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A victory by Josh Weil in Florida and/or Judge Crawford in Wisconsin could put wind in the sails of the Trump resistance.
If you live in Wisconsin or in the 6th congressional district of Florida, you’ll have a chance to do something today the rest of us only dream about doing—tell President Donald Trump and Elon Musk to go to hell.
In Florida’s 6th, House Republicans had expected an easy win to replace Rep. Michael Waltz, who became Trump’s national security adviser (but may not be much longer, given his role in Signalgate). Trump won the district by 30 percentage points last November.
But Democratic candidate Josh Weil has a real chance of winning there. If he does, the Republicans’ margin in the House shrinks to just two.
If there was ever a symbol of why we need to get big money out of politics, reform campaign financing, stop conflicts of interest, and tax great wealth, Musk is it.
In Wisconsin, the race is for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Democrat Judge Susan Crawford is clearly more qualified and more, well, judge-like than her opponent Brad Shimel, but their temperaments and characters are not the largest issues.
The winner in Wisconsin could well determine voting districts and, hence, the likelihood that the state provides more Democratic or Republican representatives in the 2026 midterms and swings Republican or Democrat in the 2028 presidential race.
Musk is a big factor. He’s already sunk a small fortune into backing the Republican candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court—along with the same kind of million-dollar giveaway stunt he used in the presidential race.
Last night, Musk gave out two $1 million checks. One of the two recipients? The head of the Wisconsin College Republicans.
A new video released by Musk’s America PAC is further evidence that Musk’s massive cash giveaways are illegal vote buying. In the clip, a Wisconsin woman named Ekaterina Deistler, who won a $1 million prize, explicitly links her financial windfall to following Musk’s instructions—including voting.
The richest man in the world has no compunctions about throwing his wealth behind the worst possible candidates in America—as when he plunked down over a quarter trillion dollars to get Trump elected.
He has also used—or threatened to use—his wealth to back anyone who runs in a primary election against any Republican member of Congress who doesn’t totally support Trump. It’s an extortion racket that is not only helping to keep congressional Republicans silent and pliable, but has no legitimate place in our democracy.
If there was ever a symbol of why we need to get big money out of politics, reform campaign financing, stop conflicts of interest, and tax great wealth, Musk is it.
Not incidentally (speaking of conflicts of interest) Musk’s auto company, Tesla, has a case against Wisconsin pending in the state’s courts.
Polls opened in Wisconsin at 7:00 am CT and will close at 8:00 pm CT. If the margin of victory is large, the race could be called early. If close, it could come down to absentee ballots in Milwaukee, which are likely heavily Democratic and might not be fully counted until midnight or later.
The early vote appears more favorable to Judge Crawford than it was to Harris in 2024—which is good news for Crawford, although the GOP early vote has shot up relative to previous Wisconsin Supreme Court races.
One final and more general thought about these two elections today.
They’re extraordinary expensive and prominent. That’s because they’re both viewed as potential harbingers of what’s in store for Republicans or Democrats in future elections, both special elections and the 2026 midterms.
No one knows which direction the political winds are blowing and how hard, because America has never been in the place it’s in right now—with a tyrannical president aided by the richest person in the world.
Democrats have had reason to crow recently about flipping Republican-held state legislative seats in recent special elections in Iowa and Pennsylvania. On Saturday, voters in Louisiana rejected four proposed constitutional amendments backed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry that would have overhauled parts of the state’s tax codes and toughened penalties for juvenile offenders.
A victory by Josh Weil in Florida and/or Judge Crawford in Wisconsin could put wind in the sails of the Trump resistance. Let’s all hope that Floridians in the 6th district and the good people of Wisconsin do what the nation needs them to do.
"The longer climate deniers keep up this charade, the more expensive things will get," said the JEC chair.
After at least two dozen U.S. disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion during a year that is on track to be the hottest on record, a congressional committee on Monday released a report detailing how the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency poses a "significant threat" to the country's housing and insurance markets.
