By Lucy Dean Stockton, More Perfect Union

President Trump has claimed many times that his mass deportation efforts will boost economic prospects for America’s working class. But the Department of Homeland Security’s recent spending spree on Immigration and Customs Enforcement warehouses may actually be padding the margins of some of the world’s largest financial institutions at the expense of taxpayers, according to financial records viewed by More Perfect Union.

DHS, which oversees ICE, has sought to acquire $38 billion worth of warehouses around the country to expand immigrant detention to hold more than 92,000 people. Records show that the federal government has already spent $1 billion so far this year to acquire dozens of warehouses, although newly-appointed DHS Secretary and former Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) has temporarily paused these deals and signaled that the agency will review the purchases.

Data compiled by the activist group Project Salt Box demonstrates that some of these purchases were made at many times their estimated market valuation, and that the sales involve some of the world’s largest investors.

“In several of the ICE warehouse purchases Project Salt Box reviewed through property records, financing documents and lien filings, the properties were owned by institutional real estate funds and financed with bank debt, and when the federal government purchased the properties, those sales coincided with loans being paid off and liens being released,” said Michael Wriston, a researcher at Project Salt Box.

In other words, some of these warehouse sales are effectively acting as a vehicle for these institutions to sell off otherwise distressed assets and profit from taxpayer-funded investment.

Examples of overpayment for these warehouses are numerous. In Social Circle, Georgia, DHS paid almost $129 million for a property previously valued at $29 million, a 333 percent overpayment. In Surprise, Arizona, a warehouse previously valued at nearly $12 million in 2023 was purchased for $70 million, a nearly 500 percent markup. And in Socorro, Texas, a property previously valued at $11 million sold for $123 million, a 1000 percent increase.

One warehouse that DHS acquired in Tremont, Pennsylvania was formerly a Big Lots distribution center that sat empty after the company went bankrupt in 2024. Its ownership was transferred to a subsidiary of a real estate fund managed by investment firm Blue Owl Capital, a major New York City-based private equity group, and was sold to DHS for $119 million, at double its estimated market value.

Blue Owl Capital, which manages an estimated $157 billion in assets, is heavily invested in artificial intelligence, software, and financial services. Its owners heavily donated last election cycle to Republican congressional groups, and one of its directors, Edward D’Alelio, previously served on the board of Trump Entertainment Resorts.

The Tremont warehouse is not Blue Owl’s first foray into ICE contracting. Through their real estate subsidiary, the private equity group owns a parcel of warehouses, including one in Durant, Oklahoma, that was recently the subject of sustained local opposition against ICE from Oklahoma City residents. That warehouse was ultimately bought by the Choctaw Nation in subversion of DHS’s planned purchase.

At least 33 members of the Trump administration reported investing in Blue Owl’s various private equity funds, including President Donald Trump — who holds more than $5 million in investments — and John Russell McGranahan, who previously served as general counsel at the General Services Administration until November 2025, the agency that typically brokers these types of government real estate deals.

Blue Owl did not respond to a request for comment.

Another proposed facility in Williamsport, Maryland, a rural county in the Western part of the state, would convert a long-vacant warehouse into a 1,500-bed ICE detention center. The warehouse had served as a series of failed food processing and industrial facilities and was most recently owned by Fundrise, a direct-access alternative asset manager that allows investors to buy a portion of a property. But the facility never took off, and its owners consistently considered its continued vacancy a liability on their financial disclosures filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In late 2025, Goldman Sachs intervened by refinancing the property as part of a $352 million loan, just months before the property was sold to the Department of Homeland Security.

Goldman Sachs was also the former majority owner of a 470,000-square-foot vacant industrial warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey, that was purchased by ICE in February for $129.3 million — 137 percent over value, according to Project Salt Box.

Goldman Sachs has had close ties to Trump, particularly in his first term. This includes Gary David Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, who served as the National Economic Council Director and Steve Mnuchin, former Goldman Sachs Chief Information Officer, who served as the Treasury Secretary. Former Goldman Sachs employees have also been appointed to Trump’s cabinet in his second term and advised on his transition.

“As a lender, we are not involved in the operations and management of the portfolios of assets we lend to. Those decisions are made by the owners of those assets,” a Goldman Sachs representative told More Perfect Union. “We are also not involved with the sales process of individual assets and would not share in the profit of an asset’s sale if there were one.”

Another new 10,000-bed warehouse project in Salt Lake City, Utah, has received significant pushback from the city’s mayor for its proposed water use as the mountain city faces down a historic drought. Before that facility was purchased by DHS on March 11 for $145 million — more than 50 percent over its estimated market valuation — the warehouse belonged to Deutsche Bank through a series of subsidiaries.

Germany-based Deutsche Bank has conducted extensive business with the Trump family, loaning him a cumulative estimated $2.5 billion over the past two decades, and continuing to make loans to him even after he sued them for a loan he defaulted on. The institution has also come under scrutiny for its ties to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who held around 40 accounts with the multinational bank.

In effect, a Deutsche Bank subsidiary may be pocketing nearly $50 million in extra taxpayer cash. Deutsche Bank declined to comment for this story.

On March 30, 54 Congressional Democrats launched an investigation into the government contractors, real estate brokers, and property owners potentially profiting from the fast-tracked expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s massive new warehouse detention facilities. They noted the secretive, rushed deals, and staggering overpayments for warehouses far beyond their market valuation.

In their letter, lawmakers also identified multiple conflicts of interest between Trump’s cabinet and ICE’s private contractors, an abuse of the defense-focused contracting system used to acquire these facilities, and inappropriate non-disclosure agreements signed with local officials.

Public records obtained from state agencies show that some of the most profitable and powerful companies in the U.S. are also among the largest employers of workers who rely on food assistance.

In state after state, data received by More Perfect Union through open records requests list giant retailers and gig-economy companies among those with the most workers enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), giving a window into how taxpayer-funded public assistance is being used as de facto wage subsidies for some of the wealthiest American corporations.

We requested data from all 50 states, and after nearly two months of correspondence received information from four: Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, and Washington. An additional state, Massachusetts, released similar information to the Boston Globe last year, and is also analyzed in this report. Most of the other states either flatly rejected our requests or said they did not maintain such records, while Texas referred the request to its attorney general, and Utah requested a fee of $5,652 for the data.

In each of the states for which we have data, two companies are among the top four employers of SNAP recipients: Amazon and Walmart. Ranked by revenue, Amazon and Walmart are also the two largest companies in the world.

Amazon’s reliance on public subsidies for its underpaid labor force has been well known for years. In 2023, researchers at the University of Illinois conducted a survey of Amazon warehouse workers across 42 states and found that 33% of those surveyed had used public assistance programs in the previous three months, including 23% who had used SNAP. Eighty-nine percent of the survey respondents said they work at least 30 hours per week, the threshold used by the Internal Revenue Service for determining if someone is considered a full-time worker.

Walmart not only relies on SNAP to make up for its low wages, but it also benefits more than any other company from people using food stamps to buy their groceries. According to a Numerator survey covering the 12 months ending July 31, 2025, Walmart is the largest retailer for SNAP benefit redemption in the U.S., receiving 25.8% of all SNAP dollars.

Other companies that frequently appear at the top of the state lists include McDonald’s, DoorDash, Uber, Dollar Tree, and Dollar General. The dollar stores accept SNAP, so are double-dipping in the same way as Walmart. DoorDash and Uber have fought efforts to reclassify their workers as employees through aggressive lobbying and political spending, most notably spending tens of millions of dollars each in 2020 to pass a California ballot proposition that exempted app-based drivers from a recently enacted state law designed to grant them employee status and minimum wage protections.

Here’s what we heard back from the states that responded:

In Colorado, self-employed workers make up the largest portion of SNAP recipients, followed by Amazon, Walmart, and several of the other companies that frequent the top state lists. The Denver-based grocery chain King Soopers is also near the top of the list, with more than a thousand employees in the state on food stamps.

The data we received from Illinois is current as of Jan. 30, 2026 and shows that the home health care company Help at Home tops the list with more than 5,000 employees on SNAP, followed by Walmart with about 4,500.

In Michigan, the top employers of SNAP participants are Walmart, supermarket chain Meijer, Amazon, and McDonald’s. Close behind them is the Michigan-based Corewell Health.

In Washington, where the state minimum wage is the highest in the country, supermarket chain Safeway tops the list of employers with SNAP recipients in their workforce, followed by home health care intermediary Public Partnerships and temporary staffing company Express Employment.

Massachusetts did not respond to our public records request, but the Boston Globe obtained data from the state earlier this year and found that, beyond the usual suspects, other top SNAP beneficiary employers include grocery store Stop & Shop, social services organization Tempus Unlimited, and non-profit healthcare company Mass General Brigham.

Watch More Perfect Union’s video reporting on this issue here.

Across the country, Americans have noticed decreasing food quality at countless restaurants. The culprit? One giant corporation that’s taking over the food distribution industry.

Market power in the food production industry is being concentrated among fewer and fewer distributors. One of the largest players in the industry, Sysco, has long been developing an outsized share of the market since forming in 1969, when nine regional food distributors merged together. According to experts, the company has since followed a playbook of relentless acquisitions and exploitative business practices to acquire over 150 companies.

“The scary thing about Sysco was it didn’t become this giant through organic growth, but instead it became a giant through relentless acquisitions that went unchecked,” Austin Frerick, an expert in agricultural and antitrust policy, told More Perfect Union.

As Sysco’s market power has increased, so has its leverage over regional buyers and workers. Sysco has allegedly used its consolidated buying power to pressure producers into accepting the lowest rates possible and to chip away at regulations. During COVID, for example, Sysco passed inflation on to its customers, while increasing its earnings to the tune of 159 percent.

“Sysco’s continuously lobbying year after year to deregulate the trucking industry,” Frerick said. “And what we’ve seen since the 1980s is trucking wages are down nearly 40 percent.”

To achieve its cost-cutting measures, Sysco has repeatedly partnered with producers that have some of the most exploitative production models in the food industry. According to an investigation from Outlaw Ocean Project, Sysco previously partnered with Chinese companies that have been accused of using forced Uyghur and North Korean labor. The company also sources its berries from Driscoll, which has been accused of widespread wage theft. Sysco sources much of its meat from Tyson, which has been accused of child labor violations and animal cruelty and recently agreed to an $85 million settlement after it was accused of illegally conspiring to limit pork supply.

Restaurant owners often have few options for redress when having issues with Sysco, such as late deliveries, crushed eggs, and swapping ingredients without informing restaurants.

And as the industry continues to consolidate, these issues will likely be exacerbated. Sysco already tried to buy their largest competitor, U.S. Foods, but the attempted acquisition was struck down by the Federal Trade Commission. Two of its largest competitors, however, are attempting a megamerger that could provide even fewer options to small restaurants seeking food suppliers.

For a deeper dive into how Sysco developed its market dominance and the company’s exploitative labor practices, watch the video below:

Reporting by Alec Opperman. See below for a full transcript of the video.

—

ALEC OPPERMAN, More Perfect Union: I’ve had a sense that lots of restaurants are starting to taste the same. And maybe you, too, have had a sense that something is amiss. So I wanted to test a hypothesis with my coworkers, that you can be served the same exact food…

ALEC: Can I just get the jalapeño poppers?

ALEC, VO: From totally different restaurants.

IAN MCKENNA, More Perfect Union: The fried pickles.

ALEC: Can I get the fried pickles?

ALEC, VO: But made in the same factory, whether you wanted it or not.

ALEC: Can I get the funnel cake fries?

ALEC: Here’s the question behind this test. Are we trapped into eating the same mediocre food from New York to Alaska, and if so, why? And who’s behind it? That’s the mystery we’re going to unpack today.

ALEC: To get to the bottom of it, first, I went to Harlan, Iowa, woke up at 5am, to talk to a restaurant owner about how they get their food.

ELLEN WALSH ROSEMAN, Milk and Honey: I’m Ellen Walsh Roseman, and I own Milk and Honey.

ALEC: The thing is, Ellen’s restaurant does it differently than most restaurants in 2025. She showed me how she makes something from scratch for french toast. She uses a distributor to get most base ingredients, the milk from a local dairy, and the eggs from a local farm, Ellen’s. The bread is brioche that the restaurant makes from scratch. From there, the brioche gets baked, cut, dipped in homemade custard, griddled and served to you, the customer, or luckily enough, me.

ALEC: It’s very good.

ALEC: It’s not just the french toast. Ellen tries to work with as many local producers as possible.

ELLEN: This is our country skillet, and this is the local sourdough bread from a bakery in Omaha.

ALEC: But for many restaurants, sourcing local ingredients like this is getting harder and harder. Ellen’s distributor is regional and employee-owned. But if you’re a restaurant owner, especially in a rural area, you might just have one or two distributors to choose from. There’s a good chance one of them is a company called Sysco. And they are suspect number one for my deep fried mystery. To hash out that suspicion, I spoke to Austin Frerick, author of the book Barons, who explained the profound way Sysco is shaping the way we eat out.

AUSTIN FRERICK, Antitrust and Food Industry Expert: The innovation of Sysco was I was the first national company to essentially offer everything a restaurant needs.

ALEC: Back in the day, someone like Ellen might have one distributor for butter and another for eggs, but Sysco is what’s called a broadliner, supplying…

AUSTIN: Everything from paper products to meat and produce.

CLAIRE KELLOWAY, Journalist, Open Markets Institute: Sysco was a merger of nine different wholesale restaurant distributors with kind of the explicit goal of making a national player.

ALEC: That was in 1969. Fast forward to today, and Sysco has grown so much that it really only has two other competitors in the national space. Among them, Sysco is the largest, and even a decade ago, controlled an estimated 35% of the market, and this year, their gross profit hit $15 billion.

AUSTIN: The scary thing about Sysco was it didn’t become this giant through organic growth, but instead it became a giant through relentless acquisitions that went unchecked.

CLAIRE: They’ve acquired over 150 companies to become really one of the only national broadline distributors for restaurants.

ALEC: And this growth, I learned, is deeply changing the way we eat from farm to table.

ALEC: Let’s start with the farm part. Ellen tries to work with as many local producers as possible, even when it’s more expensive. Sysco, on the other hand, operates with the biggest producers at massive scales to eke out savings. Producers that often have some of the most exploitative production models. Sysco gets their berries from companies like Driscoll.

AUSTIN: Driscoll has basically took the Nike sweatshop model and applied it to berry production.

ALEC: And chicken from companies like Tyson.

AUSTIN: Tyson’s applied a sharecropping model to meat production.

ALEC: If you used a national distributor, could you get the Omaha sourdough? Could you get…

ELLEN: No.

ALEC: And why is that?

ELLEN: A lot of local distributors or local producers are not able to tap into regional distribution. The volume and production quantities is too high.

ALEC: Sysco scours the globe for a good deal, and there’s reason to be concerned about how they’re getting some of those deals.

AUSTIN: Seafood is the best example of this. Many providers to Sysco have been accused of engaging in slave labor.

ALEC: That includes forced Uyghur and North Korean labor in China.

AUSTIN: Basically any dark part of the food system has moved offshore, which makes policing it really, really hard to do.

ALEC: But Sysco doesn’t just source. Shrimp and strawberries. They have their own line of mass-manufactured frozen foods, everything from sourdough and brioche to, as I learned from researching this, jalapeño poppers, other fried appetizers and desserts. Frozen food, it turns out, isn’t just a facet of the Sysco business model. It drives it.

AUSTIN: I don’t think Americans appreciate that frozen food allows these long, exploitive supply chains.

ALEC: In the early 2000s, Sysco was buying jalapeño poppers assembled in Mexico for well below minimum wage and shipped frozen all over the country.

AUSTIN: It allows a race to the bottom in terms of labor standards and pay.

ALEC: So the food we ordered could have come to a distribution center like this, frozen, shipped to restaurants across the country, then dumped into a fryer, and now the truckers driving those shipments, they’re also getting squeezed by Sysco.

AUSTIN: Sysco’s continuously lobbying year after year to deregulate the trucking industry, and what we’ve seen since the 1980s is trucking wages are down nearly 40%.

ALEC: After the food is unloaded off of trucks, it gets cooked up and put on your plate, and Sysco’s dominance means the food on that plate is increasingly the same and increasingly worse.

ALEC: Do you think regional variety is disappearing?

ELLEN: Yeah, I would say so.

ALEC: You’ve probably had a Sysco meal without even realizing it. They offer everything from these sad bread rolls to Wagyu beef burger patties. If you’ve ever spent time in a hospital or a prison, you might have had a meal off of a Sysco truck. And if you pay attention, they’re everywhere. And so, it’s getting harder and harder to avoid getting the exact same frozen meal at your local diner or brewery. It probably won’t taste that great either.

ALEC: If you were to buy pre-made brioche from one of the big national distributors…

ELLEN: They probably will try to keep things cheap. So like, they’re probably not going to use butter.

ALEC: So they’ll use, like, a canola oil, or shortening, or something like that?

ELLEN: And then, like, their sugar might be like processed sugar, like a high-fructose corn syrup, kind of thing.

ELLEN: Austin found a story of a Pennsylvania diner whose burgers weren’t frying the same on the grill. When the owner investigated, he realized the patties now contained soy protein filler. Sysco and their competitors are flooding restaurants with ultra processed food like this.

ALEC: Now you might expect that with a deep fried cheddar jalapeño popper, but maybe less so with something like bread.

AUSTIN: The irony is, you could be a diner in a small town in Iowa surrounded by some of the world’s best farmland, and yet nothing on the menu is coming from around you. It’s low quality products produced by people being exploited outside the national borders.

ALEC: The system isn’t exactly working out for restaurant owners or local distributors, either. With the competition bought out, Sysco has more leverage to arbitrarily raise prices. During COVID, for instance, they used their market power to pass on inflation to their customers and increase their earnings by 159%. Sysco’s CEO even said on an earnings call that they had no intention of competing on price.

CLAIRE: Smaller restaurants have almost no negotiating power with Sysco, and so if you are in a rural area where there, you know, aren’t any other distributors, then restaurants really don’t have many options at all. As we’ve lost some of that regional wholesale infrastructure, we also see the loss of local businesses, local farms and a regional food system.

ALEC: In general, restaurant owners have little recourse when Sysco screws them over. Complaints are rampant about late deliveries, crushed eggs below stacks of boxes, even swapping ingredients without informing restaurants. As the industry continues to consolidate, these issues will only get worse. Sysco already tried to buy their largest competitor, U.S. Foods, but was shut down by the FTC. Now Sysco’s two largest competitors are signaling they might try to merge. In an environment where the biggest companies aggressively push out competition, it makes sense. It also means restaurants will have even less choice than they already do, and farmers will have less bargaining power when selling their food.

CLAIRE: The most aggressive, you know, gold standard thing that an antitrust enforcer could do would be to look at some of these deals and say, maybe we went too far, like maybe we let Sysco acquire too many companies, and we should unwind some of those and break up Sysco. That’s something that we’ve seen antitrust enforcers take on with past deals like Ticketmaster.

ALEC: The FTC could also block future acquisitions, and states and federal regulators could scrutinize discount programs that people like Claire and Austin suspect Sysco is using to drive out the competition. But what about my mission to get the same food in entirely different states? We ordered a mix of jalapeño poppers, fried pickles and funnel cake fries in Nebraska, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and in Alaska.

ALEC (with jalapeño popper): All right.

ALEC: Moment of truth.

ALEC: Jalapeño popper. Never been to this restaurant, never been to the city, but it just tastes like something I’ve had 100 times

ALEC: In Omaha, I’m pretty sure I got the Sysco brand Jalapeño Popper, though, to be fair, their main competitor sells almost the same thing. The one that I got in Brooklyn was clearly different than that one, and was a little bit better.

ALEC: Here in New Jersey, I ordered funnel cake fries. They seem exactly the same as the ones I got in Omaha. A fellow producer also ordered them in Philadelphia, and another in Anchorage, they look pretty similar. I also ordered some fried pickles, which is what my fellow producer ordered in Philly. They’re clearly different. One is chips, one is spears, but there’s a chance that I got these Sysco pickle spears. Don’t get me wrong, you’ve probably had a frozen Sysco meal and thought it was totally fine, but the point is, in this giant food system, something is being lost, regional variety, local jobs, local businesses and just having a unique meal, a meal that’s different.

ALEC: We are always interested in stories about how corporations are changing the world around us. If you have the inside scoop on any part of the food industry, drop us a line at stories [at] perfect union [dot] us. Thanks for watching.

Democratic oyster farmer Graham Platner is the candidate best positioned to defeat Maine’s incumbent senator, Republican Susan Collins, in next year’s midterm election, according to a new poll of 500 likely voters conducted by Zenith Research for More Perfect Union.

In the initial ballot, Platner and Collins, who is running for her sixth term, start out tied. Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat who is rumored to launch a Senate run next week, holds a 5-point lead over Collins in the initial poll. After respondents were shown short biographies for both candidates, however, Platner leads Collins by 14 points, while Mills leads Collins by 8 points.

Platner outperforms Mills most with young voters, independents, rural voters, men, and gun owners.

Collins is deeply unpopular with Maine voters, who give her a 39% job approval rating (including 28% that strongly disapprove). She has a 53% approval rating among Republicans, with just 18% saying they “strongly approve” of her job performance.

The 77-year-old Mills is also a very familiar figure to voters in Maine and has been in elected office since 1980. She was first elected to the state House in 2022 and later served for eight years as state’s attorney general. Mills is now in her second term as governor and provokes a polarized response from voters. Among all voters, 48% approve of her work as governor, while 45% disapprove. Among independents, 51% disapprove and just 40% approve.

Platner is a military veteran and oyster farmer making his first run for public office. He has enjoyed a strong start to his campaign but trails in name recognition. Less than half of voters polled have heard of the 40-year-old newcomer.

The 45% of voters who have heard of Platner, however, feel overwhelmingly positive about him, due in large part to a viral launch video and a barnstorming tour of Maine that has included appearances with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Platner’s approval rating is +12 among voters who have heard enough about him to form an opinion. 15% of voters are neutral.

While Mills has governed as a political moderate during her decades in office, Platner is running as a populist outsider, channeling public anger at vast economic inequality, corporate abuses, and political corruption.

Platner is a proponent of a Medicare for All health care system, a position that 72% of voters in Maine support. He has voiced support for a billionaires tax, which is supported by 79% of Mainers (52% strongly support); and he has refused to accept donations from corporate PACs, which was similarly popular with the poll’s respondents. 54% say such a stance would make them more likely to support a candidate.

Full results from the poll will be released on Monday.

There’s a predatory lending scheme that’s been gaining traction, and it could be lurking in your doctor’s office.

Companies like Synchrony’s CareCredit offer medical credit cards to financially vulnerable patients who can’t afford to pay for their medical expenses out-of-pocket. But what’s typically presented as a financial life vest can end up leaving patients saddled with debt — and some critics argue that’s largely by design.

As the name suggests, patients sign up for medical credit cards through their health care providers. Providers sign on with a financial institution, like Synchrony’s CareCredit, to set up a payment platform. When patients are unable to afford their treatment costs, providers can sign them up for a credit card to cover the payment.

But this has led to some providers engaging in deceptive and predatory lending practices. According to David Zhao, an attorney at Public Counsel, some patients have been signed up in the exam chair or while under anesthesia — and some were signed up without even filling out a form themselves.

“I wasn’t taken to a desk. I wasn’t taken out of there. It was all done in the dental chair. You know, with—she had the clipboard waiting,” Della Ann Maciel, who was signed up for a medical credit card, told More Perfect Union.

Once these patients are signed up, they can be forced to grapple with eye-watering interest payments, sometimes even if they’re paying according to the company’s minimum payment policy. That’s because these credit card companies often utilize deferred interest plans.

“There’s a promotional period, typically 6 to 18 months, where there’s zero interest, and then at the end of that period, if a patient hasn’t paid that entire amount off, then that deferred interest actually reactivates,” April Kuenhoff, attorney at the National Consumer Law Center told More Perfect Union. “And so then they would have to pay off any remaining balance plus interest that would’ve accrued from the very start, from the day one of paying off that card.”

That’s what happened to David. “The minimum payments that they were suggesting for me actually would not result in me avoiding that huge APR at the end of the year,” he told us. “So [they were] setting me up for failure here.”

Patients who sign up for a CareCredit card online today would see a rate of 33 percent.

As a result, patients are often saddled with debt, and are sometimes sued by CareCredit. In the case of Victoria Mangram, a lawsuit occurred without any treatment taking place. After rejecting a procedure because it was too costly, Victoria’s providers signed her up for CareCredit. Roughly a year later, she was told that Synchrony Bank had already paid her dentist and that she owed them for the costs.

“Synchrony Bank gave their money straight to [the dentist]. I said, ‘that’s between you two, not me.’ But my credit is ruined,” Mangram told More Perfect Union.

For a deeper dive into how these deceptive practices work, how patients have been affected, and some of the organizations that are fighting back, watch the full report below.

Reporting by Ian McKenna. See below for a full transcript of the video.

—

DELLA ANN MACIEL: I’m walking out of there. I signed my life away. I’m like, wait a minute, what the hell — What did I do?

VOICEOVER: Della is one of 100 million Americans with medical debt, but hers is a little different.

DELLA: Here comes a girl with a clipboard. She goes, “Well, we’re gonna see if we can set you up with a CareCredit card.” And I go, “CareCredit?”

VO: She was signed up in the dentist chair by dental office staff for a credit card.

DELLA: I believe it’s just a scam.

VO: As health care becomes increasingly unaffordable for working families, medical credit cards are marketing themselves as a perfect solution.

[AD]: It’s our stress free credit card… flexible credit card… the CareCredit card…

VO: So are medical credit cards the cure? Well, for many, they aren’t.

NEWS: …that, in many cases, patients who use these products end up worse off.

DELLA: My credit is ruined. I feel like I’m being scammed.

MARTHA: They just squeeze us for every little bit of interest they make us pay.

VO: This is how multi billion dollar banks force their way into your medical

exam room.

DAVID ZHAO, Attorney at People’s Counsel: There should be no door in the doctor’s office that opens to a bank

VO: And the damage they can do once they’re in there,

APRIL KUENHOFF, Attorney at National Consumer Law Center: Egregious behavior like signing people up when they were in the dentist chair…

DAVID: Being signed up while under anesthesia…

APRIL: being charged for services that actually weren’t received.

MARTHA: What they are doing is outrageous. They are taking advantage of the fact that we need these procedures.

DAVID: I myself was the victim of a predatory medical lending practice at a dentist’s office back in 2018.

VO: David Zhao is an attorney in Los Angeles, where he provides community legal services for those affected by medical credit products. At a routine teeth cleaning, David was told he would need a costly treatment,

DAVID: But they did tell me that I could enter a zero interest payment plan. I remember that wording specifically with the dentist to cover the cost of this, like gum treatment, but it turned out I had been signed up for a credit card. I did not know that this had happened until a couple weeks later, when the CareCredit arrived in the mail and I reviewed some of the paperwork the dentist had given me and realized I had been charged over $1,000 onto that credit card immediately, and that was a Synchrony bank credit card called CareCredit.

APRIL: CareCredit really has dominated the market specifically for medical credit cards.

VO: April Kuhnhoff is a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.

APRIL: Unlike general purpose credit cards, they’re typically offered by medical providers, dentist, veterinarian, certain types of clinics, and they’re offered in order to allow an extension of credit for that medical procedure at that particular facility

VO: in 2024, Synchrony Financial, which owns CareCredit, took in $3.7 billion in interest in fees from health and wellness loans.

DELLA: This is the bill that I get. And you know, it tells you about all of this other stuff that if you don’t pay, you know, the percentage is very, very high. So, yeah, it’s $1,000 in debt.

VO: Della Ann Maciel was told that she needed teeth removed and a bone graft, a dental procedure that would not be covered by her insurance. She said she was encouraged to open a CareCredit card.

DELLA: And I go, “so what if I don’t do it?” And he says, the dentist man comes back and says, Well, you won’t, we won’t be able to do it, you know, and I’m going, well, shoot, well, okay, it was to where I was in so much pain, I went ahead and did it. I wasn’t taken to a desk. I wasn’t taken out of there. It was all done in the dental chair.

VO: In a statement to More Perfect Union, Synchrony Financial said that its contracts prohibit providers from presenting financing solutions to patients while they are being treated or while they are experiencing any type of duress or impairment.

DAVID: Every single one of the cases we take on, the person is signed up while they’re in the dental chair, examination chair.

VO: The National Consumer Law Center’s report on the medical credit card industry details a number of other problems collected through a survey of consumer advocates.

