When grocery prices surged across the United States during 2021 and 2022, most consumers blamed inflation. Rising fuel costs, supply-chain disruptions, labor shortages, and broader economic pressures appeared to offer a straightforward explanation for higher food bills. A newly settled antitrust case involving Agri Stats, Inc., however, has renewed a more complex debate among economists...
New Housing Proposal Would Bring Back Controversial Property Transfer Tool New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s newly announced housing strategy is reigniting debate over one of the city’s most controversial affordable housing enforcement tools. Unveiled on May 26, the administration’s “Block by Block” housing initiative includes a program known as “Fix the City,” an enforcement...
The Viral Video That Exposed a Larger Policy Problem A viral video from Georgia has turned a local land dispute into a national debate over property rights and corporate subsidies. In the footage, a young woman describes how her mother’s home in Coweta County is being taken through eminent domain so that Georgia Power can...
Mamdani’s Wealth Gap Math Doesn’t Justify His Solutions The $200,000 number is real. It is also the wrong metric to build policy on — and the right ones point to problems City Hall and Albany have so far refused to confront. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Preliminary Racial Equity Plan, released in April, leans heavily on a...
A federal antitrust victory in 2024 was hailed as a win for consumers. Two years later, Spirit Airlines is gone, 17,000 workers are out of jobs, and Washington is fighting over who broke the budget-airline business model. When Spirit Airlines shut down in the early-morning hours of May 2, 2026, it brought a 34-year-old budget...
Inside the Arabella Advisors Network: The Dark Money Architecture Behind American Progressive Causes In November 2025, the Washington, D.C. consulting firm Arabella Advisors announced that its core fiscal-sponsorship business had been acquired by a newly formed entity called Sunflower Services. Arabella itself was renamed Vital Impact. The reorganization affected the largest and most active donor-advisory...
How Far Does It Go? The Wider History of Nonprofits Paying Informants Inside Extremist Groups The April 21, 2026 federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center has prompted a broader question that reaches well beyond a single organization: how widespread is the practice of advocacy nonprofits paying confidential informants inside the groups they publicly...
After more than a decade of credibility problems, the global market for carbon credits has entered a markedly different phase in 2026. New international accounting rules under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, a maturing quality standard from the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), and deeper liquidity on commodity exchanges have begun...
Introduction The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has opened an investigation into a series of large, well-timed oil futures trades that preceded two major Trump administration announcements on Iran, according to reporting by Bloomberg News and Reuters. The CFTC oil futures investigation centers on roughly $1.45 billion in positions placed on crude oil contracts...
Introduction In 2024, grid operators across the United States curtailed approximately 20 million megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity generated from wind and solar sources — energy that was produced but could not be stored or delivered to consumers because the infrastructure to hold it did not exist. Four of the country’s seven major Independent System Operators...