News / political
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1 min read
Poilievre Congratulated the Man Who Just Left Him
Read more . . . →Pierre Poilievre just watched a fifth MP walk out of his caucus, and his response was to thank the guy. Mark Carney appointed Conservative MP Richard Martel — a sitting member of Poilievre’s own team — to the Senate this week, and Martel took the red chair and left. Four Conservatives before him crossed the floor straight to the Liberals; Martel just got the seat handed to him by the Liberal prime minister instead. Poilievre reportedly found out minutes before it went public. Then he put out a statement wishing Martel well, hoping he’d “continue the fight for affordability, growing...
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1 min read
He Cut 4,000 Jobs and Called Them 'Heads'
Read more . . . →Marc Benioff went on a podcast and explained, out loud, in his own voice, that he cut Salesforce’s customer support team from 9,000 people down to 5,000 “because I need less heads.” Heads. Not workers, not colleagues — heads, the word you use for cattle, applied to the people who used to pick up when your software ate itself at 2am. He replaced 4,000 of them with AI agents and mentioned, like it was a fun fact, that support costs dropped 17 percent. Four thousand livelihoods rounded down to a line item, and the man delivering the news couldn’t even...
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1 min read
A 'Nonprofit' With $18 Billion Sent Untrained Nurses to the Nursery
Read more . . . →A “nonprofit” hospital chain sat on $18 billion in cash and decided the place to save money was the room with the newborns. Ascension’s nurses at Saint Agnes in Baltimore walked out this week because management has been floating med-surg nurses into the postpartum unit — nurses who don’t have the training to care for a baby in its first vulnerable hours — rather than hire the people the floor obviously needs. The union’s phrase for it was “trying to save pennies by shifting people around.” Pennies. On $18 billion. And the money is right there. Ascension cleared $608 million...
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1 min read
Volkswagen Lost China. 100,000 Workers Get the Bill.
Read more . . . →Volkswagen wants to cut up to 100,000 jobs and shut four German plants — the biggest restructuring in the company’s 89-year history, roughly one in seven of everyone who works there. The sites on the chopping block, including Zwickau, Hanover, Emden, and Audi’s factory in Neckarsulm, employ more than 45,000 people between them. And the reason a worker in Emden is about to lose the thing his whole town is built around? Management got beaten in China. BYD and the other homegrown brands ate VW’s lunch, sales in its single biggest market fell 20 percent in one quarter, and the...
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1 min read
You Pay $900 More So a Guy With Three Houses Can Pocket $66,000
Read more . . . →They finally put a number on it, and the number is $900. That’s what the middle 60 percent of American households will pay extra in 2026 once you add up Trump’s tariffs and the tax bill he signed — $900 out of your pocket, this year, for the crime of being in the middle. Now here’s where the $900 went. The richest one percent are getting an average net tax cut of $66,000. The top tenth of one percent — the yacht tier — clears roughly $200,000. So you handed over nine hundred bucks and a guy who owns three...
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1 min read
Chevron Bought a $53 Billion Company. The Bill Went to 8,000 Workers.
Read more . . . →Chevron is cutting up to 8,000 jobs — a fifth of its people — to save $3 billion. Keep that number in your head, because two months ago the same company closed a $53 billion deal to swallow Hess, and this year it’s shovelling $20 billion into share buybacks, five billion a quarter, like clockwork. So the math was never tight. Chevron has never had more money to move around. It just decided the cheapest place to find three billion dollars was the payroll, and CEO Mike Wirth called it “stronger long-term competitiveness,” which is executive for “you, specifically, are...
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1 min read
Get Out of the Way, Says the Guy Who Wants You to Pay for It
Read more . . . →Yesterday Danielle Smith and Mark Carney rolled out a bitumen pipeline from Bruderheim, Alberta down to the BC coast — a line that’ll run somewhere between $35 and $44 billion depending on which contingency number you believe. Right on cue, Pierre Poilievre showed up to do the one thing he still knows how to do: blame Carney and cheer for oil. “You got one guy standing in the way of it all, and that’s Mark Carney,” he said. “Provide the permit, let the private sector build it, get out of the way and get it done.” Stirring stuff. One problem....
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1 min read
PECO Made $814 Million. Its Workers Are Striking on the Fourth of July.
Read more . . . →For the first time in more than a hundred years, the people who keep the lights on in Philadelphia are walking off the job. At 12:01 AM on July 4, roughly 1,600 PECO workers — the linemen and gas techs who climb the poles in the storms you’re hiding from — go on strike. They’re not asking for a yacht. They want pay that matches what the same job earns at every other utility, and an end to a two-tier retirement scheme that quietly shortchanges anyone hired after some arbitrary cutoff. PECO’s answer, across five months of talking, was a...
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2 min read
They Finally Found A Worker Worth Defending. Not Yours.
Read more . . . →The Trump administration would like you to know it has discovered a conscience. Early this month the U.S. Trade Representative proposed slapping fresh tariffs on more than 60 countries — 10% on the ones it calls partial offenders like the EU, Canada, and Mexico, 12.5% on everyone else, China and India included — over their failure to keep goods made with forced labor out of the supply chain. Jamieson Greer, Trump’s trade envoy, called that failure “unacceptable,” and said it forces “American workers to compete globally on an unlevel playing field.” The report names the usual horrors: rice picked in...
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2 min read
They Found Forced Labor In 60 Countries The Same Week Their Tariffs Got Struck Down
Read more . . . →The Supreme Court threw out Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, so the administration needed a new doorway to walk the exact same policy back through, and on June 3 it found one: forced labor. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative announced it had investigated 60 trading partners — China, Japan, the U.K., the EU, basically everyone — and discovered that all 60 of them fail to properly ban goods made with forced labor. Every single one, guilty. The proposed punishment is a tariff of 10 to 12.5 percent, which, by pure coincidence, lands almost exactly where the old illegal tariffs were...
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