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Last month, Rep. Al Green and fellow Rep. Christian Menefee faced off in a highly contested runoff to fill Texas’s 18th ...
06/18/2026

Last month, Rep. Al Green and fellow Rep. Christian Menefee faced off in a highly contested runoff to fill Texas’s 18th Congressional District seat. When Texas Republicans gerrymandered the state’s congressional maps last summer, Green saw the Houston-area district he served for two decades eliminated, and he shifted to the 18th, where Menefee had just been elected after the death of Rep. Sylvester Turner.

Nearly 40 years Green’s junior, Menefee ran on a platform not unlike his opponent’s, promising to advocate for racial and gender equality, affordability, and reforming the U.S. immigration system. But his stance on one issue diverged significantly from Green’s: cryptocurrency.

Young Black congresspeople are winning their seats with support from the crypto industry. But can investing in crypto help close the racial wealth gap?

If a lab could create the perfect congressional candidate for a particular district at this political moment, it might s...
06/18/2026

If a lab could create the perfect congressional candidate for a particular district at this political moment, it might spit out Alexis Goldstein. She was a federal worker who was fired amid the Trump administration’s push to cripple the administrative state, and she’s running in the Sixth Congressional District in Maryland, a state full of federal workers downsized in the DOGE push. Goldstein, a former program manager in the chief technologist’s office at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was fired, in fact, for confronting DOGE functionaries at the CFPB offices last February.

Plus, Goldstein is a highly skilled financial analyst—she worked as a programmer on Wall Street before quitting to join Occupy Wall Street in 2010—at a time when one of the most operatic and unusual financial schemes of the century is playing out in the highly leveraged data center build-out. Practically nobody in the government would have more unique knowledge to understand the dangers. “This is all being built by debt,” she told me. “It’s going to lead to consolidation after the crash and a bailout request, and will there be any conditions on that bailout? That’s what keeps me up at night.”

It all sounds great, until you see the $32 million sitting between her and electoral success.

That money is in the hands of two candidates who are among the richest people in Maryland. None of it is coming from outside, an anomalous scenario in an election cycle defined by special interests injecting millions across the country to influence the primaries. Instead, Rep. April McClain Delaney and former Rep. David Trone have spent the last several months pounding each other with charges of perfidy, criticisms that are largely correct, in an oligarch war over a seat they claim as theirs to purchase fair and square.

In Maryland, a billionaire is trying to get his seat back from a mega-millionaire. It’s the epitome of a broken campaign finance system. Is there a way out?

Poor Trump. He savored the end of Jay Powell’s term as Federal Reserve chair and looked forward to more of a loyalist in...
06/18/2026

Poor Trump. He savored the end of Jay Powell’s term as Federal Reserve chair and looked forward to more of a loyalist in his appointee as Powell’s successor, Kevin Warsh.

To get the job, Warsh made all manner of tacit commitments to President Trump on lowering interest rates. But it took about a minute for Warsh to appreciate that his future lay with adhering to the norms of the Fed and the realities of the economy, not the delusions of Trump.
https://buff.ly/KGHuFHI

The Fed votes 12-0 against Trump’s demand to cut interest rates.

With the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, Republicans are reprising the role they played during the lead-up to the P...
06/18/2026

With the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, Republicans are reprising the role they played during the lead-up to the PACT Act, the long-overdue bill providing needed care and benefits for veterans who’d suffered from toxic exposures. In cynical fashion, they are now championing a bill they originally opposed, disguising their effort to fulfill the Project 2025 intention to dismantle the VA health care system and reduce veterans’ benefits.

Under cover of delivering rightful benefits to veterans, a new Republican-backed bill in Congress takes them away.

The walls appear to be closing in on private equity giant Blackstone and TXNM Energy, the utility company serving 800,00...
06/17/2026

The walls appear to be closing in on private equity giant Blackstone and TXNM Energy, the utility company serving 800,000 customers in Texas and New Mexico which Blackstone is seeking to acquire for $11.5 billion. Because of an illegal equity investment Blackstone made in TXNM before the deal received approval by regulators, the firm might have to pay a hefty fine—or scuttle the entire thing.

As the Prospect reported in February, the state’s Public Utility Act is unmistakably clear: Stock of a utility or utility holding company may only be acquired “with the prior express authorization” of the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission (PRC). But that is exactly what Blackstone failed to do when it purchased eight million TXNM shares a year ago through a private placement. At no point did Blackstone or TXNM seek regulatory approval ahead of time, contravening the statute governing utility acquisitions in New Mexico.

On June 8, staff at the PRC issued their verdict: The $400 million equity transaction was indeed unlawful.

Both the firm and the utility company it’s trying to take private face potential maximum fines and a hard reset of the acquisition process for flouting New Mexico state law.