APRIL: We also saw reports in our survey about people who are actually fraudulently representing people’s income in order to qualify them for financial products, people being charged by that provider for services that actually weren’t received.

VICTORIA MANGRAM: This just goes on. I have so many synchronous, synchrony and synchrony, synchronous, synchronous, just goes on and on. I have files and files of these people.

VO: Victoria Mangram went to the dentist for a consultation for teeth pain in 2022.

VICTORIA: And they stated I needed all my teeth removed, and gave me a price that was outrageous, that I knew I couldn’t afford, and they said, Well, you can apply for CareCredit.

VO: Victoria decided not to go through with the procedure at that dental office. What she didn’t know was that the cost of the procedure was already charged to a CareCredit account in her name.

VICTORIA: Months passed, I was done with them, and I was still researching other people, you know? And so that’s when I started receiving mail about me owing. And I was like, I don’t owe anything. I’m still walking around with my teeth all jacked up, you know?

VO: She’s now being sued for the cost of the procedure she didn’t get.

VICTORIA: So then I’m laying in my little abode one morning and bam, bam, bam. I’m like, what? And I go in my little box that I’m in here, “You’ve been served.” Oh, my God.

VO: Victoria thought dental staff were just checking if she was eligible, not actually applying for CareCredit. Consumer confusion like this is understandable when medical professionals are tasked with marketing financial products to patients.

APRIL: And so that can be an initial problem: Staff who aren’t necessarily trained or experts in financial products being the ones who are your point of contact as you’re discussing or reading about this product. So they might tell you incorrect things or explain something incorrectly.

VO: A synchrony spokesperson said that providers are trained through online modules before being allowed to offer CareCredit products, and are required to retrain every two years. CareCredit is accepted in more than 270,000 providers’ offices and health focused retail locations in the United States.

DAVID: It really worries me that there are all these cards being offered by people who are not financial professionals, and to consumers who are there to get medical treatment. They’re worried about the fact that they have debilitating pain in their mouth. And so even that, to me, is like a form of duress, where, if you’re in so much pain, how can you make a reasoned, rational decision about your financial future at the same time? It’s pretty ridiculous.

VO: And turning doctors and nurses and clinic staff into credit card reps sounds ridiculous too. So why is it happening?

DR. LUKE MESSEC, Emergency Physician and Medical Debt Historian: So there’s always this problem in medicine, in American medicine, in particular, where patients are expected to pay at the point of care, and because that payment is expected, then when the patient can’t afford it, then the question becomes, who foots the bill?

VO: Dr. Luke Messick is an emergency physician and medical debt historian.

LUKE: What’s happened in the last 30 to 40 years is the rise of these middlemen that promise hospitals and doctors prompt payment by taking the debt off of their books quickly and entirely. Care Credit and Synchrony is one of them.

VO: The private insurance model of American healthcare can be frustrating for patients, but it can also cause administrative burden and financial strain for providers. That’s what could make products like CareCredit so appealing, where insurance could take weeks to pay providers, CareCredit promises payments in two business days. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has warned that in many cases, patients who use medical credit products end up worse off, because of less favorable terms than generic credit cards, like higher interest rates and provisions like deferred interest.

DAVID: So what we’re looking at is a copy of my CareCredit contract from 2018 which is what I was handed in the dental chair. And this is where the deferred interest is hidden in the contract.

VO: Under a deferred interest payment plan, a customer would pay no interest during the promotional 6, 12, 18 or 24 month term. If they paid it off in the promotional period, they would have gotten it truly interest free. But if they didn’t…

DAVID: Even if there was like, literally just one cent left on the card, what they would do is kick in a deferred interest plan where like, 27% would be charged on the card of the initial amount that had been put on the card, so not on the remaining balance.

VO: Say, I had a one year deferred interest plan for $2,500. And I’m paying $200 a month. By the end of the plan, I still have $100 left on my loan, but at 25% APR, I now automatically owe more than $300 in interest right away.

DAVID: And then that would start to compound at the higher interest rate.

VO: Patients applying online for CareCredit today would get 33% APR on a deferred interest

plan.

DAVID: Then they say that minimum monthly payments are required, but that if you make the minimum monthly payments, it may or may not actually pay off the full amount. So the minimum payments that they’re suggesting for me actually would not result in me avoiding that huge APR at the end of the year. So kind of setting me up for failure here.

VO: According to the NCLC report, 47% of surveyed consumer advocates said they had clients who were told they were getting a 0% interest plan when it was actually a deferred interest credit card.

DAVID: Other practices that we’ll see though, are the up charging. So for example, once a medical provider is able to get someone signed up for one of these credit cards, they will start adding things to the credit card. So for example, a goodie bag.

MARTHA: This is everything that came in my $500 kit.

PRODUCER: And does it seem like all of this is actually worth $500?

VO: Martha Castro went for a routine dental cleaning in 2022.

DAVID: Her case is particularly troubling, because she was actually signed up for CareCredit in the dental examination chair while she had local anesthesia applied, and she was handed forms while she could not feel her mouth.

MARTHA: I told the dental hygienist, “I think the anesthesia is wearing off. I’m diabetic and I’m worried about how much you are giving me.” She said, “The dentist is coming, don’t worry. We’ll just put a little more in.” They must’ve administered the anesthesia three times.

VO: When she realized the goodie bag she didn’t ask for actually cost her $500, she tried to return it.

MARTHA: I called the card and told them not to pay for this because I didn’t want it. I told them, “Don’t pay it.” They said they had already paid for it.

VO: Synchrony Financial says that consumers are provided a variety of clear and conspicuous disclosures as part of the application process, and that about 80% of cardholders with a deferred interest plan pay off their balance before the end of the promotional period.

DAVID: I think the fact that people are able to pay it off doesn’t mean that the practices aren’t predatory. Some people just have the financial resources to do so.

VO: Martha decided to just pay off the charge for the goodie bag, which she never used to avoid being sued.

MARTHA: They take advantage of the fact that people don’t have the time to really read all the terms and that they don’t really explain it very well.

VO: Della decided that she too would pay it off for the sake of her credit score.

DELLA: You know, on a fixed income, I’m paying 167 a month. You know, it’s a big chunk out of my little money.

VO: Victoria’s court date is set for March 2026. David is helping with her case.

VICTORIA: You can’t fight this alone. These are billion dollar companies doing whatever they can to the poor.

VO: Some states have already tried to implement protections against predatory medical credit card practices like requiring patients to fill out their own credit card application forms, or banning the promotion of third party financing in treatment areas, or banning deferred interest credit products for providers entirely. But these piecemeal solutions don’t really get to the root of the problem.

DAVID: The biggest crack is the for-profit healthcare system, our insurance system, that leaves open this door for people to have to finance privately, things that could be, you know, important for their health. In a perfect world, people should have medically necessary treatment covered by their insurance. They should not have to resort to a private lender and doctors shouldn’t have to deal with any of this. There should be no door in the doctor’s office that opens to a bank.

VO: Thank you so much for watching our video. If you’d like to see more stories like this one, be sure to like and subscribe to the channel to get more More Perfect Union in your feed. And if you have any ideas for stories that you would like for us to investigate, just drop them in the comments below.

As the name suggests, patients sign up for medical credit cards through their health care providers. Providers sign on with a financial institution, like Synchrony’s CareCredit, to set up a payment platform. When patients are unable to afford their treatment costs, providers can sign them up for a credit card to cover the payment.

But this has led to some providers engaging in deceptive and predatory lending practices. According to David Zhao, an attorney at Public Counsel, some patients have been signed up in the exam chair or while under anesthesia — and some were signed up without even filling out a form themselves.

“I wasn’t taken to a desk. I wasn’t taken out of there. It was all done in the dental chair. You know, with—she had the clipboard waiting,” Della Ann Maciel, who was signed up for a medical credit card, told More Perfect Union.

Once these patients are signed up, they could be forced to grapple with eye-watering interest payments, sometimes even if they are paying according to the company’s minimum payment policy. That’s because these credit card companies often utilize deferred interest plans.

“There’s a promotional period, typically 6 to 18 months, where there’s 0 interest, and then at the end of that period, if a patient hasn’t paid that entire amount off, then that deferred interest actually reactivates,” April Kuenhoff, attorney at the National Consumer Law Center told More Perfect Union. “And so then they would have to pay off any remaining balance plus interest that would’ve accrued from the very start, from the day one of paying off that card.”

That’s what happened to David. “The minimum payments that they were suggesting for me actually would not result in me avoiding that huge APR at the end of the year,” he told us. “So [they were] setting me up for failure here.”

Patients who sign up for a CareCredit card online today would see a rate of 33 percent.

As a result, patients are often saddled with debt, and are sometimes sued by CareCredit. In the case of Victoria Mangram, lawsuits can occur without any treatment taking place. After rejecting a procedure because it was too costly, Victoria’s providers signed her up for CareCredit. Roughly a year later, she was told that Synchrony Bank had already paid her dentist and that she owed them for the costs.

“Synchrony Bank gave their money straight to [the dentist]. I said, ‘that’s between you two, not me.’ But my credit is ruined,” Mangram told More Perfect Union.

For a deeper dive into how these deceptive practices work, how patients have been affected, and some of the organizations trying to fight back against these predatory lenders, watch the full report below.

Reporting by Ian McKenna. See below for a full transcript of the video.

—

DELLA ANN MACIEL: I’m walking out of there. I signed my life away. I’m like, wait a minute, what the hell — What did I do?

VOICEOVER: Della is one of 100 million Americans with medical debt, but hers is a little different.

DELLA: Here comes a girl with a clipboard. She goes, “Well, we’re gonna see if we can set you up with a CareCredit card.” And I go, “CareCredit?”

VO: She was signed up in the dentist chair by dental office staff for a credit card.

DELLA: I believe it’s just a scam.

VO: As health care becomes increasingly unaffordable for working families, medical credit cards are marketing themselves as a perfect solution.

[AD]: It’s our stress free credit card… flexible credit card… the CareCredit card…

VO: So are medical credit cards the cure? Well, for many, they aren’t.

NEWS: …that, in many cases, patients who use these products end up worse off.

DELLA: My credit is ruined. I feel like I’m being scammed.

MARTHA: They just squeeze us for every little bit of interest they make us pay.

VO: This is how multi billion dollar banks force their way into your medical

exam room.

DAVID ZHAO, Attorney at People’s Counsel: There should be no door in the doctor’s office that opens to a bank

VO: And the damage they can do once they’re in there,

APRIL KUENHOFF, Attorney at National Consumer Law Center: Egregious behavior like signing people up when they were in the dentist chair…

DAVID: Being signed up while under anesthesia…

APRIL: being charged for services that actually weren’t received.

MARTHA: What they are doing is outrageous. They are taking advantage of the fact that we need these procedures.

DAVID: I myself was the victim of a predatory medical lending practice at a dentist’s office back in 2018.

VO: David Zhao is an attorney in Los Angeles, where he provides community legal services for those affected by medical credit products. At a routine teeth cleaning, David was told he would need a costly treatment,

DAVID: But they did tell me that I could enter a zero interest payment plan. I remember that wording specifically with the dentist to cover the cost of this, like gum treatment, but it turned out I had been signed up for a credit card. I did not know that this had happened until a couple weeks later, when the CareCredit arrived in the mail and I reviewed some of the paperwork the dentist had given me and realized I had been charged over $1,000 onto that credit card immediately, and that was a Synchrony bank credit card called CareCredit.

APRIL: CareCredit really has dominated the market specifically for medical credit cards.

VO: April Kuhnhoff is a senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center.

APRIL: Unlike general purpose credit cards, they’re typically offered by medical providers, dentist, veterinarian, certain types of clinics, and they’re offered in order to allow an extension of credit for that medical procedure at that particular facility

VO: in 2024, Synchrony Financial, which owns CareCredit, took in $3.7 billion in interest in fees from health and wellness loans.

DELLA: This is the bill that I get. And you know, it tells you about all of this other stuff that if you don’t pay, you know, the percentage is very, very high. So, yeah, it’s $1,000 in debt.

VO: Della Ann Maciel was told that she needed teeth removed and a bone graft, a dental procedure that would not be covered by her insurance. She said she was encouraged to open a CareCredit card.

DELLA: And I go, “so what if I don’t do it?” And he says, the dentist man comes back and says, Well, you won’t, we won’t be able to do it, you know, and I’m going, well, shoot, well, okay, it was to where I was in so much pain, I went ahead and did it. I wasn’t taken to a desk. I wasn’t taken out of there. It was all done in the dental chair.

VO: In a statement to More Perfect Union, Synchrony Financial said that its contracts prohibit providers from presenting financing solutions to patients while they are being treated or while they are experiencing any type of duress or impairment.

DAVID: Every single one of the cases we take on, the person is signed up while they’re in the dental chair, examination chair.

VO: The National Consumer Law Center’s report on the medical credit card industry details a number of other problems collected through a survey of consumer advocates.

APRIL: We also saw reports in our survey about people who are actually fraudulently representing people’s income in order to qualify them for financial products, people being charged by that provider for services that actually weren’t received.

VICTORIA MANGRAM: This just goes on. I have so many synchronous, synchrony and synchrony, synchronous, synchronous, just goes on and on. I have files and files of these people.

VO: Victoria Mangram went to the dentist for a consultation for teeth pain in 2022.

VICTORIA: And they stated I needed all my teeth removed, and gave me a price that was outrageous, that I knew I couldn’t afford, and they said, Well, you can apply for CareCredit.

VO: Victoria decided not to go through with the procedure at that dental office. What she didn’t know was that the cost of the procedure was already charged to a CareCredit account in her name.

VICTORIA: Months passed, I was done with them, and I was still researching other people, you know? And so that’s when I started receiving mail about me owing. And I was like, I don’t owe anything. I’m still walking around with my teeth all jacked up, you know?

VO: She’s now being sued for the cost of the procedure she didn’t get.

VICTORIA: So then I’m laying in my little abode one morning and bam, bam, bam. I’m like, what? And I go in my little box that I’m in here, “You’ve been served.” Oh, my God.

VO: Victoria thought dental staff were just checking if she was eligible, not actually applying for CareCredit. Consumer confusion like this is understandable when medical professionals are tasked with marketing financial products to patients.

APRIL: And so that can be an initial problem: Staff who aren’t necessarily trained or experts in financial products being the ones who are your point of contact as you’re discussing or reading about this product. So they might tell you incorrect things or explain something incorrectly.

VO: A synchrony spokesperson said that providers are trained through online modules before being allowed to offer CareCredit products, and are required to retrain every two years. CareCredit is accepted in more than 270,000 providers’ offices and health focused retail locations in the United States.

DAVID: It really worries me that there are all these cards being offered by people who are not financial professionals, and to consumers who are there to get medical treatment. They’re worried about the fact that they have debilitating pain in their mouth. And so even that, to me, is like a form of duress, where, if you’re in so much pain, how can you make a reasoned, rational decision about your financial future at the same time? It’s pretty ridiculous.

VO: And turning doctors and nurses and clinic staff into credit card reps sounds ridiculous too. So why is it happening?

DR. LUKE MESSEC, Emergency Physician and Medical Debt Historian: So there’s always this problem in medicine, in American medicine, in particular, where patients are expected to pay at the point of care, and because that payment is expected, then when the patient can’t afford it, then the question becomes, who foots the bill?

VO: Dr. Luke Messick is an emergency physician and medical debt historian.

LUKE: What’s happened in the last 30 to 40 years is the rise of these middlemen that promise hospitals and doctors prompt payment by taking the debt off of their books quickly and entirely. Care Credit and Synchrony is one of them.

VO: The private insurance model of American healthcare can be frustrating for patients, but it can also cause administrative burden and financial strain for providers. That’s what could make products like CareCredit so appealing, where insurance could take weeks to pay providers, CareCredit promises payments in two business days. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has warned that in many cases, patients who use medical credit products end up worse off, because of less favorable terms than generic credit cards, like higher interest rates and provisions like deferred interest.

DAVID: So what we’re looking at is a copy of my CareCredit contract from 2018 which is what I was handed in the dental chair. And this is where the deferred interest is hidden in the contract.

VO: Under a deferred interest payment plan, a customer would pay no interest during the promotional 6, 12, 18 or 24 month term. If they paid it off in the promotional period, they would have gotten it truly interest free. But if they didn’t…

DAVID: Even if there was like, literally just one cent left on the card, what they would do is kick in a deferred interest plan where like, 27% would be charged on the card of the initial amount that had been put on the card, so not on the remaining balance.

VO: Say, I had a one year deferred interest plan for $2,500. And I’m paying $200 a month. By the end of the plan, I still have $100 left on my loan, but at 25% APR, I now automatically owe more than $300 in interest right away.

DAVID: And then that would start to compound at the higher interest rate.

VO: Patients applying online for CareCredit today would get 33% APR on a deferred interest

plan.

DAVID: Then they say that minimum monthly payments are required, but that if you make the minimum monthly payments, it may or may not actually pay off the full amount. So the minimum payments that they’re suggesting for me actually would not result in me avoiding that huge APR at the end of the year. So kind of setting me up for failure here.

VO: According to the NCLC report, 47% of surveyed consumer advocates said they had clients who were told they were getting a 0% interest plan when it was actually a deferred interest credit card.

DAVID: Other practices that we’ll see though, are the up charging. So for example, once a medical provider is able to get someone signed up for one of these credit cards, they will start adding things to the credit card. So for example, a goodie bag.

MARTHA: This is everything that came in my $500 kit.

PRODUCER: And does it seem like all of this is actually worth $500?

VO: Martha Castro went for a routine dental cleaning in 2022.

DAVID: Her case is particularly troubling, because she was actually signed up for CareCredit in the dental examination chair while she had local anesthesia applied, and she was handed forms while she could not feel her mouth.

MARTHA: I told the dental hygienist, “I think the anesthesia is wearing off. I’m diabetic and I’m worried about how much you are giving me.” She said, “The dentist is coming, don’t worry. We’ll just put a little more in.” They must’ve administered the anesthesia three times.

VO: When she realized the goodie bag she didn’t ask for actually cost her $500, she tried to return it.

MARTHA: I called the card and told them not to pay for this because I didn’t want it. I told them, “Don’t pay it.” They said they had already paid for it.

VO: Synchrony Financial says that consumers are provided a variety of clear and conspicuous disclosures as part of the application process, and that about 80% of cardholders with a deferred interest plan pay off their balance before the end of the promotional period.

DAVID: I think the fact that people are able to pay it off doesn’t mean that the practices aren’t predatory. Some people just have the financial resources to do so.

VO: Martha decided to just pay off the charge for the goodie bag, which she never used to avoid being sued.

MARTHA: They take advantage of the fact that people don’t have the time to really read all the terms and that they don’t really explain it very well.

VO: Della decided that she too would pay it off for the sake of her credit score.

DELLA: You know, on a fixed income, I’m paying 167 a month. You know, it’s a big chunk out of my little money.

VO: Victoria’s court date is set for March 2026. David is helping with her case.

VICTORIA: You can’t fight this alone. These are billion dollar companies doing whatever they can to the poor.

VO: Some states have already tried to implement protections against predatory medical credit card practices like requiring patients to fill out their own credit card application forms, or banning the promotion of third party financing in treatment areas, or banning deferred interest credit products for providers entirely. But these piecemeal solutions don’t really get to the root of the problem.

DAVID: The biggest crack is the for-profit healthcare system, our insurance system, that leaves open this door for people to have to finance privately, things that could be, you know, important for their health. In a perfect world, people should have medically necessary treatment covered by their insurance. They should not have to resort to a private lender and doctors shouldn’t have to deal with any of this. There should be no door in the doctor’s office that opens to a bank.

VO: Thank you so much for watching our video. If you’d like to see more stories like this one, be sure to like and subscribe to the channel to get more More Perfect Union in your feed. And if you have any ideas for stories that you would like for us to investigate, just drop them in the comments below.

On everything from housing and education, to gas pipelines, asset managers and private equity firms have been snapping up essential infrastructure at an alarming pace. And now, they could be coming for your utility company.

BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is trying to acquire Minnesota Power, a regional utility company that provides power to approximately 150,000 people in the state. If it succeeds, critics warn, there could be far-reaching consequences for the community, potentially driving up already-soaring utility costs and throwing a wrench in state decarbonization goals.

“There’s no requirement that they pursue this clean energy vision that the current executives in Minnesota Power have laid out,” Minnesota State Senator Jen McEwen told More Perfect Union. “We’re going into this sale on promises without any teeth in the guarantee that it’ll actually be carried forward.”

Just over a year ago, More Perfect Union released an investigation that dug into how BlackRock and other major asset managers have wormed their way into nearly every facet of Americans’ economic lives. Twelve days after the video’s release, BlackRock acquired Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), an infrastructure investment firm that acquires stakes in water and waste systems, transportation, and airports.

Now, in a bid to increase their acquisition of so-called “real assets,” GIP is making a foray into the utility market, with its first target the Midwest. In a proposed $6.2 billion deal in conjunction with the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, GIP is attempting to buy the investment firm Allete, which owns Minnesota Power.

Under Minnesota law, utilities are considered a regulated monopoly. In order for the deal to go through, final approval would have to come from the state’s five-member Public Utilities Commission before there’s any transfer of ownership, making the acquisition of power companies a bit more difficult than other deals that private equity firms and asset managers have struck. But some experts have argued that the monopolistic nature of the industry makes it an attractive option for investors seeking to cash in.

“One of the biggest incentives financially for potentially taking over a utility is the fact that utilities in regulated states such as Minnesota have a captive rate base. They have captive customers,” Alissa Jean Schafer, climate director of the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, told More Perfect Union. “Having a group of customers that have nowhere else to turn for access to electricity, that is a very attractive financial proposition.”

This isn’t just speculation. There are several examples of utility rate hikes after power companies are acquired by asset managers, which can often lead to rate hikes and layoffs. After Michigan’s Upper Peninsula Power Company was acquired by a private equity firm in 2014, residents experienced multiple rate hikes.

“The sales pitch [of the takeover] sounds pretty similar to the sales pitch that BlackRock is making to Minnesota Power, specifically, the private equity firm is promising to give capital to the utility so that the utility can do what it wants to do,” Schafer said. “But what happened with UPPCO is after the private equity firm took it over, shortly thereafter, they raised the bills. Since 2014, UPPCO being owned by private equity has seen four bill hikes.”

If the deal goes through, it could set a precedent for the future acquisition of public goods by massive firms like BlackRock. For a deeper look into this attempted acquisition and the local efforts trying to stop it, watch the video below.

—

If you live in Minnesota, you can take action by emailing the Minnesota PUC about the BlackRock takeover at consumer.puc@state.mn.us and learn more about the problem of private equity at pestakeholder.org/energy.

For actions from the general public, contact Governor Walz by submitting a comment via this form: https://mn.gov/governor/connect/conta or calling his office at 651-201-3400 with a simple message: Don’t let this deal get approved by the MN PUC.

Reporting by Gabriella Spielberg and Sean Morrow. See below for a full transcript of the video:

—

GABRIELLA SPIELBERG, MPU: This power plant is at the center of a battle between finance giants and the American people over who controls the basic necessities of everyday life. Almost exactly a year ago, we made a video about BlackRock, and remember how last time I was like, ‘calm down, guys, they don’t own the whole world. It depends on how you define ‘own,’ blah, blah, blah.’ Well, okay, that video was about how they invest in stocks. But what if I told you there’s a whole other side to this story, where they’re getting a lot closer to controlling some of the most critical parts of our everyday lives.

GABRIELLA: Just 12 days after we released that video, BlackRock acquired global infrastructure partners, and since that deal, they’ve been a lot more involved in infrastructure. You might have heard stuff like how they bought the Panama Canal, but now there’s another deal you might not have heard about. They’re trying to buy Minnesota Power, a company that owns this power plant and provides power to 150,000 people. This is a type of investment in what they like to call ‘real assets,’ which is finance code for literally anything tangible, basically everything we need to survive, like housing infrastructure and the land those things are built on. This is a test case for companies like BlackRock expanding into industries that we use every day, things like water, hospitals and electricity. And if they haven’t already, they could be coming to your town soon. So why is BlackRock trying to change course, and what will it mean if they succeed?

BOB TAMMEN: Last summer, I scattered my wife’s ashes on the South Kawishiwi river. I don’t want BlackRock to own it.

GABRIELLA: So, BlackRock bought Global Infrastructure Partners, which is a big investment fund that itself buys up things like water and waste systems, transportation companies and even large shares of entire airports. If you’ve flown in or out of London, congratulations. You’re probably a customer of GIP.

GABRIELLA: So BlackRock owns Global Infrastructure Partners, which is trying to buy Allete, which owns Minnesota Power, which owns infrastructure like power plants, dams and the land they’re on. But since people need power, it’s not that easy, even for BlackRock, and there’s a somewhat democratic process involved. This is state senator Jen McEwen, who represents many of the people who would be affected by the buyout.

JEN MCEWEN, MINNESOTA STATE SENATOR: Wisely and correctly, we have a public utilities commission, at the very least, to try to provide some regulatory oversight for these entities that have this monopoly over providing this essential service.

GABRIELLA: Usually, when private equity and asset managers buy stuff, they just do it behind closed doors, but because people would literally die without power, it’s considered a critical service, and therefore a regulated monopoly under Minnesota law.

GARNER MOFFAT, CITY COUNCIL MEMBER, Superior, WI: BlackRock doesn’t necessarily have the same amount of reporting responsibilities as a publicly traded corporation. We’ve had a lack of transparency already regarding our rates and the quality of services in our community in Superior.

GARNER: That ability to access that data would be decreased by the purchase, which would be a huge problem.

GABRIELLA: The community has made it clear that they oppose the deal, and a judge has already recommended against it. But it doesn’t end there. The final approval is going to come from the Public Utility Commission, a board made up of just five people appointed by the Governor. This could have huge implications for anyone who uses basic utilities like electricity or water, i.e. the things that keep us from freezing to death in the woods, because if they realize it’s profitable, nothing will stop them.

GABRIELLA, Duluth, Minnesota: I didn’t want to just sit around at my desk, so I came out here to Duluth to talk to some community members and leaders and hear what they had to say about the buyout. I went on a hike with longtime Minnesota Power employee and customer, Bob Tammen.

BOB: I should have asked if you want a walking stick. I got an extra walking stick. At your age, you don’t need a walking stick.

BOB: So I helped install the power lines that haul electricity from this powerhouse to my kitchen. This dam, the land we’re standing on right here, it’ll all go to the control of BlackRock.

GABRIELLA: Bob took us on a hike in the Boundary Waters to see some of the infrastructure that would be sold. He’s been canoeing out here for decades. But power plants, lines and dams aren’t all the GIP, and by extension, BlackRock, would get in the deal.

BOB: What concerns me about BlackRock purchasing Minnesota Power is that Minnesota Power owns a large amount of land where we’re parked right now. They own a lot of real estate. Some of that real estate has minerals. So if BlackRock acquires ownership of those minerals, will they develop those minerals for the long term benefit of northern Minnesota, or will they develop those minerals for the short term profit of BlackRock?

GABRIELLA: Back in Duluth, people were pretty concerned about their communities and bills.

HUDSON KINGSTON, Legal Director, CURE MN: We depend on Minnesota Power, for our regional economy, for our heat, for transportation, and indeed, for our clean water. We need this company to continue to make long term investments in our community. But that’s not what this acquisition is about. This acquisition is about maximizing short term profit.

JEN: There’s a whole host of decisions that they’re going to be making, and those decisions will no longer necessarily be just motivated by the board of directors working on behalf of the shareholders for Minnesota Power, a broad portfolio of people. It will just be these two private equity companies.

JEN: If the Minnesota PUC does a good job, and is able to hold down rate increases, the only outcome that I can imagine is that these two owners will say, well, we’re not making as much money as we thought we were going to make from this thing, and they’re going to sell it. And then who do they sell it to?

GABRIELLA: And this kind of thing has happened before in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, with a power company called UPPCO. This is Alissa Jean Schafer, the director of climate and energy at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project.

ALISSA JEAN SCHAFER, Dir. of Climate and Energy at Private Equity Stakeholder Project: If we look at Northern Michigan, there’s a utility called the Upper Peninsula Power Company, or UPPCO. This was acquired by a private equity firm in 2014.

NEWS CLIP: UPPCO Customers have seen a spike in their rates many say they can’t afford.

ALISSA: After the private equity firm took it over, shortly thereafter, they raised the bills. A couple years later, bills went up again, then that private equity firm sold it to a different private equity firm. Once the new private equity owners were in control, they raised bills again. Since 2014, UPPCO, being owned by private equity, has seen four bill hikes.