"Climate-exacerbated disasters, such as wildfires, hurricanes, floods, drought, and excessive heat, are increasing risk and causing damage to homes across the country," states the report from Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee (JEC). "Last year, roughly 70% of Americans reported that their community experienced an extreme weather event."
"In the 1980s, the United States experienced an average of one billion-dollar disaster (adjusted for inflation) every four months; now, these significant disasters occur approximately every three weeks," the document continues. "2023 was the worst year for home insurers since 2000, with losses reaching $15.2 billion—more than twice the losses reported in 2022."
"Rising premiums and this issue of uninsurability could seriously disrupt the housing market and stress state-operated insurance programs, public services, and disaster relief."
The insurance industry is already responding to that stress. The publication highlights that "insurers are pulling out of some states with substantial wildfire or hurricane risk—like California, Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina—leaving some areas 'uninsurable,'" and "in many regions, even if the homeowner can get insurance, the policy covers less than the actual physical climate risks (for example, rising sea levels or more intense wildfires) that their home faces, leaving them 'underinsured.'"
JEC Democratic staff found that last year, "the average U.S. homeowners' insurance rate rose over 11%," and from 2011-21, it soared 44%. Researchers also documented state-by-state jumps for 2020-23. For increases, Florida was the highest ($1,272), followed by Louisiana ($986), the District of Columbia ($971), Colorado ($892), Massachusetts ($855), and Nebraska ($849).
The highest premiums for 2023 were in Florida ($3,547), Nebraska ($3,055), Oklahoma ($2,990), Massachusetts ($2,980), Colorado ($2,972), Hawaii ($2,958), D.C. ($2,867), Louisana ($2,793), Rhode Island ($2,792), and Mississippi ($2,787).
The report ties the rising premiums to "surging" prices for repairs, reinsurers also hiking rates, insurance litigation issues, and rate caps in some states pushing higher costs off to states that regulate the industry less. While JEC Democrats focused on the United States, as Common Dreamsreported last week, the climate threat to the insurance industry is a global problem.
"Rising premiums and this issue of uninsurability could seriously disrupt the housing market and stress state-operated insurance programs, public services, and disaster relief," the new report warns. "Given this rising threat, innovations in climate mitigation and adaptation, insurance options, and disaster relief are essential for protecting Americans and their finances."
The publication points out that "a previous JEC report on climate financial risks discussed other potential solutions like parametric insurance (a supplemental insurance plan that can pay homeowners faster), community-based catastrophe insurance that incentivizes community-level resilience efforts, and attempts to use risk-pooling, data, and AI to better price risk."
The new document also promotes the Wildfire Insurance Coverage Study Act, introduced by JEC Chair Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) "to address these data needs and study wildfire risk, insurance, and mitigation to help Americans make more informed decisions about the risks to their homes," and the Shelter Act, which "would create a new tax credit, allowing taxpayers to deduct 25% of disaster mitigation expenditures."
The report further recommends improvements to several Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) programs, including:
The JEC publication comes as the country prepares for President-elect Donald Trump to take office next month after running a campaign backed by billionaires and fossil fuel executives and pledging to "drill, baby, drill," which would increase planet-heating pollution as scientists warn of the need for cutting emissions. Republicans will also have control of both chambers of Congress.
Heinrich on Monday called out the GOP for its climate record, saying that "Republicans have denied that climate change is real for over 40 years, and as a result, homeowners are seeing their insurance costs rise."
"Homeowners in New Mexico have seen their premiums increase by $400 over the last three years because of Republicans' refusal to act," he added, citing the 2020-2023 data. "The longer climate deniers keep up this charade, the more expensive things will get."
Of the world’s 15 largest personal fortunes, 14 currently belong to Americans. All these 14 will be stepping into 2025 with at least $100 billion in personal assets.
The good times—for America’s super wealthy—are now rolling way past good. Our richest have in 2024 enjoyed their best year ever. No other nation’s deepest pockets have watched their fortunes grow as large or as fast.
