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Daily News Egypt
15-07-2025
- Business
- Daily News Egypt
Egyptian Countryside Development explores cooperation with Kharafi NatEnergy
Amr Abdel Wahab, Chairperson and Managing Director of the Egyptian Countryside Development Company, met with a high-level delegation from the Kharafi NatEnergy Group to discuss potential avenues for cooperation in infrastructure, energy, and water projects. The visiting delegation was led by Samir Farag, Chairperson of the Group, and included Magdy El-Badry, Chairperson of Kharafi Electric Company—a subsidiary of the group—along with Ahmed Hawara, Head of Development and Sales. The meeting was also attended by Venise Fayid, Advisor to the Chairperson of the New Egyptian Countryside Development Company. During the meeting, Abdel Wahab gave an overview of the national project to develop 1.5 million feddans, outlining its strategic phases and the latest updates. He underscored the project's role as a pillar of Egypt's sustainable development strategy and highlighted major milestones already achieved on the ground. Abdel Wahab emphasized that the project stands as a testament to the government's efforts to turn the vision of political leadership into a tangible and transformative reality. He also noted the successful establishment of the project's core infrastructure using advanced technologies, including the full deployment of telecommunications and electricity networks across various sites within the 'New Egyptian Countryside.' The discussion explored areas of mutual interest between the Egyptian Countryside Development Company and Kharafi Electric, particularly in infrastructure development, energy generation, and water management. Both parties expressed a shared commitment to enhancing cooperation in support of the national initiative, which aims to unlock Egypt's agricultural and developmental potential through the cultivation and modernization of vast land areas. The Kharafi NatEnergy delegation commended the achievements made by the New Egyptian Countryside Development Company, praising the scale and speed of implementation. They recognized the 1.5 million feddan project as one of Egypt's most significant national endeavors with the capacity to drive sustainable growth and resource optimization. Samir Farag and the accompanying delegation reaffirmed their interest in establishing a fruitful partnership to support the rollout of energy projects on the project's lands. They highlighted the strategic importance of aligning with the country's broader vision for sustainable development as Egypt moves forward with its 'New Republic' initiative. Both sides concluded the meeting by stressing the importance of strengthening joint efforts and strategic collaboration to advance shared development goals and ensure the successful realization of Egypt's ambitious agricultural and infrastructure transformation.
Yahoo
12-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The Oligarchs' Big Prize in Trump's Budget-Busting Bill
If America is a ruled by a billionaire oligarchy, as I argued in a recent New Republic feature story ('How the Billionaires Took Over'), what will our billionaire overlords get out of the 'big, beautiful' budget reconciliation bill that narrowly cleared the Senate this week? Higher interest rates, for one, because the bill more than doubles the budget deficit; this will benefit billionaire creditors but hurt billionaire borrowers. The top marginal rate won't rise from the present 37 percent to 39.6 percent, as it would have done in a Harris administration, which is excellent news if you actually pay that much—but often billionaires do not. And I'll wager your typical oligarch doesn't give a rat's ass whether or not 12 million people lose medical coverage and six million people lose food stamps. The oligarchs' real prize in the reconciliation bill is the continuation or possible expansion of a 2017 change in the tax code so tedious to explain that most news accounts haven't bothered. Some people call it the qualified business income deduction, others call it the pass-through deduction, and still others just call it Section 199A. It's a deduction of 23 percent (House version) or 20 percent (Senate version) on business income that 'passes through,' untaxed, to a private individual, who then pays taxes