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corporate greed
Tax the Rich, Say Mamdani, Sanders, and NYC Inauguration Crowd
"For too long in our city, freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it," said the new mayor. "Our City Hall will change that."
Jan 01, 2026
"Tax the rich. Tax the rich. Tax the rich."
The chants broke out at City Hall in New York on Thursday as US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) addressed the crowd before swearing in Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who campaigned on a platform that prioritized NYC's working class.
"Demanding that the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes is not radical. It is exactly the right thing to do," declared Sanders—who endorsed Mamdani even before his June primary victory over former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and "the billionaire-backed status quo."
The 34-year-old mayor on Thursday described Brooklyn-born Sanders—50 years his senior—as "the man whose leadership I seek most to emulate, who I am so grateful to be sworn in by today."
During the afternoon inauguration ceremony—which followed an early morning swearing-in at the abandoned subway station beneath City Hall—Mamdani also called for taxing the rich as he reiterated the agenda that secured him over 1.1 million votes in November.
"Beginning today, we will govern expansively and audaciously. We may not always succeed, but never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try," he said. "To those who insist that the era of big government is over, hear me when I say this: No longer will City Hall hesitate to use its power to improve New Yorkers' lives."
"Here, where the language of the New Deal was born, we will return the vast resources of this city to the workers who call it home," Mamdani vowed. "Not only will we make it possible for every New Yorker to afford a life they love once again, we will overcome the isolation that too many feel, and connect the people of this city to one another."
The mayor said that "the cost of childcare will no longer discourage young adults from starting a family, because we will deliver universal childcare for the many by taxing the wealthiest few. Those in rent-stabilized homes will no longer dread the latest rent hike, because we will freeze the rent."
"Getting on a bus without worrying about a fare hike or whether you'll be late to your destination will no longer be deemed a small miracle, because we will make buses fast and free," he continued. "These policies are not simply about the costs we make free, but the lives we fill with freedom. For too long in our city, freedom has belonged only to those who can afford to buy it. Our City Hall will change that."
The ceremony also featured remarks from another early Mamdani supporter, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), as well as the swearing-in of Jumaane Williams for a third term as New York City's public advocate and Mark Levine, the new comptroller.
"New York, we have chosen courage over fear," said Ocasio-Cortez, whose district spans the Bronx and Queens. "We have chosen prosperity for the many over spoils for the few. And when the entrenched ways would rather have us dig in our feet and seek refuge in the past, we have chosen instead to turn towards making a new future for all of us."
AOC: New York City has chosen the ambitious pursuit of universal childcare, affordable rents and housing and clean and dignified public transit for all. We have chosen that over the distractions of bigotry and the barbarism of extreme income inequality
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— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) January 1, 2026 at 1:47 PM
As NYC kicked off the new year with progressive city leadership, 2025 findings from the Bloomberg Billionaire Index sparked fresh wealth tax demands. According to the tracker, the world's 500 richest people added a record $2.2 trillion to their collective fortunes last year. About a quarter of that went to just eight Big Tech billionaires: Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, Jensen Huang, Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg.
In New York, Mamdani has proposed raising the state corporate tax rate from 8.85% to 11.5% and hiking taxes for individuals who make more than $1 million a year. Achieving those goals would require cooperation from state legislators.
Mamdani acknowledged Thursday that for much of history, the response from City Hall to the question of who New York belongs to has been, "It belongs only to the wealthy and well-connected, those who never strain to capture the attention of those in power."
In the years ahead, he pledged, "City Hall will deliver an agenda of safety, affordability, and abundance, where government looks and lives like the people it represents, never flinches in the fight against corporate greed, and refuses to cower before challenges that others have deemed too complicated."
"Together, we will tell a new story of our city," the mayor said. "This will not be a tale of one city, governed only by the 1%. Nor will it be a tale of two cities, the rich versus the poor. It will be a tale of 8.5 million cities, each of them a New Yorker with hopes and fears, each a universe, each of them woven together."
