of enriching behemoth mining firms and Trump’s billionaire friends.
The track records of these companies undermine any claim that Trump’s deal is about peace for the Congolese people. Ivanhoe Mines’s cochair Robert Friedland once ran Galactic Resources, responsible for one of the worst mining-related environmental disasters in U.S. history. He has already been exposed for harmfully evicting Congolese families to expand his new operations in the Congo. Rio Tinto, notorious for sparking a civil war in Papua New Guinea and for destroying a 46,000-year-old sacred Aboriginal site in Australia, is now eyeing Congo’s Manono Lithium Deposit. Glencore has been fined over $1 billion for abuses in its African mines and maintains illicit financial ties to sanctioned Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler. Both Ivanhoe and Rio Tinto are reportedly set to join a forthcoming minerals agreement tied directly to the deal’s economy-driven clauses.
Lacking the infrastructure to process its own resources, Congo remains trapped in a cycle where foreign actors siphon off its $24 trillion in mineral wealth while its citizens remain among the poorest in the world. Compounding that systemic inequality, both corporate and artisanal mines enact severe human rights abuses and environmental devastation on the Congolese people, injustices that the agreement appears likely to bolster as it opens the door to firms perpetrating them against communities around the globe. In doing so, the accord threatens to entrench this cyclical poverty and violence in service of enriching behemoth mining firms and Trump’s billionaire friends.
Despite what he may think, or wish, Donald Trump deserves no applause for this “peace agreement” because the agreement itself is misnamed. Its focus has never been peace, but rather profit, and his attempt to launder it into something more benevolent is transparently disingenuous.
Without a radical shift, Trump’s deal will likely achieve exactly what it was intended for, funneling billions to already wealthy oligarchs and multinational corporations while sidelining the communities forced to live with its consequences.
Trump’s defenders will call the ballroom symbolic. They are right. It symbolizes a state that has abandoned the moral obligations of government and replaced them with architecture.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s $200 million plan to construct a new golden ballroom at the White House is not just a monument to narcissism. It is statecraft by spectacle, financed by national rot. The timing is not subtle. It arrives alongside his “One Big, Beautiful Bill,” a federal budget that slashes Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, and climate programs, all while inflating the national deficit past $40 trillion. In this juxtaposition—architectural self-glorification for the ruling executive, fiscal starvation for the governed—we are not witnessing innovation. We are watching reruns of Versailles.
Louis XVI’s France operated on the principle of dépense utile, or “useful splendor”—the idea that royal extravagance was a form of political investment. Gold leaf and crystal chandeliers weren’t indulgence. They were instruments of authority. Versailles was never merely a residence. It was theater. It showcased the king’s ability to dominate not only his nobles but the metaphysical order of the kingdom itself. Every garden vista, every mirrored hallway, whispered the same thing: Obedience is beautiful, and beauty belongs to the crown.
This logic broke the country.
Calonne, Louis XVI’s finance minister in the 1780s, argued with sincerity that royal pageantry had diplomatic utility. France, he said, could not afford to appear poor. To reduce spending would be to lose face, both at home and abroad. It would risk undermining the delicate myth of royal omnipotence that kept the aristocracy groveling and foreign rivals guessing. So he doubled down. The state borrowed to cover Versailles’ operating costs. The result was a debt spiral so vast that it cracked the ancien régime wide open.
The French monarchy believed it could govern through performance. It fell because people eventually realized they were not guests at the party. They were the bill.
Fast forward to 2025. The United States now faces annual interest payments approaching $2 trillion, nearly one-third of all federal revenue. Unlike France in 1789, America has no tax-exempt aristocracy. Instead, it has tax-exempt billionaires. And instead of court ballet, it has cable news. But the fiscal structure is no less absurd. Trump’s budget performs the same dark magic: redirecting public funds toward elite vanity while accelerating structural collapse
The ballroom is a symptom. A projected $200 million marble-and-gold performance space, modeled loosely on Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, will sit at the center of Trump’s renovated West Wing. It will host foreign dignitaries, Republican fundraisers, and presidential photo ops. This is how kleptocracy dresses itself—in borrowed grandeur, gilded walls, and florid illusions of permanence.
Meanwhile, Medicaid is being “restructured.” Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program benefits are being “realigned.” These are words chosen to disguise cruelty. The One Big Beautiful Bill is an exercise in anti-governance. It is designed to shrink the public sphere until only the strong, the connected, and the loyal remain. The money isn’t gone. It’s just moved—upwards.
There is bitter historical irony here. The French Revolution did not erupt because peasants lacked bread. Bread shortages had existed for centuries. What changed was the visibility of the farce. The illusion cracked. People saw a monarchy bleeding the treasury dry for glitter and pride, while demanding austerity from everyone else. The palace at Versailles, once a symbol of majesty, began to look grotesque. The line between luxury and insult collapsed.
Today, Americans are watching that same shift in real time. A president calls himself “king” on social media and receives thunderous applause from his base. He designs a ballroom while communities lose clinics. He throws gala dinners while food pantries see record demand. The White House is not a palace, but it is being remade into one.
The parallels to 18th-century France are not metaphorical. They are operational. Royal France justified excess as necessary to preserve order and prestige. Trump’s America justifies it with the language of branding. In both systems, the result is the same: obscene pageantry disguising political decay. The court is televised now. The courtiers wear microphones. And the people foot the bill.
There is no modern equivalent of Calonne’s Assembly of Notables. No gathering of billionaires will be summoned to justify the deficit or explain why America can afford a golden ballroom but not insulin. The rituals of accountability have vanished. The theater remains.
Trump’s defenders will call the ballroom symbolic. They are right. It symbolizes a state that has abandoned the moral obligations of government and replaced them with architecture. It is the spatial embodiment of policy by spectacle. The Roman emperors built circuses. Louis built Versailles. Trump builds ballrooms. The continuity is not ideological. It is psychological.
And it is ending the same way.
History offers no guarantees, but it does offer warnings. The French monarchy believed it could govern through performance. It fell because people eventually realized they were not guests at the party. They were the bill.
The question is not whether America can afford another ballroom. The question is whether it can survive the regime that thinks it should build one.