on it as personal rather than corporate income. The rationale for this deduction is that business income shouldn't be taxed at a maximum 37 percent rate when the corporate income tax is only 21 percent. Are you bored yet? If so, you're exactly where the oligarchs want you. Maybe you'll perk up if I tell you this tax cut will add to the budget deficit either $820 billion (House version) or $736 billion (Senate version). More than half the benefit will go to millionaires. Pass-through income is a key driver of income inequality. Between 1985 and 2021, the top 1 percent in the income distribution increased its share of the nation's income from 13 percent to more than 25 percent. The majority of that increase came from pass-through income. Defenders of the pass-through tax break will tell you that most pass-through businesses are small businesses, and that's true. But the majority of income from pass-through businesses goes to the rich. In 2011, 70 percent of all pass-through income went to the top 1 percent; the 2017 tax break almost certainly pushed that proportion higher. We're talking oligarch money. When corporations spend money on political candidacies, as they were invited to do by the Supreme Court's execrable Citizens United ruling in 2010, the corporations in question are seldom publicly held (i.e., the kind that pay corporate tax), because shareholders are liable to object. Instead, corporate contributions typically come from privately held S-corporations, partnerships, and limited liability corporations (or LLCs), where income passes through to a very wealthy owner. The less tax these oligarchs pay on pass-through income, the more they have to buy politicians. Pass-through corporations proliferated after Ronald Reagan's 1986 tax reform reduced the top marginal income-tax rate from 50 percent to 28 percent. That law lowered the corporate tax rate too, but not enough to halt a stampede from public to private corporations. (I'm grateful for this history to Bloomberg's Justin Fox.) The pass-through advantage diminished in subsequent years as a result of various tax changes. But when Trump's 2017 tax law dropped publicly held corporations' tax bill from 35 percent to 21 percent, the pass-through-dependent rich screamed bloody murder until Congress agreed to lower taxes on pass-through income too, with the 20 percent deduction. (Reason Number I-Lost-Count why it was dumb to lower corporate taxes in the first place.) The result was not, in fact, parity, mainly because revenue generated by publicly held corporations gets taxed twice (through corporate taxes and taxes on dividends or capital gains) whereas pass-through revenue gets taxed only once. If any type of corporate structure should be favored by the tax system, it's public ownership. I'm no cheerleader for publicly held corporations, but they're usually preferable to privately held corporations because they're at least theoretically accountable to shareholders, many of them pensioners. And again, it's privately held corporations that account for the bulk of corporate political spending unleashed by Citizens United. But the trend runs the other way; between 1996 and 2020, the number of publicly held corporations shrank by nearly half. You don't have to be a bleeding heart to hate the pass-through tax break. The American Enterprise Institute's Kyle Pomerleau can't stand it, either, on the grounds that tax policy shouldn't favor one type of corporate structure over another. According to Fox, 'it's hard to find any tax expert of any political leaning not in the employ of the pass-through industrial complex who thinks the qualified business income deduction is a good idea.' A 2021 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found the 2017 pass-through deduction did not increase capital investment, wages, or employment. When it was first proposed, Daniel Savior, professor of law at New York University, called it 'the worst provision ever even to be seriously proposed in the history of the federal income tax.' But oligarchs love pass-through income, perhaps most especially Donald Trump, whose Trump Organization is privately held. And what oligarchs want, they usually get. Sign in to access your portfolio
Los Angeles Times
08-07-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Does America need billionaires? Billionaires say ‘Yes!'
