What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat For the richest men on Earth, everything is free and nothing matters.

No one can become a billionaire without becoming weird & anti-social. We should just accept that & pass policies that prevent anyone from accumulating that much money.

These State Pension Funds Invest in Palantir Public pension funds from California to New York hold a combined billions of dollars in Palantir stock, while teachers and other public employees protest their retirement savings funding the tech powe...

Public pension funds in over half of U.S. states hold billions of dollars in Palantir stock, according to @Sludge.

Public workers in several of these states, like Maine, New Jersey, New York, and Oregon, are protesting the fact that their pension funds are being funnel to this dangerous company.

We're hiring a contract LGBTQ+ reporter The 19th is seeking a part-time contract reporter to report, write and produce coverage of LGBTQ+ issues, focusing on the intersections with politics and elections.

The 19th is seeking a part-time contract reporter to report, write and produce coverage of LGBTQ+ issues, focusing on the intersections with politics and elections.

Apply here! ⬇️

BREAKING: A jury has found Live Nation and Ticketmaster to be an illegal monopoly that overcharges fans.

After the federal government settled the case, 34 states kept pursuing the giant ticket and concert company.

Now, the states have won.

The Last Day at Kids of Faith: Parents Navigating a Child Care Crisis

Must read piece on this wild stat: More than 400 day cares in Oklahoma have gone out of business since November. Don't miss the parents sending their kid to live in a different state b/c they don't have care.

It's past time for universal childcare!

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/13/u...

A WHOLE CIVILIZATION WILL DIE TONIGHT My son needs lunch, and I have to put his backpack together, but a whole civilization will die tonight, so I'm wondering if they've closed their schools. Like, a snow day, maybe, except instead of snow it's "keep your children home so if you die, you die together" — instead of "well open back up once the plows have cleared" it's "we don't know if we'll be here tomorrow, hold your babies tight." It's just "talk" I'm told, which I've been told before. "It's how the president makes his deals." But I've never heard anyone talk about other human beings this way, and I'm not certain I can look my son in the eyes if we all agree to stomach it one more time. A civilization will die tonight, but as I zip up his backpack and kiss him off to school I think: if this is what we call leadership then I'm not entirely sure ours isn't already dead. @michaelfdubois Mukad A QuBoy @michacifdubois

Brutal.

If Trump commits war crimes in Iran, he can be prosecuted | Kenneth Roth There is no question that Trump’s threats, if carried out, would amount to war crimes. The international justice system is positioned to act

"There are international options for prosecution that lie beyond the court’s lawless license. They are not easy to exercise, but the terrible precedent of the world’s most powerful president openly flouting international humanitarian law should compel action."

I said we needed to submit to the jurisdiction of the ICC, repeal The Hague Invasion Act, and promise to send everyone involved to The Hague the moment we had the chance to do so.

Fraud with Benefits How Breaking the Rules Makes Welfare Work

This was the best thing I read this week. www.thedriftmag.com/fraud-with-b...

Medicare Advantage plans win extra $18.6 billion as feds cut star ratings measures CMS is scaling back the number of measures it uses to grade health insurers.

NEW: Trump admin is making it easier for Medicare Advantage plans to grab bonus $$ from star ratings. It'll cost taxpayers $18.6B over the next decade (more than the $13.2B originally expected). Will MA plans continue to cry poor? www.statnews.com/2026/04/02/m...

When I say it's "really tough" for job seekers right now, I mean that the hiring rate hasn't been lower than it is right now since at least *2012*.

And these data are from before we launched the war in Iran.

When Did This War Really Start? When Trump Blew Up Obama’s Iran Deal The 2016 JCPOA was real, and it was working. If Trump had stayed with it, there’d be no need—or excuse—for war today.

The Iran Nuclear Deal was the most important security agreement of this century, "not only of [Obama’s] presidency." Trump threw it away. He promised a “bigger, better deal” that he never delivered. This set us on the path to war. trib.al/XCn02g3

The shortages in transformers, switchers and batteries are indeed delaying construction of data centers, but that's only part of the story. Thanks in part to intense demand from the data centers, they're getting more expensive, which means that ratepayers pay more for modernizing the grid.

Your data is everywhere. The government is buying it without a warrant Data brokers buy up huge amounts of information from cell phones and browsers to sell for targeted advertising. But the government, including ICE, also buys the data.

No really, I am not kidding when I say that the data broker industry must be destroyed: www.npr.org/2026/03/25/n...

Have You Paid Your “Intuit Tax”? Tax prep oligarch Sasan Goodarzi blocks the “public option” for tax filers.

Have you ever wondered why our tax system is so complicated? Whether you use their services or not, most of us pay an "Intuit Tax" www.thenation.com/article/poli... @inequality.org @ips-dc.org @patrioticmillionaires.org

Amazon Moves on the Post Office USPS is in trouble, and Amazon wants to hasten its decline. The privatization of the postal system would be a true disaster for American society.

Great analysis of how Amazon is positioning itself to replace USPS, and how that would lead to terrible mail service for Americans and a "decimation" of the unionized postal work force.

ontheseams.substack.com/p/amazon-mov...

Why is Trump racking up record deficits? Largely because he has turned much of the treasury over to Elon, Zuckerberg, Thiel and their ilk.

What makes them independent is that the money they make stays in the community, rather than going to corporate HQ and Wall St.

The variety comes not from the aesthetic, but from the different relationships and opportunities they create with their workers, suppliers, customers, and community.

Must-read @wired.com reporting on RealToken—a crypto-driven, PE landlord that bought hundreds of Detroit homes and promised investor returns, but left tenants with fires, flooded basements, and broken plumbing.

We’ve been working with Detroit tenants to show the cost of financialized housing 🧵 ⬇️

*cough* gender.

Recall that a year ago, following Elon Musk's dismantling of USAID, the State Dept threatened African countries with additional tariffs and development aid cuts unless they accepted new contracts with Starlink

This admin's foreign policy is extortion

www.propublica.org/article/trum...

Hired Actors, Paid Media: Big Tech Has Already Dumped $8M Into Hochul's Car Insurance Ploy - Streetsblog New York City Buckets of cash and ads with professional actors are boosting Uber and Hochul's cause.

An Uber-backed group has poured more than $8 million into supporting Gov. Hochul's insurance deregulation push.

The big cash drop includes an ad with "testimonials" by New York drivers who were mostly professional actors, Streetsblog found. nyc.streetsblog.org/2026/03/13/h...

Wow. I was looking for images to illustrate an educational presentation on Reagan's union-busting and slashing of taxes on the rich. Assumed I'd need to find 2 separate images and then I came across this front page. Good grief. So much lasting damage to our country - all on one day!

PE takes over the two firms providing a service essential to guaranteeing people's civic rights.

PE changes the business model of these firms, squeezing workers to maximize profits.

Worker burnout threatens the availability of critical services.

Wall St. profits. Everyone else loses.

“Sometimes it is difficult to notice when fascism is knocking on your doorstep.”

We spoke to Pavel Talankin, a teacher from Central Russia. He spent over two years documenting his school's conscription into Putin’s war propaganda machine for the Oscar-nominated doc, Mr. Nobody Against Putin.

Also an opportunity for Dems to openly criticize Trump for unwinding government green transition efforts, not just for the climate harms, but for substantively increasing security and economic risks for the country

We are officially an oligarchy, ICYMI

The 51st is expanding D.C. needs more local journalists. You can help us hire them.

It's an extra good time to support us, we're in the last week of our campaign to be able to expand our newsroom to meet this moment: 51st.news/bigplans