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'Nation is Not For Sale': Thousands of Albanians Protest Kushner Resort Plans in Protected Wetland
"Barbed wire cannot silence people," said one conservationist. "A protected landscape of global importance is under attack, and people are demanding an end to the devastation."
Jun 03, 2026
As President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner moves forward with plans to build a luxury resort on one of the last untouched parts of the Mediterranean coast, thousands of Albanians have taken to the streets in protest.
On Tuesday evening, a throng gathered outside the office of Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama in the capital Tirana, holding inflatable flamingos and signs reading "Nation is not for sale" and "I don't want Albania like Dubai," Reuters reported.
Kushner's investment firm, Affinity Partners, is seeking to build a €1.4 billion ($1.6 billion) resort on the uninhabited island of Sazan and around 10,000 hotel rooms and villas along a stretch of coastline near the protected wetland of Vjosa-Narta.
According to BirdLife International:
The area shelters over 70 endangered species and more than 200 bird species, including flamingos and Dalmatian pelicans. It sits on the Adriatic Flyway, a critical migration corridor for millions of birds traveling between Africa and Europe each year. The surrounding waters are among the last Mediterranean refuges for the Mediterranean monk seal, one of the world’s most endangered marine mammals, and a key nesting ground for the loggerhead sea turtle.
In February 2024, Albania's parliament amended its protected areas law to allow the development of luxury resorts. Just weeks later, Kushner announced plans to build in Albania, which spurred an investigation by anti-corruption prosecutors.
Kushner himself has not been accused of any wrongdoing, but protesters view the construction of the sprawling complex as a symbol of the country being sold out to powerful oligarchs without their consent.
"We have a protected area, but above all, our state has allowed construction work to continue without consultation and without transparency," said Klajdi Belo, an activist who attended a demonstration on Monday, told Euronews.
Activists have said bulldozers have begun tearing through the coastline and gravel has already been dumped on age-old sand dunes—damage that could take hundreds of years to repair. Meanwhile, a large barbed-wire fence has been erected, blocking public access to the beach.
Over the weekend, protesters assembled outside the barricades surrounding the development near the coastal village of Zvërnec.
"Don't defend the oligarchs!" one man was seen shouting into a megaphone. "Those are the citizens' properties!"
During these protests, a video captured an activist being dragged along the ground by a group of black-shirted security contractors.
"There is great public outrage over what is happening in Albania, but the spark was what happened in Zvërnec," said Arilda Lleshi, who said the man and others were there because they were "protesting against a fence that had been installed there illegally."
As activists have called for heavy machines to be removed from the protected area, Rama has said no amount of public backlash will lead him to abandon the project.
"Under no circumstances do we receive the stigma of being a country where investors are met with hostility," he said in a statement to Reuters. "There is absolutely no chance that the investment will stop as long as I am here."
Anouk Puymartin, head of policy for BirdLife Europe and Central Asia, said that it's not just the habitat of endangered species at stake, but the question of whether longstanding environmental protections can be shredded at the whim of the wealthy.
"Barbed wire cannot silence people. Thousands have taken to the streets of Tirana to defend Vjosa-Narta from destruction driven by private profit," Puymartin said. "A protected landscape of global importance is under attack, and people are demanding an end to the devastation."
Ivanka Trump, the US president's daughter and Kushner's wife, has come under scrutiny for her comments about the development project recently, which were blasted as "out of touch."
In a recent interview, the Trump heiress described being inspired to purchase the island of Sazan while vacationing there years ago: “We were on a friend’s boat, and we stopped for a swim. Effectively, that’s how we found it. We swam to the islands. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated.”
She described the project of developing the island as part of an effort to "help realize its potential" and described it as "the culmination of all of my experience in real estate, all of my travel, a lot of reflection on how I want to live."
But Puymartin describes the project as an encroachment by private wealth onto land that was previously held for the benefit of everyone.
"Nature belongs to everyone, not a handful of investors," she said. "The horrendous situation in Vjosa-Narta shows why laws are crucial to protect both people and nature. But those protections mean little if governments fail to uphold them."