What's the most downtrodden and persecuted minority in America? If you said it's transgender youths, immigrant workers or women trying to access their reproductive health rights, you're on the wrong track. The correct answer, judging from a surge in news reporting over the last couple of weeks, is the American billionaire. Concern about the welfare of this beleaguered minority (there are about 2,000 billionaires in the U.S.) has been triggered — or re-triggered — by the victory of Zohran Mamdani in New York City's June 24 Democratic primary. A self-described 'democratic socialist,' Mamdani has had to weather bizarrely focused questions from cable news anchors and others about comments he has made about extreme wealth inequality in the U.S., and specifically in New York. 'I don't think that we should have billionaires,' he told Kristen Welker of NBC's 'Meet the Press' on June 29. Welker had asked Mamdani, 'Do you think that billionaires have a right to exist?' This was a weirdly tendentious way of putting the question. She made it sound as though he advocated lining billionaires up against a wall and shooting them. In fact, what he has said is that the proliferation of billionaires in America, and the unrelenting growth in their fortunes over the last decades, signified a broken economic system. Nevertheless, the billionaire class and their advocates in the media and on cable news expressed shock and dismay at the very idea. 'It takes people who are wealthy in New York to maintain the museums, maintain the hospitals,' John Catsimatidis, a billionaire real estate and supermarket tycoon, fulminated on Fox News. 'Do you know how much money we put up to contribute toward museums and hospitals and everything?' Catsimatidis may not have realized that he had proved Mamdani's case: In New York and around the country, a tax structure that indulges the 1% with tax breaks has forced austerity on museums and hospitals and services that should be publicly supported. They're public goods, and they shouldn't be dependent on the kindness of random plutocrats. The sheer scale of billionaire wealth in the U.S. prevents most people from understanding how historically outsized it is. 'To own $1 billion is to possess more dollars than you'll ever count,' observed Timothy Noah of the New Republic in a must-read takedown of the American oligarchy published last month. 'It's to possess more dollars than any human being will ever count. And that's just one billion. Forbes counts 15 Americans who possess hundreds of billions.' The most comprehensive defense of billionaires appeared July 1 in the Financial Times. It was written by Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a pro-business think tank that has advocated against increasing the minimum wage (in a article by Strain), against the Dodd-Frank post-Great Recession banking reforms, against environmental legislation and against tobacco regulations, among other bete noires of the right. 'We should want more billionaires, not fewer,' Strain writes. 'While amassing their fortunes, billionaires make the rest of us richer, not poorer.' Exhibit A on Strain's docket is Jeff Bezos, the magnate whose recent wedding in Venice is estimated to have cost as much as $25 million, tasteful and unassuming as we all know it to have been. Strain cites the common estimate of Bezos' personal fortune at about $240 billion. He then applies a calculation developed by Nobel economics laureate William D. Nordhaus in 2004, that only 2.2% of the social value of innovations is captured by the original innovators. If Bezos' $240 billion is 2.2% of the social value of Amazon's revolution in retailing, then Bezos must have created $11 trillion in wealth for the rest of us. 'Not a bad deal,' Strain writes. Strain's interpretation of Nordhaus is hopelessly half-baked. First, Nordhaus was talking about the gains captured by corporations, not individual entrepreneurs. Also, his estimate arose from abstruse economic formulas and lots of magic asterisks. Nordhaus didn't present his findings as a defense of any particular economic policies — the 2.2%, he wrote, was excess or 'Schumpeterian' profits, those exceeding what would be expected from the normal return from invested capital, which implies that they're somewhat illegitimate. Further, it makes no sense to start with an individual entrepreneur's wealth and extrapolate it to the social value of his or her innovation. It would be more appropriate to try to estimate the social value of the innovation, and then ask whether the innovator's profits are too much, not enough, or just right. I asked Strain to justify his treatment, but didn't hear back. Another issue with Strain's advocacy is that he depicted every innovation as the product of a single person's efforts. Elsewhere in his op-ed, he wrote that Bill Gates and Michael Dell 'have made hundreds of millions of workers more productive by creating better software and computers, driving up their