Elon Musk, of course, perfectly embodies this unprecedented surge in the personal wealth of America’s wealthiest. Musk has entered 2024’s last two weeks with a net worth spilling past $450 billion, nearly half a trillion dollars. Over the last 12 months, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index neatly notes, Musk’s wealth has doubled.
But Musk’s good fortune hardly rates as unique. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is sitting on a quarter-trillion personal fortune, and the Facebook-driven net worth of Mark Zuckerburg has jumped comfortably over $200 billion as well.
In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, a Guardian analysis points out, the super rich of Silicon Valley alone spent almost $400 million to elect their favored candidate.
Of the world’s 15 largest personal fortunes, 14 currently belong to Americans. All these 14 will be stepping into 2025 with at least $100 billion in personal assets.
Amid the ranks of America’s up-and-coming ultra-rich, in other words, $100-billion fortunes have suddenly become eminently imaginable. For the rest of us, a personal fortune of a mere single billion remains utterly unimaginable. An American with a job annually paying $75,000 would have to labor over 13,000 years to amass enough pay stubs to equal that singular billion.
This past September, analysts at the London-based Informa research group predicted that Elon Musk, based on his then-current wealth trajectory, would hit trillionaire status sometime in 2027. Three other Americans, the researchers added, would likely join the trillion-dollar club before 2030. All these numbers, with this fall’s personal fortune figures now almost all in, appear to make for a severe underestimate.
Numbers, of course, can only paint part of America’s top-heavy picture. Where the riches of our richest end up going tells an even more disturbing story.
In the 2024 U.S. presidential election, a Guardian analysis points out, the super rich of Silicon Valley alone spent almost $400 million to elect their favored candidate. Some $243 million of that total came from Elon Musk’s effort to elect Donald Trump. That huge outlay—the largest personal investment ever in a single American political campaign—amounted to a pinprick on Musk’s overall fortune.
Back in the old days—before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizen’s Uniteddecision in 2010—America’s wealthiest faced restrictions on how much money they could invest in electing their political pals to office. Today those rich can essentially spend whatever they want on political campaigns.
Or on anything else. Take housing, for instance. In the first half of this year, elevated mortgage rates had U.S. home sales overall down 12.9%. But the luxury housing market has remained notably robust. Luxury sales rose 5.2% during this year’s first half—even in the face of a 14.2% rise in typical luxury home prices.
Elon Musk, not surprisingly, is leading the luxury way. Mansion Global is reporting that Musk may soon be buying a $100-million condo in Florida’s West Palm Beach, a little home away from home right across the bridge from Donald Trump’s spread at Mar-a-Lago. A Musk acquisition at that level would more than double the $42.6-million existing purchase-price record for a West Palm condo.
Plenty of ultra-high-net-worth individuals have of late been rushing into Donald Trump’s Greater Miami environs, and this rush has created at least one major problem these rich never envisioned: Teachers in the local elite private schools that cater to their kids can’t find affordable places to live in America’s new “Wall Street South.”
Local housing prices overall have jumped about 75% over the last five years, Bloombergnotes, “bid up by thousands of affluent families moving south with jobs at firms like billionaire financier Ken Griffin’s Citadel.” Miami now ranks as America’s least affordable metro area for housing.
At Ransom Everglades, a private secondary school that charges over $50,000 a year for tuition, wealthy parents think they’ve come up with a teacher housing solution. They’ve created a $30-million endowment that will offer each of the school’s 132 teachers a housing stipend worth at least $11,000 a year.
Public school teachers in Florida, meanwhile, are facing their own tough times. Only one other state in the nation pays teachers in public school less than Florida. The main reason? The state has no income tax and depends overwhelmingly instead on sales taxes and excise tax levies on motor fuel, alcohol, and tobacco. This rich-people-friendly approach to financing public services has Florida’s working families paying in taxes over triple, as a share of their income, what the state’s richest 1% pay.
Is Florida going to define America’s future? Could be—if Donald Trump gets his way. He’s filling his new administration, Politiconotes, “with people who learned how to throw elbows in Florida first.”
Those elbows, once in Washington, most certainly won’t be hitting too many rich people’s chins.