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British Activist Blasts 'Sociopathic Greed' of Big Tech After US Judge Blocks His Detention
"I chose to take on the biggest companies in the world, to hold them accountable, to speak truth to power. There is a cost attached to that," said Imran Ahmed, one of five Europeans targeted by the Trump administration.
Dec 26, 2025
After a US judge on Thursday blocked President Donald Trump's administration from detaining one of the European anti-disinformation advocates hit with a travel ban earlier this week, Imran Ahmed suggested that he is being targeted because artificial intelligence and social media companies "are increasingly under pressure as a result of organizations like mine."
Ahmed is the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). The 47-year-old Brit lives in Washington, DC with his wife and infant daughter, who are both US citizens. While the Trump administration on Tuesday also singled out Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index, Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg of HateAid, and Thierry Breton, a former European commissioner who helped craft the Digital Services Act, Ahmed is reportedly the only one currently in the United States.
On Wednesday, Ahmed, who is a legal permanent resident, sued top Trump officials including US Attorney General Pam Bondi, Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Todd Lyons, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the District Court for the Southern District of New York.
"Rather than disguise its retaliatory motive, the federal government was clear that Mr. Ahmed is being 'SANCTIONED' as punishment for the research and public reporting carried out by the nonprofit organization that Mr. Ahmed founded and runs," the complaint states. "In other words, Mr. Ahmed faces the imminent prospect of unconstitutional arrest, punitive detention, and expulsion for exercising his basic First Amendment rights."
"The government's actions are the latest in a string of escalating and unjustifiable assaults on the First Amendment and other rights, one that cannot stand basic legal scrutiny," the filing continues. "Simply put, immigration enforcement—here, immigration detention and threatened deportation—may not be used as a tool to punish noncitizen speakers who express views disfavored by the current administration."
Just a day later, Judge Vernon Broderick, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, issued a temporary restraining order, blocking the administration from arresting or detaining Ahmed. The judge also scheduled a conference for Monday afternoon.
The US Department of State said Thursday that "the Supreme Court and Congress have repeatedly made clear: The United States is under no obligation to allow foreign aliens to come to our country or reside here."
Ahmed's lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said that "the federal government can't deport a green-card holder like Imran Ahmed, with a wife and young child who are American, simply because it doesn't like what he has to say."
In the complaint and interviews published Friday, Ahmed pointed to his group's interactions with Elon Musk, a former member of the Trump and administration and the richest person on Earth. He also controls the social media platform X, which sued CCDH in 2023.
"We were sued by Elon Musk a couple of years ago, unsuccessfully; a court found that he was trying to impinge on our First Amendment rights to free speech by using law to try and silence our accountability work," Ahmed told the BBC.
Months after a federal judge in California threw out that case last year, Musk publicly declared "war" on the watchdog.
CCDH's work is being targeted by the U.S. State Department trying to sanction and deport our CEO, Imran Ahmed. This is an unconstitutional attempt to silence anyone who dares to criticize social media giants. But a federal judge has temporarily blocked his detention.More in BBC ⤵️
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— Center for Countering Digital Hate (@counterhate.com) December 26, 2025 at 4:05 PM
"What it has been about is companies that simply do not want to be held accountable and, because of the influence of big money in Washington, are corrupting the system and trying to bend it to their will, and their will is to be unable to be held accountable," Ahmed told the Guardian. "There is no other industry, that acts with such arrogance, indifference, and a lack of humility and sociopathic greed at the expense of people."
Ahmed explained that he spent Christmas away from his wife and daughter because of the Trump administration's track record of quickly sending targeted green-card holders far away from their families. He said: "I chose to take on the biggest companies in the world, to hold them accountable, to speak truth to power. There is a cost attached to that. My family understands that."
The British newspaper noted that when asked whether he thought UK politicians should use X, the former Labour Party adviser told the Press Association, "Politicians have to make decisions for themselves, but every time they post on X, they are putting a buck in Mr. Musk's pocket and I think they need to question their own consciences and ask themselves whether or not they think they can carry on doing that."