wages.' He also cited Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who 'revolutionized email, internet search and mapping technology'; he added that 'many of us would eagerly shell out money every month for these services, if they weren't provided by Google free of charge.' (Is that so? If Google thought that consumers would eagerly pay for its services, you can be sure the company would find a way to charge for them, instead of making its money from advertising and sponsorship deals.) This isn't the first time that billionaires have felt abused by the zeitgeist. Back in 2021, I wrote that America plainly leads the world in its production of whining billionaires. My example then was Leon Cooperman, a former hedge fund operator who appeared on Bloomberg to grouse about proposals for a wealth tax. He called them 'all baloney,' though a viewing of the broadcast suggested he was about to use another label beginning with 'B' and caught himself just in time. A few years earlier, in a ghastly letter published in the Wall Street Journal, Silicon Valley venture investor Thomas Perkins compared the suffering he and his colleagues in the plutocracy had experienced due to public criticism to that of Jews facing Nazi pogroms. 'I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its 'one percent,' namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the 'rich,'' Perkins wrote. The truth, of course, is that while rich entrepreneurs love to pose as one-man bands, every one of them acquired their wealth with the help and labor of thousands of others. Many of the rank-and-file workers without whom Bezos, Dell and their fellow plutocrats could have reached their pinnacles of fortune have struggled in the oligarchic economy, relying on public assistance to make ends meet. Bill Gates didn't originally create 'better software' — Microsoft's original product was a computer operating system he sold to IBM, but which was developed by someone else, Gary Kildall. As of last year, Microsoft employed more than 220,000 people. Dell's original innovation wasn't a better PC, but a system of selling clones of IBM PCs by mail order. It's proper to question whether any of these innovations have been unalloyed social boons. Amazon may have revolutionized retail, but at the cost of driving untold mom-and-pop stores, and even some big chains, out of business, and paying its frontline workers less than they're worth. As for its benefits for consumers, in a lawsuit filed in 2022, California accused Amazon of hobbling retail market competition by having 'coerced and induced its third-party sellers and wholesale suppliers to enter into anticompetitive agreements on price.' The state said that 'Amazon makes consumers think they are getting the lowest prices possible, when in fact, they cannot get the low prices that would prevail in a freely competitive market.' (Emphasis in the original.) Amazon says the state's claims are 'entirely false and misguided,' and denies the state's assertion that its agreements with vendors and suppliers are designed to 'prevent competition' or 'harm consumers.' The case is scheduled to go to trial in San Francisco state court in October 2026. That brings us back to Mamdani. In questioning whether billionaires should exist in the U.S., he was implicitly repeating an observation favored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.): 'Every billionaire is a policy failure,' a phrase generally attributed to AOC adviser Dan Riffle. Riffle's point is that the accumulation of such wealth reflects policies that exacerbate economic inequality such as tax breaks steered toward the richest of the rich, leading to the impoverishment of public services and programs. That trend has been turbocharged by the budget bill President Trump signed on July 4, which slashes government programs to preserve tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy enacted in 2017 by a Republican Congress and signed by Trump. Mamdani adeptly underscored that point during his appearance on 'Meet the Press.' 'I don't think that we should have billionaires,' he told Welker, 'because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of so much inequality, and ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country.' His prescription is to raise the state corporation tax by several percentage points to match that in neighboring New Jersey, and to add a 2-percentage-point city surcharge on incomes over $1 million, and use the revenue to finance free bus service, free child care and other public services. The focus by cable news and other media organizations on the idea that Mamdani would erode New York's economic base by driving the ultra-rich out of the city was as dubious as it was sadly predictable. Some of them have been feeding on spoon-fed pap by the rich and powerful for so long that — as A.J. Liebling once put it — they need to relearn how to chew. Then Mamdani would get a fair shake, and so would the rest of us.
