Effective tax rate paid by Jeff Bezos from 2014 to 2018: 0.98% Effective 2025 federal tax rate paid by Amazon: 1.4% Typical tax rate paid by the average American: 14.5% Just thought I should point that out.

A thing I just had occasion to email someone: These days, state of incorporation is branding. Delaware brands as "I am respectable and will respect the law." Texas brands as "I only answer to Republican law." Nevada brands as "LOL what is law?"

Whistleblowers need journalists. Journalists need whistleblowers. Our free guide illustrates how they can support each other to share the truth. ✨Download our guide for free: whistleblower.org/guideforjour...

Given the continued national love of wordle, it’s a crime that Jotto, the much harder, two-person, on paper version, has been forgotten

DOJ announced last week a new “Focus” initiative meant to corral the increasingly large number of #FalseClaimsAct cases coming from data-mining #whistleblowers. Max Voldman explains how DOJ is trying to strike the right balance to encourage thoughtful data-miners while discouraging #AI slop:

I don’t know if the future regulator we will need to recover from this moment is the CFTC, SEC, or some third as yet unimagined agency. But there’s no way our democracy survives without aggressive financial crime regulation and anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves

We looked into Polymarket's presence in Panama, obtained its government paperwork and visited its headquarters in Panama City. There was no sign of Polymarket. Nobody had heard of Polymarket there. www.npr.org/2026/05/05/n...

When I say I’m never someone’s first call, this post is what I mean

This is more broadly generalizable: If you don't do the research yourself, you have no idea if AI is making stuff up. And if you do the research yourself, then AI isn't saving you much labor, if any.

SF next?? Cmon y’all. Maybe we can have nice things

Re-upping for tax day: “Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society” according to Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. But time and money Americans spend on tax reporting is the price we pay for a dysfunctional government unwilling to invest in public interest capacity.

The same week the NYTimes was devoting its significant resources to producing this ridiculous piece about Lauren Sanchez Bezos's call for rich people to not worry and be happy, Ryan Hass, an independent journalist in Oregon, was investigating this horrifying story about a death in an Amazon plant.

This is very true! And as the research on the issue shows and as the Hungarian example confirms, and the Polish one before that, the key to large turnout is long-term, grass-roots organizational labor that helps people understand how their single vote is a dignified part of a larger transformation.

My colleague @stjbs.bsky.social and I spent months working on this new @sfchronicle.com investigation into each of the 48 deaths in ICE custody since the start of 2025. Powerful work as well by our data viz colleague Nami Sumida and @santiagomejia.bsky.social www.sfchronicle.com/projects/202...

DOJ’s AssuredPartners settlement puts ACA Marketplace fraud squarely in the FCA conversation. Our latest post explains the allegations, why the case matters, and what it says about whistleblowers’ role in exposing healthcare fraud. #FalseClaimsAct #Whistleblower #HealthcareFraud

The Mamdani administration today announced its own click to cancel rule, to make sure that every subscription transaction in the city is as easy to end as it is to start. The FTC did this in 2023, it was challenged in court & Trump's FTC wouldn't defend it. NYC is doing it themselves.

We all knew this was coming and yet it's still somehow shocking

Did you hear the story of the one man $1.8 billion business built by AI as portrayed in the @nytimes.com? Turns out basically every aspect of that story is bullshit and the story should be retracted.

Haven’t felt so seen since the Zoe Kravitz rant www.youtube.com/shorts/74Gr5...

all timer banger

Palantir discovered ontology in much the same way Columbus discovered America. That is to say:the broligarchs are thieves & barbarians. They plant their flags on others' work & say "look at our genius!" Now they're claiming to have "popularized" a well-known branch of philosophy 1,000s of yrs old.

this is HILARIOUS therepublicjournal.com/essays/ai-an...

i love the small print “because the regulators won’t let us :(“

After Claudia Goldin became the first woman to win a solo Nobel in economics, she got hundreds of invitations. She accepted three. One was advising WNBA players on a labor deal. She helped players land the biggest % raise in US sports history. www.wsj.com/economy/wnba...

really can't be said enough that this case was decided by the same court that decided plessy v. ferguson. if they could have found a plausible rationale to limit birthright citizenship they would have done it. but there is none! the text is as clear as constitutional language can be.

Two years ago, a group of us took a leap to build a boutique firm focused on whistleblowers. As we celebrate our second anniversary, we’re grateful for the journey. In New Orleans, we reflected on teamwork, like jazz, each strength matters. Thank you to our clients & community, just getting started!

