News / political
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1 min read
Snap Fires 1,000 So a 2.5% Shareholder Can Feel Good
Read more . . . →A hedge fund called Irenic Capital bought 2.5% of Snap, put up a website named savesnapnow.com, and uploaded a PowerPoint titled “6 Steps to 7X.” Two weeks later, Snap fired a thousand people. The stock jumped. Evan Spiegel got on the earnings call and described it as “a new way of working,” which translates from billionaire into English as “we figured out we can stop paying a thousand people and the market will applaud.” This is the whole model now. You don’t have to own the company to gut it. You buy a slice of the cap table, post a...
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1 min read
The Tate Brothers Just Accidentally Funded Women's Shelters
Read more . . . →Devon and Cornwall Police seized roughly a million pounds from Andrew and Tristan Tate — unpaid taxes on £21 million the brothers raked in running their misogyny-industrial complex — and handed it straight to programs that reduce violence against women and girls. That is the single funniest sentence written in English this month. The guy whose entire career is built on teaching young men to treat women as objects is now, involuntarily, bankrolling the people trying to undo his damage. He ran the grift, skimmed the receipts, and a U.K. magistrate stuffed those receipts into a women’s shelter. Incredible. Meanwhile...
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1 min read
HUD Workers Had to Build a Website to Do Their Jobs
Read more . . . →The people whose literal job is to investigate housing discrimination are being told they can’t investigate housing discrimination. HUD civil rights lawyers got fired for going to Congress with concerns that the agency was gutting fair housing enforcement. So they did the most American thing possible — they built a website. “Dear America” is a collection of anonymous employee letters from inside HUD, and the picture they paint is grim: if a case involves race, gender, or sexual orientation, you’re not allowed to touch it. The agency that exists to fight discrimination has been ordered to stop fighting discrimination. Meanwhile,...
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1 min read
Poilievre Got Triple-Trounced and Still Won't Quit
Read more . . . →Mark Carney just locked down a majority government. Three byelections, three wins, double-digit margins. Poilievre’s Conservatives got embarrassed in ridings they should have been competitive in, and four of his own MPs had already crossed the floor before voters even got a chance to confirm what everyone already knew. Fifty-three percent of Canadians prefer Carney as PM. Twenty-three percent back Poilievre. That’s not a political gap, that’s a restraining order. And Pierre’s response? “I’m not going anywhere.” Which is technically true — he’s been going nowhere for months. The man watched his caucus defect, got demolished in every byelection, and...
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1 min read
Tariff Refunds Are Coming. You're Not Getting a Dime.
Read more . . . →The government is about to start handing out tariff refunds on April 20th. Billions flowing back to the companies that “passed the costs on to consumers” — their words, not mine. So naturally those savings are coming back to us too, right? Of course not. CNBC surveyed a bunch of CFOs and not a single one plans to share the refund money with customers. Zero. Every penny stays at the top. This is the grift working exactly as designed. Trump slaps tariffs on everything, prices go up, companies jack their margins and blame “the tariffs,” and when the refunds come...
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1 min read
Trump Posted Himself as Jesus and Even His Evangelicals Said No
Read more . . . →Donald Trump posted an image of himself as Jesus Christ — not a supporter’s fan art, not a meme someone else made, from his own account — and for the first time in a decade, his Evangelical and Catholic base actually flinched. Major allies publicly called it blasphemous. The post got deleted. That’s the rarest thing in American politics right now: Trump backing down because the people who built his coalition told him he went too far. Here’s what “too far” means for this crowd. Kids in cages? Fine. Tariffs cratering the economy? God’s plan. Bragging about grabbing women? Locker...
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1 min read
ProPublica's Journalists Had to Strike Their Own Newsroom
Read more . . . →ProPublica’s entire thing is holding the powerful accountable. They’ve won Pulitzers doing it. So when 150 of their own journalists walked off the job last week — the first major U.S. newsroom strike partly over AI protections — the irony wasn’t subtle. The people who spend their careers investigating corporate abuse had to picket their own employer just to get basic contract negotiations moving after two years of management stalling. Two years. ProPublica sat across the table from the union representing the reporters who generate all the prestige and all the revenue and refused to budge on wages, AI guardrails,...
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1 min read
Harvard Sits on $50 Billion While Grad Workers Beg for a Living Wage
Read more . . . →Harvard has a $50 billion endowment. Fifty. Billion. And they just told their graduate workers — the people who actually teach the classes and run the labs — that a 74% pay raise to equalize teaching fellows with research assistants is too much to ask. Their counter-offer? “Modest raises.” The strike vote passed with 96% support. April 21 is the deadline. One bargaining session left. This is the same playbook every corporation runs. Doesn’t matter if it’s a meatpacking plant in Colorado or the most prestigious university on the planet — the people at the top would rather blow the...
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34,000 NYC Building Workers Are About to Remind Manhattan Who Actually Runs It
Read more . . . →Thirty-four thousand NYC doormen, porters, and supers are gearing up to strike because the real estate industry — the one that made billions turning housing into a speculative asset — can’t stomach paying them a fair contract. These workers make about $62k a year in a city where rent on a shoebox is $4,000 a month. They keep your building running, accept your packages, fix your pipes, and somehow haven’t burned the whole thing down yet. The Realty Advisory Board’s counter-offer? Try to gut their healthcare and strip legal aid from immigrant members. Classic. If they walk out on April...
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1 min read
68,000 LA School Workers Are About to Shut It All Down
Read more . . . →Sixty-eight thousand education workers in Los Angeles — teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, janitors, special ed assistants — are set to walk out on April 14th. Three separate unions, all at once. You know things are cooked when even the principals are joining the picket line. The district is offering a staggered 4% raise while teachers are pushing for 13% to starting salaries because rent in LA costs more than most people’s entire paycheck. The district is sitting on a billion-dollar reserve fund. They have the money. They just don’t want to spend it on the people who actually run...
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