GABRIELLA: There’s nothing stopping BlackRock from doing the same thing in Minnesota. And in addition to bill hikes, it could even trample existing laws.

NEWS CLIP: Well today, Governor Walz signed a bill that requires utility companies to provide 100% carbon free electricity by 2040.

GABRIELLA: But after the deal goes through, we don’t know if BlackRock will follow those laws. Their size and capital imbue them with the power to basically ignore this kind of thing. To them, the fees are chump change. And who do you think is more powerful? The Minnesota State legislature or BlackRock?

JEN: There’s no requirement that they pursue this clean energy vision. We’re going into the sale on promises.

GABRIELLA: But remember, BlackRock isn’t directly purchasing Minnesota Power. Global Infrastructure Partners is purchasing its parent company, Allete, which also owns Superior Water, Light and Power just over the border in Wisconsin.

GARNER: So we’ve been looking at double digit rate increases every two years, and our rates are already some of the highest in the entire state, and that’s not a coincidence.

GABRIELLA: So let’s zoom out for a minute. If you saw my last video about BlackRock, you know that they don’t really own everything, they just have a small percentage of ownership in everything, specifically publicly listed companies that you could buy shares of too. But this buyout shows a general shift in strategy. They’re looking to fully own or majority-own entire infrastructure systems by taking those companies off the public stock market altogether. And while BlackRock’s just been dipping their toes into real assets, and it’s still a relatively small slice of their giant portfolio, there have been some big players in this game for a while now.

GABRIELLA: Brookfield is the biggest owner of real assets, and real assets are the bread and butter of BlackRock’s doppelgänger, Blackstone. Even though Blackstone is overall smaller, they’re actually much more efficient at generating returns for their investors. So of course, BlackRock is now looking for their piece of the pie. Here are the totally not frightening categories of things these asset managers are trying to get as much control of and profit out of as possible: Water, farmland, housing, transportation, schools and hospitals and energy and telecommunications, including data centers. So that makes the list really all the things I, for one, wouldn’t last very long without. I don’t know about you, but I personally love food, housing, electricity and water, and want affordable access to it. Check out this house. It has lines bringing in electricity and phone and internet. It has pipes bringing water in and out. Roads bring in food and tenants pay rent. BlackRock wants a cut of all of those things.

ALISSA: In addition to potentially raising customers’ bills, they might be looking for ways to cut costs. This could look like a reduction in the job force, it could look at, like, reduction in operation and maintenance.

PROTESTOR: If you don’t have enough people to do a job, you know, you’re going to get people hurt.

GABRIELLA: And the Minnesota Power case is just one point on the map. If we zoom out, there’s a larger cycle we’re already in. Here’s the playbook. Asset managers buy the thing, often using debt, massive loans they get just because they’re already rich. Then they run the thing as cheaply as possible for a few years, and finally sell it, often to another asset manager or private equity firm, and ideally at a large profit. This is super profitable for guys like Larry Fink, but not so much for anyone who relies on the thing they bought. And there’s a reason necessities like apartment buildings, water and parking are all at the heart of this. They’re things where even if you maybe kind of have a choice to use a different provider, it’s logistically pretty hard or downright impossible. For BlackRock, that’s basically free money.

ALISSA: Utilities in regulated states such as Minnesota have a captive rate base. They have captive customers. Having a group of customers that have nowhere else to turn for access to electricity, that is a very attractive financial proposition.

GABRIELLA: So how exactly do these deals work? They bank on you not understanding, so let’s try to understand. Usually, they’ll set up an investment fund and give it a snazzy name like ‘BlackRock Global infrastructure Fund Four,’ and then they’ll get a bunch of big companies to sign on to invest with them. The asset manager itself will invest a little bit too, just to show everyone else they have some skin in the game, but usually only between one and 5 percent. And then the investment fund, this thing they just made up, like a group project for supervillains, goes and buys the thing. Investing is always about risk, but BlackRock’s risk to itself is minimized, because when they take out loans, they borrow against the company they’re buying, not themselves.

GABRIELLA: That’s like if I bought a Honda Civic on a loan, and then the car was in debt instead of me. And when that’s a public utility, it’s the customers, or taxpayers, even, paying off that debt for them. This means you’re not just paying for power or water or whatever. You’re also paying off an asset manager’s loan from a bank, which, if they default on, will sink the company they’re buying, but not the asset manager that took out the loan in the first place.

GABRIELLA: Isn’t it so cool how if you or I default on our student loans or medical debt, it can ruin our lives, but if bestie Larry, I don’t know, flubs an airport and can’t pay back $700 million dollars, the captain just gets to walk away from the ship? Love that for us.

GABRIELLA: Now apply this to housing and roads and tolls and everything. When this happens on a huge scale, what that means is that none of these companies exist to serve customers, they exist to maintain stuff that asset managers then own and rent back to us, and often, all these resources are intertwined. One reason BlackRock wants more control over energy is something we’ve all been hearing a lot about lately, America’s favorite rainbow copyright infringement machine. We’re in the midst of an arms race for who can own the most data center infrastructure, and never put it past BlackRock to try to get their pound of flesh. And if this isn’t already a problem in your area, buckle up.

ALISSA: It appears that BlackRock is moving very aggressively to insert themselves at just about every angle of the supply chain when it comes to AI and data centers, and that includes everything from the data center development itself, to the computer software, computer hardware, and now with this move into local utility companies, possibly even the power company that would be powering those data centers.

GABRIELLA: You don’t need to take Alissa Jean’s word for it. Here’s BlackRock’s own Larry Fink.

BRIAN SULLIVAN, CNBC Interview: We need energy, but we also need the last mile. We need a power line that goes from the energy source to the energy user. There’s only so much BlackRock can do about that.

LARRY FINK, CNBC Interview: This is really important to unlock, and if we can’t unlock that, we’re not going to grow. If we’re not going to unlock this, it’s going to be harder and harder to build out these AI data centers.

JEN: It just creates a lot more burden on our state. Are we going to have to have the fight at the state level to try to take on these private equity, trillion dollar investors who own more than the state of Minnesota?

GABRIELLA: So to come back to the literally eternal question, does BlackRock own your life? Kinda. They certainly want to. And this mode of ownership provides them way more direct control and profit than stock portfolios do. It also gives them a much more direct relationship with you and your bank account. Just because your bill doesn’t say BlackRock power, doesn’t mean they don’t get your money.

GARNER: The Public Works Committee over there has approved a contract to work with a consultant to help us look at the feasibility of purchasing our utility assets from superior water, light and power.

JEN: I’d like to see us moving in the direction of having more ownership distributed amongst the community, but what we’re moving toward is even more corporate consolidation, even more toward a monopoly model, even more toward a model where the control over this essential service is separated from our community, and the decisions that are made about it are going to be out of our hands.

GABRIELLA: But it doesn’t have to be this way. And everybody I spoke to seemed to want pretty much the same thing. In Wisconsin, they’re even trying to buy their power company back to get out of this BlackRock situation so that they won’t have to go through this kind of thing again.

BOB: We should remember that even though we might live a long way apart, we’re still all neighbors. Our grid is all connected together. We have a little powerhouse here. It’s connected into the grid that goes all over the United States, and generally, if people are good neighbors, everybody is careful that they don’t take more power than the grid can handle. The system works. I think we should all be good neighbors. We should have local control, local communication, and be neighbors on a national level.

GABRIELLA: The final hearing for the buyout is on September 25 and the actual decision is set to be made on October 3. So if you live in Minnesota or Wisconsin, now’s a great time to talk to your representatives and go to those meetings.

GABRIELLA: Thank you to the advocacy groups working on this issue: Cure, Sierra Club, private equity stakeholder project, and the Citizen’s Utility Board. And thank you for watching, and don’t forget to like and subscribe and send us your story ideas at stories@perfectunion.us.

Since its inception in 1998, Google has grown from a scrappy search engine startup to a tech behemoth with a nearly $2.5 trillion market cap and a hold over a staggering 91 percent of digital ad markets, according to the DOJ.

As the company’s grip over the ad market has grown to near-unilateral control, many users have begun to notice a considerable decline in quality. Some researchers suggest, in line with user concerns, that the search engine is drowning out useful information in favor of search-engine-optimization, or SEO, tactics that involve trapping users on the search engine in order to drive up ad revenue.

But how did Google get to this point in the first place, and what could the integration of artificial intelligence mean for the company that already controls the most essential architecture of the internet?

Back in 2001, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page brought on Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of software company Novell, to help expand the company. Schmidt (who, in the wake of Microsoft’s monopoly investigation, accosted his employees for not prioritizing market domination to the point of being the subjects of an antitrust suit themselves) went on to lead years of acquisitions, especially in ad tech, that helped the company gain control over the ad infrastructure that has helped transform it into the industry titan it’s become today.

Google’s growth didn’t come without regulatory pushback, and its expansion has previously been the subject of antitrust considerations: Once in 2008, in which the company’s planned advertising partnership with Yahoo would have prompted an FTC lawsuit, and another in 2012, when the FTC made a case against Google, claiming that the company’s then 70 percent search market share was harming competitors.

By this point, Google had become so essential to the internet that most webpages were forced to optimize their content in line with Google’s search result rankings. While there’s no official guide as to how search results are ranked, it is known that the engine rewards pages based on how much time users spend on them—as this means more time users spend looking at ads and ultimately higher profits for Google.

“They own the supply, as in, how you buy the ads, how you sell the ads, how you get the ads places, and indeed, the ads that appear on search itself,” technology writer and PR specialist Ed Zitron told More Perfect Union.

This practice has severely impacted user experience, even to the point that some of Google’s engineers have spoken out against it, expressing concern that the company has been too focused on growth at the expense of the search engine’s quality.

“They don't care about whether you're finding things. Indeed, if you find something, you might leave Google. And that's not what Google's in the business of,” said Zitron.

While Google’s market dominance could have been curbed in two separate antitrust cases, a recent ruling in one of the cases amounted to little more than a slap on the wrist. DOJ officials in both suits alleged that the company illegally monopolized both digital advertising markets and online search markets, but the ruling in the search market case essentially allows Google to continue uninhibited.

Judge Amit Mehta, who oversaw the breakup of Google’s search engine case, released a series of remedies that some critics characterized as “cowardly” and “contradictory.” The remedy bars Google from entering or maintaining exclusive distribution agreements and forces the company to share portions of its search index and user interaction data with competitors, but substantive remedies designed to break up the illegal monopoly, like divestiture of chrome, were dismissed as “overreach.” Upon the news of the lax remedies, Google stock jumped up 8 percent.

Despite Judge Mehta ruling that Google is an illegally-formed monopoly, the remedies allow Google to subvert any real accountability for and largely leaves its market dominance intact. It doesn’t bode well for the advertising case’s resolutions.

For a deeper dive into the history of Google’s dominance, what integrating AI might look like for the company and its workers, and what consumers might be able to do to push back against the search engine’s longstanding and ongoing drop in quality, see the video below.

Reporting by Sean Morrow. See below for a full transcript of the video.

—

SEAN MORROW, More Perfect Union: I research things online for a living, so that means I spend a lot of time on…

SEAN, on desktop: Google. For me, like 80% of Americans, Google is my gateway to the entire internet. And I couldn’t help but notice: Google has gotten a lot worse recently. I remember it being a lot better, and lots of other people do too. But… there really is no major alternative, right? Google’s become a bit…. Inescapable. They influenced the very nature of the internet itself, and by extension the way humanity shares information. This very video couldn’t have been made without them. And that, of course, has made a handful of people very, very rich. And now Google is integrating something new:

*NEWS CLIPS TALKING ABOUT AI*

SEAN: What does the integration of artificial intelligence into most people’s gateway to the internet mean for humanity? I went through old research papers, corporate governance documents, and spoke with some of the people doing the work to power Google’s AI behind the scenes. So how’d we get to the point where one product launch could alter how we access knowledge? Let’s look into it the only way anyone knows how anymore: Here are ten Google searches to tell the story of how Google stole the internet:

SEAN: Let’s start simple. “What is Google?” “Google is a multinational technology company whose “core mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, according to Google. So let’s find out what Google really is with Ed Zitron. He’s a writer, podcaster, and PR expert who has been covering the tech industry for years.

SEAN: So, what is Google?

ED ZITRON, Writer: So everyone thinks that Google is just Google search, and in many ways, they're right. Everything centers around that… What Google has become is a kind of an amalgamation of what is now about 10 to 20. Different companies.

SEAN: We’ll get back to Ed–he’s got some bigger truths to drop–but first we’ll rewind to the beginning.

SEAN: 2: Why did we need Google? In the 90s, home and personal use of the internet took off, and people began creating webpages–documents with text and images, linked together with hypertext, forming websites. In mid 1994, there were only 2700 websites. By the end of that year there were 10,000. A few months later, 650,000. People needed a way to dig through all this stuff. The first search engines started popping up, like Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves. But these search engines had a problem. The results they returned were just based on if the exact phrase you searched appeared on the page, and how many times. So if you searched ‘chicken parmesan recipe,’ you’d get whatever page mentioned ‘chicken parmesan recipe’ the most. Some of these actually had a human staff curating results into a directory, which became totally impossible as the internet grew.

VIDEO CLIP: Now that I’ve gone on the internet, I’d rather be on my computer than doing just about anything.

SEAN: In 1998, two Stanford researchers, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, published an academic paper: “The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine.” The paper suggests that the ideal way to find information online is not by how many times the search phrase appears on the page, but by the amount of other pages that link to it. So a search for “chicken parmesan recipe” would return the result that the most other sites said “check out this chicken parmesan recipe.”

ED: This paper shows that, yeah, this was not our hodgepodge thing. These were scientists. These were guys that actually, genuinely wanted to do something cool.

SEAN: Just six months after launch, a glowing newspaper article wrote Google “usually finds exactly what we're looking for and for some mysterious reason it tends to be within the first five hits”

ED: There used to be this crazy idea where you type in a thing, and it would come up with a result, and the result would be good. And indeed, you'd find cool things on Google. You'd find obscure blogs that Google had risen. The idea of Google was that the web is too big for you to search alone, that things are disconnected, decentralized. Google centralized them, and in return, Google made an absolute arse ton of money.

SEAN: So how’d they make that arse ton of money?

SEAN: What does arse—How does Google make their money?”

ED: This company really is just a giant ad monopoly pretending to be a thing that you type stuff into that gives you answers, and used to give you better answers than it does today. But in reality, it is a large ad monopoly.

SEAN: That seems a bit weird considering a section of that original paper Brin and Page wrote “Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives” It’s a section outlining the problem with a search engine getting its revenue from ads

SEAN, reading to Ed: “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.”

ED: Damn. In retrospect, wouldn't that suck if someone did that?

SEAN: If you can’t tell from Ed’s classic British sarcasm, Ed is calling out that that’s exactly what Google does today, it’s what they built a monopoly on. The first ever ad was for “Lively Lobsters” a company that sent you live lobsters in the mail. And investors saw the promise immediately… of the ads, not the lobsters.

SERGEY BRIN: We met this guy, you know, he took a quick look at our search engine, we started talking about, he said, ‘oh, well I’d be interested in investing.’ So he went back to his car, came back with a checkbook, and he wrote us a check for $100,000.

SEAN: But with those new investors also came new demands.

SEAN: Google investors thought the young brand needed a money guy, so…

*BRIN AND PAGE, on Charlie Rose*

ROSE: You've just hired Eric Schmidt. So what's the idea behind that? You guys couldn't run it yourself?

LARRY PAGE: Parental supervision,

SEAN: He was brought on to build “corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google's rapid growth.” I wonder if Ed has any thoughts on rapid growth.

ED: The only thing that grows forever is cancer. And I mean, Google kind of feels cancerous right now, but nothing can grow forever, nothing unless you make it worse like this.

SEAN: That’s Ed reflecting back from 2025, but even back in 2001 when Schmidt entered, Google was huge. “Google” as a verb for… googling something, was already in dictionaries and episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

CLIP FROM BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER: Have you googled her yet? Willow, she’s seventeen.

SEAN: Eric Schmidt had a history of fawning over rapid growth even to the point of monopoly, reportedly saying at a previous company: “Why isn't it the goal of each and every one of you to become so successful that someone sues us for being too dominant?" At Google, Scmidt led years of acquisitions of companies, mostly in ad tech, building an advertising juggernaut out of the search engine. So let’s say you do a Google search, again, for chicken parmesan recipe. You see several ads on the page, but you click on what looks like a legitimate recipe. There are ads all over that page. And guess who sells those ads.

ED: They own the supply, as in, how you buy the ads, how you sell the ads, how you get the ads places, and indeed, the ads that appear on search itself.

NEWS ANNOUNCER, 2004: Google, the company that makes the world’s most popular internet search engine, just went on sale to great fanfare today.

SEAN: In 2004, Google IPOd, their introduction to the public stock market. Google’s IPO documents introduce what became their well-known slogan: Don’t be evil. Brin and Page write, in their ‘founders letter,’ “Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical, financial and many others. We will live up to our “don’t be evil” principle by keeping user trust and not accepting payment for search results. Then we saw the first sign of Google being too big, as Eric Schmidt finally achieved his dream:

SEAN: In 2008 a potential advertising partnership with Yahoo brought about Schmidt’s coveted antitrust investigation: the FTC told the companies they’d file an antitrust lawsuit if the partnership went through. Then in 2012, the FTC investigated Google again, claiming Google was wielding their 70% market share, prioritizing Google products in results, and taking bits of competitors' content, like Yelp reviews, and just putting them directly into Google Maps and search, otherwise manipulating Google tools considered essential for most consumers.

SEAN: Google’s argument was that antitrust law is meant to protect consumers, not competitors, so therefore they did nothing wrong. It worked, and after Google made some minor tweaks, the investigation was dropped. But was this actually all positive for consumers? Once Google had all that power, what did they do with it?

SEAN: Remember that algorithm from the paper, earlier? With the algorithm? It’s changed and gotten more complicated over the years, and Google doesn’t really share how exactly it works—there’s really no official guide to how search results are ranked. But for any business that operates online, or anyone that wants to share information, being higher up on Google is vital. So, like ancient people following arcane esoteric rites to please Gods for a desired outcome, webpages had to be built to please Google.

SEAN: It became an entire industry—search engine optimization, or SEO,

ED: So you have good faith SEO, people go, ‘what if we provided good information that ranked high because it's good?’ Wonderful, brilliant, great. That's the minority. The majority of SEO operators, search engine optimization people, are there to just get in the way. They're there to make sure that they rank high on a search.

SEAN: A really easy way to understand how Google affects the internet is recipes. You know how recipes always have a bunch of boring BS before you see the actual recipes? That’s because of Google. Google prioritizes pages based on how long one spends on them. So when you’re scrolling all the way down to see the damn recipe, it's because they want you to spend more time on the page. More time spent on the page, meant more time spent looking at ads, which Google profits from.

ED: That's another thing that Google could have helped with. Google could have it's pretty easy to tell, yeah, because there's 17 different pop up ads that make your phone 200 degrees. That's how you know it's an SEO operation because, but except you want to know who's serving those ads, it's fucking Google. Google AdWords. That's the thing, they don't care. In fact, the web sucking is great for them. They show you ads everywhere. You'll never find what you want.

SEAN: It’s not just recipes, obviously. The entire internet is made for Google. That means that the way we exchange information, like basically as a species, has been irrevocably changed. And that’s just search, Google has expanded into other products, building a full ecosystem

PICHAI, Google CEO: 6 of our consumer products: Search, Android, Maps, Chrome, YouTube and Google Play all have over 1 billion monthly active users each.

SEAN: That’s Sundar Pichai, a former McKinsey guy who took over in 2015, speaking at one of the first earnings calls of his tenure, an early sign of the decline of Google.

ED: Google knew exactly how much they could fuck with people, and they made themselves so essential that they could make it worse very gradually.

SEAN: But you’re more likely to spend time using something good than using something bad, right? Which brings us to our next search.

SEAN: Why is Google worse now? This is a search that sometimes brings up Ed’s own reporting, you’ll see it even more if you search “who is the man who ruined Google?” Or, “Who ruined Google?”

ED: So I wrote a story back in 2024 about the man that destroyed Google search.

SEAN: The man was Prabhakar Raghavan, the executive in charge of ads at the time

ED: In 2019, something called code yellow happens. Code yellow is a situation inside Google where a number ain't going up in the way they want to. And there was query weakness, which means the number of searches people were doing on Google weren't matching up so good.

SEAN: Google was measuring their success based on how many searches people did. But if you’re a user, using the product more isn’t necessarily better: do you like when you need to search again because the first one didn't work? Still, Raghavan demanded queries go up, to the chagrin of some engineers, who expressed that on an email chain made public during one of Google’s antitrust hearings:

ED: This horrible email chain, you're looking at them as Ben Gomes and Shashi speak to this other guy and go, Hey, look, if we change things to make queries go up, that might make things worse. And indeed, there is a line, and when I read this, I had to go and check I wasn't being pranked, where Ben Gomes says, I think that all Google cares about is growth.

SEAN: But the changes, thought to actually just be rollbacks of previous more positive changes, went through.

ED: Next year, 2020, some SEO experts kind of see that things have got worse, that some spammier results have come in. And then some changes are made where it's even harder to see what results are ads or sponsored and real results

SEAN: Ads on Google searches went from boxes in the side bar, to highlighted boxes within the search results, to less obviously highlighted boxes, to this… one tiny little label saying “Ad.” This isn’t just Ed’s theory, you can actually watch Google get worse through the amount of people complaining about it online. And there’s an increase of people staying on Google after a search, instead of going to a webpage, because Google traps them there.

ED: They don't care about whether you're finding things.

SEAN: You gotta try again.

ED: Indeed, if you find something, you might leave Google. And that's not what Google's in the business of. They're not an honest business. They're in growth.

SEAN: They want to keep you there.

SEAN: Raghavan may’ve made the call, but he’s just one part of a greater problem, emphasized by the Pichai tenure, which reflects Pichai’s previous job:

ED: The CEO of Google was a McKinsey guy. McKinsey, as in, consultant brain. And consultants only see growth. They don't see people.

SEAN: It’s an insistence on growth no matter what. Schmidt and Page and Brin aren’t innocent here, but Pichai took everything they did and amplified it.

ED: It is exploitative, and they make money from the exploitation. But they're not sitting there like Gargamel or Dr claw planning. They go, Fuck. How are we going to make money from these pigs? These people seem unhappy, but they're using it a lot. We need to grow. We need growth. Growth. Money means money. Now I can't, couldn't possibly think of the consumer. It is genuinely a detachment from society.

SEAN: And now there’s a new technology that's arguably a bigger detachment from society than ever before, and promises seemingly unlimited growth.

*TECH LEADERS TALKING ABOUT AI*

SEAN: I talked to some of the people behind it.

RACHAEL: Hi. Yes.

SEAN: What happens when you introduce artificial intelligence into the tool that already has monopolistic control over all information? Again, ‘Google’ has become the word for ‘search for something online.’ But answer me this: if you were going to use a verb for “used AI” what would you use?”

*TIKTOK USERS TALKING ABOUT CHAT GPT*

SEAN: Google is this huge monolith, but for once it feels like they’re falling behind, and that’s why they’re kind of forcing it on you, even though it kinda sucks. But I don’t want to denigrate Gemini completely, because there’s a lot of invisible labor behind it, workers like you or I behind the scenes actually building the thing. Question number six: hey Gemini… Are you listening?

SEAN: I spoke with two workers with Global Logic and its subcontractors. Global Logic is a tech labor contractor owned by the Japanese conglomerate Hitachi which makes, uh…lots of stuff. They were hired by Google to provide workers to work on the language and answer aspects of Google’s AI. Workers like screenwriter Andrew Lauzon, and journalist and technical writer Rachael Sawyer, who didn't feel comfortable showing her face, but luckily Google had a solution.

ANDREW: I am a cog in a prompt engineering machine of just output, output, output.

RACHAEL if I had to describe my job in one word, I would say eerie because you're extremely siloed. You're completely alone for all of the day.

SEAN: Both are interacting with Gemini all day, then suggesting changes and often making changes themselves. And they’re expected to work very quickly.

RACHAEL: Yes, our productivity is always being logged. So, how many minutes down to the second that we spend in the tool. If we want to go take a bathroom break, we need to log out of the tool, fill out a form

SEAN: Which means they’re also rushed in their factchecking, testing, and editing. They’re often given as little as six minutes for a task.

RACHAEL: Are we putting the very best that we could out there? I don't think we are because we're simply not given the tools to do that.

SEAN: And when they don’t have time, they’re asked to do what many of us do when pressed for time: ask AI.

ANDREW: And if you didn't know something, instead of taking the time to do your own independent research, they just told us to ask Gemini, because they wanted to get as many ind data points in. They didn't want you spending an hour doing your own independent research to make sure to get it right. They were just, ‘ask Gemini, be done in five minutes and move on to the next thing.’

SEAN: They’re training the AI on the AI. Again, it’s all about speed. And while Google may not have the AI name recognition of ChatGPT they do have a different advantage: everyone already uses them every day:

PICHAI: Today, all of our two billion user products use Gemini.

SEAN: Two billion people use at least one Google product, and they just tossed AI in there. It’s everywhere. Even here. Watching me. Google is exponentially exploding the problems that broke the little search engine that these two little dorks invented and feeding it to 2 billion of us.

ED: If I made something so beautiful as Google search and I fucked up that way, I would hope my children kill me, not that I have multiple children, but I would hope they would rather be run out of town with pitchforks. Because if you make something beautiful and you share it with everyone, and you make it worse that you can make a quick buck, you are a scumbag. You are a cretin, You are a monster, honestly, burning the Library of Alexandria to feel warm. It's disgraceful. Nothing can grow forever, nothing, unless you make it worse like this.

SEAN: And they already have access to all the information online, because it was created to please them. So now when you search “chicken parmesan,” you get a recipe “based on a combination of different methods,” methods pulled and stolen from the recipes we talked about earlier, the people who were making a living off of it. Google made their tool an essential way to find information, then made people create webpages in a certain way to rank higher, then took control of most online advertising, one of the only ways to make money putting information online, put ads on everything which made websites worse, then made it so people don’t have to click on websites at all.

SEAN: So what do we do? Well, the government is trying to help: two new antitrust investigations were opened by the FTC, saying that Google had monopolized search and advertising, and it was determined that… They had. Now the Judge responsible is working on “remedies,” the anti trust version of sentencing:

ED: They're talking about selling Chrome. They're talking about Google having to share their search data with other people, as with other companies, other search engines, and they're just talking about breaking the whole damn thing up, which I think would be both very funny and a lot better for the web.

SEAN: But what can YOU do? Ed has an idea:

ED: This sounds dumb, but more people talking about it and saying Sundar Pichai, saying Prabakhar Raghavan, and this man had no SEO before me. Now all his SEO is just people talking about the article, which is so funny, because I, you know what? Someone like that. You can never take their riches or their power, but you can take their name. And I think that that is a powerful thing.

RACHAEL: These men don't have our best interests in mind. I wonder if there's any kind of stigma at all attached to exploiting people. Bringing that stigma back, making sure that we don't lionize these disruptors who are taking away the middle class and making us give up our power through these weird myths that these titans of industry have our best interest in mind.

ED: I think it becomes a class issue immediately, because a free platform that is poorly kept means that the majority of people who do not have a ton of money, will be given poorer information and be more open to manipulation.

SEAN: The internet was formed by Google, because with a little bit of good tech, massive growth, and the power of capital they were able to seize control over the very basic operations of it all. But what happens when the good tech is gone? Now, it’s just a tool for funneling cash to wealthy investors and executives. Don’t let them tell you otherwise: they’re monopolists just like the barons before them, and they need to be treated like it.

SEAN: Thank you so much for watching. Please don’t forget to like and subscribe. And, if there is a story in tech that’s making you nervous for the future of humanity, or if technofascism has affected you or your community personally, let us know in the comments or email us at stories@perfectunion.us. Or, reach out to me personally on social media. Search ‘Sean Morrow,’ on, you know, whatever.

As she was in the middle of performing cancer surgery on one of her patients, Dr. Elisabeth Potter got a call from a UnitedHealthcare representative. Her staffer described it as urgent, so she scrubbed out to answer the call. The representative who made the call wanted to see whether or not the patient’s inpatient hospital stay following the surgery, which was for breast cancer, was justified.

Dr. Potter’s TikTok video recounting the incident went viral. Shortly after posting it, she received a letter from Clare Locke, a law firm specializing in defamation, alleging that she had made false claims about UnitedHealthcare and demanding that she take down the video and apologize.

