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private equity
Platner Says His Anti-Private Equity Ad Targeting Red Sox Owners Was 'Taken Down' During Game Broadcast
"Private equity is destroying our favorite baseball team, stripping them for parts," Democratic US Senate candidate Platner said in an ad that aired on the New England Sports Network.
May 23, 2026
Maine Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner on Saturday said that a campaign ad that aired during a Boston Red Sox game was "taken down" after it took aim at the team's ownership.
The ad in question features Platner discussing the role that private equity firms play in the US economy, including sports teams.
"Private equity is destroying our favorite baseball team, stripping them for parts," Platner says at the start of the ad. "Private equity is buying up our homes, our sports, and our lives. I will reverse the private equity curse."
Private equity is taking our homes. It's taking our hospitals. It's taking beloved local businesses and stripping them for parts.
And now private equity is running the Red Sox into the ground.
Our new ad ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/w7LapElpdA
— Graham Platner for Senate (@grahamformaine) May 22, 2026
Platner concludes the ad by saying that he approves this message "because I miss Mookie Betts," the star player whom the Red Sox traded to the Los Angeles Dodgers in 2020 in a deal that was widely decried by local fans as a salary dump.
According to Platner, his campaign began airing the ad Friday on the New England Sports Network (NESN), the cable TV station owned partially by Fenway Sports Group, the conglomerate that owns the Red Sox.
However, he said that "midway through the game the ad was taken down" by NESN, after which the Red Sox proceeded to blow a 4-0 lead, losing to the Minnesota Twins by a final score of 8-6.
Platner, an oyster farmer and upstart candidate who has never before held political office, became the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee for the 2026 US Senate race in Maine last month after his top rival, Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills, dropped out of the race.
In recent weeks, Platner has pivoted to challenging incumbent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who has held the seat since 1996 and is now running for her sixth term in office.
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Why Did We Stand in the Freezing Rain and Snow? Healthcare
In Colorado and all over the country, we gathered to demand that those who vote to take our healthcare away will be held accountable.
May 08, 2026
What we say at rallies and meetings with people who could help, but rarely do, is sometimes abstract and loaded with policy discussions that muddle even interested advocates at times. Healthcare in Colorado and all over the country is not only taking a hit with provisions of the “Big Beautiful Bill” passed by Congress in 2024 beginning to take effect, the healthcare industry is also still and increasingly one of the most profitable investment opportunities and nearly one-fifth of our GDP, or gross domestic product, flows from the healthcare industry. Private equity is in. Wall Street is in. It is as though the health industry CEOs and the elected officials they fund know exactly how to play the market to win. Human life is on the balance sheet bottom line buried in accounting lingo and those gorgeous profit terms.
Medicaid cuts hurt people. Medicaid cuts hurt communities. And on Tuesday, May 5, 2026, Coloradans were busy explaining the pain. Some were in warm conference rooms at Denver Health with a United States senator, and some were in the cold rain outside a clinic that could suffer or even close because of the cuts.
Cut losses; maximize gains. We are human widgets—forget the AI revolution if you have ignored the business insurgency into every aspect of the healthcare industry. We all needed to learn the language of greed and profit taking without regard for human life, and all the while we argued lives were lost without coverage. Those numbers of sacrificial dead are no match for the billions and yes, trillions, of dollars wagered, won, and lost making sure that final bottom line looks sexy.
So, in Colorado and all over the country, we gathered to demand those who vote to take our healthcare away will be held accountable. We may be widgets to the bean counters, but to one another and across multiple states and organizations, we stood together against the storm. In Westminster, Colorado, it was freezing rain and chilly, but we stood and carried on.
We intend to love one another enough to make sure human life is the profit we value more than the almighty dollar.
Dr. Vince Markovchick ran the emergency medicine department at Denver Health for 26 years. Think about what he must have seen and heard over time. Human life saved. The care not given when a patient tells the doctor they cannot afford the care or missing work or groceries if they allow care for a serious illness or injury. That is what Dr. Markovchick spoke about. Tender mercies delayed and shared as the rain briefly paused as we listened, as if the universe cared too. (Meanwhile, safe and sound and warm, in the hospital where he gave his professional life for us all, Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) held an invitation only round table on the Medicaid cuts. Even the press stayed nice and warm and didn’t come to witness the more than 25 Coloradans who gathered in the cold.)
Lydia Guzman spoke with passion and fire about the damage she saw and sees in lives without access to care; Tyler Quick spoke to us about the issues the LGBTQ+ community faces in receiving not only gender affirming care but HIV prevention and care. We might weep for his reminder to us that what happens in the LGBTQ+ community will also spread to the straight community and others among us. Like it or not, no human is an island. Nope. We are the human community.