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‘Super PACs Should Be Outlawed,’ Says Platner, as Pro-Collins Corporate Dark Money Pours Into Maine to Attack Him
"It's fascinating that the more money that goes into our political system, the less we talk about actual politics."
Jun 02, 2026
The super PACs pouring money into the US Senate race in Maine are doing a great job of proving Graham Platner's point.
As new reporting on Monday detailed the flood of dark money targeting his campaign, the Democratic hopeful in recent days has put a spotlight on the super PACs, which he says have created a political system dominated by corporations and wealthy donors who want to distract from the serious issues and struggles faced by everyday voters and working families.
"I think it's very telling that a political system that has become controlled by money, controlled by the power of organized money, is also a political system that is trying to convince all of us down here that policy and discussions around what government can or cannot do is not what they want to talk about," Platner said during a conversation with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a longtime critic of super PACs, posted to social media.
"It's fascinating that the more money that goes into our political system," he continued, "the less we talk about actual politics."
"I agree with Senator Sanders: Super PACs should be outlawed," said Platner.
On Monday, Sludge reported that a pair of shadowy nonprofits "with no public presence and no disclosed staff" have dumped at least $750,000 into a super PAC supporting Platner's opponent, the five-term incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings.
Condorcet Initiative Corp. has given $500,000 to Pine Tree Results PAC across two separate donations, including $250,000 on May 1 that was disclosed in a filing reported to the Federal Election Commission last week. Ardleigh Impact Corporation contributed an additional $250,000 in April.
The PAC has spent nearly $4 million on attack ads against Sen. Susan Collins’ Democratic challenger Graham Platner, according to FEC data.
The two nonprofits are both described as shell-like entities linked to the same address in Springfield, Virginia, belonging to Republican political consultant Staci Goede.
The groups are part of a much larger network and have poured a combined $9 million into GOP-aligned PACs since 2024, including in four competitive Senate races in this coming cycle.
Goede, meanwhile, is the treasurer or officer for at least nine different nonprofits "that span Republican Senate campaigns, pro-Israel donor pass-throughs, and issue advocacy groups," according to the report.
The Campaign Legal Center has filed a complaint against Ardleigh, arguing that the nonprofit, which contributed an astonishing $2.575 million across six federal committees in its first three months of existence, was being used as a straw donor to conceal the identities of one or more rich benefactors.
The source of the $750,000 aimed at Platner remains unknown. But the Pine Tree Results PAC is already known to have a slate of wealthy backers from the commanding heights of finance and tech, including Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, hedge fund founder Paul Singer, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp. The fund has also taken in contributions from an affiliate of the tobacco giant Altria and from the far-right news company Newsmax.
According to a FEC data, it has raised more than $16 million to help Collins ward off a challenger in 2026, which will almost certainly be Platner.
While the potential use of straw donors may present legal issues, the use of super PACs by wealthy backers to dump unlimited sums behind their preferred candidates is unquestionably legal under federal campaign finance law.
As of March, super PACs funded by crypto, artificial intelligence, pro-Israel donors, and outside groups had already spent more than $225 million trying to influence the 2026 election cycle, according to the Washington Post.
Platner has argued on the campaign trail that the unchecked ability of the wealthy to influence elections is a genesis point for the growing wealth gap between the rich and poor.
"The inequality we’re experiencing, it didn’t happen organically," he said at a recent campaign event. "We live in the outcome of policy written by establishment politicians who for 40 years have been doing the bidding of those who donate the most money to them."
The Pine Tree Results PAC had already spent nearly $4 million on ads attacking Platner as of May 20, according to FEC data. As Sludge's reporting notes, "Rather than engaging with policy, the ads are exclusively focused on personal attacks against Platner, digging up comments the candidate made online going back as far as 2013."
So far, attempts to mire Platner in personal scandal have done little to blunt the momentum of his populist campaign. A poll from the University of New Hampshire in late May showed him leading the incumbent by a nine-point margin among likely voters and other polls show similar advantages.
It can be expected that the PACs attacking Platner will make a meal out of recent reports from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times that probe into the private details of his marriage.
