News / political
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1 min read
Bomb the Ally
Read more . . . →Oman has never fought the United States. Not once. Not in any war, any proxy conflict, any diplomatic standoff in the country’s entire modern history. It’s been a US ally for decades, hosts American military facilities, and has spent years brokering back-channel talks between Washington and Tehran because somebody in the region had to be the adult. And on Monday, on Fox News, between segments about boat parades, the president of the United States said, direct quote, “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them.” Because Oman is close to a deal with Iran to...
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1 min read
He Bought the Picket Line
Read more . . . →Tesla just ended the longest strike in modern Swedish history. One thousand and twenty-one days of industrial action, and the company’s resolution strategy was to write severance checks to every remaining striker until IF Metall had nobody left to represent. The walkout started in October 2023 over something basic: Tesla refused to sign a collective bargaining agreement. In Sweden, where those agreements cover 90% of the workforce, that refusal was never a negotiation tactic. It was a declaration. Three years later, the agreement is still unsigned, and Tesla operates in Sweden with zero union representation. At the strike’s peak, 500...
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1 min read
He Broke the Window and Sold You the Glass
Read more . . . →Trump set a deadline of August 19 — tomorrow — for 50% tariffs on Canadian dairy, alcohol, and autos. The “deal” he’s offering to make them go away: Canada drops its retaliatory tariffs, opens up dairy markets, kills provincial procurement rules, and accepts the American interpretation of trade quotas. In exchange, the US would reduce some of the tariffs it imposed on Canada in the first place. That’s not a negotiation. That’s a guy who breaks your window and then offers to sell you the glass. Carney keeps saying Canada won’t accept a bad deal, but the framework leaking out...
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1 min read
Seventeen Said It Out Loud
Read more . . . →Seventeen Conservative MPs told CTV, off the record, that they don’t think Pierre Poilievre can beat Mark Carney. Not two backbenchers griping into a pint glass. Seventeen elected members of his own caucus, speaking to a camera crew, saying out loud what the polling has been screaming since spring: the man is underwater. His favourability sits at 34 percent. His unfavourability is 52. Carney leads him on every single policy question pollsters can think to ask — cost of living, housing, trade, health care — by gaps of nine to fourteen points. The Liberals are up 43 to 34 nationally....
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312 to 1 and Nobody Blinked
Read more . . . →The AFL-CIO dropped its annual number this week: 312. That’s how many times the average S&P 500 CEO out-earned the median American worker last year. It was 285 the year before. Average package: $22.8 million. Average worker: $73,000. One of these people sat in meetings. The other one did the work those meetings were about. CEO pay went up 21% in a single year while the people who generate the revenue got whatever their annual review felt like giving them. Then there’s Musk, who broke the spreadsheet entirely. His Tesla comp package was $158 billion — fourteen times the total...
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The Country That Invented Labor Day Is on a Watchlist Now
Read more . . . →The International Trade Union Confederation put the United States on its Global Rights Watchlist this year. First time ever. The category is “systemic violations of worker rights.” The ITUC represents 200 million workers across 169 countries, and they looked at a nation that stripped collective bargaining from over a million federal employees by executive order and said yeah, that belongs on the list. The same kind of list the US waves around when it wants labor provisions in a trade deal. The ITUC called it “perhaps the biggest act of union busting in the nation’s history.” Not one union. Not...
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You Built the Bridge and Paid the Toll
Read more . . . →Canada spent $6.4 billion building the Gordie Howe International Bridge. Then agreed to share the toll revenue with the United States for fifteen years. Then scrapped the digital services tax. Then killed the Netflix tax. Then pulled its own retaliatory tariffs off the table. A reporter asked Carney what Canada got back for all of that. He couldn’t name one thing. Not a reduced rate, not a delayed deadline, not a handshake agreement scribbled on a napkin. Six and a half billion dollars and a stack of policy surrenders bought exactly zero goodwill from a man who doesn’t sell it....
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Your Groceries Have Surge Pricing Now
Read more . . . →Walmart is putting digital price tags on every shelf in every store by the end of this year. They say it’s about efficiency — updating a price used to take two days with paper tags, now it takes minutes. What they’re not telling you is that the same technology lets them change the price of milk at 5pm when every tired parent in the zip code walks through the door. The grocery workers’ union has a name for it: surveillance pricing. Uber for your cereal aisle. The tags can respond to foot traffic, time of day, weather, local demand. The...
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They Sold You Trump. Now They Want a Refund.
Read more . . . →The guys who spent two years telling you to get off the couch, hit the gym, grind your crypto portfolio, and vote for Trump are now calling for his impeachment. Sneako — the man who converted to Islam on a livestream to impress Andrew Tate — posted that Trump “would rather drag America into WW3 than have his Epstein blackmail footage released.” Rogan’s doing the same slow walk backward he does every time he realizes the person he platformed for three hours might be a problem. These are not political thinkers experiencing a crisis of conscience. These are brand managers...
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Water Break Killed in Committee
Read more . . . →On July 21st, the House Education and Workforce Committee voted 18-15 to pass a bill that would ban OSHA from finalizing a federal heat safety standard. The proposed rule — the one they killed — would have required employers to provide water and a cool place to rest when it hits 80 degrees. Water. Shade. That’s the government overreach they gutted. The same month, a heat wave had already killed dozens of people across the country. Rep. Mark Messmer from Indiana sponsored it. Committee chair Tim Walberg from Michigan backed it. They called a water-and-shade requirement “one-size-fits-all,” which is a...
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