Fox News
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
Why Andrew Sullivan says the gay rights movement has gone off the rails
There's a phrase I keep hearing these days: TAKE THE WIN. It can be applied to anyone – Donald Trump, Chuck Schumer, AOC – who notches a victory and then insists on demanding more, however unrealistic that might be. What brings this to mind is an extraordinary essay by Andrew Sullivan in the New York Times. It was Sullivan – a gay, British conservative Catholic running the New Republic – who first made the case for gay marriage back in 1989. "As it has become more acceptable for gay people to acknowledge their loves publicly, more and more have committed themselves to one another for life in full view of their families and their friends. A law institutionalizing gay marriage would merely reinforce a healthy social trend." The cover story was wildly unpopular and viewed as extremist. Despite his optimism, many gays remained closeted, including in the media, for fear of repercussions. Gays in the military, before Bill Clinton, were subject to discharge or court-martial. So Sullivan's dream was seen as a faraway fantasy. Christian conservative Gary Bauer, on "Crossfire," said "this is the loopiest idea ever to come down the pike. Why are we even discussing it?" In the spring of 1996, Andrew came to me and asked me to break the story that he had AIDS, and, in part, that's why he was resigning as the New Republic's editor. He said he'd known he had the disease for three years but was in good health. "It's an awful burden being lifted," he told me. "It's hard enough to battle the disease, but when there's a secret about it, you can't help but tap into feelings of shame and guilt that just destroy you." It was not until 2015, after 37 states had already acted (with some overturned), that the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage the law of the land. And when straight couples realized their own marriages were unaffected, it gradually faded as a hot political issue. Polls now show that seven in 10 Americans support gay marriage. Gays now serve openly in the Cabinet and in state houses. "As civil rights victories go," Sullivan, still in generally good health, writes in the Times, "it doesn't get more decisive or comprehensive than this." The issue is getting plenty of media play because it's the 10th anniversary of the SCOTUS ruling. But now comes the overreach. Rather than declare victory and close up shop, the movement lurched in a dangerous new direction. Sullivan says he always supported civil rights for transgender people. And I feel the same way. But gay rights groups, with money pouring in, tried to replace the distinction between men and women with "gender identity" – and that meant an embrace of gender-altering surgery for minors. That is an issue opposed by roughly 80 percent of the country. Along with an obsession with pronouns, the movement also backed letting trans women compete in women's sports, another issue that most people find unfair, viewing them as men. The new mantra, according to Sullivan: "TRANS WOMEN ARE WOMEN. TRANS MEN ARE MEN." President Trump has ordered trans military members booted from the service. Sullivan, no fan of the president, says some activists reflexively oppose whatever Trump supports. "Dissenters from gender ideology are routinely unfriended, shunned and shamed. Almost all of the gay men, trans people and lesbians who have confided in me [say] that they don't agree with this… "Leave children out of it. We knew very well that any overreach there could provoke the most ancient libel against us: that we groom and abuse kids." This is one man's opinion; Sullivan allows he may be "just another old fart." As if to underscore his point about intolerance, a poster on Reddit called the piece an "incoherent mishmash" and says Sullivan is "blaming trans and LGBTQ+ activists for conservative attacks on the trans community." This from "an aging gay man whose brain is soaked in prejudice and fear." Plenty of people may disagree with Andrew Sullivan's analysis; Republican support for same-sex unions falls below 50 percent. But as the first man to crusade for gay marriage 36 years ago, and openly discuss his battle with HIV, I'd say he's earned the right to be heard.