Dr. Potter fired back by publishing the letter that UnitedHealthcare sent via their lawyers. Potter also threatened an anti-SLAPP suit against the company. Shortly thereafter, the company backed off from the lawsuit.

Dr. Potter’s story isn’t an isolated incident. It’s one of many allegations of UnitedHealthcare retaliating against individuals, media organizations, or any other critics that speak out against its practices.

Amazon and Vimeo reportedly took down a docuseries after UnitedHealthcare contacted them, saying the series was defamatory. The company has also sued the Guardian for defamation after the outlet released an article that claimed UnitedHealth Group had paid off nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers.

To that end, they’ve enlisted Clare Locke, which has carved out a niche for itself as the legal attack dog for the rich and powerful. The firm has previously been hired by the likes of hedge fund kingpins and Russian oligarchs in an attempt to stop unfavorable coverage.

As it turns out, Potter was in the middle of trying to get her surgery center, RedBud (which provides breast reconstruction surgery to cancer patients) in network with UnitedHeathcare via her consultants. She has personally been in network with the company, but, she told More Perfect Union, after her video criticizing the company went viral, they immediately cut off all communications with her consultants.

Potter’s inability to get in network with UnitedHealthcare could be financially devastating, which she believes to be deliberate. She told More Perfect Union that this affects nearly a quarter of her potential patients, and that as a result, she may now have to shut down her facility.

For a more detailed look into the realities of providing medical care within a for-profit health care system and how Dr. Potter is continuing to navigate this difficult terrain, watch our full report below:

Reporting by Alec Opperman. See below for a full transcript of the video.

—

ALEC OPPERMAN, MPU: UnitedHealthcare hired Clare Locke. This is a law firm that specializes in defamation. They've been hired by the Sacklers of opioid fame and Russian oligarchs to threaten journalists and they threatened you. How does it feel to be in the cross hairs?

DR. POTTER: My grandfather always told me that if you weren't pissing someone off, you weren't doing it right.

VO: Dr. Elisabeth Potter made national news for doing what many doctors wouldn’t: Publicly calling out health insurance companies.

POTTER, on TikTok: Insurance just keeps getting worse.

AMY GOODMAN, Democracy Now: Dr. Elizabeth Potter, who’s performing cancer surgery on a patient, scrubs out when she gets a call from UnitedHealth.

POTTER, on TikTok: And the gentleman said he needed some information about her, wanted to know her diagnosis and whether her inpatient stay should be justified. And I was like, do you understand that she’s asleep right now?

VO: Her message went viral, but now, she claims UnitedHealthcare is retaliating against her for it – and that it could bankrupt her.

ALEC: Why do you think UnitedHealthcare is afraid of you?

POTTER: I think it's all about money.

VO: Dr. Potter is part of an alarming trend – she is just one of many people who claim UnitedHealthcare is trying to silence them for speaking out. I wanted to know - why is a $200 billion dollar company afraid of one Texas surgeon? And who else has ended up in their crosshairs? And what is the company trying to hide from the public?

VO: So I went to her clinic in Texas to find out.

VO: This is Redbud surgery center. Dr Potter opened it in 2024, it’s a place where she can reconstruct living breast tissue for breast cancer patients who have had mastectomies. She does so by using the patient’s own skin and fat.

POTTER: I make it live by sewing the blood vessels of that tissue to blood vessels in the chest. So like hooking up a garden hose.. But the hookup there, the connection is so small, it's tiny.

POTTER: I have patients who, you know, live in Alabama or Mississippi who waited two or three years before they could find anybody who would take their insurance and had the skillset to do this.

POTTER: So I built the surgery center. I invested my own money in that; three and a half million dollars in personal loans and another one and a half million in savings.

VO: When Doctor Potter opened RedBud - she was already in-network with many providers, including UnitedHealthcare - as a surgeon. But this new surgery center, with all of its staff and costs, was not. So, she needed to hire consultants to pitch RedBud to insurers.

POTER: So I hired consultants to ask the insurance companies to let me in-network. And that sounds ridiculous, but that's just how it is. Like, I can't just ask them if I just ask, ‘Hey, United, will you let me in-network?’ They say no.

POTTER: And so we were in that process with a lot of insurance companies, including with United.

VO: It was in the middle of this process that Dr. Potter’s trouble with United started – when she went viral for talking about how she stepped out of a surgery to deal with a United rep.

ALEC: Why do you think your video went so viral in the first place?

POTTER: I think that's just a commentary on where we are as a society. I think that the sincerity of the video came across, but I also think that it struck a nerve. Um, you know, I think we, we all heard that when the CEO of United was murdered in December of 2024, and that was tragic and awful. It was so strange as a society for us to have a groundswell of like, cynicism, as a result. People are disillusioned, people have been harmed, and they can't believe that insurance companies are acting this way.

VO: Shortly after posting her video, Dr. Potter received a letter from Clare Locke, a law firm specializing in defamation suits. Billionaire Bill Ackman hired them to threaten Business Insider. The Sacklers hired them to go after opioid journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. A Russian oligarch hired them to threaten the New York Times. Now, UnitedHealth had hired them to threaten Dr. Potter. They demanded she take down her viral video and apologize.

POTTER: So when I got that letter, I was scared. And, um, I had to let it kind of sink in. And then I talked with, um, the attorneys and we decided, okay, I have a couple of options here. We can try to just make this go away. That's what the attorney said, ‘do you wanna make this go away, or do you wanna make a difference? And if you wanna make a difference, it's gonna be painful.’ But I made that choice. I said, ‘Okay, let's do it. Let's publish their words. Let's publish their letter and let America read it.’ And then we responded also to United and told them that if they persisted that we would, um, file suit against them as well.

ALEC: What, what do they say? How do they respond?

POTTER: They didn't respond. That was it. They just sort of went quiet.

ALEC: They backed off.

POTTER: They backed off. Um, except this other thing that I had in the background was I have a surgery center and I've been trying to be in network and I, I knew that there was a chance that they might take this out on me.

ALEC: And so you've paid these consultants to make the case? ‘Please let me save you money. United Healthcare by covering this center in-network.’

POTTER: <affirmative>

POTTER: So with my consultant, there were communications with United. Um, and then after I posted the video, they stopped communicating

ALEC: The surgery center's, not in network with them.. Some people may think like, ‘big deal, there's lots of other insurers.’ But is that true?

POTTER: It's a huge deal.

POTTER: For me, I think it's over a quarter of my patients. When I look at the business model, if I can't be in network with United, that is gonna be financially devastating to me. Um, so much so that I might not be able to keep this place open.

ALEC: You are facing potential financial ruin, not because you're a bad doctor, not because you have a lack of patients, but because UnitedHealthcare you feel is retaliating against you.

POTTER: Yes. I do think that's what's happening.

VO: Unitedhealth claims their decision to keep Redbud out of the network came before Potter’s viral video. Dr. Potter claims her consultants and United were communicating and the insurer had only gone silent after her videos.

POTTER: I think it's just really important to recognize that insurance companies across the board, including United, are making public statements that they are actively trying to save the American people money. By taking surgeries that are being performed in a hospital where it's really expensive and moving them into centers just like Redbud but where it's less expensive and the care is great.

POTTER: They're saying that they want more surgery centers like mine, but they're not letting me in-network. I have a hard time calling it anything other than retaliation, and I guess that’s up to the American people to decide.

VO: Dr. Potter is not the only person who alleges UnitedHealthcare came after them after speaking out. After an eruption of public rage against United following the murder of CEO Brian Thompson late last year, the company has gone on the offensive against public criticism. In July, the New York Times reported Amazon and Vimeo took down an independent docuseries after United’s lawyers sent them a letter warning the series was defamatory. The company sued the Guardian for defamation because of an article that drew on internal documents and claimed UnitedHealthGroup had paid nursing homes to reduce hospital transfers. Even billionaire Bill Ackman couldn’t escape United’s intimidation - he received a letter from Clare Locke after posting about Dr. Potters viral video. These letters can reportedly cost nearly six figures.

VO: Despite UnitedHealth’s tactics, Dr. Potter told me she won’t stop speaking out. She raised over 500,000 dollars to keep RedBud open. She continues to use social media to share the reality of practicing medicine under the rule of American health insurance.

ALEC: Do you think patients understand what it takes for you to even get them on this table? Like dealing with insurance?

POTTER: No, I don't think patients, especially facing breast cancer, have any idea of how hard it is to provide care. Um, and I'm not saying that because I have any bitterness about providing it. Like I'm not, oh, ‘woe is me.’ I just want the system to be better for them.

ALEC: Thank you so much for watching our video. If you have any ideas or pitches of what we should cover next, leave them in the comments. And be sure to like and subscribe to get more More Perfect Union in your feed.

There’s a hidden cost to data centers—and it could be in your electric bill.

As massive tech companies pour billions into the AI race, data centers are springing up across the country to keep up with the demand for computing power. As a result of the record demand for electricity these centers incur, many ratepayers have found that their electricity bills are rising at an alarming pace.

This year alone, the tech industry is expected to spend $475 billion on data centers, a 45 percent increase since last year. This is projected to be especially taxing on electricity supply. While data centers make up about four percent of U.S. electricity demand today, that’s expected to triple in the next three years.

As a result of this increasing demand, electricity prices are rapidly following suit. According to an independent market monitor for PJM , the world’s largest energy market that covers 13 U.S. states from Illinois to Washington, D.C., it’s estimated that data centers were responsible for an added $9.3 billion in additional costs for ratepayers.

But more often than not, residents are left in the dark about the details of these plans. Negotiations surrounding the planning and construction of these centers are often shrouded by non-disclosure agreements. Residents often lack crucial information about the new costs these centers would incur or the companies behind the centers — or a meaningful voice in the conversation.

Meanwhile, the companies behind data centers, tech giants like Amazon and Meta, are frequently able to score reduced rates with localities and utilities companies for themselves while consumers must grapple with the rate increases. For example, one utility company in Louisiana proposed spending over $3 billion on a new power plant to meet demand for a data center that Meta had proposed.

“Meta has signed a 15 year deal and it only obligates them to pay for about half of that $3 to $4 billion of infrastructure, which means that there's a big risk that everyone else in Louisiana will get stuck with the rest of that bill,” Ari Peskoe, a professor at Harvard Law School and author of a recent report on how data centers affect energy markets, told More Perfect Union.

“Meta saw an opportunity to negotiate a massive data center deal without the public having any input,” Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, told More Perfect Union. “And to this day, there is still massive amounts of detail about that massive Meta AI complex that the people of Louisiana have no information about.”

Given the monopolistic nature of the electricity market, ratepayers aren’t able to shop around for other options in the same way that customers can in other industries. This means that they’re left with few avenues to advocate for themselves or their communities as the price of electricity continues to rise.

For a deeper look into how data centers are driving up utility prices for consumers while shirking the costs themselves, watch the video below.

Reporting by Samuel Black. See below for a full transcription of the video.

CASSANDRA LAINEZ, New Jersey Resident: When I noticed my electric bill had gone up, I started asking my neighbors, is your bill also going up? And they had no idea that this was happening.

SAM, More Perfect Union: If you live in any of these states, your electric bill is higher this summer. It's not because of anything you did. You're paying more because the world's biggest tech companies are building so many data centers.

SAM ALTMAN, OpenAI CEO: I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time, but I don’t know, because maybe put them in space.

SATYA NADELLA, Microsoft CEO: Is this something where we are committed to building out data centers across our 60 regions? We are absolutely going to.

SAM: Big Tech's quest for artificial intelligence is creating a tidal wave of new costs that are about to hit all of us, even if you live nowhere near a data center.

ARI: The big problem is that we're all subsidizing the wealthiest corporations in the world in their pursuit of artificial intelligence.

TYSON: Americans' utility bills are rising while Big Tech's profits are going through the roof.

SAM: We traveled into data center country and found a hidden wealth transfer. Everyday people covering the power costs of the data center buildout. Companies like Amazon and Meta striking secret deals with utilities.

TYSON: It's all proprietary. It's all behind non-disclosure agreements and blacked out documents.

SAM: And lobbying for a system that leaves all of us footing their bill, unless we do something about it.

CASSANDRA: So I've always paid attention to my electric bill, mainly for environmental-friendly reasons. I wanted to make sure I'm not using too much light and what room am I using the most light.

SAM: Cassandra Lainez lives in northern New Jersey. In July, she got an electric bill that caught her attention.

CASSANDRA: The thing I noticed right away was compared to the same time last year, my bill has gone up, but also I noticed my usage went down. I started to pay attention to this box area where it describes your supply charges, and I noticed a $29 increase on my bill. To me, honestly, it felt almost like a slap in the face to use less energy and then get charged more for it. A lot of folks sometimes work two to three jobs to be able to pay their bills and don't take the time or have the time and luxury to even look down at their bill. I sat down with a neighbor and I asked her about her electric bill, if it's gone up. And she was like, well, where would I check that? And she brought it out and I checked and her bill looks the same as mine. It's also gone up in the supply section.

SAM: I wanted to understand why Cassandra and her neighbors are suddenly paying so much more for electricity every month. To figure that out, I ended up having to travel 300 miles south.

JULIE BOLTHOUSE, Director of Land Use, Piedmont Environmental Council: This is like the Wall Street of the data center industry.

SAM: Julie Bolthouse researches the dramatic growth of an area of northern Virginia known as Data Center Alley.

JULIE: So there's already over 200 data centers that are built or approved in Loudoun County. We have the largest data center market in the world by far. And so there's a race to ensure that these companies have enough space to grow out what they hope to be the future of AI.

JENSEN HUANG, Interview with Bloomberg: The demand is just off the charts.

JON GRAY, Blackstone President and COO, CBS Interview: We’re the biggest owner, the biggest developer of data centers. And our pipeline right now is up 25% year on year.

SAM: Between 2021 and 2024, the number of data centers nationwide nearly doubled. And that's because companies like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, and Google have decided to invest billions on technology that requires an enormous amount of computing power.

ELON MUSK, Interview: For AI, that means you've got to have the most powerful training computer. Training computer is kind of like the engine. How many, it’s the horsepower of the engine?

MARK ZUCKERBERG, Interview with The Information: We are basically all-in on this. We’re building multiple multi-gigawatt data centers.

ARI PESKOE, Director of the Electricity Law Initiative, Harvard Law School: As the tech industry is currently conceiving of artificial intelligence, it just requires a massive amount of energy-intensive, power-hungry computer chips.

SAM: Ari Peskoe wrote a recent report about how data centers are affecting energy markets.

ARI: We've seen announcements from Meta and from OpenAI that they intend to develop five gigawatt data center campuses.

MARK ZUCKERBERG: I mean, just to, I guess, put this in perspective, I think a gigawatt, it's like around the size of like a meaningful nuclear power plant only going towards training a model.

ARI: These AI development companies want to get these gigawatt size facilities online. They want many of them around the country and they want to do it within the next few years.

SAM: In 2025, the tech industry is expected to spend about $475 billion on data centers, up 42% since last year. Today, data centers make up about 4% of U.S.electricity demand. In just the next three years, that's expected to triple.

TYSON SLOCUM, Director, Public Citizen’s Energy Program: The United States has never generated more electricity in our history than we are today. The problem is, is that data centers are bursting through the envelope of energy demand and we're seeing record energy demand almost entirely being driven by data centers.

SAM: Tyson Slocum works on energy and utility issues at Public Citizen.

TYSON: And so, let's take an example in the world's largest power market, which is called PJM, it covers 13 US states from Illinois to Washington, DC, about 65 million Americans live within its footprint.

SAM: Many factors determine what we pay for electricity. But to understand how data centers are making it more expensive, it's important to know that the price that utility companies pay for power is set in regional markets. The biggest of those is a market known as the PJM.

TYSON: They had a big, what’s known as a capacity auction last year. Last year’s capacity option broke all records.

DAVID LAPP, People’s Counsel: And what happened last summer in the auction is the prices went up by 800%, a massive increase in costs.

SAM: David Lapp represents ratepayers in Maryland, another PJM state. He explained to me that when utilities have to pay a higher capacity price, they pass it on to consumers in the form of supply charges. According to the PJM's independent monitor, data centers were responsible for 63% of last year's price increase.

DAVID: We saw customers with bills $900, over $1,000. It's unfathomable that they are having to pay higher rates to support wealthy corporations building data centers.

TYSON: And it's not just PJM, we're seeing this happen across the country. We're seeing data center loads from coast to coast. It's affecting every energy market.

SAM: One way to start addressing this supply and demand problem would be to bring new power supply to the grid. But then the big question is, who's going to pay for that new infrastructure? The way the system currently works, we all pay for it.

ARI: So the utility business model is more than 100 years old and it was designed to spread electricity service at the beginning of the 20th century. The basic idea is that utility builds something and you socialize the costs to all of the rate payers that have no choice but to take that utility's service.

SAM: The cost of new infrastructure mostly shows up on another part of your electric bill, sometimes called delivery charges. Utility companies are allowed to set those charges high enough to recoup every dollar they spent building, plus a regulated rate of profit, usually around 10%.

ARI: So this is a huge profit opportunity. This growth in demand is a great excuse to build the sort of infrastructure that they're very comfortable building. If you look at sort of any of the earnings calls that these companies do, they're touting data center growth in their region.

SAM: To lure data centers to their service areas, utilities have started cutting direct deals with big tech.

ARI: One way the utilities might attract new data center customers is by offering them a good deal on electricity. This is a competition between utilities to attract these data centers.

SAM: Ari and his team looked at nearly 50 regulatory proceedings across the country about utility rates for data centers. What they found is that the deals between tech companies and utilities are typically hidden from the public. And there's good reason to believe we should be concerned about that.

ARI: The concern with these deals is that the data center may be underpaying, that it's not covering the cost that the utility is incurring to provide service to that data center. And there's going to be a shortfall for the utility, and it's going to look to the rest of us, to ordinary ratepayers, to make up that difference. And so our rates will go up in order to finance a sweetheart deal for a data center. One recent example is happening right now in Louisiana with a data center being developed by Meta.

SAM: Last year, a utility company in Louisiana proposed to spend $3 billion on a new power plant to meet electricity demand from a Meta data center. The full terms of its deal with Meta are secret, but redacted regulatory filings have revealed that the public is on the hook for Meta’s power plant.

ARI: Meta has signed a 15-year deal, and it only obligates them to pay for about half of that $3 to $4 billion of infrastructure, which means that there's a big risk that everyone else in Louisiana will get stuck with the rest of that bill.

MARK ZUCKERBERG: I believe deeply in building personal superintelligence for everyone. And at Meta, we have the resources to build the massive infrastructure required and the ability to deliver new technology to billions of people.

TYSON: Meta saw an opportunity to negotiate a massive data center deal without the public having any input. And to this day, there is still massive amounts of detail about that Meta AI complex that the people of Louisiana have no information about.

SAM: In Virginia, the utility company Dominion Energy has proposed to build six new power plants to meet data center demand, the first at a cost of $4.5 billion. According to one estimate, only 30% of that will be paid for by the customer class that includes data centers.

AD, Dominion Energy: At Dominion Energy, we know power is personal.

SAM: Residential customers will pay about half the cost, despite the fact that residential demand for electricity has flatlined. Dominion projects that average residential electric bills will more than double to $315 a month in the next 15 years, primarily due to data centers.

JULIE: We should not be having to pay the bill for the infrastructure that is supporting private companies that are making a ton of money off of this infrastructure. They're not building AI just because it's fun to build AI. They're building AI because it's making them money.

ARI: The right way to do it is to make sure that the data centers pay for every penny of this infrastructure.

SAM: In Maryland this year, ratepayers and advocates came together to try to address this problem and passed a state bill that creates a new customer class for data centers.

DAVID: So what this legislation does, and it's an important step forward, is it says these data centers don't fit within any of those customer classes and we need a new customer class for large loads.

ARI: Once you have a ratepayer class, then you can actually specifically charge that class for infrastructure that's being built for them, and you can isolate them from other ratepayers. Isolating these data centers is an important first step, and a number of states are taking that step.

SAM: The Oregon legislature also passed a law this spring that isolates data centers from other ratepayers. But taking that step in other states will not be easy, because big tech companies have other plans. A group called the Data Center Coalition is opposing these efforts at state capitals across the country. It's a membership organization made up of Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and dozens of other data center operators. And it claims that its members are already paying their fair share for power.

DAVID: We hear the data centers say, we welcome paying those costs, but we're not seeing them advocate for reforms where they really take on those costs.

TYSON: The data center coalition is corporate public relations, right? They're not paying their fair share. The numbers don't lie.

SAM: In the last few years, the data center coalition has raised millions of dollars from its corporate members. In Virginia last year, its PAC gave over $2 million to state legislators. The investment paid off this spring, when state leaders voted down several bills that would have regulated data centers.

TYSON: Big tech is literally the wealthiest, most profitable industry in the world. They have the capacity to pull out their pocketbooks and cover their costs associated with this data center expansion. Instead, the American people and small businesses that aren't data centers are covering their costs.

SAM: In the next 15 years, data centers are expected to add an additional $160 billion to grid costs in the U.S. If policymakers fail to change anything, by one estimate, electricity rates for average households will spike by as much as 70%.

CASSANDRA: I think if the tech companies are the ones that want to do this, are the ones that are in competition with each other, want to create this open market and have this business, I think they're the ones that need to pay for these infrastructures, you know, not myself.

SAM: Thanks so much for watching our video. If you'd like to see more stories like this, be sure to like and subscribe to our channel to get more More Perfect Union in your feed. And if you have ideas for other stories we should investigate, just drop them in the comments below.

There’s a new wave of shady lenders hitting the market, and they’re convincing their borrowers—and lawmakers—that they’re nothing like the payday loan operators or swindlers of old.

A closer look at how these companies work reveals a different story.

Apps like EarnIn, DailyPay, and other “earned wage access” platforms promise users (the majority of whom make less than $50,000 a year) that they can access the wages they’ve already earned, free of interest charges or any extra fees, without waiting until payday.

In an age where more than 60 percent of Americans report living paycheck to paycheck, it’s an enticing option for those who need a cash advance but are wary of traditional payday lenders.

“I grew up seeing people use [payday loans] and the energy is already kind of like down, feels kind of loan-sharky,” Runeda, an EarnIn user, told More Perfect Union. “They're always in buildings that are not well kept, like abandoned shopping malls.”

Apps like EarnIn appear to offer a convenient alternative. Borrowers don’t have to go to a physical location to receive their money, and the apps promise no interest or mandatory fees—because according to the companies behind them, they’re not offering loans at all.

But a study by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation found the average annual percentage rate, or APR (the total annual cost of a loan, including interest and any associated fees) of EarnIn and similar apps to be a staggering 334 percent. This doesn’t include the revenue apps like EarnIn derive from hidden charges like subscription fees.

Despite having rates similar to or much higher than traditional payday lenders, these companies continue to argue that their services are distinct from lending. The argument isn’t just for branding, either: It’s a loophole that gives the companies a way around state usury laws.

Interest rates are regulated on a state-by-state basis. In New York, for example, it’s a felony to charge more than 25 percent APR. This effectively bans payday loans, as their business model operates off of eye-watering fees and interest rates. Cash advance apps and their lobbyists, however, say they’re not providing loans at all. They argue that users are accessing their own money rather than borrowing, and that the APR calculation is misleading because their loans don’t last for a full year.

“That's like saying that you didn't violate the speed limit in miles per hour because you didn't drive for an hour. Oh, you were only driving for two minutes,” Andy Morrison of the New Economy Project, told More Perfect Union.

To learn more about these predatory lending apps, the corporate-backed “regulatory” legislation that’s popping up in statehouses across the country, and the community-driven solutions that could help offer a viable alternative for working people, you can watch the full report below:

Reporting by Sanya Dosani. See below for a full transcript of the video.

—

BC Nightly News: Millions of Americans struggling with ballooning prices.

Fox News: Rents are too high, childcare is too high.

Fox: There are many American families that are a simple root canal away from financial disaster.

WBALTV: More American families are drowning in debt, US household debt now at 17.94 trillion dollars.

SANYA DOSANI, More Perfect Union: Runeda is one of the 60 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. She works full time to provide for her four year old son. He has a developmental disorder so he has therapy 4 times a week, and needs extra care in general.

RUNEDA (In Car): If you're in a single income household like mine, the odds are kind of stacked against you at that point.

SANYA: These days, when Runda is short on cash, she’s been using EarnIn, one of these new banking apps that call themselves “earned wage access.” And they’ve got a pretty appealing pitch.

EARNIN AD: Did you work today? Probably. Did you get paid for the work you did today? Probably not. You won’t see that till Friday, right?

EARNIN AD: Stop waiting for payday. With Earnin you can get paid as you work.

DAVE AD: I can get you up to 500 dollars of your future money, now.

JASON DERULO, Ad: “I just partnered up with Dave”

SANYA: They’ve got ads with celebs like Jason Derulo, and flashy investors like Mark Cuban. They’ve got Democratic lawmaker support, and lobbyists who sound like Bernie Sanders.

MOLLY JONES PAYACTIV, Washington House: Cost of living has skyrocketed across the country.

RYAN NAPLES, Nevada: Two thirds of Americans live paycheck to paycheck

BEN LAROCCO, New York: Paycheck to paycheck

DAILYPAY REP, Ohio: Paycheck to paycheck

SANYA: They’re fighting for the underdogs, like David slaying Goliath. Goliath being predatory big banks. But people who have actually used these apps have a different take.

RUNEDA: That should be illegal.

LEE: I feel deceived by it, it's crazy. It's absolutely insane.

ANDY MORRISON, The New Economy Project: This is not some scrappy, um, FinTech startup scene. This is an industry that's backed by billionaires like Larry Ellison and Mark Andreessen, to make profits off people who are struggling.

SANYA: Today, I'm gonna show you how EWA apps make life feel like a series of traps. And even if you don’t use these apps, they could affect you too. Because with help from lawmakers, and the nation’s largest employers, earned wage access is perpetuating some of the most unstable parts of our economic system. And with one wrong move, the whole thing could collapse.

SANYA: Here’s how it works. Runeda has connected her bank account to EarnIn.

RUNEDA: So like, if I want to, um, borrow money, it tells me how much I can cash out.

SANYA: In EarnIn language, that amount is her “earnings,” and it’s determined by an algorithm.

RUNEDA: You spin the little wheel and then choose to transfer out.

SANYA: Wait, what's that?

RUNEDA: It says tip what you think is fair. So they're asking for a tip.

SANYA: Do you ever tip?

RUNEDA: No I do not. <laughs>

SANYA: What do you think about this app asking you for a tip?

RUNEDA: The audacity. <laugh>, I am here to borrow money. I don't have any to give you

SANYA: Okay, surely nobody tips their banking app, right? But the data shows that they receive tips 73 percent of the time. This is because the apps are very manipulative. At one point, EarnIn made you click 13 times to opt out of tipping. The dave app also messes with your emotions, telling you your tip is going towards helping hungry children. As you decrease the tip amount, you make the little animated child sad by taking her food away.

SANYA: But an FTC investigation found that for each percentage point of a tip, Dave only donates 10 cents. So if I tip 10 percent on a hundred dollar advance, my tip is 10 dollars, only a dollar of that is going towards feeding hungry kids. That's not enough for 10 healthy meals and the other nine dollars? Those Dave pockets. In SEC filings, Dave reported making 68 million dollars from tips last year, and according to EarnIn:

BEN LAROCCO, Senior Director of Government Relations at EarnIn: About 40% of our revenue is tips.

SANYA: So zero tip.

SANYA: So after opting out of tipping a bank algorithm, Runeda has two options to receive her cash. If she selects this free version, the money could take a day or two to hit her bank account. With the lightning speed option, she can get it right away, but there’s a transaction fee between 4 and 6 dollars.

RUNEDA: And then once you click that, then that would complete the transaction.

SANYA: The next time Runeda gets her paycheck, EarnIn automatically takes back the money she withdrew, plus any fees.

SANYA: So when I heard this I was kinda like, this just sounds like a payday loan, where you borrow a few hundred dollars and pay it back with your next paycheck—with lots of interest, of course.

KEKE PALMER: What are the interest rates?

(employee points)

PALMER: Damn, I thought that was the year of establishment.

(employee shakes head)

SANYA: But all of the ewa app users i talked to said they would never consider taking out a payday loan.

RUNEDA:I grew up seeing people use them and the energy is already kind of like down, feels kind of loan-sharky. They're always in buildings that are not well kept, like abandoned shopping malls.

