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If the Confederacy had been a separate nation, it would have ranked as the fourth richest in the world at the start of the Civil War. The slave economy had been very good to American prosperity. By the start of the war, the South was producing 75 percent of the world’s cotton and creating more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation. Slaves represented Southern planters’ most significant investment—and the bulk of their wealth.

Building a commercial enterprise out of the wilderness required labor and lots of it. For much of the 1600s, the American colonies operated as agricultural economies, driven largely by indentured servitude. Most workers were poor, unemployed laborers from Europe who, like others, had traveled to North America for a new life. In exchange for their work, they received food and shelter, a rudimentary education and sometimes a trade.

With ideal climate and available land, property owners in the southern colonies began establishing plantation farms for cash crops like rice, tobacco and sugar cane—enterprises that required increasing amounts of labor. To meet the need, wealthy planters turned to slave traders, who imported ever more human chattel to the colonies, the vast majority from West Africa. As more slaves were imported and an upsurge in slave fertility rates expanded the “inventory,” a new industry was born: the slave auction. These open markets where humans were inspected like animals and bought and sold to the highest bidder proved an increasingly lucrative enterprise. In the 17th century, slaves would fetch between five and ten dollars. But by the mid-19th century, an able-bodied slave fetched an average price between $1,200-$1,500.

Astor’s enormous fortune was made in part by sneaking opium into China against imperial orders. The resulting riches made him one of the world’s most powerful merchants—and also helped create the world’s first widespread opioid epidemic.

That damage took the form of drugs—namely, opium. Since there wasn’t much demand in China for western goods, England and the United States made up for it by providing something that was. They used the profits from opium to purchase tea, pottery and fabrics that they’d resell back home. This also allowed merchants to get around a big technical challenge: an international shortage of silver, the only currency the Chinese would take.

Opium was technically banned in China, but merchants like Astor found a way around the ban. Large ships containing gigantic hauls of opium met small vessels outside of legitimate ports and swiftly unloaded their illicit cargo. Bribery was common and officials who had taken bribes looked the other way instead of enforcing anti-opium laws.

As social mores and cultural preferences change, companies adjust. They change what they sell, adding or updating products and letting others go. This isn't news -- or at least it wasn't, until American right-wing media outlets became obsessed with so-called "cancel culture."

Their latest focus is Dr. Seuss. The company that controls the Seuss catalog has decided to pull six of his dozens of books, the earliest of which was written in 1937, because they contain racist images of Asians and Africans. This seems sensible: Seuss' estate has an interest in protecting and promoting his legacy, and that's not going to happen by selling racist books to kids. That is not an attack on a beloved children's author. It is a recognition that a small portion of his older work is out of place today.

You'd think nothing else was going on -- that half a million Americans weren't dead from a virus that has ravaged the nation; that a vaccine rollout wasn't in full force; that Democrats, in the face of rock-solid Republican opposition aren't close to getting Americans a huge relief package after a year of fumbling inaction.

The next phase of President Biden’s $4 trillion push to overhaul the American economy will seek to raise taxes on millionaire investors to fund education and other spending plans, but it will not take steps to expand health coverage or reduce prescription drug prices, according to people familiar with the proposal.

Administration officials had planned to include a health care expansion of up to $700 billion, offset by efforts to reduce government spending on prescription drugs.

The president is set to outline his so-called American Family Plan, which includes measures aimed at helping Americans gain skills throughout life and have more flexibility in the work force, before his first address to a joint session of Congress next week.

he implies that the marriage issue would not have taken hold of L.G.B.T.Q. politics if it had not been for the vociferous opposition of the religious right. Because conservatives deemed marriage so crucial — and because they went to such lengths to keep queer Americans away from the institution — they successfully (and perhaps unwittingly) laid a trap, forcing activists to defend gay marriage and concede the importance of the institution.

Issenberg’s book, then, serves as a 900-page case study of what the sociologist Tina Fetner refers to as the “symbiotic” relationship between conservatives and queer activists. The religious right told us we couldn’t have marriage, so we decided we needed it.

If that’s the case, gay couples owe no organization more than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

While Memorial Day was a milestone for a return to a sense of normalcy from the Covid-19 pandemic, it could take another two weeks to determine where the US really stands, an expert said.

"In some ways, this was the first big stress test," CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said. "We have restrictions lifted en masse, people going about their normal lives. We know that in the past, after major holidays and an increase in travel, that we then had a substantial uptick in the rate of infections."

12 states have reached President Joe Biden's goal of having 70% of Americans getting at least one dose by July 4.

“We’re in a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st Century,” Biden said. His aides describe the president as preoccupied with the challenge from China.

aides say Biden believes it is a key test by which historians will judge his presidency.”

As Biden said to the nation from the well of the House of Representatives, the authoritarian President Xi Jinping is “deadly earnest” about China “becoming the most significant, consequential nation in the world. He and others—autocrats—think that democracy can’t compete in the 21st century with autocracies.”

Protesters defied an emergency decree and confronted police in Chile's capital Monday, continuing violent clashes, arson and looting that have left at least 11 dead and led the president to say the country is "at war."

The unrest was triggered by a relatively minor increase in subway fares of less than 4% — but analysts have said the protests are fed by frustration from a long-building sense among many Chileans

Officials said it could take weeks or months to fully restore service.

The political and economic power wielded by the approximately 750 wealthiest people in America has become a sudden flash point in the 2020 presidential election

The populist onslaught has ensnared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, led to billionaire hand-wringing on cable news, and sparked a panicked discussion among wealthy Americans and their financial advisers about how to prepare for a White House controlled by populist Democrats.