Buzz Feed
30-06-2025
- Politics
- Buzz Feed
Reactions: Democrats Who Voted Not To Impeach Trump
Back in 2021, Donald Trump became the only president in US history to face impeachment for a second time. This month could've marked the beginning of impeachment number three for Trump with the introduction of a House resolution that asserted that the president had carried out "abuse of presidential powers by disregarding the separation of powers — devolving American democracy into authoritarianism by unconstitutionally usurping Congress's power to declare war." However, the resolution, which was introduced by Texas Democratic Representative Al Green, failed the day it was introduced by a vote of 344–79. Green introduced the measure in response to President Trump's decision to strike Iran without congressional approval. Several Democrats were in agreement, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said the move was "absolutely and clearly grounds for impeachment." The 344 impeachment dissenters included 128 Democrats, and people had a LOT of thoughts about it on a thread on r/politics discussing a New Republic article about the vote. Here is what just a few of the more than 4,000 commenters had to say: "How many times did Republicans vote to repeal Obamacare during Obama's second term? They knew it would be vetoed, but they kept the issue in the news cycle. What don't Dems get about this?" "Only reason I vote for this loser party is because I hate the other one more." —Ok_Use7 "If we can't impeach a president because 'it's not a realistic option' and 'he was already impeached twice,' then the system has failed and we have a dictator." "I understand the frustration, but this is not the issue that Trump should be impeached for. I mean, he should, but it would be a very hard sell to the American public. The problem is that every president for decades has taken similar actions without declaring war or going through Congress. This is a problem, but too easy for Republicans just to point to Obama and say, 'Well, he did it.'" "Yup. We need to vote them out. Politicians need to start learning that they don't get to keep their jobs if we don't get what we want. Too many career people in place, and we cannot trust them to fix that problem either. "Trump is the best proof we have that the only people who have power to change things are us. We removed him from office. Not McConnell, not Republicans, Democrats, Congress, the Senate, the Judiciary. We need to really remember that when people say voting doesn't matter."—BotherResponsible378 "Democrats are not beating the controlled opposition allegations anytime soon." "I'm tired of hearing people say, 'What can the Dems do, they have no power.' They can do this. They can rally people with symbolic votes. They can rally people with speeches. They can rally people with town halls. They can rally people with protests. How the fuck else are they supposed to win the next election if they aren't rallying the voters?" "Like what the hell is the point of this party, other than beating back progressives in primaries?" "Democrats trip over themselves trying to look principled while Republicans fall in line behind a convicted felon like it's a team sport. One side argues over morals, the other just wins. I'm exhausted." "It's quickly becoming necessary for a third party, I think. Something that captures the best three or four items from each of the main parties, and adds three to four of its own. There are too many old people running the Democrats, and too many intolerant people running the Republicans. The majority of voters aren't represented by any of them. And everyone gets hurt by their indecision or narrow-mindedness or both. It's time for one or both of them to just go the way of the Whig Party." —WhattaYaDoinDare "It would be nice if people actually participated in primaries. Currently, it's around 25–30% on average. People need to pay attention to their reps' and senators' actions and act accordingly." "I don't care if a Democrat doesn't think impeachment is a viable option to stop the Orange Turd!! You still vote for it. You don't join the asshole Republicans!!" "There are two dozen things to impeach Trump over. This isn't one of them. People really need to stop calling every single military action they don't like 'illegal.' It isn't. It's blatantly within Article II powers, just like Libya, Syria, Bosnia, etc." —BillRuddickJrPhd "Between this and the NYC mayoral race, it's pretty clear to anyone paying attention that the purpose of the Democrats is to suppress the left, not fight the right." "It's always been a class war, and they've been spending butt loads of money convincing everyone it isn't for a very, very long time. If you want a government run by the people, and for the people instead of by the oligarchs and for the oligarchs, the US model ain't it." "This is a prime example of why Americans are fed up with stupid ass Democrats. How many Republicans do you think would vote against a resolution to impeach a Democratic president? ZERO! God, these guys are idiots." "One hundred and twenty-eight, eh? David Hogg was right. We do not have a Democratic party. We have Republicans and Republican-lite. The two-party system is a terrible joke." —Sleepylimebounty "I studied political theory a few decades ago, and most of our discussion revolved around the concept of fighting the fights you can win vs fighting the fights that are worth fighting: opportunity vs obligation." "This is why the Democrats are doomed. They just don't get it." "To play the devil's advocate for a moment: Is it possible that to not table this resolution would waste legislative time on something with zero chance of passing, thereby reducing the likelihood of passing other more impactful pieces of legislation?" "Last time there was taxation without adequate representation, we threw a party." —the_sylince And finally, "Because they know yet another failed impeachment attempt will only solidify the loss of power in the Democratic Party. Impeachment without Republican support is a political no-win for the Democrats and a political windfall for the Republicans. An impeachment attempt now, which would absolutely fail, would pay massive dividends to Republican propagandists, especially with midterms coming up." What do you think? Sound off in the comments.
