"She is one of the heirs to the Walt Disney fortune – and has long argued for rich people like her to pay more tax. Now she is working out how best to meet the challenge of Trump, Musk and the politics of chaos"
She being Abigail Disney...
“I spend a lot of time trying to think of reasons to be optimistic, because I don’t know how to function without that. And I want to find the energy and the grit for a really long fight. This isn’t just four years … you know, there’s a whole civilisation-level reset to be done. I mean, I heard the other night when Trump spoke, he mentioned that we would get Greenland one way or another. And then there was laughter. Laughter! I just thought, ‘Oh, we have sunk so low.’”
What did you expect, applause?
The film-maker (and the grand-niece of Walt Disney) is speaking to me on video call from her home in Manhattan. She talks with a mixture of speed, eloquence and certainty – partly because her view of Donald Trump and his allies is all about something with which she is well acquainted: wealth, and what it does to people.
She doesn't appear to believe it's done anything bad to her. Only other people. People she disagrees with politically.
I then mention something she well knows: that Trump’s sidekick Elon Musk is also from a very wealthy background, having started his first business ventures with money provided by his father, and then becoming rich beyond the dreams of avarice. This, she tells me, partly explains the frazzled morals of someone who has just imposed all those cuts to overseas aid, with apparently no regard for the consequences.
Well, those 'consequnces' aren't falling on the people who elected his boss:
Among the schemes Musk has frozen, Disney points out, was the Pepfar programme, AKA the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, which is estimated to have saved 25 million lives by supplying medicine to people with HIV and Aids around the world. “There are people suffering and dying today because of that cut,” she says. “There are children who have HIV who shouldn’t because of Elon Musk. Now. As we sit here and talk.” She exhales.
And how do the American people feel now their taxes aren't going to people halfway around the world that they have no connection to or responsibility for, or didn't you think to ask them?
“That natural human proclivity to say, ‘Hmm, that doesn’t feel right’ – he doesn’t have it. Trump doesn’t have it.
Actually, they do, they just think that robbing the US taxpayer to pay for things like this isn't right.
They’re spending no time in shame, and shame is a righteous emotion. It’s not an emotion you want to live in, but it’s an emotion you want as a motivator sometimes. And where is it? Where’s the shame?”
We got rid of it because you progressives wanted to, remember?
And by the way, how much tax have you voluntarily paid to the US Treasury, or are you just like all those others who whine that people like you should 'pay more tax' yet never actually do?
10 comments:
Or she could cut out the middle man and help these people directly if she cares so much about them.
Stonyground.
Typical demonrat supporter: I bet her house staff are illegals, too!
"there’s a whole civilisation-level reset to be done"
She's absolutely right there. But it's not the reset she thinks it is...
A key issue for me is that the moment you pay taxes, put money in the collection, or give to charity you surrender all control over the money. Quite clearly there have been an increasing number of people willing to administer that money on your behalf, with little control over what they skim off for themselves.
Perhaps Abigail appreciated being able to donate money so that she could feel good about herself, and now worries that the size of the administrative costs (the gravy train) are becoming more apparent?
As a child I enjoyed the Biggles books. One thing about them was that no-one ever actually said anything, not a single "he said". Roared, questioned, whispered, screamed, enquired, grunted and groaned, all of those and more but never was there an exhaled. The writer of that article goes one better than Captain W E Johns.
I'm sure she has many empty rooms in her mansion...
Wouldn't be at all surprised!
Indeed!
I doubt she possesses that much self-awareness...
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