SANYA: The apps, on the other hand, have bright colors and clean design. You can download them right from apple’s app store and on google play. That’s gotta be worth something, right? They’re sending you puppy videos on snapchat, they’ve got cuddly mascots, and they’ve got paid influencers on instagram and tiktok that reassure you that it’s totally not a loan, because…

INSTAGRAM AD: No late fees, no credit checks, and no interest.

INSTAGRAM AD: It’s your own money, just earlier.

SANYA: And if you don’t see their ads on social media or tv, you may see them at work.

LEE: It was in the teacher's bathroom. Next to the OSHA signs.

SANYA: Lee saw an ad for an app called DailyPay at the school they worked at in Kansas. DailyPay is one of the EWA companies that partner with big corporations like Amazon, Target, Mcdonalds – to offer paycheck advances as a benefit, like PTO or health insurance.

SANYA: So Lee signed up, the school turned over their payroll information to DailyPay, and soon, Lee could start withdrawing money from their “paycheck” whenever they wanted.

LEE: I have money in my account before payday, right? It's almost like endorphins.

SANYA: Like Runeda, Lee grew up watching their parents take out payday loans and saw how financially damaging that was.

LEE: But obviously even with that, like, I fell for this. I didn't see it as a loan. You're not like signing stuff, you know, you're not sitting and reading through a loan agreement. It's just like, it's instant. It's fast and it seems cheap.

SANYA: It seems cheap. A lot of people I spoke to said that exact thing. I decided to find out if it was true.

SANYA: If we want to compare two loans to see which one will end up being cheaper, we can’t just look at the simple interest rate. That won’t give you the full picture. What you want to do is calculate each loan’s APR - or annual percentage rate. I know, this equation looks scary, but don’t worry, there are online calculators that do the math for you. APR is, like, the price of a loan. It takes into account what you’ll pay in interest and in fees, and it also takes into account the number of days you have to repay. The more time you have to repay the loan, the lower the price of the loan. So, let’s say Runeda needs 100 dollars now.

SANYA: If she took that as a payday loan, that would likely cost her 25 dollars in fees, plus 36 percent interest. Now, Virginia law says the payday lender has to give you twice your paycycle to repay. and Runeda gets paid biweekly, so she’d have to pay back the loan a month later. The APR would be 305%. That’s expensive.

SANYA: 36 percent is kind of the upper limit of what we as a society have considered acceptable.

SANYA: So what if you took that 100 dollars out from EarnIn instead? Well, Runeda actually did that yesterday. and i asked her to calculate the apr.

SANYA: Her only fee was that small lightning transfer fee of 3.99. but … she’s going to get her paycheck tomorrow, and even if she needs the money for something else, EarnIn will take back what she owes right away. So she only has 1 day to repay, which means her APR is…

RUNEDA: 1456.35%. Insane. That's a lot. Jesus Christ.

SANYA: A study conducted by California regulators found that the average APR for companies like EarnIn is 334%. But these calculations don’t include all the random hidden charges these apps can have, like subscription fees.

RUNEDA: I don't care how small the fee is. They're getting it right back the next day. That should be illegal.

SNYA: Yes. Quadruple digit interest rates should be illegal. So why aren’t they? Well, interest rates are regulated on a state by state basis. I’m currently in New York, where the APR cap on small loans is 25 percent. That effectively bans payday loans. Their business model just isn’t as profitable without high fees and interest rates, so they don’t operate here. But EWA companies do. Because of an extremely dumb loophole. Lending laws technically only apply to loans.

TAHRA JIRARI: These are not loans.

DAILYPAY LADY: EWA is access to earned wage, not a loan.

BEN LAROCCO: We are advancing money and getting paid back.

SANYA: Right. Guys, it’s not a loan, you’re just borrowing money and paying it back later. And now, how come you don’t have to cap your interest rates?

ANDREW WELCH, DAILYPAY: There is no interest charged ever because these are not loans.

SANYA: Okay, so let me get this straight. You're not a loan because you don’t charge interest, And those fees and tips you charge are not interest, because only loans have interest, and you’re not a loan.

SANYA: If you’re starting to get dizzy, buckle up ‘cause there’s more. EWA lobbyists use words like.

LOBBYIST: Choice.

LOBBYIST: Dignity:

LOBBYIST: Flexibility.

SANYA: To try to convince lawmakers that they’re providing an important service to working Americans. And they started doing this years ago, before most people had ever heard about earned wage access. That's allowed them to define the narrative by repeating the same 5 talking points.

RYAN NAPLES, DailyPay, Nevada: Workers can only access their own money.

DAILYPAY REP, Ohio: Their own money.

ALYSSA, DailyPay, Nevada: It is absolutely not a loan.

NAPLES: Because our product is not a loan, no EWA provider charges interest.

MOLLY JONES PAYACTIV, Nevada: There is no interest

LAROCCO, EarnIn, New York: We do not charge any late fees or interest ever.

JONES, Washington: Wages you have already earned that are trapped in a batch payroll cycle.

EARNIN CEO, U.S. Congress: Antiquated payroll system.

LAROCCO: Arbitrary payday.

ANDREW HERF, EarnIn, Ohio: Arbitrary 2 or 4 week pay cycle.

NAPLES, Massachusetts: Even If we were to assign an APR it would be misleadingly high.

DAILYPAY, Washington: And emphasizing APRs is misleading for a non loan product with no interest or recourse.

NAPLES, Nevada: there's also no requirement to repay.

HERF, Ohio: They have literally forever to pay it back. Because it’s their money, they’re just borrowing against their future self – I shouldn’t say borrowing, they’re accessing wages against their future self.

SANYA: Wait a minute, what did he just say?

HERF, Ohio: They have literally forever to pay it back. Because it’s their money, they’re just borrowing against their future self – I shouldn’t say borrowing, they’re accessing wages against their future self.

ANDY MORRISON, New Economy Project (Watching Video): Oops.

ANDY: They can’t even keep their own tangled knots straight.

SANYA: I was getting lost in the all the corporate doublespeak, so i got help from Andy Morrison. that’s him testifying against ewa lobbyists in the new york state house.

ANDY: These are essentially payday loans by another name.

SANYA: Andy debunked every talking point. First up, that there’s no interest.

ANDY: It's not true. The average effective interest rate on EWA loans is over 330% APR.

SANYA So are fees the same thing as interest?

ANDY: Yes. When the cost of a loan is calculated, it's inclusive of fees. and in this case, it should be inclusive of, of the tips.

SANYA: What about their claim that you never have to pay it back?

ANDY: They have access to your bank account, um, they're getting paid virtually every single time.

SANYA: And those antiquated payroll systems?

ANDY: There's nothing inherently broken about a two week pay cycle. What's broken is that wages are too low, and the cost of living is too high for millions of workers.

SANYA: Is APR really misleading for these short term loans?

ANDY: It's just the standard of measurement for loans everywhere.

SANYA: Andy said EWA companies claim annual percentage rates are misleading because their loans don’t last for a whole year.

ANDY: That's like saying that you didn't violate the speed limit, uh, in miles per hour because you didn't drive for an hour. Oh, you were only driving for two minutes.

SANYA: And finally, all together now, is it really your own money?

ANDY: What they're doing is lending, they're offering a worker money against their future earnings. The worker has to pay that back. It’s a loan.

SANYA: Just in the past few years, these apps have drained 500 million dollars in fees and tips from working Americans, and that’s just in New York. This should piss off lawmakers, and yet…

MORRISON: A lot of lawmakers kind of fall for it, hook, line, and sinker.

WASHINGTON HOUSE: Earned Wage Access, in my opinion, does not qualify as a loan

TOBY YUREK, Nevada: I think it is an amazing concept

NY STATE ASSEMBLY: You're not loaning me, you know, the money, it is mine. I earned it.

NICOLE CANNIZZARO, Nevada: I do think this is a real solution for our constituents

SANYA: Once they win over enough lawmakers, fintech lobbyists get one of them to introduce a “regulatory” law. during the hearing they’re like, ‘hey we’re not predatory, look we want to be regulated.’

PHIL GOLDFETTER: I crisscrossed the country generally supporting legislation

SANYA: Meanwhile the legislation was written by fucking Alec, the guys that are secretly behind tons of conservative state laws like, state your ground, bills that weakened labor unions, and voter id laws. They're basically a fill-in-the-blank bill factory for pro-corporate lawmakers. That’s how the same EWA bill ended up on statehouse floors across the country. It gives legal blessing to the way these companies already operate, and ensures that they won’t have to cap fees or disclose APRs or be subject to other lending rules.

ANDY: And it becomes extremely difficult to, um, remove them once they become entrenched.

SANYA: And once people start using these apps to help pay the bills, they quickly become dependent on them. The average EWA user takes out 36 advances a year, the average payday loan consumer takes out 8. As I talked to Runeda about each of her recent EarnIn advances, I started to see how that happens.

SANYA: The first time Runeda used Earnin It was a couple years ago after her son was born, she had just switched to this remote job, which was a pay cut, but it let her stay home and care for her son at the time. And then after she went back to her normal job, she actually stopped using Earnin for nearly two years. She got on a stable financial footing. She even bought this house.

SANYA: But housing costs are expensive and for a bunch of complicated reasons, her child support payment is less this year than it was before. And that put Runeda in this really precarious position where if one thing went wrong, it would completely throw her off financially. And about two weeks ago, that's exactly what happened.

RUNEDA: So, uh, my son wakes up, uh, really early sometimes, and it was like five o'clock in the morning. And I went to try to open an app on my phone and it wasn't loading. And I was like, did they turn my internet off? I checked the router and it said, your service has been interrupted for non-payment. And I'm like, what the heck are you talking about?

SANYA: The bill used to be on autopay, but for some reason wasn’t anymore.

RUNEDA: They told me I had to pay like over $200. I had like 50 bucks in my bank account. That was the first domino and everything else just kind of fell apart from there.

SANYA: Runeda borrowed 150 dollars from EarnIn to pay the internet bill, the 20 dollar reconnection fee, and the 6 dollar EarnIn fee.

RUNEDA: I had to, like, go down to the McDonald's to use their wifi.

SANYA: That setback meant Runeda had to borrow again just 3 days later for gas, and 4 days after that for a utility bill. Which meant her next paycheck was smaller, which meant she ended up borrowing again 3 more times over the next week. Leading to another small paycheck, which led to more borrowing, and another small paycheck, until she was trapped in a debt cycle. By comparison, the previous month, Runeda only borrowed one time.

RUNEDA: You don’t have room to breathe, it’s like you can’t breathe. Every dollar is accounted for. It leaves no room for error.

SANYA: Fintech’s colorful, emoji-filled version of payday loans is just the latest in a long tradition of predatory lending. I mean, loan sharks have existed since ancient Mesopotamia.

ANDY: There are prohibitions on usury in practically every religion.

SANYA: If they’ve innovated anything, it’s that they’ve made it way too easy to get into debt.

LEE: when you go to the payday loan, you are kind of watching your backs. Who's seeing me walk into this building? But the cash advance, uh, apps, it's private. There's this huge social stigma against people who are poor. Everyone I know is in debt. But we have to pretend like we're not. And there's a lot of shame wrapped up in that.

ANDY: In our society, people are made to feel that if, if they're struggling financially, it's their own fault. When in fact, we have a financial system and an economy that is designed to extract money from people. And I think the EWA industry really exemplifies that.

SANYA: Now, at this point in a video about consumer exploitation I would normally give a shout out to Lina Khan over at the FTC, which had been going after EWA companies the last couple years. I'd also mention that last year, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau issued a statement that earned wage access is a loan and should be regulated as such. But Elon Musk is on a mission to delete the CFPB, and the Trump admin has already started trying to make that happen. Closing headquarters and telling staffers not to do “any work tasks”. and Lina Khan is out too. Her replacement, Andrew Ferguson, is taking the FTC in a different direction.

FERGUSON: The previous Administration they were all about rules rules rules. That’s not what we’re about in the Trump Administration.

SANYA: Those anti-regulation vibes are already playing out in the states. Twelve states have laws on the books regulating EWA, but only two of those say that paycheck advances are loans. The other ten are EWA-friendly Alec legislation. And if you live in one of these 18 states with EWA legislation pending – make sure your state’s bill isn’t the Alec one. EWA lobbyists are trying to make it seem normal that if you’re broke you should be taking out dozens of small loans a year to get by – which, as I've shown, just makes things worse.

ANDY: The solution to thirst isn't lead contaminated water.

SANYA: So, what are the solutions for people struggling to get by? Well, one could be community-driven credit unions, which can offer people fair loans at reasonable rates. Or, to dream even bigger, what if people didn’t need to turn to debt in the first place?

SANYA: That’s one of the reasons advocates like Andy support public banks – they’re run by the state, and therefore, are accountable to us, instead of private shareholders. And since they don’t exist to turn a profit, they could invest our taxes into things that would help our communities, like building affordable housing.

ANDY: It's part of the recipe for how we create an economy that works for people that doesn't exist to extract profits, but actually exists to build, um, wealth and root wealth in local neighborhoods so that people can thrive.

SANYA: But instead of talking about any of that, we’re stuck debating the definition of a loan, and whether biweekly pay is good or not. That is why EWA is so dangerous, even if you don’t use it. And even worse, by normalizing debt as a way to deal with low wages, they’re reducing the pressure that would naturally build on employers to pay people more, thus keeping wages low. Because the obvious solution here is literally just paying people more. That's what finally helped Lee and Runeda break out of their debt cycles: Lee, when they got a new job that paid more, and Runeda when she got a raise at her current job.

RUNEDA: One day I would just love to like, not have to think about it. Like, I don't have to be filthy rich. I just don't wanna have to think about what's in my bank account every day. That'd be nice, 'cause all I care about is making his life better.

SANYA: Thanks for watching the Classroom. We’re always looking to tell more stories unpacking the economic systems that impact our daily lives. What other issues do you want to see us cover? Sound off in the comments and don’t forget to like and subscribe.

Big rail is gunning to go automated—but critics worry it could have lasting consequences on safety and spark an uptick in accidents.

The Association of American Railroads, the lobbying arm of industry behemoths like Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, has petitioned the Federal Rail Administration for a waiver allowing the companies it represents to reduce their required amount of visual inspections by 75 percent.

If granted, critics warn, the waiver could result in an increase in derailments (it’s estimated that there are currently around three per day) and have lasting impacts on rail safety—or result in another incident like the East Palestine derailment.

The deregulatory push is premised on an assumption that the automated inspection systems can identify defects in railways as thoroughly and accurately as human inspectors. Railway safety experts and union officials, however, argue that this is untrue and that the crusade for automation raises serious safety concerns.

“A lot of people are under the idea that [automated systems] can look for all the defects and it will find all the defects and that’s because [the rail companies] use this creative language of ‘automated track inspection,’” Roy Morrison, director of safety at the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, told More Perfect Union. “That’s not what’s happening.”

The technology in question is called “track geometry measurement,” which some railroads already use to help inspectors check a track’s gauge, alignment, and curvature. Though rail unions and inspectors are generally in favor of the technology, they caution that it’s unable to pick up all of the defects human inspectors can.

Morrison told More Perfect Union that of the 23 defects regulatorily required for visual track inspection, track geometry only is equipped to look for six.

“Track geometry measurement is really nothing more than a really fancy tape measure. And it does a really good job of that, which is why we support bringing on the technology,” said Morrison. “It’s a great technology for what it does, but it’s not an inspection.”

The waiver also includes a request to allow railroads up to 72 hours to address any problems after they’ve been identified. Current regulations require human inspectors to address any potential defects immediately. This could result in scenarios where trains transporting hazardous materials and toxic chemicals would continue moving over defected tracks for days after the problem has been identified.

“I don’t think anyone living around a railroad track or within a mile or two of a railroad track wants to have chemicals running over defects, or wants to have passenger trains running over defects in their area,” BMWED President Tony Cardwell told More Perfect Union. “It will cause derailments, and it will cause death and it will cause harm and it will destroy the environment. And that’s our warning to people.”

For a full look at the shady scheme to undermine rail safety, the likelihood of the waiver’s adoption, and the unionists trying to block it, watch the full report below.

Reporting by Ian McKenna. See below for a full transcript of the video.

—

VOICEOVER: Keeping railroad tracks safe is supposed to be their job.

TYLER PAVICH, Railroader: Like our rulebook, they say it was written in blood, because every rule in there is because someone was injured.

VO: But the biggest railroads want them to do it less.

REP. DINA TITUS: Class 1 railroads have requested a safety waiver to reduce visual track inspections from twice a week to twice a month.

TONY CARDWELL, BMWED: Nobody in the rail industry on the executive side can explain why that's rational.

VO: Big Rail, it seems, wants to go automated.

ROY MORRISON, BMWED: They use this creative language of automated track inspections.

SEAN DUFFY, Sec. of Transportation: Automated track inspections.

CSX CORPORATE MATERIALS: Autonomous track testing vehicles.

AAR MATERIAL: Automated track inspection systems.

ROY: A lot of people are under the idea that this can look for all the defects and it will find all the defects. But that's not what's happening.

VO: This is the story about the fight over rail safety in America today.

ROY, at meeting: We're averaging three reportable derailments a day in this country. Every single day, we have the opportunity for an East Palestine three times. And for some reason, the rail industry is okay with that.

VO: The rail titans trying to call the shots.

TONY: They're all billion-dollar-a-quarter type revenue. They're giant corporations.

VO: And the technology they're trying to push in the name of safety.

TYLER: I would not think minimizing us out there in replacement for a geometry car would be a good idea at all.

VO: Because for big business, safety costs money.

TONY: The idea that this vulture capitalism is okay. That this greed before everything else in safety is nuts.

VO: But the question is, could deregulation cost us even more?

ROY: If track inspectors are not allowed to do their job, we're going to have more derailments. No ifs, ands, or buts about that.

TYLER: You do realize when people new come into town, they're like, oh wow, there's a train. How close is it? And I'm like, we're kind of surrounded.

VO: Tyler Pavich is a railroad worker in Nebraska.

TYLER: A track inspector gets a territory, and that's their responsibility. You are in charge of inspecting all of it and making sure that train traffic can move safely.

VO: Track inspectors work for the railroad companies, visually inspecting track for defects and unsafe conditions. Conditions that could cause train derailments.

TYLER: There's something about having a small territory where you can become familiar with it. And you can start noticing subtle things that are hints to something major. That's where you almost want inspectors out there more. To get more familiar, not less.

VO: But less visual inspections is exactly what Big Rail has been pushing for.

TONY: Track inspectors are required on the highest classes in the United States of rail. They're required to do two inspections per week.

VO: Tony Cardwell is the president of the union that represents these rail workers, the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way employees division of the Teamsters.

TONY: The carriers are asking for those inspections to be reduced to twice a month. 75% reduction in the required inspections.

VO: In April, some of the biggest rail companies in the country submitted a safety waiver petition to the Federal Railroad Administration through an industry group known as the…

TONY: Association of American Railroads. And the AAR is oftentimes the group that's doing most or all of the lobbying for the railroads. So they represent Union Pacific Railroad. They represent North Fork Southern Railroad, Canadian Pacific Railroad, Canadian National Railroad, CSX Railroad. So all the major railroads. The untold secret is that, you know, velocity is everything in their world.

ROY: The reason the AAR wants the waiver is because the number one thing slowing down trains is having your people out on the track in front of them.

VO: Roy Morrison is the safety director for the BMWED.

ROY: If they can take the track inspectors and remove them from the track, they can run more trains. It's really just to try and make money for the railroads.

VO: The rail carriers want instead to rely more on what they're calling automated track inspection technology.

ROY: The railroad started pushing to try and get what they call automated track inspection cleared back in 2018. And what it actually is, is track geometry measurement.

VO: Track geometry makes up just one part of the FRA's track safety standards.

ROY: Geometry is exactly what it sounds like, is the measurements of where the track is. So it's measuring the distance between this rail and this rail. That's the gauge. It's checking the degree of a curve and it's checking the elevation of that curve. And then it's checking the alignment. So it's making sure that this piece of tangent track is straight and not curvy or wavy. This track geometry measurement is really nothing more than a really fancy tape measure. And it does a really good job at that, which is why we actually support bringing on the technology. We just don't think that it can safely replace a human track inspection at this point.

VO: That's because train derailments are not just caused by defects in track geometry.

TYLER: This is my compliance manual, my engineering manual for how I inspect tracks, the standard that they need to be maintained to. And this much is what that geometry car can find.

VO: That means track inspectors are responsible for identifying all the other potential defects. The ones that these track geometry measurement systems are unable to identify.

ROY: It's not looking at anything in this turnout or this switch. It's not looking at the vegetation around it. It's not looking at any drainage. These ties, the fasteners that are holding them, these two joint bars right here in this curve, the machine can't look for those things.

VO: The National Transportation Safety Board has said that track geometry measurement systems are only intended to supplement, not replace, inspectors physically examining a track.

ROY: They're looking for just six defects out of 23 total, regulatorily required, and then there's plenty of other things that aren't required by regulation that track inspectors look for.

VO: More advanced forms of automated track inspection do exist, types that go beyond track geometry, that could help inspectors keep rail safe.

VO: There's LIDAR, there's high-speed cameras, AI looking over the high-speed camera data. But that's not what AAR is asking for. And they did that on purpose. They want the bar as low as possible.

VO: A BMWED analysis of 10 years of FRA derailment data shows why relying solely on track geometry measurement systems could lead to disaster. So total we had 1,284 derailments in those 10 years on mainline tracks. Tried to put it in two buckets, what could be identified by track geometry measurement and what couldn't be. So these are ones that ATI could not find, 725. And these 559 are the ones that it can find. They're also detectable by a human in their visual inspection. So this is where 56.5% of the actual derailments we had, the machine didn't even have the ability to look for.

VO: Under the waiver request, these rail carriers might only have to run the track geometry measurement systems once a month.

ROY: The track structure itself is a living, breathing entity. It's constantly in a state of flux. And that's part of the reason we need to keep the frequency of a track inspector where it's at currently.

VO: There is another concerning aspect of the waiver request.

TONY, in meeting: The same waiver would allow railroads up to 72 hours to address a defect after it is identified.

TONY: For years it's required that defect to be remedied. Now, when I find a defect as a track inspector, my job is to go and remedy that defect. Instead, you're going to be running trains at full speed, 65, 70 miles an hour over that defect while it's still in the track for up to three days. I don't think anyone living around a railroad track or within a mile or two of the railroad track wants to have chemicals running over defects or wants to have passenger trains running over defects in their area. It's dangerous. It will cause derailments, and it will cause death, and it will cause harm, and it will destroy the environment. And that's our warning to people.

TYLER: Half my family lives in this town where if something happened and the right or the wrong train derails and explodes, that just affected my whole life. And I wouldn't want that on anybody. In every community that we work on, we know people from every town and care about all of them. We care about everybody, and that should be everyone's outlook. As railroaders, it's an unforgiving job. Everything's heavy. Everything's big. Everything's very powerful. So safety's very important.

VO: The BMWED has been trying to warn the public about the potential consequences of granting the safety waiver for months.

UNION REP: We are in Columbiana in eastern Ohio, and we are here to talk about rail safety.

VO: Columbiana is just a few miles down the road from East Palestine, Ohio.

TONY, at meeting: Because if there's anything we want out of the devastation that happened in East Palestine, it's to ensure that there's change in the industry.

VO: A defective wheel bearing caused the derailment in East Palestine, according to the NTSB.

TONY: Guess how many rules and laws that they've held past to solve some of these problems? A big, gigantic goose egg, right? None. They've done nothing.

VO: In fact, Big Rail lobbied heavily against the Railroad Safety Act, the bill crafted in the wake of the East Palestine disaster.

TONY: So we've got to keep reminding them of what happened. We've got to keep reminding them of their promises and obligations. The railroads aren't going to grow a conscience. So our job is to remind the people that can control these issues, that can pass laws, and say, look, this has to be done.

TONY: I think the most disgraceful thing that could happen to the folks in East Palestine is if they suffered through all this, and then it happens again in another community. That would be the most, that'd be spitting in their face, right?

VO: The waiver request is being considered by the Department of Transportation's Federal Railroad Administration. The decision could come to Trump's nominee to run the FRA, David Fink, a former railroad executive.

SEN. BEN RAY LUJÁN: How can we trust you to hold this position and hold companies accountable to areas that were not met while you were there?

VO: Fink is the former president of Pan Am Railways, where safety issues were not receiving the serious and thoughtful consideration that Pan Am's employees and the public deserve, according to an FRA audit.

TONY: I hope that he understands that the role that he serves in now isn't to make the railroads more profitable. The whole point of the FRA is to make sure that rail passage to this country is safe. And so are we asking that Fink not grant the waiver? And if he does, then there will be blood on their hands.

ANDREW RIVERA, MPU: Thank you so much for watching our video. If you'd like to see more stories like this one, be sure to like and subscribe to the channel to get more More Perfect Union in your feed. And if you have any ideas for stories that you would like for us to investigate, just drop them in the comments below.

Recently, the freight rail giant Norfolk Southern announced its acquisition by Union Pacific in an $85 billion deal. On top of being the largest freight rail merger in history, this deal could mean lower safety standards and less oversight for a company that was just at the center of a massive derailment scandal.

Back in 2023, a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. The company insisted the only way to avert an explosion was for local authorities to conduct a controlled detonation, releasing vinyl chloride—a known carcinogen—into the air and potentially poisoning thousands of residents. The detonation turned out to be completely unnecessary. Norfolk Southern, investigators found, misled authorities to make it seem like the only option.

More Perfect Union recently went back to East Palestine, where residents are still facing health issues like rashes and respiratory problems as a result of the chemical exposure. Experts say they could feel the impacts for years.

“I think there’s often a misunderstanding that when a toxin goes away, the injury goes away. But when the hammer that hit a person’s head goes away, the problem from that doesn’t go away,” Dr. Beatrice Golomb, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, told More Perfect Union.

When the train derailed, Norfolk Southern alleged that an explosion was inevitable and that the only remedy was a “vent and burn”—a last resort procedure that involves releasing the chemicals into the air in order to avert a total meltdown.

But a yearlong investigation conducted by the National Transportation Safety Board found the procedure “unnecessary,” and that the company provided incomplete and misleading information in order to pressure decision-makers to greenlight the procedure.

“Unfortunately, while they’re making these decisions, the temperatures of the cars are starting to trend downward. That is indicative of a commodity that’s stabilizing,” Jared Cassidy, safety lead at SMART-TD, the largest rail union in the country, told More Perfect Union. “We were heading in a good direction. And they decided to do the vent and burn anyway.”

Letting the derailed trains cool down could have meant averting the ensuing health crisis. But the vent and burn let Norfolk Southern resume their operations more quickly.

“When you look at the railroad industry, there’s always something in the back of every decision they make — and that’s a profit margin,” said Cassidy.

Norfolk Southern has since retracted many of the promises it initially made to residents in a bid to “make it right.” The company withdrew its promise to East Palestine School District to rebuild athletic facilities and a wellness center, now the subject of a multi-million dollar lawsuit. It also helped block the Railway Safety Act, a bipartisan bill that would have implemented stronger safety standards for trains carrying hazardous materials.

Now, the company is set to be bought out by fellow freight rail giant Union Pacific—the sector’s largest buyout in history. Historically, rail mergers have resulted in lower safety standards and an uptick in crashes, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Regulators and labor unions have decried the merger, arguing it would further undermine safety in an industry that’s already under-regulated. SMART-TD is challenging the tie-up and plans to take the case to the Surface Transportation Board.

Though Norfolk Southern has moved on, residents will see the impacts for generations.

“I kept thinking we were getting closer to justice and accountability,” said former resident Jami Wallace. “But every time something comes out, it's more lies, more betrayal from our government.”

Watch our full report below:

Reporting by John Russell and Josh Hirschfeld-Kroen. See below for a full transcript of the video.

—

JAMI WALLACE, former East Palestine resident: Actually, my heart’s kinda pitter pattering - just sitting here with these memories and looking around.

JAMI - it’s making the hair stand up on the back of my neck and I feel like I might puke. This is what they did to us, this is what they did to our community. And it all started right here.

JOHN RUSSELL, More Perfect Union: The last time I was in East Palestine, things were…pretty different.

CELLPHONE FOOTAGE: Look at those flames. Look at that shit.

JR: I’m from this county - I went to their high school dances, barbecues, and I was there, a few weeks after the derailment, to document the unfolding man-made disaster.

WOMAN AT PUBLIC MEETING: Do I have to wait until i have cancer or my kids are sick before you guys are gonna do anything

EAST PALESTINE RESIDENT: Why the fuck would you let Norfolk do that? Why would you let them clean up their own mess?

JR: Now, more than 2 years later, East Palestine is quiet.

