News / political
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1 min read
Poilievre Ran Out Of Enemies He's Allowed To Name
Read more . . . →Poilievre is sitting at 37% while Carney runs a 66% approval rating, his own seat is now something pundits openly game out losing, and the party that was supposed to stroll into government is watching two-thirds of the country say they’d rather keep the banker. So he did the thing every cornered politician does when the affordability pitch stops selling: he found someone smaller to blame. This week it’s “very hard caps” on immigration, and the line he said out loud is that he wants more people leaving the country than coming into it. That’s not a housing plan or...
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1 min read
They Put a Clock-In App on the People Who Defend You
Read more . . . →Public defenders are the people who stand between a broke stranger and a cage, for a salary that wouldn’t cover a Brooklyn one-bedroom. Brooklyn Defender Services just spent days on a picket line to claw back a little dignity, and their contract fight ended in a tentative deal on Tuesday. The Bronx Defenders are set to walk on July 27. Not over some fortune. Over a tracking app that makes them clock in and out like they’re suspected of skimming the register, and over a probation period where management can fire a new hire “for any reason.” Sit with “for...
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2 min read
327 Trades the Day Before He Flipped the Switch
Read more . . . →Here’s the timeline, because it does all the work. April 8, 2025: the market is still falling off a cliff that Trump personally pushed it over the week before with his “Liberation Day” tariffs. That same day, accounts linked to him make 327 separate stock purchases — as much as $12.8 million total, six figures a pop into Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet and dozens more. The next morning he posts on Truth Social that it’s “a great time to buy.” A few hours after that he pauses the tariffs. The S&P 500 rips one of the biggest single-day gains...
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1 min read
The Tate Brothers Got Cuffed in the Country That Flew Them In
Read more . . . →Rewind eighteen months. In February 2025 the Trump administration leaned on Romania to lift the travel ban keeping Andrew and Tristan Tate in the country while they faced trafficking charges. Richard Grenell worked the Romanian foreign minister at the Munich Security Conference, calls got made, and days later the brothers boarded a private jet and landed in Fort Lauderdale like they’d won something. Trump, asked about the men his own people had just sprung, said he knew “nothing about it.” This week US Marshals walked into Miami and put both of them in federal detention on a British extradition warrant....
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1 min read
Poilievre Blew a 20-Point Lead, Then Called His Best People Liberals
Read more . . . →At the Calgary Stampede this month, Pierre Poilievre stood up and celebrated a BC Conservative leadership win over what he called “Liberal lobbyists from out East.” The men he was sneering at weren’t Liberals. Kory Teneycke ran Doug Ford’s campaigns and worked for Stephen Harper. Nick Kouvalis and Anthony Koch have spent years electing Conservatives. Their actual crime was telling Poilievre the truth last spring: that Trump’s trade war, not Justin Trudeau, was the thing that would decide the 2025 election. He didn’t want to hear it. He blew a lead of more than twenty points, finished with 144 seats,...
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1 min read
They're Spreading the Tariff Out So You Won't Notice Who Did It
Read more . . . →The New York Fed just published the part of the tariff story nobody at a podium will read aloud. Ask companies what they’re doing with the bill and 47% of service firms and 44% of manufacturers say the same thing: raising prices, with more to come. But the word that matters in that report isn’t “raising.” It’s how. The Fed calls it “trickle up” — you don’t jack the price all at once, because a jump big enough to notice is a jump big enough to get blamed on. You leak it in. A little on this order, a little...
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1 min read
Record Buybacks, Record Insider Selling. Do the Math.
Read more . . . →In July, S&P 500 companies announced $166 billion in stock buybacks — the biggest July on record. That’s the corporate treasury spending shareholder money to hoover up its own shares and tell everyone the stock is a bargain too good to pass up. So here’s the number they’d rather not put in the same sentence: the executives signing off on those buybacks sold $77.6 billion of their own stock in the first half of the year, the second-fastest insider selling pace in more than two decades. With their own cash, those same insiders bought back $6.9 billion. They sold roughly...
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1 min read
400 Companies Begged His Trade Office for a Break. That's the Confession.
Read more . . . →Trump has spent his whole second term telling you tariffs are a tax on China, on Europe, on whoever the villain is that week — the bill lands on foreigners, never on you. That’s the load-bearing lie of the entire project. So here’s the part he’d rather you skip: when his trade office opened the floor for public comment on the newest round, more than 400 companies wrote in, and almost every one of them was begging to be let off the hook. Ford. The electrical manufacturers. The people who import cigars. Nobody writes a panicked letter asking to be...
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1 min read
Citi Paid Fraser $42 Million to Cut 20,000 Jobs
Read more . . . →Jane Fraser is running Citigroup through the biggest layoff in its modern history — 20,000 jobs on the chopping block, 7,000 already gone — and the board handed her a 22% raise for it. Forty-two million dollars for 2025. The reorganization that emptied those desks is the same reorganization her pay package rewards. She didn’t get paid despite the cuts. She got paid for them. Here’s the part nobody says out loud: at the top, mass firing is a resume line. Every worker she cut was a number that made a slide look better, and the slide is what the...
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1 min read
BILL Had a Good Quarter, So It Fired a Third of You
Read more . . . →BILL Holdings had a good quarter. Revenue up 13 percent, earnings beat, the kind of numbers a company puts in a press release with an exclamation point. So on May 7 the board did the obvious thing with all that success: it moved to fire up to a third of the company — roughly 700 people out of about 2,333 — and on the exact same day authorized a billion dollars to buy back its own stock. Not a slow quarter. Not a demand cliff. A beat. The money was never missing. There was a billion dollars sitting right there,...
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