🚨 Starting a new thread here because I think there may still be more attempts to delay ranked-choice voting in D.C. It is currently set to be implemented for next June's primary, but some back and forth today makes me think two councilmembers could try to derail that.

Still reeling from the Stanford report on Brexit. Reduced GDP by up to 8% and investment by as much as 18%. The UK Treasury would have £40 billion more each year if Britain had remained in the EU. Devastating self-immolation.

Trump's weaponization of antitrust is about more than his falling short on campaign promises: "the government is cynically wielding its antitrust authority...as a means of punishing its enemies, rewarding its friends and consolidating Trump’s political authority." www.nytimes.com/2025/11/25/o...

Bird flu has killed 8.7 million turkeys, chickens, and ducks in the U.S. since September, alone. Outbreaks on turkey farms earlier this year plunged the U.S. turkey flock to its lowest size in 40 years. As a result, wholesale prices for whole turkeys surged 75% between October 2024 and October 2025.

Europe in dangerous territory. Putting democratic protections on the chopping blocks for trade concessions invites a slippery slope. Increasingly tariff negotiations cuts at the heart of European national security. www.ft.com/content/5820...

Ahem. "You can pry the end dash—which AI risks ruining—out of my cold, dead hands."

This didn’t happen overnight. Citizens United opened the floodgates to unlimited spending, and 15 years later, we’re living with the consequences—more polarization, less accountability, and policymaking tilted towards the ultra-rich. Reform is still possible: rooseveltinstitute.org/publications...

NEW from me: the proposed executive order to block states from regulating AI is indicative of the purchase of our government by tech overlords, & likely to spread to shield any business able to persuade Trump that because they use an algorithm or a computer, they're part of the AI revolution too.

Extremely upset that a throw-away XKCD joke somehow became the organizing principle for the Internet.

NEW: As Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick drives billions of dollars in foreign payments to help build AI data centers in the US, his sons help run a company earning tens of millions in fees helping finance AI data centers. A NYT investigation. (Free link) www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/u...

We teamed up with a range of public interest groups to urge state AGs to appeal the incredibly weak, insufficient remedies to address Google's monopoly over search. www.economicliberties.us/press-releas...

Last week: vote with the far-right to concede to Trump's demands for deregulation of climate policy. This week: weaken data privacy and AI rules to the benefit of Trump's Big Tech backers. Does the EU really want to be joining us under techno-oligarchal rule?

President Trump is in the process of sending millions of dollars in taxpayer money directly to his political allies — and himself. One of the biggest beneficiaries may be Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor.

Economists: markets knows best! The real world: www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...

it is extraordinary that gov. hochul's response to seeing a war on clean energy from washington dc is to capitulate in advance, and that she thinks that's somehow evidence of good, commonsense politics www.canarymedia.com/articles/car...

Fun fact: the US sells more higher ed to China than soybeans

In 2024, Tesla reported a profit of $7.1B but paid no corporate income tax—and it's legal. Corporations are forever telling the IRS their profits are low, even as they tell Wall Street that their profits are high Both Trump terms have been one business tax cut after another. trib.al/qRro3dA

Not a good look for the Governor, as she approves a new natural gas pipeline as well as gas for a crypto-mining operation. Both decisions fly in the face of NY's climate law. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/13/n... @doreenharris.bsky.social @governor.ny.gov

Senator Menendez is sitting in his cell at Allenwood right now because he took a 1kg gold bar from the Egyptians, among other forms of “lobbying.”

The richest person on that list is Elon Musk. Convert his net worth to centimeters and it’s enough to circle the globe more than 100 times. It’s not even really comparable. 7/8

"It was tough to beat Apple, but the Swiss did it." said one administration official. How the Swiss convinced Trump to drop tariffs with gifts of a Rolex desk clock and a 1 kg gold bar. www.axios.com/2025/11/14/t...

“Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I love you all.”

While the COP is an important milestone every year, the real engine of global climate action is now industrial policy. That’s why next Friday, as COP closes, we will launch the Clean Industrial Capabilities Explorer. Register in-person: luma.com/cd2255t4 Sign up for the webinar: bit.ly/484IS5o

Private equity firm Sycamore Partners bought Walgreens. Now Walgreens has stopped giving most workers paid vacation on Thanksgiving, Christmas and other major holidays. Private equity takeovers are a disaster for workers, and customers.

what's wild is we're not even really seeing the impact of the complete and total evisceration of corporate oversight, consumer protection, and the social safety net yet our regulators genuinely no longer function and the press, politicians, and even policy people also haven't noticed yet

See you in Nuremberg, Google! www.404media.co/google-has-c...