JAMI: It’s the twilight zone. It’s like living on this movie set, this fantasy world.

JR: But behind the scenes, a much bigger scandal is still unfolding.

JAMI: Every one of these little stories, in and of itself, is shocking, but the totality of it…we have been stabbed in the back by everyone.

JR: Do you think Norfolk Southern paid as big a price as you did?

CHRIS ALBRIGHT, East Palestine resident: You gotta be outside your mind. You must be outside your mind!

JARED CASSIDY, SMART-TD safety lead: I wish there was one smoking gun here - the problem with East Palestine is there’s about 30 smoking guns.

JENNIFER HOMENDY, NTSB chair: There are no accidents. This derailment was 100% preventable.

CHRIS: I’m a Trump supporter - he needs to make this right. He has the ability. The opportunity to.

JAMI: We lived right over here, in this house on the bottom. I brought my daughter home from the hospital here. It was our little piece of country in the middle of the city.

JR: Jami Wallace had plans of raising her daughter in East Palestine.

JAMI: Every single happy moment in my life was spent right here in this town.

JR: But on February 3rd, 2023, all of that changed.

NEWS FOOTAGE: Fifty train cars derailed, causing a massive fire.

NEWS FOOTAGE: Five of the cars that derailed were carrying vinyl chloride.

SOCIAL MEDIA: That’s all of the poisonous gas right there, just leaving our town.

JAMI: I saw that big mushroom cloud, it was like that big dark cloud over the whole community.

JR: That mushroom cloud was the result of a controlled detonation, carried out by the railroad company, Norfolk Southern. 1 million pounds of toxic vinyl chloride were burned, released into the air, and spread across 16 states.

JR: What really sticks in your mind about that whole experience?

JAMI: The fear. The panic, the not knowing.

JR: But just 2 days later, residents were told that it was safe to return home.

JAMI: The EPA was saying everything was fine, and as soon as I pulled into the driveway, you can see, it runs along the creek, I get out of my car, can’t breathe, coughing, skins on fire, I look over at this creek here, and this is sulfur run, the most contaminated creek in town. And instantly I knew something wasn’t right.

JR: Jami didn’t stick around much longer - she took her daughter to a rental outside of town. But most residents did stay, trusting state officials who said that it was safe.

JR: When you heard that at the time, did you believe it?

CHRIS: Absolutely - it’s our government. They’re not gonna lie to us, why would they put us in danger. They’re telling us it's safe, it's safe.

JOHN: Chris Albright lives with family, a half-mile away from the tracks. Just two weeks after the derailment, his symptoms started setting in.

CHRIS: I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t walk from here to the door without stopping.

JR: Chris had been healthy and active his whole life. But by the middle of March, he was diagnosed with severe heart failure.

CHRIS: I really thought I was gonna be dead soon. I really thought I was gonna be dead. With my health condition, there was no way I could stay in the house. There was absolutely no way.

JR: So he and his family packed up, and moved to a hotel outside of town.

CHRIS: We had one room. That’s what we lived in for four months.

JR: How did it come to an end? Was it safe to go back or something?

CHRIS: No. We ran out of money. When we left I had $40 left in my savings account. $40. I’m still suffering health effects, and they want me to go back to this house that I know is not safe to go back to.

JR: To this day, the EPA and the state of Ohio still claim that East Palestine is safe. But in just the last 2 years, hundreds of residents have reported getting sick.

SOCIAL MEDIA USER: Look at my eyes. I look crazy.

SOCIAL MEDIA USER: My skin has been red like a lobster.

NEWS FOOTAGE: Federal workers actually got sick while they were serving in East Palestine after that derailment.

NEWS: They showed symptoms similar to what other people have been talking about.

JAMI: I have been diagnosed with asthma. I have periodontal disease and my teeth are falling out. And that’s just what I know of.

DR. GOLOMB, UCSD professor of Medicine: We sort of heard the messaging that everything was fine, at the same time that people were reporting they were sick. And we thought, we’ve seen this movie before.

JR: That’s Dr. Beatrice Golomb, a professor of medicine at University of California, San Diego. She’s currently conducting a large-scale health study in East Palestine.

GOLOMB: I think where claims have been made that residents are all safe, it’s been based on a lot of presumptions. The safety for many of those chemicals is simply not known. There’s often no or very limited human testing.

JR: And even if it is true that East Palestine is now safe, that doesn’t erase the toxic exposure that already took place.

GOLOMB: I think there’s often a misunderstanding that when a toxin goes away, the injury goes away. But when the hammer that hit a person’s head goes away, the problem from that doesn’t go away.

JAMI: Look at 9/11, it took how many years before their illnesses started showing up - and when they say no one died. No one died yet.

JR: Dr. Golomb’s study is still ongoing, and it could be years before residents know the full effects of the toxic plume that engulfed their town. But there is one thing we do know, thanks to a recent investigation into Norfolk Southern, which revealed that all of this, the mushroom cloud, the sickness that followed, all of it was unnecessary.

JAMI: They lied - we didn’t need to blow those trains up. They lied.

JARED: They were making this pitch that an explosion was inevitable, but the science of this proves otherwise.

JR: Jared Cassidy is the safety lead for the largest rail union in the country. And he was part of a major federal investigation into Norfolk Southern’s crucial decision to conduct a vent and burn.

JARED: When you look at what’s in place in East Palestine… we have cars on fire - we have a derailment that has caused catastrophe across an entire community. And so now you have the commodity - the oxyvinyl that’s starting to heat up - it's becoming unstable.

JARED: The railroads call into the war room all of the major players that are part of the emergency response. Which did include the governor, it did include state police, it included the volunteer fire chief.

JARED: And the railroads make the pitch that “look, this is the situation. The temperatures are rising, we believe that polymerization is imminent. And the best course of action is to do a vent and burn.”

JARED: But outside of the room is oxyvinyls. The actual producer of the commodity. The one that understands the volatility, and all of the reactions that can take place. And they’re not being allowed a meaningful voice into the conversation.

JARED: And so the railroads just keep pushing this, “hey its in trouble, its in trouble, its in trouble.”

JARED: And ultimately, it’s the volunteer fire chief, is the one that makes the decision. But because he’s out of his lane, if you will, he’s relying on the railroad’s information.

KEITH DRABICK, East Palestine fire chief: We were told based upon the conditions at hand, we only had 13 minutes.

JARED: And so the folks that are responsible theoretically for the decision making don’t have the education or the information they need to properly consider what’s being thrown at ‘em. And they rely on the railroads that “hey they’re telling me the truth.”

JARED: And unfortunately, while they’re making these decisions, the temperatures of the cars are starting to trend downward.

JR: It’s going down, the line’s going down.

JARED: It's going down. That is indicative of a commodity that’s stabilizing. The fact is, we were heading in a good direction. And they decided to do the vent and burn anyway.

JD VANCE: Thank you chair Homendy for being here and for all your work.

JR: In March of 2024, after a year-long investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board confirmed what many people had feared.

HOMENDY: In order for polymerization to occur, which was Norfolk Southern and their contractor’s justification for the vent and burn, you would have to have rapidly increasing temperatures or some sort of infusion of oxygen, neither of which occurred.

HOMENDY: Oxyvinyls was on scene. They believed polymerization was not occurring and there was no justification to do a vent and burn.

JARED: What you had was a railroad that was trying to rush the clean up, trying to prioritize the movement of trains above all else. And so they manufactured a story that ultimately was proven to not be true.

HOMENDY: There was another option - let it cool down. It was cooling down.

JARED: When you look at the railroad industry, there’s always something in the back of every decision they make - and that’s a profit margin.

JD VANCE: This is a really, really troubling set of circumstances - this town very well may have been poisoned to facilitate the rapid movement of freight.

ALAN SHAW, former Norfolk Southern CEO: I want a response from Norfolk Southern that we can look back five years from now, 10 years from now, [and] we can be proud of how Norfolk Southern responded. But more importantly, the folks of East Palestine can be proud of how Norfolk Southern responded five years from now, ten years from now. And we’re on that path.

JR: In the 2 years since the derailment, Norfolk Southern has promised to dedicate millions of dollars towards “making it right” in East Palestine.

JAMI: They gave us the old train depot, that’s been sitting there dilapidated for years. I think they spent 1 million to renovate it.

CHRIS: We had the street fair that one year - they paid for all the rides for everybody, nobody had to pay for anything.

JR: But many of those promises have fallen short.

ALAN: I made a commitment that we would set up a regional training facility near East Palestine - and today, we kept our promise.

JAMI: They were supposed to have the training center and pay for the upkeep of it and everything - that’s completely gone.

NEWS CLIP: East Palestine school district is the latest to sue Norfolk Southern.

NEWS CLIP: The lawsuit claiming the railroad broke a $30 million promise to rebuild athletic facilities and the wellness center.

JR: But there was one promise that Norfolk Southern couldn’t walk away from: a class action lawsuit, which yielded a $600 million settlement for residents within 20 miles of the derailment.

CHRIS: That’s a lot of money, it is. $600 million is a lot of money. Not when it’s divided up between how many people.

JR: According to the settlement, anyone within 2 miles of the derailment can theoretically get up to $70,000 per household for property damage, and up to $25,000 per person for health problems.

JAMI: So you say 70,000 per household [gasps ironically]. Let’s break that down. That’s in the 1-2 mile zone. So my household of 4, that would have been $17,500 a piece. But wait, we rent a hotel for 6 months, they’re deducting all that…we’re gonna get zero.

CHRIS: Over four months in the hotel, with food, we ran up over $35,000. We have to give that back.

CHRIS: We might get $35,000.

JR: Seems like a dumb question now, but is that enough?

CHRIS: [laughs] that’s not a drop in the bucket.

CHRIS: $35,000 towards cancer treatment. Burn it. That’s not gonna do anything. That’s not gonna do anything.

JAMI: You ask people around town - not one person will say “I took it because it's a good deal.” They took it because they want to get out. I mean, you know the people I know - some of them haven’t had $1000 in their bank account in their life.

JR: $600 million is one of the largest settlements in Norfolk Southern’s history. But the company expects most of those costs to be covered by their insurance. So the final cost will be a fraction of the annual revenue for the $62 billion company, which saw its stock fall on February 3rd, 2023, only to completely recover in the months that followed.

CHRIS [speaking about lawsuit]: They wanted to get it done, shoved under the rug, shut us up. And move on.

JAMI: They took away my home town. And they walk around and they made money? What stops them from doing it again? Because it will happen again.

JR: Basic question - are we any safer today than we were when the train derailed in East Palestine in 2023?

SHERROD BROWN, former senator: No we’re not. And we’re not partly because congress never passed the Railway Safety Act.

JR: That’s Sherrod Brown, the former senator from Ohio. In the wake of the derailment, he and JD Vance teamed up to draft what could have been a historic piece of legislation.

NEWS ANCHOR: The Railway Safety Act would boost safety for trains carrying hazardous materials.

SHERROD: It shouldn’t take a train derailment for elected officials to put partisanship aside.

JR: The disaster in East Palestine drew attention to an alarming fact: the railroad industry is extremely unregulated. Local officials don’t even know about the contents of the trains that pass through their towns. And there are 3 major derailments, on average, every single day. Critics in the industry blame a practice known as Precision Scheduled Railroad, or PSR.

JARED: They’re cutting these people down to the bone and forcing them to work to the absolute max, they’re not letting them have adequate sick time or rest time. It’s just trying to do more with less, and that’s the bottom line of that.

JR: PSR is all about moving trains from point A to point B with as few stops as possible. Over the years, that’s resulted in larger trains.

SHERROD: You see these huge trains that are bigger than you can imagine, when they’ve jumped the tracks or they’re lying on their sides

JR: And smaller crews.

SHERROD: The railroads insisted they only needed one person on a train, although they want two people in a cockpit if they’re flying on their corporate planes, so…there’s more than a little hypocrisy there but…what else is new.

JR: The Railway Safety Act was designed to eliminate many of these risks.

SHERROD: The railway safety act would have made sure that there were at least two people driving these trains. It would have required the railroads to notify communities when they were coming through with hazardous material.

JR: But the railroad industry had a different plan. In just one year, the five largest carriers spent an estimated $17 million dollars lobbying to block the bill. And they were successful - the Railway Safety Act never made it to the floor of Congress.

SHERROD: These guys are so effective at corporate lobbying - there was overwhelming support for this bill from the public.

JD VANCE: I’m a republican - and I worry that there has been a movement in my party in response to the legislation that I’ve proposed that would not hold Norfolk Southern or the railway industry accountable.

JARED: Basically what they’re saying is “we don’t feel like we should be a regulated industry. We should have the freedom to do whatever we want.”

JAMI: As mad as I am at Norfolk Southern, I think I’m more pissed at my government.

JAMI: I used to be proud to be an American. What hillbilly isn’t? And now I’m not a proud American at all. I'm a really pissed off, upset, betrayed, lied-to American. And when you break my trust to the level of my child’s life? That’s my child’s life. What would you do?

JR: On the second anniversary of the derailment, Jami and Chris joined hundreds of other residents in filing a new lawsuit - claiming that Norfolk Southern, and multiple government agencies, had all failed to protect them.

JAMI: Every step of the way we’ve had to fight. And that’s what I learned - no one’s gonna fight for us, we have to fight for ourselves.

JAMI: Do you know how many politicians I’ve talked to? And how many promised they were gonna help.

JAMI: I didn't give a shit if you were a Republican or a Democrat. If you would talk to us, we talked to you.

JAMI: Fast forward, JD Vance gets elected Vice president. I’ve heard from none of them.

JAMI: We’re still sitting here sick. People are still here suffering. And where is he?

JAMI: At this point, you see the corruption, the lies from every one of our agencies - unless the president says “we’re gonna make this right for these people”, it’ll never be made right.

JR: In February, Jami wrote a letter to President Trump, calling on him to sign a major disaster declaration, and to deliver universal healthcare for anyone in East Palestine who needs it.

CHRIS: I’m a Trump supporter. But he needs to make this right.

CHRIS: He has the ability to say, you know what Biden, screw you, I’m gonna make this right. And still he hasn’t.

JR: When you get a minute, you’re alone, what kind of sticks with you about all of this so far?

CHRIS: When I get a minute by myself, I’m not thinking about this. I’m not. I’m thinking about going golfing tomorrow, I’m thinking about going fishing, I’m thinking about my family. Anything but this. Anything I can to not be a part of this anymore. There are times you need to step away, for your own health, for your own sanity you have to step away from it.

JR: It’s a lot of weight for anyone to carry - and for one person that I knew, it became too much.

COURTNEY MILLER, former resident: I just don’t trust their results. We’re all ending up sick, and they're telling us it's safe, and everything’s at a safe level.

JR: I spoke with Courtney Miller after my last trip to East Palestine - we texted back and forth, about how she was getting sick, and wasn’t getting the answers, or the help, she needed. But we were never able to connect in person. That’s because on August 21, 2024, Courtney took her own life. We paid a visit to her home, which sits next to the tracks, along the banks of sulfur run, one of the most impacted creeks in town.

JR: I’ve spoken to Courtney’s family - the wound is still too fresh for them to talk about on camera, but they gave me permission to quote their belief that Courtney’s passing was 100% related to the derailment.

JR: For the people of East Palestine, what happened on February 3rd, 2023 was a wound, one they may be dealing with for the rest of their lives. For Norfolk Southern, it was just another Friday.

JAMI: You’re from this area. When someone first says “sacrifice zone”. Well what the hell’s a sacrifice zone?

JR: That’s us.

JAMI: But we grew up here. When it’s all around you, I don’t think you even notice it until you step outside the box, and you look from the outside looking in.

CHRIS: There’s railways all around this country. If you ever noticed - they’re not in, like, the rich parts of town - they’re in our neighborhoods. They’re in the working class neighborhoods.

JR: There’s an unwritten law of big business in America - if you have enough money, you can get away with almost anything. And if you don’t have the money…well…

CHRIS [showing tattoo on his arm of his EKG]: That one there was when my heart was bad. And that’s just a reminder of what I’ve been through, what I’ve gone through. What I’ve beaten.

JR - What does justice for East Palestine look like for you, and how far are we away from that, right as we’re standing at ground zero right now?

JAMI: You know, I don’t know - I kept thinking we were getting closer to justice and accountability, but every time something comes out, it's more lies, more betrayal from our government….

JAMI: It’s gonna be hard to take this country back, it’s gonna take everyone of us. It’s gonna take people to realize that this could be my community.

JAMI: I know…that I'll never be able to move back here again…but you still just pray that one day, one day you might get your home back.

JR: Hi, thanks for watching our video. If you liked this story and you want more stories like this, be sure to like and subscribe to the channel to get more More Perfect Union in your feed. And if you have stories that you want us to investigate, drop ‘em in the comments below.

Back in 2009, the CEO of one of the largest dialysis providers in the U.S. made a telling remark about the nature of his business strategy.

“If I had 1,400 Taco Bells and 32,000 people who worked in them, I would be doing all the same stuff,” Kent Thiry, the former CEO of dialysis giant DaVita, told an audience at UCLA.

Though Thiry has since stepped down, the legacy of his controversial playbook—which some experts have dubbed the “fast food” model of health care—lives on. A look into this strategy reveals, in part, why patients with kidney failure in the U.S. are worse off than almost anywhere else in the developed world.

Kidney failure affects roughly 750,000 people in the U.S. and is the country’s 8th leading cause of death, according to the National Kidney Foundation. Of the roughly 100,000 people on the national kidney transplant list, only a fraction are able to find a donor. The remaining patients, with their kidneys unable to remove the toxins from their blood stream, need to undergo dialysis in order to survive.

The dialysis market’s two biggest players, DaVita and Fresenius, control around 80 percent of facilities across the country. They’ve gotten there by snapping up independent clinics, paying doctors in ways that some allege amount to illegal kickbacks, and slashing costs—largely at the expense of their patients and workforce.

The companies’ clinics have seen chronic understaffing, reduction in care quality, and even premature deaths. Ryan McDevitt, a Duke University economist who has studied the dialysis industry extensively, found that hospitalization and death rates increased after DaVita or Fresenius took over, and kidney transplant rates fell by almost 10 percent for patients in those facilities.

“It seems to me that if you want to maintain your cash flow, you don't let people off dialysis,” journalist Tom Mueller told More Perfect Union. “And that sounds a bit sinister, but it just is a matter of incentives.”

In some cases, DaVita and Fresenius’ fast food ethos creates scenarios where patients are asked to go against a doctor’s orders. In order to drive up revenue, patients are stacked back-to-back. When delays inevitably happen, the packed schedules mean staff have to ask patients to cut their dialysis time shorter than ordered by their doctor.

To get around the orders, the companies ask patients to fill out AMA forms, indicating that they acknowledge they’re going “against medical advice.” This can be damning for patients hoping for a transplant. One DaVita patient told More Perfect Union that she was turned down for a donor organ in part because of the AMAs on her medical record.

More Perfect Union took a deeper look at the industry’s consolidation and what it means for patients, and the dialysis workers fighting for better pay and working conditions.

Watch the full report below:

Reporting by Alec Opperman. See below for a full transcript of the video.

ALEC OPPERMAN, MPU (in front of Taco Bell building): This is the future of health care. Oh, I'm sorry.

ALEC (in front of DaVita building): This is the future of health care. If I was confused, it's because, according to the former CEO, they have the same business model.

KENT THIRY, former CEO of DaVita: If I had 1,400 Taco Bells and 32,000 people who worked in them, I would be doing all the same stuff.

ALEC: You may not have heard of DaVita, but they're everywhere, along with their biggest competitor, Fresenius.

ALEC: They're the biggest players in the dialysis market, which you may not know or particularly care about, but you should, because more than likely, you have a kidney inside of you right now. And nearly 750,000 people a year experience kidney failure, while over half a million Americans are currently receiving the only treatment for kidney failure besides a transplant, dialysis.

ALEC: But taking a look at how the free market ran wild on just this one organ in the human body, can give us some insight into the future of American health care.

RYAN MCDEVITT, economist: They're doing a lot of things that you might encourage a fast food restaurant to do, like get a lot of patients to the facility each day, cut back on wages, cut back on costs. Turns out that kidneys are a little different than a Crunchwrap Supreme.

CARMEN CARTAGENA, former dialysis patient: I was scared because at that point was when I realized I can die on the chair and I won't even know it.

ALEC: This is Carmen. Because Carmen's kidneys didn't work properly, she needed to show up to dialysis several times a week just to stay alive. For over a decade, Carmen showed up week after week so a machine could do what her kidneys couldn't, clean her blood. And for most of that time, the clinic performing that life-saving service was a DaVita. Over time, Carmen had witnessed the kind of cost-cutting and decline in quality many of us have witnessed in retail, food, and furniture.

CARMEN: In 14 years, the quality of care diminished to the point where patients were having to suffer needlessly.

ALEC: They cut back on cleaning costs, leaving blood stains on the floor and chairs. They took away the numbing medication Carmen used. The needle sticks are incredibly painful. But one of the most alarming trends is short staffing, asking nurses and dialysis technicians to do more and more.

ALEC (with chemistry equipment): You may think of dialysis as something like a gentle blood draw, but it's more like an all-out assault on your body. Patients describe passing out, losing dangerous amounts of blood, nausea, vomiting, blood pressure spikes. Is this just a normal part of dialysis?

TOM MUELLER, journalist: High-speed, short treatment time, high ultrafiltration rate dialysis causes cardiac disease, plummeting blood pressure, horrible quality of life.

ALEC: This is journalist Tom Mueller, who spent five years talking to over 100 patients, workers, and kidney doctors to blow the lid on this industry. It is, and I'm not exaggerating, the most horrifying thing I've read in years. And I asked him, what happens when you do this kind of high-speed dialysis with not enough staff?

TOM: I've talked with Magellan Hanford, who is a former LAPD officer who retrained as a dialysis nurse. He said that at times, as a nurse, he had 17 patients that he was responsible for.

And his description of the day at the office was like working in a MASH unit in a war zone. It was, you know, someone's cramping here, someone's coding here, running from place to place. More than once, he described having to put a deceased patient under a sheet and continue treating everyone else because there was just no other option.

CARMEN: You're just sitting there waiting to see what emergency is going to happen. I've bled out, and while I'm bleeding out, there's a person across from me that is alarming. Who are they going to help first?

ALEC: And it's not just DaVita. For this story, I spoke to Fresenius workers across California, who all describe the same kind of nightmare scenarios Carmen experienced at DaVita.

MANNY GONZALEZ, dialysis technician: Over the years, I believe it went from, you know, care over profit to, very quickly, profit over care, to get as many patients as they can with the least amount of staffing and hoping that nothing happens.

SAMUEL ESPINOZA, dialysis technician: On a bad day, you can get up to seven, eight, nine patients with one technician.

MANNY: A manager told one of my coworkers, we were complaining because we were short staffed that weekend and nobody came to help and oh, well, nobody died. That was the response.

TOM: One of the nightmare scenarios of dialysis is the patient is hooked to the machine, they go to sleep, the needle dislodges and the alarm doesn't sound and they bled out. That is something that I've heard in my reporting numerous times.

CARMEN: My worst experience on dialysis was one of the times when I passed out. When I came to, I had no idea that that had happened to me and I was scared. At that point was when I realized I can die on the chair and I won't even know it.

TOM: If they're understaffed, you don't have someone watching you every minute. So bad things happen in a short time.

CARMEN: One of the ladies that I used to ride transport with, I saw her walking to the scale really wobbly and shaking. Nobody was around to help her or able to help her because they were running short staffed that day like usual. So while normally they will escort you to the scale, that was not the case that day. At the scale, she fell. And then next thing you know,

the ambulance people are rushing in and they're putting her in. And they covered her head when they took her out.

KENT THIRY, former DaVita CEO: If I had 1,400 taco bells, I would be doing all the same stuff.

TOM: You have patients on an assembly line crammed in as rapidly as possible and as many shifts as possible to make the facility more profitable.

ALEC: But even when you're trying to run dialysis like an assembly line, things happen.

A patient's ride drops them off late. An emergency happens. And to catch up, somebody has to cut their dialysis time short. But here's the problem. The doctor has prescribed a certain amount of time for each patient to sit in a chair with a certain amount of blood being pushed in and out of their system. If I need five hours of dialysis and I'm only getting four, it's not cleaning my blood as much as it should. Toxins can build up in my bloodstream, making me sick.

TOM: One of the most unambiguous findings of medical research in dialysis over the last 30 years is that shortened treatment times shorten lives. It's very straightforward.

ALEC: Now, if a patient wants to cut their dialysis time short, they need to sign something called an AMA, a document basically saying, you want to do this against medical advice. But at DaVita and Fresenius, it's not always willing.

SAMUEL: We would ask the patient to sign AMA, even though it's not the patient's fault. But we have a schedule to keep with the next patient.

RYAN: That's the fast food model of healthcare, where the chains want patients on that machine

for three to four hours.

ALEC: This is economist Ryan McDevitt, who studied the business of dialysis extensively.

RYAN: If a patient needs to be on the machine longer today, they have another patient supposed to come in for their session, where they're gonna get another reimbursement. They don't wanna adjust the schedule to accommodate that patient that needs a more personalized type of care.

ALEC: But here's the problem. If you want one of the limited kidneys available for transplant, disregarding a doctor's order looks really bad. One DaVita patient I spoke to claimed she was turned down for a kidney transplant, in part because of these AMAs on her medical record. A kidney transplant means not being trapped in a chair for hours a week, it means living longer. But transplant organizations don't want to give kidneys to people that they feel won't follow a doctor's orders. Another problem in the dialysis industry is that the very system designed by Medicare to keep clinics accountable has been gamed by DaVita and Fresenius.

RYAN: They have an incentive to push out patients who are gonna harm their scores. And so most glaring aspect of this is when a patient is kicked out of the facility. And they'll find different nefarious ways to do that. We've heard anecdotes where they'll trump up charges on a patient, say they've been disruptive or they’ve threatened staff. But what it does is help them look better on the report cards. And that's important because if they fall short, they will lose 2% of their Medicare reimbursements.

ALEC: Another glaring example of juicing their scores involves ambulances. When a patient gets sent to the hospital from the clinic, it's a sign something has gone wrong. And so it hurts your score.

CARMEN: My blood pressure shot sky high. I mean, really high. I'm like, shouldn't we be calling the ambulance? They're like, no, we're gonna get it down. We'll get it down, we'll get it down. I'm thinking if you don't get me to the hospital, I'm gonna have a damn stroke. I never got an ambulance until I put my foot down. And I said, either you call an ambulance or I will, because I really don't give a damn about DaVita's numbers.

ALEC: I've actually heard an incredibly similar story from another patient at an entirely different DaVita location. Allegedly, a man was repeatedly fainting while another patient pleaded with staff to call an ambulance.

RYAN: Whenever there's a dollar at stake, the for-profit chains do everything they can

to chase that dollar, even if it comes at the expense of patient care.

ALEC: Now, if you're wondering why these patients just can't go to another company for dialysis instead of the emergency room, well, DaVita and Fresenius have been on a buying spree.

And Ryan McDevitt studied what happens when they buy up other clinics.

RYAN: We use this quirk in Medicare data where we could look at the same facility, same patients before and after Davida and Fresenius took over, hospitalization rates went up by about 6%, death rates go up 3%, and most alarming, transplant rates for the patients during their first year of dialysis fell by almost 10%.

TOM: Now you think, well, why would that be? It seems to me that if you want to maintain your cash flow, you don't let people off dialysis. That sounds a bit sinister, but it just is a matter of incentives.

ALEC: More alarming is that when patients do push back and advocate for themselves, the consequences are sometimes dire.

TOM: In my experience as a reporter, patients who speak out about their rights, patients who are a little bit difficult, patients who don't agree immediately to be passive subjects of care, are quite often targeted for intimidation and sometimes pushed out of their clinics. When you're pushed out of a clinic as a dialysis patient, your lifeline is cut.

ALEC: This sphere has been a consistent throughline in the history of dialysis. In fact, 25 years ago, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley held a hearing on dialysis and couldn't find many patients willing to go public. He expressed his frustration by saying, ‘they must dialyze to live.

That fact alone has discouraged many patients interviewed by this committee from coming forward today to publicly testify.’

TOM: Quite often, because you've been discharged, you're not accepted to other clinics. You're blackballed in the area where you live. So your last resort is the emergency room, but emergency rooms aren't set up for chronic care. So they don't actually treat you until your blood is so toxic, your whole physiology is so messed up that you're about to die. Of course, this yo-yo effect on the human body is disastrous and leads to, you know, rapid demise.