Ahmed also said that it was "telling that Mr. Musk was one of the first and most vociferous in celebrating the press release" about the sanctions against him and the others.
"He said it was great, and it is great, but not for the reasons that he thinks," the campaigner said. "Because what it has actually done is give a chance for the system to show that the advocacy that we do is both important and protected by the First Amendment."
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Instacart, Stop Using American Shoppers as Lab Rats During an Affordability Crisis
The grocery delivery app is conducting large-scale, hidden pricing experiments on unsuspecting shoppers to determine just how much money they can extract from customers on the groceries they buy to feed their families.
Dec 26, 2025
Somewhere, a mom taps through her grocery app while waiting in the school pickup line, purchasing a box of Wheat Thins for $5.99. Across town, someone else scrolls through the same grocery app and adds the exact same box of Wheat Thins to their cart. For them, the crackers ring up at $6.99. It is the same item, from the same store, at the same time, but one unlucky shopper is stuck paying a higher price. Neither shopper has any idea this pricing game is even being played.
This is not a hypothetical scenario. Increasingly, it’s happening all over the country. Right now, grocery delivery app Instacart is conducting large-scale, hidden pricing experiments on unsuspecting shoppers to determine just how much money they can extract from customers on the groceries they buy to feed their families.
How do we know? Our team at Groundwork Collaborative had a feeling Instacart might be experimenting on shoppers, so we decided to run an experiment on them. Alongside our partners at Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union, we recruited over 400 volunteer secret shoppers to shop for the same basket of 20 items at the same grocery store at the same time. We ran the experiment in four different stores across the country.
The results were damning: At every store we tested, shoppers were charged different prices for an identical basket of groceries. Overall, Instacart basket totals varied by about 7%, with some items posting differences as high as 23%. For example: the exact same basket of groceries from a Safeway store in Seattle, Washington ran some shoppers $114.34, while other shoppers were charged $123.93. At a Target in North Canton, Ohio, prices varied by as much as $6, as some shoppers rang up a total of $84.43, while others were charged $87.91 or as much as $90.47.
Unfortunately, Instacart’s predatory pricing is just one small piece of a much larger–and rapidly growing–economy of extraction.
Based on the company’s own estimates, this “Instacart tax” could drain as much as $1,200 from American households’ pocketbooks each year.
Meanwhile, Instacart is gloating about their ability to use unaware shoppers as guinea pigs to pad their bottom line profits. On their website, the company notes that, “End shoppers are not aware that they’re in an experiment. For any given shopper in any given store, prices only change on a few of the products they shop and only by a small margin; it’s negligible.” But we’re facing the greatest food affordability crisis in a generation. As grocery prices continue to rise and reliance on Buy Now, Pay Later is accelerating, it is painfully evident that an additional $1,200 a year is anything but negligible for many American families.
Unfortunately, Instacart’s predatory pricing is just one small piece of a much larger–and rapidly growing–economy of extraction. Enabled by corporate consolidation and artificial intelligence technologies, companies across industries now deploy a dizzying array of tactics designed to extract maximum profit from each individual. They tack on hidden fees; collude with their competitors on price increases; and individualize prices for consumers based on granular, personal data.
These predatory pricing strategies are not about managing scarcity or efficient markets. They’re corporations experimenting with your willingness to pay to see exactly how much they can squeeze out of you.
Since its release last week, our report has struck a national chord—earning front-page coverage in the New York Times, primetime coverage on broadcast news, and featuring in a video that has already amassed nearly 2 million views. Instacart’s own stock even dropped 6% the day after our report was published, which the Wall Street Journal attributed in part to our investigation.
This reaction is unsurprising: Americans dislike being surveilled, they resent being gouged, and they certainly don’t like being lab rats for profit-driven experimentation. Fair and honest markets are the bedrock of a healthy economy—and companies like Instacart jeopardize that trust by making prices opaque and unpredictable.
Our message to Instacart—and any corporation that would try to replicate their pricing experiment—is simple. Close the labs. American shoppers are not guinea pigs.
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