With the stock market at an all-time high, the debate about wealth accumulation and inequality has become a top issue in the 2020 campaign

As the first primaries and caucuses of 2020 approach, the race for the Democratic nomination is shaping up to be a three-way primary between Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. This means the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is going toe-to-toe with the centrist wing of the party, whose policies are less intrusive to entrenched corporate power. The most certain way to ensure the corporate wing wins is for the progressive wing to fracture.

According to FiveThirtyEight's most recent assessment of which candidate is most likely to win the nomination, Biden comes out in front, with the data model giving him a 40%chance of winning outright and predicting he'll receive, on average, over 1,500 pledged delegates. Sen. Sanders has a 23% chance of winning outright, with the model. F forecasting an average of over 1,000 pledged delegates, and Sen. Warren has a 13% chance, with around 700.

Nominating Biden could very well lead to four more years of President Trump, given his lack of a robust volunteer base. As the Philadelphia Inquirer noted in October, debate watch parties organized by Biden's campaign were sparsely attended. The Biden campaign's impotent efforts in Iowa were well-documented by The New York Times in November, with one county Democratic Party chair calling the unscripted portions of his speeches "unfocused and less energetic."

While President Trump and his allies in Congress seek to tighten access to food stamps, they are showing compassion for one group: zillionaires. Their economic rescue package quietly allocated $135 billion — yes, that’s “billion” with a “b” — for the likes of wealthy real estate developers.

My Times colleague Jesse Drucker notes that Trump himself, along with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, may benefit financially from this provision.

The fine print was mysteriously slipped into the March economic relief package, even though it has nothing to do with the coronavirus and offers retroactive tax breaks for periods long before Covid-19 arrived.

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

“Many millionaires perhaps may consider themselves tomorrow’s billionaires.”

The billionaire class has long leaned on farmers and ranchers to beat back efforts to tax inheritances more heavily. This year, the tactic worked to kill a proposal from Mr. Biden that would have set the value of inherited assets at their original purchase price, not their worth at the time of the original owner’s death.

“Not only does it distort discussion of incredibly important policy,” he said, “it ends up advancing the interest of this very small number of people and industries that have a chokehold on public policy in Washington.”

[Hanania] expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

He still makes explicitly racist statements and arguments, now under his own name. “I don’t have much hope that we’ll solve crime in any meaningful way,” he wrote on the platform formerly known as Twitter earlier this year. “It would require a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won’t appreciate it, whites don’t have the stomach for it.”

Responding to the killing of a homeless Black man on the New York City subway, Hanania wrote, “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.”

Mr. Obama’s and Mr. Fisher’s plan hinged on recruiting blue-collar whites back into a reborn version of the March on Washington coalition. According to Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher, these votes could be won over with a platform that appealed to both the values and the material interests of working people. That meant shifting away from race-based initiatives toward universal economic policies whose benefits would, in practice, tilt toward African Americans — in short, “use class as a proxy for race.”

Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher didn’t pretend that racism had been expunged from American life. “Precisely because America is a racist society,” they wrote, “we cannot realistically expect white America to make special concessions towards blacks over the long haul.”

Demanding that white Americans grapple with four centuries of racial oppression might be a morally respectable position, but it was terrible politics. “Those blacks who most fervently insist on the pervasiveness of white racism have adopted a strategy that depends on white guilt for its effectiveness,” they wrote, ridiculing the idea that whites would “one day wake up, realize the error of their ways, and provide blacks with wholesale reparations in order to expiate white demons.”

Last Wednesday, one of the worst tragedies that has ever occurred on the Mediterranean Sea took place: a fishing boat carrying around 750 people, mainly Pakistani and Afghan migrants, capsized on its way to Italy. There were 100 children below deck in that ship. One hundred children. The exact number of fatalities are unclear: so far we know that 78 people have been confirmed dead and as many as 500 are missing

hundreds of dead and missing migrants have failed to garner anywhere near the amount of attention from the US media as five rich adventurers.

I’m not saying there hasn’t been any coverage of the Greek shipwreck. Of course there has. But it pales in comparison to the attention that’s been given to the Titan’s disappearance

I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.

“In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”

This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.

Initial data shows that at least 500,000, and perhaps nearly 1 million, have left in the year since the invasion began — a tidal wave on scale with emigration following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

The huge outflow has swelled existing Russian expatriate communities across the world, and created new ones.

Some fled nearby to countries like Armenia and Kazakhstan, across borders open to Russians. Some with visas escaped to Finland, the Baltic states or elsewhere in Europe. Others ventured farther, to the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Thailand, Argentina. Two men from Russia’s Far East even sailed a small boat to Alaska.

Jack Bogle is ready to declare victory. Four decades ago, a mutual-fund industry graybeard warned him that he would “destroy the industry.” Mr. Bogle’s plan was to create a new mutual-fund company owned not by the founding entrepreneur and his partners but by the shareholders of the funds themselves. This would keep overhead low for investors, as would a second part of his plan: an index fund that would mimic the performance of the overall stock market rather than pay genius managers to guess which stocks might go up or down.

Not even Warren Buffett has minted more millionaires than Jack Bogle has—and he did so not by helping them get lucky, but by teaching them how to earn the market’s long-run, average return without paying big fees to Wall Street.

The mutual-fund industry is slowly liquidating itself—except for Vanguard. Mr. Bogle happily supplies the numbers: During the 12 months that ended May 31, “the fund industry took in $87 billion . . . of which $224 billion came into Vanguard.” In other words, “in the aggregate, our competitors experienced capital outflows of $137 billion.”