What do we demand together in this drippy, difficult weather? We spoke clearly, “Stop Taking Our Healthcare.” No more beautiful bills taking benefits away; no more enforcement of policies in unrelated ways to healthcare delivery; and no more healthcare dollars wasted on business measures like advertising, stockholder pleasures, “inducements” for prescribing or procedures, lobbying expenses for policies passed or policies blocked, or even baubles and freebies when you table with your wares at all those conferences.
Then, we would be fine with seeing that end of the healthcare industry given over to actual delivery of care—for us all. And we intend to stay loud. We intend to be seen. And we intend to love one another enough to make sure human life is the profit we value more than the almighty dollar.
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New Trump Rule Would Let Private Equity, Crypto ‘Endanger Retirement Savings of Millions'
“This isn’t about advancing the interests of retirement savers, it is about opening a new profit center for crypto and Wall Street," said one critic.
Mar 31, 2026
US President Donald Trump's Labor Department on Monday unveiled a proposal that would welcome private equity and cryptocurrency investments into Americans' 401(k) plans, the culmination of an aggressive Wall Street lobbying push that could leave the retirement savings of millions vulnerable to the wild swings of so-called "alternative assets."
The proposed rule, now subject to a public comment period, was issued at the direction of a Trump executive order from last year that was characterized at the time as "the holy grail for private equity."
In addition to giving employers a green light to include private equity and crypto investments in 401(k) plans offered to workers, the new rule would establish a "safe harbor" allowing retirement account administrators to avoid legal action from employees who believe their funds were steered into excessively risky products.
"The legal immunity created by this safe harbor will incentivize financial advisers to pitch these toxic products, which will become ticking time bombs in tens of millions of retirement accounts, which will no doubt result in significant losses," warned Benjamin Schiffrin, director of securities policy at the advocacy group Better Markets. "There are good reasons why 401(k) plans have been considered closed to private markets and cryptocurrencies, and those reasons have not changed. The only thing that has changed is the administration’s support for these industries and regulators’ willingness to do their bidding."
"This is no reason to endanger the retirement savings of millions of Americans," Schiffrin added.
Oscar Valdés Viera, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform, similarly warned that "opening 401(k)s to these products risks turning workers’ retirement savings into a Ponzi-like scheme that throws a lifeline to an industry scrambling for fresh cash."
"This isn’t about advancing the interests of retirement savers, it is about opening a new profit center for crypto and Wall Street," said Viera. "Retirement savers should not be bailing out these high-risk industries and subsidizing the Wall Street and crypto billionaire class."
"Private equity firms should not get a free pass to loot workers’ 401(k) retirement savings."
Americans currently hold over $10 trillion combined in 401(k) plans, a huge trove of wealth that the private equity industry has been working for years to access. The Labor Department indicated that its proposed rule would apply to over 720,000 retirement plans covering roughly 118 million workers.
The American Prospect reported Tuesday that the managers of private equity firms are "already pressuring companies, third-party administrators, and the consultants who advise them to list their offerings" among workers' retirement plan options.
"One staffer at an institutional investor who is not authorized to speak to the media told the Prospect about their primary worry: that private equity will stick their most overvalued companies into continuation funds exclusively for 401(k) plan holders, or 'retail investors,' as they are known," the outlet continued. "Private credit firms are retailoring their funds for 401(k) plans as well, and some of the biggest have already struck deals with asset managers like Voya and Vanguard. 'I’d be shocked if the industry doesn’t attempt to dump their garbage onto retail,' the staffer said."
One recent analysis by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) found that private equity funds for retail investors "dramatically underperformed publicly listed stock indexes" in 2025 while charging much higher fees.
Jim Baker, PESP's executive director, said Monday that "private equity firms should not get a free pass to loot workers’ 401(k) retirement savings."
“The bar for including private equity in 401(k)s should be extremely high,” said Baker. “Private equity funds have lagged public markets while charging much higher fees, and public pension funds are pulling back from the asset class. Instead, this rule risks shifting more financial risk onto workers who rely on their retirement savings for long-term security.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also ripped the Labor Department rule, saying in a statement that "Americans facing an uncertain future in Trump’s economy will now have more reasons to question the security of their retirement savings—all so that Trump’s Wall Street buddies have another pile of cash to play with."
"Anyone who cares about the financial security of working people," said Warren, "should oppose this proposed rule."
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