Saving money by cutting govt contractors and stopping contractor overcharges? Yes please. Always better to stop a False Claims Act violation before it starts than have to find a brave whistleblower to clean up the mess afterwards

Someone or someones made $580,000,000 in exquisitely well-timed oil trades that took place 15 minutes before Trump's dubiously optimistic post about the negotiations with Iran. Gift link ⤵️ giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/...

Focus on the depressing 2025 number, yes. But really hard to avoid the depressing conclusion that this is the culmination of a bipartisan 20-year downward trend, with only a short-lived post-2008 blip in there

We are experiencing the federal equivalent of "Blue Flu," a wholesale white-collar enforcement strike by government regulators and prosecutors. (A "White Out"?) An elite crime spree is and will continue to be the inevitable result.

in this piece, I look at Chavez and another abuser, Danish chef René Redzepi — two men who define opposite ends of the food system, but connect it with a throughline of narcissistic violence amid a personality cult that enabled their abuse. www.coyotemedia.org/kill-the-her...

From Dolores Huerta: “I am nearly 96 years old, and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for… I can no longer stay silent…” Full statement: medium.com/@dolores_hue...

David Boies didn't just "represent" Theranos, he threatened and put pressure on whistleblowers who tried to go public. So you can tell that he has really great judgment.

Worth noting that this company is owned by Meta and the blog post doesn't say one word about privacy or what happens to any of that data

Last week, FinCEN announced a record-breaking $80 million civil penalty against Canaccord, a broker-dealer, for violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. Read Liz Soltan’s blog post analyzing what Canaccord did wrong and what this settlement tells us about FinCEN’s enforcement efforts:

New: In a pretty straightforward calculation I'm surprised I hadn't seen done before, researchers at @consumerfed.bsky.social looked at how much people report in the scam losses to FBI + the most reliable study on how underreported scams go, and calculated we're losing $119 billion a year at least.

CMS recently used a new enforcement mechanism to deter fraud on #Medicare Advantage (MA), threatening to suspend Elevance Health’s enrollment and marketing activities over data submission requirements. As Max Voldman explains, this represents a significant new tool in CMS’s MA #compliance efforts.

Very good result for my partners at @whistleblower.law . Incentive compensation cases are quite tough to win, and this was against a recruiter getting paid by the body to get U.S. students to British schools. Kudos!

@wbpartners.bsky.social Our client’s False Claims Act case against an education recruitment company has gotten notice on both sides of the Atlantic. Thanks to @bloomberglaw.com, @thepie, @law360.bsky.social, @marketwatch.com and others for covering the important story.

A new rule aimed at combating money laundering through the US residential real estate sector took effect on Sunday, even as the government faces a new lawsuit challenging its implementation. The rule effectively ends a nearly 25-year industry exemption from US anti-money laundering rules.

In light of the Anthropic, Open AI, and Pentagon situationship, re-upping an article I wrote almost two years ago now about how little tech companies understand the False Claims Act and how likely that ignorance is to bite AI companies in the end thehill.com/opinion/tech...

The wonky world of privatized military housing continues to prove endlessly fascinating. Read the new deep dive investigation into a El Paso-based military housing empire and the Texas families fighting for justice, co-published with @texasobserver.org www.pogo.org/investigates...

Reminder that the CFTC is already mandated by law to prohibit these kinds of contracts and is abdicating its responsibility

There is, of course, a much, much easier way to “take fraud seriously” and that’s strengthening the False Claims Act and whistleblower protections

Whistleblower Partners announces an education fraud settlement. WP attorneys @poppyalexander.whistleblower.law & @maryinman.bsky.social & co-counsel represented a WB alleging an education recruiter violated rules barring per-student incentive pay for recruiting US students receiving federal funds.

This story so perfectly illustrates the real world consequences of secrecy jurisdictions, as I told @h-lev.bsky.social

"Women adopt AI at rates 25% lower than men. This isn’t a guess. It’s the finding of a Harvard Business School meta-analysis examining eighteen studies, over 140,000 participants, across multiple countries." "Every AI Company Is Building a Different Wife" abiawomosu.substack.com/p/they-built...

From me and @dfriedman.bsky.social: Why did Bill Pulte’s charity give $65K to a nonprofit that doesn’t seem to exist? The recipient may actually be an LLC with ties to Trump’s lawyers. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Last week, I was fired in retaliation for confronting DOGE staff in 2025. Today, I launch my campaign for U.S. Congress in Maryland’s 6th district. Marylanders show enormous bravery in defense of our communities. #MD06 deserves a Rep as brave as its residents. secure.actblue.com/donate/alexi...