The statute banning "unconscionable" business practices in NYC is really powerful, I was told about it a couple weeks ago www.semafor.com/article/11/1...

“Providing tech services to supercharge ICE operations while blocking tools that support accountability of ICE officers is entirely backwards." - @kateruane.bsky.social www.404media.co/google-has-c...

If Musk meets all the benchmarks of his new $1 trillion pay package from Tesla he will be paid $274 MILLION EVERY DAY FOR THE NEXT 10 YEARS This is his part-time job

Homo Sapiens emerged about 300,000 years ago. Imagine you gave an early Sapiens $9,000. And they looked at you and said “the fuck is this?” But anyway, you piled up $9,000 Every Single Day since the first Sapiens walked the Earth. You still wouldn’t have a trillion dollars. Capitalism is fucked

oh look at that. it’s really easy to make people hate data centers

We're witnessing the culminating rot of shareholder capitalism in real time. Some of the most powerful corporations in America have sided with an authoritarian regime in order to protect their short term profits — the fundamental rights of everyone else be damned.

Facing budget shortfalls due to the end of COVID funding, cuts to Medicaid in the Big Beautiful Bill and tariffs, states are turning to one place for cuts: child care. Many advocates in 2023 warned that a child care cliff was coming. Years later, it’s now here. 19thnews.org/2025/11/stat...

It's hard for outsiders to quantify the horrific or fraudulent social media content. Well: Meta shows an "estimated 15 billion 'higher risk' scam" ads with signs of fraud daily. "Meta earns about $7 billion in annualized revenue" from this scam ad category www.reuters.com/investigatio...

We were looking for a good quote to set up the satire here, but nothing clicked. Then Douthat’s op-ed dropped late morning, and well, thank you New York Times yet again. www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/yea...

Getting new details on this now: As the arrest unfolded, teachers pleaded with the agents telling them the teacher had a work permit. The agents went into multiple rooms looking for teachers while children were present. One teacher hid with a child in her care while the agents stormed the facility.

The 10 richest people in the United States have seen their collective fortune grow by nearly $700 billion since President Donald Trump secured a second term in the White House and rushed to deliver more wealth to the top in the form of tax cuts.

Unbelievable! Saving parents $15,000 per year or more is a cheap way to get more adults into the workforce.

Posting a photo of Ceausescu’s bathroom for no apparent reason.

I mentioned this stat from Alisa Wood of KKR in a talk I did a few weeks ago, but did you know: There are more private equity firms in the United States than there are McDonald's? (~19,000 vs. 14,000) In 1980, there were 24 PE firms *total* in the U.S. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Amazon is helping fund a $300 million build of a ballroom for the White House. Independent bookstores are donating to food banks and organizations that help with food insecurity. They are not the same.

This is a piece of the Mamdani campaign that I think is really underdiscussed—that in a moment of terror and despair, his premise is that standing up against fascism can be joyous.

Experts in child care policy and the politics around it see the shared ground for these two politicians — even if they don’t agree on all the details — as emblematic of how critical the issue has become to many voters, particularly younger ones.

“When a platform removes criticism of a political book while leaving praise, or removes everything to hide that [that] criticism existed, they’re not saying neutral—they’re picking a side”

After January 6, 2021, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Comcast publicly pledged to stop donating to politicians who sought to undermine the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election. In 2025, these companies have stopped worrying about democracy and are buying Trump a ballroom.

No surprise here: Trump's new drug pricing plan is riddled with conflicts of interest. BlinkRx, an online drug delivery company, is set to make millions off the new plan. Their newest board members? Donald Trump Jr. and Treasury Sec. Lutnik's millionaire children.

Good to see enforcement of the DSA continuing despite Trump's threats. While the US government claims that the DSA allows "censorship", in the real world Meta is preventing users from exercising their legal rights to challenge its opaque content moderation decisions. ec.europa.eu/commission/p...

By focusing the political debate on the wrong issue, Europe’s car industry may well turn into the next industrial policy train wreck. The real risk is a costly muddle of regulatory rollbacks, bailouts, and a patch work of national subsidies - only for the sector to slow-walk into oblivion anyway

It's bribery and corruption, a protection racket. But another way to describe money given to the government under threat of punishment is taxation, here imposed unilaterally and arbitrarily by the executive without the legislature. Ship money is the analogy, if you're up on 17th C. English history.