But noting the failure of past attempts to drown Platner in controversy, Lever News founder David Sirota questioned in a piece on Monday if these sorts of "character" attacks even work in an age of politics defined by rapacious corporate greed and corruption.
He noted how Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Ct.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) responded to recent questions from news outlets about whether Platner’s controversies mean he’s failed to “pass the character test.” Murphy responded that “character involves standing up to people who are bankrupting and corrupting this country,” while Khanna lauded Platner for “having the character to stand up against the war in Iran, against genocide, and against an unfair and lopsided economy.”
This response, Sirota said, hinted that the country could be entering a new political paradigm—"a reality in which many voters are so economically pulverized and politically disillusioned that they now define 'character' in a politician solely as whether or not they are single-mindedly focused on destroying oligarchy and ending corruption."
“It is, potentially, a new era in which voters who can’t afford anything and who feel totally ignored by their government have reimagined their entire definition of political 'character' on economic/anti-corruption terms—rather than on old definitions of personal moral rectitude,” he wrote. “In this potential new reality, the personal shortcomings of individual politicians—which often have little effect on voters’ actual lives—are less important and electorally salient than the policies those politicians support and oppose."
"And such a shift," he added, "would make sense in the current moment.”
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'The IPO Is Being Engineered': 12-Minute Video Details Growing Fears Over Elon Musk Plot to Become World's First Trillionaire
As the Trump-backed oligarch tries to grow even more wealthy and with longstanding rules changed to his benefit ahead of the SpaceX public offering, "retirees could take huge losses, while insiders cash out."
May 28, 2026
Billionaire Elon Musk has ambitions to become the world's first trillionaire when his company SpaceX makes what is expected to be the biggest initial public offering in history—and money unwittingly invested by ordinary Americans may help him get there.
Progressive media outlet More Perfect Union on Wednesday published a video detailing how the Nasdaq stock market exchange changed its own rules so that SpaceX can be immediately included in index funds without having to wait through the one-year "seasoning" period that used to be required for newly public companies.
The reason companies in the past had to wait a year to be included in index funds is that such funds contain a large chunk of Americans' retirement savings, and are thus supposed to be more averse to risk.
Watch the 12-minute video:
NEW: Elon Musk wants a SpaceX IPO valuing the company at upwards of $1.75 trillion.
To get there he got the rules changed so that index funds, with millions of Americans' retirement savings, are forced to buy in.
Retirees could take huge losses, while insiders cash out. pic.twitter.com/DviJEt0XAu
— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) May 27, 2026
This means that ordinary investors could see their money plunged into an unproven company while investors who have bankrolled Musk's previous ventures now rolled into SpaceX could cash out at inflated prices.
"Every piece of evidence we have is that the IPO is being engineered to rise very rapidly after it prices, and then fall very dramatically after that," George Pearkes, global macro strategist for Bespoke Investment Group, told More Perfect Union. "That is a recipe for retail investors, especially, to take large losses."
SpaceX is a particularly risky bet, Preakes added, given that it is seeking a $1.75 trillion valuation with its IPO. For a company that made only $19 billion in profits last fiscal year, critics say a valuation 54 times larger than its projected revenue multiple, a measure of its value based on expected future earnings, is a huge red flag.
"This combination of extreme size and this extreme multiple," Peakes said, "is completely unprecedented."
Pearkes isn't in the only expert concerned about the structure of the SpaceX IPO.
Writing at Seeking Alpha, independent equity researcher Julia Ostian similarly argued that the SpaceX IPO is structured using a "calculated mechanism that will feed the artificial demand generated by the forced index fund buyers," and thus at least initially send share values soaring beyond what the company's fundamentals would suggest, and giving insiders an opportunity to quickly cash out.
Ostian added that "it is clear who is the beneficiary here and who pays the price for this engineered system," and said that "the rich are getting richer openly, without hiding it or even without trying to pretend it’s something else."
As More Perfect Union emphasized, the entire IPO was orchestrated by Musk for maximum advantage to himself and his closest allies, but he needed regular Americans to put up the money for the scheme to work.
"He got the rules changed so that index funds, with millions of Americans' retirement savings, are forced to buy in," the outlet noted. "Retirees could take huge losses, while insiders cash out."
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