RYAN: DaVita and Fresenius collectively today own about 80% of facilities across the country. They systematically gone and bought up over a thousand independent clinics.

ALEC: One way they've maintained this duopoly, Ryan alleges, is by bribing kidney doctors.

RYAN: They're paying kickbacks to nephrologists to get them to refer more patients to the facility. So DaVita and Fresenius have collectively paid over a billion dollars in settlements and fines over the past decade or so. They view it as a cost of doing business. For them, it's like paying their rent or paying employees.

ALEC: With their duopoly cemented, DaVita and Fresenius have been able to aggressively

enshittify dialysis with no repercussions. Sam and Manny have been organizing with United Healthcare Workers to fight for better pay and more staffing at Fresenius and DaVita. Manny alleges Fresenius has been retaliating against workers involved in unionizing. Carmen is lucky. She got a kidney transplant, but she is still fighting for better working conditions for the dialysis workers that kept her alive.

CARMEN: They take care of us. They're responsible for my kidney. My brand new kidney is going to be two years old tomorrow.

ALEC: If you have kidney failure in the United States, you're worse off than almost anywhere in the developed world.

TOM: Patients in America die sooner than anywhere else in the developed world. They have a 20% annual mortality rate. Compare that to Europe, which is 12 to 15, compare that to Japan, which is 6%. It's radically, radically different. So American patients die two to three times faster.

ALEC: The dialysis industry strongly objects to the way Tom characterized their business in his book. They did so through lawyers.

TOM: I sent some of the stronger statements to the major dialysis companies. And some didn't answer, but others, via their lawyers, wrote back and said, basically, I was full of shit. I was completely wrong about everything. And to me and to my publisher, that was an attempt to block publication of the book. They didn't say it in so many words, but they suggested this was libelous.

ALEC: In 2019, before Ryan McDevitt's damning publication about dialysis chains, the editors of that journal received a lengthy email from a DaVita executive. It includes a laundry list of complaints that, if true, would likely have gotten the paper retracted, according to McDevitt. After he and his co-authors responded, an editor called the complaints silly and confused. The DaVita and Fresenius model are not unique to dialysis. They just have the perfect set of customers, people who need to show up three times a week or die in short order. But hospitals, doctor's offices, pharmacies, even veterinary clinics, are being consolidated in similar ways.

TOM: That's one of the few things that everybody can agree on, right, left, and center, is that our healthcare system is broken. And dialysis is just sort of the worst case scenario of what can happen when you totally focus on profits and on Wall Street and turn the other cheek to human harm.

ALEC: The model is the same. Buy up local businesses and aggressively cut costs. It doesn't have to be this way. Nearly every other country in the world has figured this out.

ALEC: Thank you so much for watching. If you work in dialysis or any other part of the healthcare industry and have a story to share, we'd love to hear from you. Send us a line at stories@perfectunion.us.

If your electric bill is outrageous this summer, Wall Street might be partially to blame.

Investor-owned utilities, motivated by a commitment to secure ever-higher returns for their shareholders, have embarked on a quiet plan to build expensive energy projects and pass the costs on to their consumers.

In the utility industry, profits are based on a fixed percentage of the amount of capital a company invests in infrastructure. Since more money spent on a project means higher profits, companies have an incentive to invest as much money as possible, regardless of whether it provides value to consumers.

“Customers pay both for the investments and they pay for the excess profits,” Mark Ellis, a financial consultant, told More Perfect Union. “The excess profits alone are about $50 billion a year nationwide. So works out to about $300 a household. So, it's real money.”

After years of buyouts, mergers, and consolidations, two-thirds of electric utilities in the U.S. are now privately owned.

As a result, energy bills have risen at unprecedented rates. Unlike their public counterparts—whose rates have risen by 44 percent less than inflation over the past three years—investor-owned utilities’ rates have increased by 49 percent more than inflation, according to the American Economic Liberties Project.

Montana’s NorthWestern Energy, the state’s largest utility of which BlackRock and Vanguard are the top shareholders, is advocating for a 20% rate increase. Just two years ago, regulators approved the company’s requested rate increase of 28%.

Industry insiders and a trail of financial records suggest that regulators have favored investors, letting them secure excessive returns at the expense of consumers.

“There are models that have been used for decades, not just in utilities, but all over finance to estimate the cost of capital for any business,” Ellis said. “If you run them correctly, you come up with a utility cost of equity around 5.5 to 6%. But utilities are regularly granted profits of around 9-10%."

In Montana, NorthWestern’s latest investment is the Yellowstone County Generating Station, a $320 million methane gas plant.

“The utility wanted to build that because in my mind, it's expensive and that earns it a higher amount of money for its shareholders over time,” Anne Hedges, Executive Director of the Montana Environmental Information Center, told More Perfect Union. “Every dollar it spends, it gets a return on its equity.”

NorthWestern recently asked Montana’s regulators, the Public Service Commission, to approve returns of 9.6 percent, including on the extortionate Yellowstone plant, igniting widespread public outcry.

What happens in the state could set a precedent for what utility companies can get away with. Will regulators side with the public? Or will they continue to let giant firms like NorthWestern hike up rates — and force consumers to foot the bill?

Watch our full report below:

Reporting by Katie Nixdorf and Ava Anderson. See below for a full transcript of the video.

—

VOICEOVER: Wall Street investors are infiltrating your home in ways you might not even realize – but are paying a huge price for.

NEWS ANNOUNCEMENT: Get ready to pay more for your electricity bills.

ANNOUNCER, FOX 57: Energy bills are increasing along with those temps.

TikTok Users talking about their electricity bills

VOICEOVER: Americans’ utility bills are rising at unprecedented rates because of a systemic failure.

LARRY BEAN, MONTANA RESIDENT: Their primary concern is to make more money, and their only way to make more money is to take it away from people like me.

ANNE HEDGES, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE MONTANA ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION CENTER: People should be angry.

VOICEOVER: To uncover how electric utilities are getting away with this, we talked to an industry insider.

MARK ELLIS, FINANCIAL CONSULTANT: People were realizing like, hey, this is a, you know, a corrupt business model. It's not bribes, but it is corruption.

VOICEOVER: And went to Montana to investigate the most powerful utility in the state.

NORTHWESTERN SECURITY GUARD: Can we help you or something?

MPU: Hi, we’re just filming.

SECURITY GUARD: We need to take pictures of your license plates. Also, sheriffs are on the way. This is a private facility.

VOICEOVER: What we heard was a shocking account of how these companies are gaming the system and making homes uninhabitable.

STEVE KRUM, LAUREL RESIDENT: The hay is drying pretty fast.

KASEY FELDER, LAUREL RESIDENT: My property boundary is here, and then obviously the look north, and there you have the plant. You can feel it vibrating inside of our house.

VOICEOVER: Kasey and her father Steve, live in Laurel, Montana. Two years ago, the state's largest utility began building a $320 million methane gas power plant less than a mile from Casey's house.

STEVE: This is the most populated area in the state, and yet they build a power plant right smack dab in the middle of it.

KASEY: They just kind of shoved it down our throats. This area, this residential area, and claimed it was in an industrial area.

VOICEOVER: Northwestern provides power for more than two thirds of Montanans. The company claimed this new gas plant was critical to an even cleaner energy future.

STEVE: It's all bullshit. That's what it is.

KASEY: Just kind of feels like local government just pushes through whatever Northwestern wants.

MARK: They are literally, you know, it's like shooting, what's the expression, shooting ducks in a barrel?

VOICEOVER: Mark Ellis is a financial consultant who used to work at one of the largest utilities in the US. He saw the corrupt business model that companies like Northwestern are using firsthand.

MARK: A lot of people don't realize that their local utility company is a for-profit company, and like any other for-profit company, their incentive is to maximize profits.

VOICEOVER: Northwestern energy is an investor-owned utility. Its biggest shareholders are massive investment firms like BlackRock and Vanguard. Almost two thirds of U.S. electric utilities are investor-owned. Their main goal is not to provide affordable power for the community, but to generate profit.

MARK: The utility’s profits are basically a fixed percentage on the amount of capital they invest in infrastructure, power plants, pipelines, distribution systems.

VOICEOVER: The more expensive a project, the more money investors get out of that fixed profit percentage.

MARK: So if their profit is based on how much they invest, and like every other investor-owned company, they want to maximize profits. How do they do that? By maximizing the amount of capital they invest.

ANNE: Yellowstone county generating station is a 175 megawatt gas plant, and it is the most expensive type of gas plant you can build today. But the utility wanted to build that because, in my mind, it's expensive and that earns it a higher amount of money for its shareholders over time.

VOICEOVER: But unlike the profits of other companies, utilities’ profits are set by government regulators.

MARK: So in principle, the regulator's job is to balance the consumer and the investor interest, right? Based on my work and the observations of many others, regulators are not doing their job when it comes to balancing those interests with respect to setting the appropriate level of utility profits.

VOICEOVER: Northwestern is currently asking Montana's regulators, the Public Service Commission, or PSC, to approve a 9.6% profit on its investments, which now include the costly Yellowstone gas plant.

ANNE: Northwestern is back in the rate case right now, arguing that all of the costs for this plan were justified.

SARAH NORCOTT, NORTHWESTERN: We understand that increases in utility bills are difficult, especially when families are already managing rising costs in other areas. This is why we've worked hard to keep the impact as low as possible while still making critical investments needed to keep the lights on and the heat flowing.

ANNE: Northwestern wants to acquire the most expensive resources that it can get away with in order to earn a greater return for its shareholders, and it wants to convince the utility commission to charge customers for those at a really sweet return on equity.

VOICEOVER: Regulators are supposed to grant profits that are fair and reasonable in order to avoid driving up costs for consumers that utilities serve, but the financial evidence is that these profits, or what's called the cost of capital, should be much lower.

MARK: There are models that have been used for decades, not just in utilities, but all over finance, to estimate the cost of capital for any business. So you can run those models, and if you run them correctly, you come in around five and a half to six percent.

VOICEOVER: But utilities are repeatedly granted profits of around nine to ten percent.

MARK: Customers pay both for the investments and they pay for the excess profits. The excess profits alone are about $50 billion a year nationwide. So works out to about $300 a household.

So it's real money.

EDWARD BARTA, MONTANA RESIDENT AT RALLY: Thank you very much for being here. We are here today because we are fed up. We are here because Northwest energy is out of control. How many of you have felt the squeeze of your wallets lately? How many of you are tired of seeing your hard-earned money disappear into the wallets of a greedy monopoly.

VOICEOVER: In addition to approving Northwestern profit, the PSC approves the rates the utility can charge its customers. Two years ago, the PSC approved a 28% rate hike, and now Northwestern is back asking for another 20% increase.

ITA KILLEEN, MONTANA RESIDENT: I see people trying to work longer hours, sometimes six days a week, eight to 12 hour days, or juggling different, you know, several jobs. I see people turning off their lights. I see people in mobile home parks where there's not good insulation being cold during the winter because they don't want to use more gas.

MARY ANN DUNWELL, MONTANA STATE SENATOR: My 20,000 constituents certainly can't afford a senseless increase in energy costs simply to pay for the Laurel natural gas generating fossil fuel plant

MARK: Since 2020 the last time I looked at the data, publicly owned utilities, their rates have basically just gone up a little bit below inflation, but investor-owned utilities have gone up much faster than inflation.

LARRY STIMAC, MONTANA RESIDENT: As a utility consumer, I'm confused: is Northwestern energy regulating this body, or is this body regulating Northwest energy?

LARRY: You just can't give these rate increases and look out for the best interest of the actual average everyday user. I think they try real hard to try to protect the people, but I think their hands are really tied because of politics.

VOICEOVER: The PSC is still deciding on Northwestern proposed rate increases. What they do could set a new precedent for what utilities are able to get away with nationwide.

LARRY: We do come to a point of hopelessness when all the stuff you go through is just, doesn't matter. They just go forward with what they're going to do. They make their rulings based on what Northwest Energy wants.

VOICEOVER: For Casey and Steve, the Yellowstone plant has fundamentally changed the place they live.

ANNE: The people in the area are really upset. It was so unfair. They tried everything they could think of to convince Northwestern not to build it near their homes, not to build it along the banks of the Yellowstone River.

KASEY: I am concerned about the air pollution that is coming from that plant.

LARRY: None of these pollutants kill you in a day or two. It's down the road when my granddaughter grows up as Casey gets older, when we're gone, she can, she's probably going to get sick sooner because of that, the people who live around these things should have a say in it, and instead, it's the controlled politicians.

ANNE: until our elected officials try to rein in this out of control utility, we're going to continue on this path of ever increasing rates and a degraded environment.

VOICEOVER: Some states are taking action to curb utilities' incentive to invest in expensive and polluting projects.

MARK: This is starting to get political traction. You know, you are continuing to see state and federal legislators saying, like, the rates are too damn high.

VOICEOVER: Five states recently introduced bills to match utilities’ profits to what financial models actually say they should be.

MARK: It hasn't gone anywhere, unfortunately, in any of the states. But the basic idea is like, hey, we need to formally legislate a standard, huge step in the right direction.

VOICEOVER: Until then, it's up to regulators to put the interests of consumers ahead of corporations.

MARK: Nationwide, they talk about an affordability crisis, and I think that that's starting to reach a tipping point.

LARRY: Whoever sees this, many, many people across the country are going to go, yeah, that's us. So I hope we have a good outcome, and I hope that will be an encouragement for others.

MPU: Thanks for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe to get More Perfect Union in your feed. If you have a story about a utility company in your state, send us an email at stories at perfectunion.us.

Until recently, trades workers in Maine couldn’t fill clean energy jobs fast enough. Electricians who in the 2010s had to take across-the-board pay cuts to get jobs suddenly found themselves at the forefront of a renewable energy boom.

Now, these same workers are facing a devastating wave of layoffs — and thanks to the passage of the Trump administration’s so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill,” trades workers across the country may soon face the same situation. .

So what happened?

Many of these jobs can be traced back to the Inflation Reduction Act, which marked the largest federal investment in renewable energy in U.S. history. The act, passed under the Biden administration in August 2022, helped to spark a clean energy boom by providing tax credits, grants, and loans for renewable energy projects like wind and solar.

This increased demand for electricians and construction workers, who were able to leverage their newfound bargaining power to receive higher wages and better job opportunities.

“The rate for a union electrician is currently about $39 an hour. In 2020 we were at about $29, $30 bucks an hour,” Scott Cuddy, a longtime electrician at IBEW 1253, told More Perfect Union. “So we have seen an enormous increase in the wages for the people doing the work. And that's because when you have work to do, you get bargaining power.”

Since January, however, uncertainty surrounding whether or not these tax credits would survive under the Trump administration has led to the cancellation of or delays in more than $14 billion in clean energy projects, resulting in the elimination of at least 10,000 jobs. Some of these workers who voted for Trump now feel betrayed.

“When I voted for Trump, my big thing was I agreed with his stance on immigration. I agreed with his idea of no tax on tips, no tax on overtime,” apprentice electrician Brayden House told More Perfect Union. “I liked his stance on no new wars and now we're seeing the exact opposite happen.”

The passage of the “One Big Beautiful Bill” stands to make the workers’ employment prospects worse. The bill phases out the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy investments, derailing hundreds of billions of dollars in planned construction and eliminating hundreds of thousands of jobs.

“They love to have the guys standing behind 'em in the hard hats, when they have a press conference. But when it comes to doing the actual policy, that will actually help us, we have that policy in place right now,” Cuddy told More Perfect Union. “It's the IRA. It's helped bring more people into the trades. It's helped us get paid more. And this is across the board.”

Watch our full report here:

Reporting by Samuel Black. See below for a full transcript of the video.

BRAYDEN: I had heard people say, if you vote for this, you're gonna get what you voted for, but that's what people say every election.

SAM BLACK, More Perfect Union producer: A catastrophic wave of layoffs is hitting electricians in Maine. It may be a preview of hundreds of thousands of jobs that could be lost nationwide, after President Trump and Republicans just repealed billions in clean energy investments.

WORKER 1 (JAKE): It was like a light switch got opened and all of our work just disappeared overnight.

SAM: We went to Maine, where a solar boom has already come to an abrupt halt.

WORKER 2 (BETHANY): I got laid off at the beginning of May. I haven't gotten any calls yet.

WORKER 3 (CIERRA): I’m on unemployment right now, and in the state of Maine that's $595 dollars per week. And I pay rent that's $1350 a month.

JAKE: This has nothing to do with our local union or the companies around us bidding jobs. It solely comes down to what's happening in our federal government right now.

SAM: We came here to talk to electricians who voted for Trump, to understand: how are they thinking about his agenda, now that it’s costing them work?

SAM: We're outside Bangor, Maine, and we're headed to meet an apprentice electrician who's been working steadily for the last several years, but suddenly he finds himself unemployed and he wants to talk to us about why.

BRAYDEN: A good friend of mine in high school, he was three grades above me. And whenever I'd go over to his house, he'd have $2,000 guitars, like a $5,000 Marshall amplifier. And I'm like, where are you getting all this money, dude? And he's like, well, I'm an electrician. I learned to be an electrician. You should do it too.

SAM: Brayden House is an apprentice electrician who last year voted for Trump.

BRAYDEN: After finding out I was having my daughter at 17, I'm like, I, I need money. And I, it ain't gonna be spent on guitars and amplifiers, it’s gonna be spent on diapers and making a future for this kid.

BRAYDEN: I applied to the apprenticeship and heard back in March of ‘22. And I started work three weeks after I graduated high school.

I'm a 17-year-old kid, they're asking me life experience questions. I'm like, I don't know dude. I work at a Dunkin’ Donuts. My first week I get in, I get a check for $1,300 for a 40 hour week. And I'm like, yep, this is what I'm doing now. I'm sticking with this.

BRAYDEN [at solar field]: Obviously you see the arrays of solar panels. Yeah. And you see underneath it.

SAM: Brayden took me to one of the eight solar projects he has helped build over the last several years.

BRAYDEN: Nothing beats, like just before August, like, May to June in a solar field.

I remember being on a solar field one day and I get an email of my Lincoln Financial account. I'm like, holy shit, I've only been doing this for a year and a half and I have three grand in my retirement account.

SAM: Why do you think the work was so steady?

BRAYDEN: Because there were so many solar projects. You can't go anywhere in this state without seeing the solar field or multiple.

SCOTT CUDDY, IBEW 1253 electrician: It kept every electrician in our local union employed.

Sam: Scott Cuddy is a longtime electrician out of the same union local as Brayden. He told me that until recently, there were so few jobs that electricians had to take across the board pay cuts to get work.

SCOTT: We had zero solar projects going on for years and years and years. Guys were traveling to other jurisdictions to go work on solar projects.

SAM: That started to change in 2022.

News clips about Congress passing the Inflation Reduction Act

SAM: The Inflation Reduction Act was the largest federal investment in clean energy jobs in American history. It provided tax credits that encouraged business to build renewable projects like solar, wind, and battery storage. And as those projects multiplied, the landscape for skilled trades workers transformed.

SCOTT: The rate for a union electrician is currently about $39 an hour. In 2020, we were at about $29, $30 bucks an hour. So we have seen an enormous increase in the wages for the people doing the work. And that's because when you have work to do, you get bargaining power.

BRAYDEN: They were so desperate for people, they'd raise the amount of money they'd pay you for, per hour, to get you there. And it was competitive. Like companies were competing on how much they would pay their guys to get the amount of guys that they needed to finish these solar fields. Solar, it fed my family, you know, solar lined my pockets. It gave me work for years.

SAM: Take me through your thinking, what was your thinking when you decided to vote for Trump?

BRAYDEN: When I voted for Trump, my big thing was I, I agreed with his stance on immigration. I agreed with his idea of no tax on tips, no tax on overtime. I liked his stance on no new wars, and now we're seeing the exact opposite happen. And the immigration thing and Palestine were two of the biggest things that turned people off to the Biden administration, to the potential Harris administration. At least in who I've spoken to on job sites.

SAM: What, what was your reaction when Trump was elected?

BRAYDEN: I was not surprised.

SAM: But were you, were you happy? I mean, you voted for Trump.

BRAYDEN: Yeah, I was pretty happy. I was, happy is not the right word. I was indifferent. I was more, you know, great, the better of two evils. Let's hope nothing goes bad, and then now it's going bad.

SAM: Since January, at least $14 billion of renewable energy projects have been cancelled or put on hold across the U.S. – including three big solar and battery developments in Maine.

SCOTT: At the February Union meeting, of this year, of 2025, the business manager during his report said, guys, I can, I can chart out full employment to mid 2027 right now. At the March union meeting, he said, we're gonna be looking at 50% unemployment this summer. It went from, I can see full work, get your strength back so you can get back out on the job for the next thing till 2027 to, we will be at 50% unemployment this year.

SCOTT: The uncertainty has devastated the construction industry in Maine. And I think an important point in this is the tax credits aren't even gone yet.

SAM: A week after this conversation, Republicans in Congress passed Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” drastically scaling back investments in solar and wind. The bill rapidly phases out the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy investments, preserving funding only for projects up and running in the next 18 months. That will likely derail hundreds of billions of dollars of planned construction, and eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs.

SAM: When did you realize this would affect you?

BRAYDEN: It really hit me about two weeks into my layoff because at first it was like, yeah, these layoffs should only last one or two weeks. And then the fourth week came around, and that's when it really hit me that we might be in for no work for a while.

SAM: Brayden is one of 66 apprentices in his union who’ve been laid off since April. He's now on a waiting list for the next job, with nearly 30 people ahead of him.

BRAYDEN: I've seen three people move off that list in the last 60 days. In summer, usually everyone's employed. Usually there’s enough work that everyone’s employed. Right now, seeing only three people move in 60 days, that's, it's bleak.

PRESIDENT TRUMP (at rally): I will terminate the “Green New Scam” immediately. It’s the greatest scam in history.

SCOTT: They love to have the guys standing behind 'em in the hard hats, when they have a press conference. But when it comes to doing the actual policy, that will actually help us, we have that policy in place right now. It's the [Inflation Reduction Act], it's helped bring more people into the trades. It's helped us get paid more. And this is across the board. The policy's in place. If you just let the policy survive, we will be fine.

TRUMP (on tarmac): This is a great bill. This is going to be a great bill for the country.

BRAYDEN: I think he could swallow his pride. He's cutting the things that Joe Biden did that made labor so good. And the name of, “I don't like Joe Biden, so I don't want to stand for anything he stood for.” But you shouldn't be cutting something that your predecessor did that was good because he's your predecessor. You should continue to build on the good things he did. If it's creating jobs, if it's boosting the economy, why get rid of it?

By Donald Shaw and David Moore, Sludge

Three House Democrats backed by millions from cryptocurrency industry super PACs and executives are urging their colleagues to support a Republican-led bill that would deregulate the industry and help it attract more investment.

According to Politico, Democratic Reps. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.), Ritchie Torres (N.Y.), and Don Davis (N.C.) sent a letter to their fellow Democrats asking them to vote in favor of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, a top crypto priority sponsored by House Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. French Hill (R-Ark.). The bill would ensure most cryptocurrency tokens are treated as commodities and not securities, limiting the Securities and Exchange Commission’s oversight and helping the industry grow under a more relaxed regulatory framework.

Here’s how the cryptocurrency industry has backed these Democrats, including multi-million dollar super PAC expenditures, rallies with rappers, and contributions from executives made just days before they circulated their letter.

Josh Gottheimer

Rally with Gottheimer for NJ Governor: Crypto advocacy group Stand With Crypto Alliance held a rally with Gottheimer and others on June 5, ahead of the New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial primary. Gottheimer was the only Democratic candidate participating, along with two Republicans. The event featured rappers Big Sean and 070 Shake. “Attendees will enjoy free food, drinks, and live music while rallying support for voter participation and engagement in the crypto community,” according to the RSVP page.

2024 House campaign super PAC support: Crypto industry-funded super PACs Fairshake and Protect Progress spent $242,791 on independent expenditures supporting Gottheimer in the 2023-2024 election cycle, according to FEC records.

Campaign contributions: Gottheimer received $50,800 in campaign contributions from crypto industry PACs and associated individuals in the 2023-2024 cycle, according to the crypto money tracking website Follow the Crypto.

June 2025 Bitcoin Policy Center event: Gottheimer, along with Torres, participated in a late-June panel in D.C. at the Bitcoin Policy Summit. They were the only elected Democrats who spoke at the event, along with several Republican members of Congress.

Ritchie Torres

Super PAC support: Fairshake and Protect Progress spent $173,232 on independent expenditures supporting Torres in the 2023-2024 election cycle, according to FEC records.

Campaign contributions: Torres received $129,100 in campaign contributions from crypto industry PACs and associated individuals in the 2023-2024 cycle, according to Follow the Crypto.

Formation of Crypto Caucus: In March 2025, Torres joined GOP Rep. Tom Emmer (Minn.) in forming the Congressional Crypto Caucus, “a unified nonpartisan voting block in Congress, ready to mobilize to support and defend open, permissionless, and private innovation in the United States.”

Don Davis

Millions in super PAC support: Fairshake spent $2.28 million on ads supporting Davis in the 2023-2024 cycle, according to FEC data. Only two candidates received more Fairshake super PAC support in the 2024 elections, and both lost, making Davis the top beneficiary of the group’s 2024 spending in Congress this session. (OpenSecrets)

Campaign contributions: Davis received $18,200 in campaign contributions from crypto industry PACs and associated individuals in the 2023-2024 cycle, according to Follow the Crypto.

Plus, new donations disclosed yesterday: In his Q2 filing, Davis reported receiving $7,000 from Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and $7,000 from Coinbase President Emilie Choi, both in late June. Brad Galringhouse, CEO of Ripple Labs, also donated $3,300 on June 30. Note: There may be more crypto-tied donations here to be found with a closer review.

Crypto for Harris event: Davis and Torres were both participants in an August 2024 Crypto for Harris event.

JBS, the Brazilian meatpacking conglomerate that’s garnered a reputation for its bribery-related scandals and child labor violations, just had its initial public offering with the New York Stock Exchange — spelling danger for independent ranchers, workers, and consumers across the country.

JBS’s history is one of intense growth, with the company seeking to acquire as many assets as possible and kicking aside legal and ethical concerns along the way. JBS was previously barred from accessing U.S. markets, and Joesley and Wesley Batista, the billionaire brothers behind the company, even served jail time after bribing more than 1,800 Brazilian politicians in exchange for government support.

In April, though, the firm’s bid to go public was approved by the SEC. The approval came through shortly after a subsidiary of JBS, Pilgrim’s Pride, donated a whopping $5 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. JBS also doubled its lobbying spending at the beginning of 2025.

“Is a donation like that a quid pro quo? I'm not sure I can be the judge of that, but what I can say is this: This is clearly a company and two billionaire top shareholders who have pleaded guilty and have a clear history of bribery, kickback and corruption schemes,” Chloe Sorvino, a journalist and author who writes about the food industry, told More Perfect Union.

JBS’s IPO makes a bad situation for small farms even worse, given that the U.S. meatpacking industry is already extremely concentrated. According to antitrust guidelines from the Department of Justice, if the top four players in an industry have 20-25% of the market share, it’s considered a highly consolidated industry.

Market concentration in the meatpacking industry dwarfs these numbers.

“In the beef industry, you have 80 to 85% with the top four. In pork you have more than 70% with the top four, and in chicken you have over 60% controlled by the top four, so that pretty much impacts every single worker at these plants, the farmers—any American that is buying meat is impacted by the consolidation,” Sorvino told More Perfect Union.

As a result, smaller operations are unable to develop alternative supply chains for the costly process of slaughtering their livestock. Those who aren’t forced out of the business altogether are left with few options other than to do business with the giants who control the industry.

“The biggest challenge in the production of livestock for meat is the slaughter piece,” independent rancher Mike Callicrate told More Perfect Union.

This is a problem Callicrate has been trying to bring attention to for decades.

“Because we only have three packers today really setting the price – and it’s really only one, the other two follow, in fact all the rest of them follow – we’ve decoupled supply and demand,” Callicrate said at a 1996 cattle conference in South Dakota.

Now, JBS will have more market dominance, and better access to more investors and capital, to fund their acquisitions. It’s more power for the packing companies, and less for the small farmers and ranchers who are already being pushed out of the market.

Watch our full report here:

Reporting by Ian McKenna, Claire Haughey, and Zach Ben-Amots. See below for a transcript of the video.

VOICEOVER: There is a force in our meat industry that you don’t even know about.

CHLOE SORVINO, Author of Raw Deal: This is the biggest story in food. This is the biggest story for anyone who eats.

FRANCE 24: Joesley and Wesley Batista . . .