A $69 billion merger between two real estate behemoths is set to create the largest publicly traded apartment landlord i...
06/17/2026

A $69 billion merger between two real estate behemoths is set to create the largest publicly traded apartment landlord in U.S. history, dramatically expanding the market power of two firms that have been sued repeatedly over alleged tenant abuses and illegal price-fixing.

Together, real estate investment trusts (REITs) AvalonBay Communities and Equity Residential own more than 180,000 apartments nationwide, with another 20,000 under development. Were these two companies banks or broadcast networks or grocery stores, their merger would face mandatory review by federal regulators. But long-standing loopholes exempt real estate mergers from antitrust scrutiny—even as concerns mount about the consolidation of housing in the hands of large investors.

A combination between AvalonBay and Equity Residential would put close to 200,000 apartments in the hands of one company.

The U.S. Postal Service has proposed a rule to block delivery of mail ballots in states that have not complied with an e...
06/17/2026

The U.S. Postal Service has proposed a rule to block delivery of mail ballots in states that have not complied with an executive order President Trump signed in March directing the USPS to halt election mail unless states hand over voter lists.

One part of Trump’s March order directed the Postal Service to issue just such a rule. Several pending lawsuits contend that both orders amount to an illegal executive branch seizure of election administration that the Constitution reserves to the states. https://buff.ly/pRJwBHe

The latest scheme to use the Postal Service to block mail ballots and take over elections

To the casual observer, the two candidates vying for the Democratic nomination in New York’s Seventh Congressional Distr...
06/17/2026

To the casual observer, the two candidates vying for the Democratic nomination in New York’s Seventh Congressional District to replace retiring 16-term stalwart Nydia Velázquez may look indistinguishable. New York Assemblymember Claire Valdez and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso are both Democrats, and both intend to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), fund affordable housing, institute health care for all, and end Israel’s war on Palestine, which they agree is a genocide.

Both candidates have substantial endorsements from powerful figures and organizations. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani backs Valdez, a fellow Democratic Socialists of America member, as do DSA-NYC and Justice Democrats; Rep. Velázquez, the New York Working Families Party, and state Attorney General Letitia James back Reynoso.

NY-07 is a 22-square-mile section of New York City that covers neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens, and includes much of what political analyst Michael Lange last year referred to during Mamdani’s campaign as the “Commie Corridor,” where a “young and hungry leftist base” is “reshaping politics in New York City.” Census data shows that the vast majority of the district’s residents are under 64 years old; 40 percent are white, and 33 percent are Hispanic. Nearly 20 percent live below the poverty line. Mamdani won 67.3 percent of the vote in NY-07 last November, the highest rate of any congressional district in the city. https://buff.ly/llONdwq

The goals of New York Assemblymember Claire Valdez and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso are similar. How they intend to meet them is miles apart.

It’s taken about 45 years for a politically potent supermajority of Americans to come together and realize that they’re ...
06/16/2026

It’s taken about 45 years for a politically potent supermajority of Americans to come together and realize that they’re on the losing end of a class war, but better late than never. Besides, they’re not the ones responsible for the snaillike pace of this awakening: Their political institutions and the mainstream media didn’t even begin to confirm this massive shift in income and power until relatively recently, and the only institutions to consistently point this out—unions—were all but wiped off the map of most of the United States during this time as well.

You might think that Democrats view this as an opportunity to stamp themselves as progressive populists devoted to ending the massive upward redistribution of the nation’s wealth to the wealthy and to reversing the flow back to workers. If you did indeed think that, you’d be half right.

https://buff.ly/gJ5e1YH

Americans realize they’ve lost power and income to the very rich. Too many Democrats, even too many unions, have yet to go to war for them.

The target sectors are often small, family-owned, and with lots of independent suppliers, which allows consumer choice a...
06/16/2026

The target sectors are often small, family-owned, and with lots of independent suppliers, which allows consumer choice and competition based on quality, price, and reputation—just the way capitalism is supposed to work. A rollup allows the acquiring PE company to dominate a local market and amass pricing power. For the seller, who may be a family-owned business, the sale allows an exit strategy and even a small windfall in sectors where there may be few buyers.

Typically, the PE partners put little of their own cash into a deal, but borrow most of the money, and then pile the debt onto the books of the operating company. Following the acquisition, the new PE owner may run the company for a while and reap supernormal profits, or may extract so much money from the operating business that it will be driven into bankruptcy, by which time the PE company has made back its own investment many times over.

You might think this entire business strategy, which aims for local monopoly pricing power, would be illegal under the antitrust laws. It surely ought to be; but for the most part, rollups fall between the cracks of existing laws and enforcement concepts, because the process of concentration occurs gradually.

Is antitrust enforcement equal to the challenge of defeating the most prevalent abuses?

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