BBC NEWS:. . . executives of JBS . . .

FRANCE 24: . . . bribing nearly 1900 politicians . . .

FRANCE 24:. . . under investigation for corruption . . .

VOICEOVER: The Brazilian meatpacker JBS has been steadily taking over America for years..

BLOOMBERG:The world’s largest meat producer, Brazil’s JBS . . .

VOICEOVER: This is a company that has been plagued with scandal.

MIKE CALLICRATE, independent rancher: Look at the recalls, look at the child labor. Look at the payoffs and settlements.

BLOOMBERG:. . . inspectors were bribed to clear tainted meat for export . . .

SORVINO:. . . price-fixing allegations, wage-fixing allegations, environmental desecration allegations, discrimination in their plants . . .

VOICEOVER:Despite all of that, the company just debuted on the New York Stock Exchange.

CALLICRATE: You are turning a criminal actor loose on American investors. This makes zero sense.

SORVINO: The government seems to have taken a step back from its regulatory authority. They’ve chosen cheap meat. Cheap meat wins over pretty much anything else in America.

VOICEOVER: But what is the real cost of cheap, corporate meat? And what could it mean for the food we depend on?

CARSON JORGENSEN, independent lamb rancher: The problem is right now, we have set this up for a major collapse.

VOICEOVER: The industry’s consolidation and predatory behavior from companies like JBS have made it increasingly difficult to build alternative food supply chains.

CALLICRATE: You’re standing in front of our Angus Wagyu cross calves. We had a couple thousand head in this feedlot. Well, for an independent rancher, this is a good size operation. But in comparison to the industry, it’s extremely small. The biggest feeders now are 100,000 head-plus operations.

VOICEOVER: Mike Callicrate is an independent rancher. In over 30 years of ranching, he’s seen just how much the industry has changed and gotten worse for small producers like him.

CALLICRATE: Out of this very facility I used to sell to 20 meatpackers at any given time, and that got down to zero. Why is it that US ranchers are going out of business? It’s for lack of market access.

VOICEOVER: Mike now operates Ranch Foods Direct, a vertically integrated meat business focuesd on local, ethical, and sustainable meat production.

CALLICRATE: As far as the number of folks in the US that do what we do at Ranch Foods Direct, which are basically pasture to plate, there’s hardly any.

VOICEOVER: PAsture to plate. That means Ranch Foods Direct raises the cattle, slaughters them, then processes and packages for direct sale. But that is not typical for most producers.

CALLICRATE: The biggest challenge in the production of livestock for meat is slaughter piece.

VOICEOVER: That slaughter piece—the ‘processing and packaging before meat reaches customers—is where just a few big meatpackers are able to set pricing and squeeze the ranchers selling them cattle. Because of consolidation in the industry, ranchers have basically no other options but to accept — a problem Mike has been speaking out on for 30 years.

(1996 South Dakota Governor's Cattle Conference) CALLICRATE: Because we only have three packers in the business today basically setting the price, we’ve decoupled supply and demand. We don’t have a high level of competition out there that will pay you a premium for your cattle.

VOICEOVER: Back then, the Brazilian meat processing giant JBS wasn’t even in the U.S. market. But now…

CALLICRATE: JBS is now our biggest meat company in the world and in the U.S. and they’re essentially a predator in the industry.

SORVINO: JBS is a particularly concerning company because there’s been a history of over a decade of different bribes, over 1,800 politicians in Brazil.

VOICEOVER: Chloe Sorvino reports on the food industry and the titans who run it — like the billionaire brothers behind JBS.

SORVINO: Joesely and Wesley Batista took over their family’s meatpacker in their 30s, and they set their sights on going abroad as big as possible and so they looked at the U.S. to acquire assets on the cheap, and they ended up using bribes, and a kickback-fueled corruption scheme to finance loans that helped them get some of the most iconic meatpacking assets. They’ve pled guilty to foreign corruption practices and have had to pay fines, they’ve even had some jail time in Brazil.

VOICEOVER: Chloe’s book, Raw Deal, traces the Batista brothers rise — and broader consolidation in America’s meat industry.

SORVINO: To take a step back, America’s antitrust regulations with the DOJ are created around this idea that the top four players in an industry, if those top four players have around 20 to 25% control together, that’s a highly, highly consolidated industry.

And, in the beef industry, you have 80 to 85% with the top four. In pork you have more than 70% controlled by the top four, and in chicken you have over 60% control by the top 4, so that pretty much impacts any American that is buying meat.

VOICEOVER: And JBS’ IPO could just make that all worse.

SORVINO: JBS trading means that it’s gonna have access to U.S. investors and pension funds and all of these funds that are pouring more money in. They will be able to finance better loans, they will be able to have more capital to do whatever they want with.

VOICEOVER: That means more money to fuel their acquisition spree—further consolidating the market, giving more power to the packing companies, and less to the farmers and ranchers whose livestock will eventually end up there.

SORVINO: For American food producers, it means that JBS is not going away anytime soon.

JORGENSEN: I think it is important to look at the sheep industry as the canary in the coal mine and I can tell you what will happen to the beef industry if we don’t take action now.

VOICEOVER: Carson Jorgensen is a sixth-generation lamb rancher in Utah. In 2001, his family was one of roughly 150 sheep ranching families that banded to leverage their power against the big meatpackers.

JORGENSON: I guess there’s not, you know, as many people now as there used to be with that connection and those roots. It just makes for a different dynamic.

VOICEOVER: In 2001, his family was one of roughly 150 sheep ranching families that banded to leverage their power against the big meatpackers.

JORGENSON: Mountain State Rosen co-op was a family-owned operation. Just prior to Covid, MSR was — it was having some difficulties.

VOICEOVER: In 2020, as restaurants shut down and production lines stalled across the country, Mountain States Rosen filed for bankruptcy.

JORGENSON: That being said, they had a buyer to come in and buy the plant. That was the plan, this Canadian company that was going to buy it and produce—you know, process American lamb and keep it here in the United States. That was the plan.

Well, JBS owns the plant across the street and JBS’s contract with MSR was for the wastewater management and for the steam that it takes to run the plant. JBS wouldn't transfer over the wastewater contract and the steam contract to the new buyers because ultimately they wanted that plant and they knew if they couldn't sell the plant, it would go defunct and they would end up with it. And that’s exactly what happened.

VOICEOVER: After JBS converted the plant into a beef facility, sheep ranchers across the West were left with very few options for regional processing.

JORGENSON: That was a really critical piece of infrastructure for us producers here in the western United States.

VOICEOVER: Many opted to go with Double J in Texas, a family-owned processing plant more than a thousand miles away for producers in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. But Double J is now also at risk of closing, once again leaving ranchers with alarmingly few options for selling or processing their meat, and scrambling for solutions.

JORGENSON: It’s like watching a car crash in slow motion. It’s coming. You know the train’s about to hit that car, and everybody’s yelling and everybody’s screaming but there’s just a lot of people standing there watching it happen and there’s not much anybody’s doing about it.

AJ RICHARDS: JBS going public would be the final nail in the coffin.

VOICEOVER: AJ Richards is an entrepreneur promoting regional meat systems.

RICHARDS: Now, for us, it’s more of the mentality, it’s better to have and not need than to need and not have.

VOICEOVER: AJ has been very vocal with his concerns about what JBS going public could mean for ranchers—and for our food supply.

[RICHARDS — INSTAGRAM LIVE VIDEO]: Mr. President, I love you, I appreciate you. It is our job as citizens to hold you accountable. And whoever you’ve got in your circle, they ain’t speaking truth because you’re about to put us in a whole world of hurt.

VOICEOVER: As the big meat processing plants have grown larger, more efficient, and gained greater control over pricing, it’s become increasingly difficult for any alternative supply chain—like AJ's—to compete.

RICHARDS: We can’t lose one more farm and ranch, and in fact, stopping hte loss isn’t what we have to do. We have to make a path so that more people can get into farming.

RESIDENT: Most of the people I grew up with there, they’ve gone bankrupt. Their family farms are no— they’re not family farms anymore, which is sad.

VOICEOVER: JBS has been trying to go public for years now, but the company’s alarming track record has prompted bipartisan efforts to block them from accessing U.S. capital markets—including a 2024 letter to the SEC, signed by Cory Booker, Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley and more.

RICHARDS: You know, monitoring, watching this JBS IPO for the last couple of years, I was happy to keep seeing it get shut down.

VOICEOVER: But this April the SEC finally greenlit their listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

SORVINO: JBS got the green light only a few weeks after they did give this big donation to the Trump administration.

RICHARDS: And so, big surprise. A few months later, now the people that donated $5 million are going public and nobody’s standing in their way?

SORVINO: Is a donation like that a quid pro quo? I'm not sure I can be the judge of that, but what I can say is this: this is clearly a company and two billionaire top shareholders who have pled guilty and have a clear history of bribery, kickback and corruption schemes.

VOICEOVER: Regardless of how they got there, JBS is now trading on the NYSE—and that could spell danger for our food supply.

SORVINO: Meatpackers say that they have these massive plants so that they can have cheap meat made as at most efficiently as possible...But at the end of the day, they're also creating this kind of underlying vulnerability because it's super fragile. I mean, if one plant goes out, one feedlot goes out, or a few of them go out because of a hurricane or extreme weather or, you know a pandemic — this is a system that has no life preservers.

CALLICRATE: So anyways our carcasses come down and they go into the cut room here.

VOICEOVER: The industry’s consolidation and predatory behavior from companies like JBS have made it increasingly difficult to build alternative food supply chains.

CALLICRATE:

CALLICRATE: “This is the place that the real investment occurs as far as meat processing. This is a vacuum-packaging machine with a labeler: $135,000. The room is just full of this kind of equipment. And this is why not everyone can do what we do here in processing. It’s really expensive to get into.

VOICEOVER: Even Mike’s Ranch Foods Direct operation is only possible due to the financial success of another business ventures.

CALLICRATE: We’ve got to absolutely control the predators in the market, and only the government is big enough to do that—of antitrust and breaking up concentrated power and wealth, which has always been the greatest threat to any free society. That’s simply not happening.

SORVINO: JBS has skirted American watchdogs and the scrutiny of policymakers for years now.

VOICEOVER: But . . . it’s not just that nobody will stand up to them.

SORVINO: They're propping JBS up with millions of dollars in contracts every year. That’s meat that’s going to public schools, soldiers around the world, nursing homes that are publicly funded, hospitals. And they’ve chosen cheap meat. Cheap meat wins over pretty much anything else in America.

VOICEOVER: But meat this cheap comes at a cost.

JORGENSEN: At some point we have to look at it and say, “Somebody’s trying to break this.” And at the end of the day, it’s just about money. It’s about the bottom line.

By Donald Shaw and David Moore, Sludge

As the Republican Congress was putting together the multi-trillion-dollar “megabill,” corporate America was hard at work to stuff it with their favorite handouts, tax cuts and loopholes. Lobbyists flooded Capitol Hill, spending tens of millions of dollars to make sure the package would come out in their favor.

Corporate-funded groups blanketed swing states with ads, while billionaire GOP donors popped up in op-ed pages to sell the policymakers on provisions that would impact their bottom lines. Now, with a razor-thin Republican majority managing to push it through the Senate, the bill is packed with favors for powerful interests—from private equity barons and fossil fuel giants to weapons companies and pharmaceutical manufacturers.

While the bill will make life harder for millions of current Medicaid recipients and low-income families, a wide swath of corporate America came out as big winners. Here’s a look at the industries that won in the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” and one that didn’t quite get everything it wanted.

Winner: Big Business

The megabill restores 100% bonus depreciation, allowing companies to fully and immediately write off the cost of investments like machinery, vehicles, and other pieces of equipment. First enacted by the Trump tax cuts package of 2017, the provision has been phasing out and is set to sunset completely under current law. But big business lobbying groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers mounted a major pressure campaign to bring it back. It’s a massive tax break that overwhelmingly benefits the largest corporations in sectors like manufacturing, fossil fuels, and construction. According to the tax experts at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, some of the companies that benefited the most from the tax break when it was originally in effect from 2018-22 include Facebook, Verizon, and Edison International. In early June, billionaire GOP donor Jeff Yass and David McIntosh, president of the conservative Club for Growth, penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal touting the policy’s effects and lamenting that it had begun to sunset.

Winner: Big Pharma

Drug companies successfully pushed for the bill to include the ORPHAN Cures Act, which exempts more drugs from being subject to price negotiations with Medicare. The legislation is promoted by its pharmaceutical industry-funded sponsors as a way to protect treatments for rare diseases, but in practice it expands a loophole that companies can use to protect their high-priced drugs from cost controls. Under current law, drugs that are used exclusively to treat one rare disease are protected from price negotiations, an exception that was designed to ensure companies are incentivized to develop drugs that would serve a small number of patients. This provision will shield drugs with multiple orphan indications, even if they are already on the market and highly profitable. The pharmaceutical industry’s major trade groups PhRMA and BIO pushed hard to get this in the bill, and they could breathe a sigh of relief late Monday night when the Senate parliamentarian ruled the measure could remain in the package.

Winner: Metallurgical Coal Companies

One bizarre provision in the reconciliation bill will expand an advanced manufacturing production tax credit, originally meant for clean energy projects, to include metallurgical coal. Met coal is used in steelmaking and is treated differently than thermal coal by being processed into coke, but it is still a major source of carbon pollution. The provision redefines what qualifies as a “critical mineral” used in clean energy components, a term that was originally meant for substances like lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements that are used in solar panels and electric vehicle batteries. The change will benefit met coal producers, possibly including a firm controlled by the family of West Virginia Republican Sen. Jim Justice called Bluestone Resources, a major met coal producer. According to his financial disclosure, Justice has a stake worth more than $50 million in the company.

Winner: Oil And Gas Drillers

In a major victory for the fossil fuel industry, the Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill will shield some oil and gas companies from the corporate alternative minimum tax, potentially eliminating outright the tax bills of some of the country’s largest and most profitable drillers. The language directs the IRS to factor “intangible drilling costs” related to the exploration and development of oil and gas when determining corporate alternative minimum tax liabilities. It will significantly lower the “book profits” used to assess if a company owes the 15% minimum corporate tax, effectively gutting it for oil and gas producers. The tax carveout has been a top priority of the American Petroleum Institute, a massive industry lobbying group with member companies including giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron. It was inserted into the Senate version of the reconciliation bill by Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), a longtime ally of the industry whose top career industry donor is oil and gas, according to OpenSecrets. The language mirrors a bill Lankford proposed in January called the Promoting Domestic Energy Production Act, which has been the subject of favorable lobbying by API, the American Exploration and Production Council, Ovintiv, Civitas Resources, and ConocoPhillips, according to Senate records.

Winner: Billionaire Space Company Owners

Tucked into the latest Senate version of the bill is a new tax break for the space industry that allows spaceports to qualify for tax-exempt “exempt facility bonds,” a public financing tool generally used for public infrastructure projects like airports. Spaceports are defined as facilities close to a launch site that are used to manufacture, assemble, or repair spacecraft, or used for flight control operations. The provision will allow companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to benefit from tax-exempt municipal bonds, essentially giving them access to subsidized public finance for private space projects.

Winner: Private Prisons

Private prison operators will get a $45 billion funding boost for Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers over four years under the bill. The money will flow to private contractors like GEO Group and CoreCivic, both major donors to Trump’s inauguration and the GOP. In an earnings call last year, GEO Group President Wayne Calabrese said the company had been communicating to ICE that it was prepared to quickly expand its detention capacity if given the funding. “We have assured ICE of our capability to rapidly scale up our capabilities to monitor and oversee several hundreds of thousands, or even several millions of individuals in order to achieve the federal government's immigration law compliance objectives," Calabrese reportedly said.

Winner: Gun and Silencer Manufacturers

One strange provision in the bill is the elimination of the $200 federal tax to purchase firearm silencers and short-barrel rifles under the 1934 National Firearms Act. Both silencers and short-barrel rifles are regulated under the law because of how they make firearms more concealable and harder to trace, making them useful for certain types of crime. The move has been a top priority for gun rights groups and firearm manufacturers, who have lobbied through the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the American Suppressor Association to roll back the restrictions. In the Senate, the measure was pushed by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who secured its inclusion after benefiting from nearly $400,000 of NRA Victory Fund spending during his most recent election. Cornyn has also received at least $345,000 in campaign contributions from gun rights interests, making him the fourth-highest recipient in Congress as of a 2022 OpenSecrets analysis.

Winner: Wall Street Investment Firms

Section 899 of both the House and Senate versions of the bill, dubbed the “revenge tax,” would have raised taxes on inbound foreign investment from countries that tax U.S. companies unfairly, but it was scrapped last month after a Wall Street lobbying push. The Investment Company Institute, a Wall Street lobbying group representing firms like PIMCO and T. Rowe Price, argued it would scare off foreign investments in U.S. markets. Ultimately, the Wall Street voices won and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent cut a deal with OECD countries to keep a global tax agreement, prompting Republican congressional leaders to cut it.

Winner: The Defense Industry

The bill includes a more than $150 billion boost in defense spending, much of which will go to giant defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, including $25 billion for Trump’s “Golden Dome” space-based missile defense system. SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril—companies run by powerful Trump supporters—are reportedly the frontrunners to win contracts to build out the system. The “Golden Dome” project’s potential for skyrocketing costs led it to be slammed as a “gold-plated boondoggle” by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), and the Congressional Budget Office put one initial estimate at $831 billion for the system over two decades.

Winner: The Semiconductor Industry

The Senate version of the bill ramps up support for semiconductor companies by expanding the Advanced Manufacturing Investment Tax Credit, an incentive created by the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, from 25% to 30% for qualified investments in advanced manufacturing facilities. Major fabless chip designers like Intel, Micron, and Global Foundries stand to benefit from this expansion, which is intended to solidify the dominance of American chip manufacturers.

Winner: Hedge Fund and Private Equity Managers

Back in February, Trump said that he wanted to end a tax loophole for private equity and hedge fund investment managers known as the “carried interest loophole” that lets them pay the same lower capital gains rates on their compensation that actual investors pay. But even though congressional Republicans were scrounging for revenue to offset the costs of the megabill, both the House and Senate versions did not address the “carried interest” preferential tax treatment. The CBO projected that leaving the loophole in place would increase the deficit by $13 billion over ten years; just one high-powered industry trade group, the American Investment Council, spent nearly three quarters of a million dollars in the first quarter lobbying on carried interest and other topics.

Loser: Big Tech and A.I. Industry

Tech giants Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta lobbied in favor of a controversial provision in the House-passed version of the megabill that would have prohibited state attempts to regulate A.I. for a decade, according to the Financial Times. A group called the A.I. Competition Center, formed last year by a Big Tech-funded trade group, argued to lawmakers that regulation would cause the U.S. to be outpaced by China. Trump megadonor Marc Andreessen, joined by artificial intelligence firms OpenAI and Anduril, also lobbied intensely for the A.I. moratorium that the House included in its legislative package. In the Senate, though, the provision was struck in a 99-1 overnight vote before the chamber passed the reconciliation bill.

To push the megabill through the Senate, deep-pocketed conservative advocacy groups spread out at least $8.2 million in ad buys across congressional districts, according to research last month from the watchdog group AccountableUS. At the end of May, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce announced a “comprehensive advocacy blitz” promoting the bill’s tax policies after the House passed its version, and the “dark money” group American Action Network planned a $4.2 million ad buy after being bankrolled with millions of dollars from lobbying groups like PhRMA in recent years. Those campaigns are on top of the nearly $19.8 million that the Chamber spent lobbying the government in the first quarter of this year, making it the top overall lobbying spender in Washington, D.C. The group’s disclosures mentioned lobbying on the expiration of tax provisions from the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act among scores of other issues.

By Donald Shaw and David Moore, Sludge

Senate Republicans are planning to a hold a vote this afternoon on legislation that could boost President Donald Trump’s latest crypto venture, World Liberty Financial’s USD1, alarming watchdogs who warn that the president’s growing crypto empire—from memecoins to Bitcoin mining—presents serious ethical red flags and may amount to criminal violations of anti-corruption laws.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the Senate Majority Leader, said on the Senate floor this morning that the Senate will vote on cloture on the GENIUS Act—a bill that would establish a clear, industry-friendly regulatory framework for payment stablecoins, which are digital assets whose values are kept constant through being pegged to fiat currencies. The bill would classify stablecoins as non-securities, shielding them from SEC oversight and giving issuers the choice of federal or state regulation while also setting standards for reserves, redemption rights, and disclosures that could spur mainstream adoption.

Such a regulatory framework could benefit stablecoins like Trump’s USD1, whose creators are hoping to build into a widely-used asset that functions as a bridge between traditional finance and decentralized digital projects. The GENIUS Act passed the Senate Banking Committee in March with bipartisan backing, but its Democratic support has eroded over concerns about the Trump family’s crypto moves.

Over the weekend, nine Senate Democrats who had previously backed crypto industry-friendly legislation said they would not support the bill, including four who voted for it in March during the Banking Committee mark-up: Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-Del.), and Andy Kim (D-N.J.). Then last night, Gallego, Warner, Gillibrand and other on-the-fence Democrats reportedly hashed out a deal with Republicans to win back their support.

The details of the deal are still unknown, but reports indicate that they are seeking to have a vote on adding language to the bill that would ban presidents, executive branch officials, and members of Congress from financially benefiting from, issuing, or endorsing crypto projects, along the lines of a measure they introduced on Tuesday called the End Crypto Corruption Act. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), a co-sponsor of the bill, said she was “very hopeful” coming out of negotiations last night.

Gallego, who benefited from $10 million in spending by the crypto industry-funded Protect Progress super PAC during his 2024 campaign, is reportedly one of the Democrats currently deep in negotiations to make a deal with Republicans and back the bill. In March, Gallego held a fundraising retreat at a luxury resort featuring crypto investor Marc Andreessen, a Trump megadonor and a top funder of the crypto industry’s super PAC efforts to knock off lawmakers who supported stronger consumer protections. The Silicon Valley firm Andreessen Horowitz has been championing stablecoins as potentially crypto’s first “killer app” and recently invested in a stablecoin company called Zar.

The recent revelation of a $2 billion deal between an Abu Dhabi state-backed investment firm and Binance using World Liberty Financial’s stablecoin has sparked outrage among congressional Democrats, who call it an example of corruption benefiting Trump. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has urged Democrats not to support the GENIUS Act in its current form, though reports indicate that he is open to backing the bill if anti-corruption measures are added. At least three Republicans oppose the bill, meaning its advancement looks unlikely barring significant revisions.

Launched in March, the value of USD1 in circulation is about $2.1 billion, making it the fifth-largest stablecoin and one of the fastest-growing stablecoin projects. USD1’s market capitalization shot up by about $2 billion on April 29, days before the deal between Binance and the Abu Dhabi firm was announced.

“Currently, people who wish to cultivate influence with the president can enrich him personally by buying cryptocurrency he owns or controls,” said bill sponsor Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). “This is a profoundly corrupt scheme. It endangers our national security and erodes public trust in government. Let’s end this corruption immediately.”

Unlike the leading stablecoin Tether, which has been plagued by secrecy and regulatory scrutiny, USD1 is being promoted by WLFI as an “institutional-ready stablecoin” that operates on the transparent Ethereum blockchain, its reserves audited by an independent third party and held in custody by BitGo, a regulated firm backed by Goldman Sachs. This transparent design could give USD1 a first-mover advantage for greater compliance with the GENIUS Act regulations than a project like Tether, though it faces challenges from competitors like Circle, as well as skepticism surrounding Trump’s involvement.

According to WLFI’s “gold paper,” a Trump-linked company called DT Marks DEFI LLC is entitled to receive 75% of the company’s initial token sales, which totaled $550 million. In exchange for his share, Trump agreed to promote WLFI from time to time and allow the company to use his likeness. In addition, Reuters reports that the Trump family is entitled to 60% of revenues from the company's operations, presumably including transaction fees and other forms of profit generated by USD1.

The Trump family’s crypto ventures take conflicts of interest and supersize them, nonpartisan watchdog groups warn. The recently-announced deal for Emirati investment firm MGX to use Trump’s USD1 as the vehicle for its eye-popping $2 billion investment into Binance has captured attention. While details were not released, the size of the investment could yield the Trump family tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue, according to the New York Times. With the new deal, the president’s WLFI created a financial link to Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world. Binance and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty in November 2023 to crimes including money laundering and failure to register as a money transmitting business.

Just days before his inauguration, Trump announced the $TRUMP memecoin, a token of which 80% is owned by the Trump Organization and affiliates, whose sale initially brought in billions. The Trump family and insiders raked in some $100 million in trading fees in under two weeks, a sum that rose to around $325 million as of last month, according to the firm Chainalysis.

Also last month, the memecoin’s value spiked by more than 50% when the president announced a black-tie-optional dinner with the top 220 coin holders—netting gains of around $900,000 for Trump and insiders in two days. Just last week, a Houston-based shipping firm named Freight Technologies announced its plans to snap up $20 million worth of Trump’s meme coin to gain access to influence the president’s tariffs policy.

Watchdogs have flagged a host of other clear-as-day ethics concerns around WLFI’s crypto dealings. For one, the recent deal announcement in Dubai featuring Eric Trump was joined by crypto billionaire Justin Sun, who in January bought up to $75 million worth of World Liberty tokens, then in February got word that the Securities and Exchange Commission was pausing the fraud case against him. Soon after President Trump signed an executive order to establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, his sons launched a Bitcoin mining venture, American Bitcoin, that “aims to become the world’s largest, most efficient pure-play miner while building a robust strategic Bitcoin reserve.”

Earlier that month, the SEC had similarly paused a lawsuit against Binance in a case that accused the exchange of artificially inflating trading volumes, among other violations. Another Abu Dhabi-based firm that bought $25 million worth of World Liberty tokens in April, DWF Labs, has reportedly been the subject of market manipulation inquiries within the crypto industry; the company said it was planning to provide liquidity for USD1.

Public Citizen has alerted federal prosecutors that it believes Trump’s appeals for his memecoin are violations of federal laws preventing the president from soliciting gifts. “As this is not a presidential act, he does not enjoy immunity from prosecution,” the group wrote this week.

In recent years, a massive scheme to traffic and exploit vulnerable agricultural workers has taken shape in the US.

Corporations are bringing in hundreds of thousands of temporary workers via a legally obtained, temporary H-2A visa. But those workers have few rights and little recourse when their employers break the law, and those same employers are increasingly turning to the H-2A program instead of local workers, including U.S. citizens, who’ve fought for fair wages and dignity on the job.

“We have a problem in this country,” Antonio De Loera-Brust, the communications director for the United Farm Workers, told More Perfect Union. “Our agricultural production has depended on workers who are in some ways not fully free.”

The program is largely made up of workers from Mexico, who are seeking to provide for their families with higher wages than they can make at home. But in some cases, workers like Frank Javier Zavala Martinez have found rampant exploitation and violations of the law.

Zavala worked for three years as an H-2A worker at a farm in Connecticut. To do that, he needed to take out a high-interest loan to cover his travel costs — which should have been provided by his employer — and was later charged fees in order to be recruited back the following season. Once in the U.S., he was forced to live in substandard housing and work long hours with no holidays and no paid time off.

“I didn't look for someone [to talk to] because we're kind of forbidden from approaching people to talk about our situation,” he told More Perfect Union.

Nearly 3,000 miles away in Sunnyside, Washington, Crisanto Serrano worked for 40 years as a farmworker in the Yakima Valley. Serrano obtained his citizenship and built a family in Washington, but after the mushroom farm where he worked, Ostrom, began bringing in H-2A workers and paying them more than local workers, Serrano and his coworkers began organizing with the United Farm Workers.

Ostrom, which was later sold to a Canadian private equity firm and renamed Windmill Farms, eventually agreed to a $3.4 million settlement with the state for unfair and discriminatory practices. But Serrano has struggled to find agricultural work.

“If it rains or it's too cold or too hot, we have to stop at certain times, but not for [contracted workers],” Serrano told More Perfect Union. “[Companies] want to bring slaves.”

And as the Trump administration ramps up deportations and continues to gut labor enforcement, the farm lobby is pushing to expand the H-2A program even further.

“Many growers have come to the conclusion that they would like their entire workforce to be H-2A,” De-Loera Brust said. “They don't wanna have to deal with the messiness that comes with having to treat their workers as human beings.”

We talked to workers, experts, and activists about the exploitation in the H-2A program, who’s behind the push to expand it, and what all of this means for the future of agricultural labor and both local and guest workers alike. Watch our video below to learn more: