Tag: corporations

‘Borderline Barbaric’: Troubled Dem Payroll Vendor Accused of Punishing Employees For Taking Paid Family Leave

The human resources software company Rippling emerged as a top Democratic Party vendor after receiving tax breaks from Gavin Newsom and Kathy Hochul. It’s also accused of cultivating a “borderline barbaric” culture that penalizes employees who take paid family leave, according to lawsuits and complaints from several former employees.

Newsom and Hochul, the Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr reports, awarded Rippling nearly $20 million in combined tax breaks between 2023 and 2025, money that helped the firm build offices in San Francisco and New York City. ActBlue and the DNC have processed more than $23 million in payroll expenditures through Rippling in the 2026 midterm election cycle, campaign finance disclosures show. And while Newsom and Hochul have made expanded paid family leave a cornerstone of their political platforms, Rippling is accused of taking a different approach.

Former employees have alleged in lawsuits that the company fired them after they took family leave or expressed their intention to do so. A March 2025 suit from former engineering manager Fu Zhou alleged that she was fired after taking medical leave to undergo IVF treatments—and that her replacement, a man, was terminated “shortly after expressing his own intention to take family leave.” An anonymous former employee, meanwhile, posted on the employer review site GlassDoor describing the company as “borderline barbaric in today’s workplace culture.”

Rippling responded to the Free Beacon with a legal letter from the leading defamation lawyer Tom Clare, whose firm ClareLocke represented Matt Lauer amid his #MeToo battles, former Obama White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler amid revelations of her close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, and former Harvard president Claudine Gay amid her plagiarism scandal. Clare, who penned a seven-page letter filled with veiled legal threats—and marked “Confidential—Not For Publication Or Attribution,” a condition to which the Free Beacon did not agree—said the Free Beacon did not afford the company adequate time to comment, demanded the Free Beacon “identify all its sources,” and said Rippling could not comment on pending litigation anyway.

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DOJ sues California towing company for auctioning off US military members’ vehicles

The Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against California-based S&K Towing, Inc., accusing the company of illegally auctioning off vehicles owned by US servicemembers in violation of federal law.

According to the DOJ, the San Clemente towing company sold or otherwise disposed of as many as 148 vehicles belonging to military personnel between August 28, 2020, and April 15, 2025. Many of the vehicles were reportedly towed from Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton.

Federal prosecutors allege that S&K failed to comply with the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA), which requires towing companies to obtain a court order before selling or disposing of a vehicle owned by a protected servicemember. The DOJ noted that S&K’s contract with Camp Pendleton required the company to follow all applicable state and federal laws.

“Towing companies must respect and abide by the federal laws that protect members of our Armed Forces,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Dhillon said servicemembers are often away for long stretches because of training or deployment and may not even know their vehicle has been towed.

She added that the SCRA is intended to ensure troops receive basic legal protections, including notice and the opportunity to have towing and storage fees adjusted while they are serving.

First Assistant US Attorney Bilal A. Essayli for the Central District of California said servicemembers “deserve peace of mind” that their legal rights will be protected while they are away serving the country. “It is unacceptable for a business to sell or dispose of servicemembers’ vehicles without abiding by the laws that protect servicemembers,” Essayli said.

The DOJ also alleged that S&K was explicitly warned about the issue in May 2024, when a Military Legal Assistance attorney contacted the company and explained that it was violating the SCRA. According to the lawsuit, a manager at S&K responded: “We do this all the time.”

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Walgreens Gives Bodycams To Employees After Rise In Retail Assaults

As most Americans are now well aware, national retail theft has seen a significant spike since 2021, with total shoplifting incidents increasing by roughly 53% between 2021 and 2024 based on industry data.  This has led to sweeping policy changes to retail businesses, specifically in urban locations, and long aisles of locked glass cases are only the beginning.  

In the case of Walgreens, the company has closed a significant number of locations in high crime areas since 2024 as part of a broader plan to shutter underperforming stores nationwide. The company announced in October 2024 that it would close approximately 1,200 stores across the U.S. over three years (through 2027), with about 500 targeted for fiscal year 2025. 

This decision is not unique. Hundreds of larger retailers are also shutting down stores in risky neighborhoods, and critics argue that these closures are directly targeting areas in predominantly black and minority neighborhoods.  They complain that this trend is leading to “food deserts” where minorities do not have easy access to convenient shopping.

The problem, of course, is that these are the areas with the worst crime rates.  Furthermore, to keep said stores open in such places also puts employee safety at risk and makes the companies vulnerable to liability. 

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Companies Are Starting To Enforce AI Use. Is That A Good Or Bad Thing?

Years ago, I was working on the editorial side for what was then a hot new media company, and found myself spending more and more time with Johan, the lead programmer, and his team, asking them a lot of annoying questions as it was all so new – certainly to me. I was standing over Johan’s left shoulder, mesmerized by whatever new video game he was obsessing over that week…when suddenly, out of nowhere, a spreadsheet and a pie chart appeared on his screen.

“Whatcha got there, Johan?” asked Jim, Johan’s boss, peering over a sheaf of print-outs as he sharked past the cubicle.

“Hey, just looking at some numbers,” Johan replied. Johan had hit the “game key” in the nick of time – in those days, every video game had a game key – ALT-G if memory serves – calling up a slight variation of the same spreadsheet and pie chart.

This would never happen today. First, you’re probably not working in a cubicle, and if you are, it’s not the game key you’d hit to give your boss the impression that you’re actually doing productive work…it would be the “AI key.”

“Tech Firms Aren’t Just Encouraging Their Workers to Use AI. They’re Enforcing It.”

This article appeared in the February 24 edition of the Wall Street Journal. It includes the subtitle: From startups to giants, including Meta and Google, companies are factoring AI use into performance reviews and trying to track productivity gains

Across industries, companies are now enforcing AI use through performance reviews, dashboards that track adoption, and explicit mandates that tie it to compensation and promotion. What began in Silicon Valley has rapidly spread to consulting firms, banks, manufacturers, hospitals, and even government agencies.

As you’d expect, Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft were the first to move from encouragement to enforcement. Employees at these firms now see AI usage metrics appear in quarterly reviews. Non-adopters have reported stalled promotions or explicit warnings that “AI fluency” is a core competency (The Wall Street Journal, Feb 2026, reporting on internal policies).

The trend has jumped sectors. PwC requires every consultant to complete an “AI + Human Skillset” curriculum and incorporates usage into evaluations (Business Insider, Feb 5, 2026). Colgate-Palmolive’s “AI evangelist” tracks adoption across global teams. Major banks have begun tying bonuses to the number of AI-assisted analyses completed. Even some hospitals now require doctors and nurses to use AI-assisted diagnostic tools for certain procedures.

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They Are Experimenting on Your Dog

You read the labels. You check the ingredients. You avoid seed oils, limit sugar, and side-eye anything with a barcode longer than a haiku. You subscribe to Substacks that dissect institutional capture. You understand, probably better than most, that “the science” can be quietly purchased by the people it is supposed to regulate.

So let me ask you a question that might sting.

What did you feed your dog this morning?

If the answer is a brown pellet from a bag, you are running the same ultraprocessed food experiment on your dog that you have spent the last few years learning to reject for yourself and your family. And you are doing it for entirely understandable reasons, because the same machinery of institutional capture, industry-funded research, and reassuring pseudo-scientific language that once told you margarine was healthier than butter has been quietly operating in veterinary medicine for decades.

I am a practising veterinary surgeon in the UK. I have spent over 30 years in clinical practice, and I am the founding president of the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society. I also lecture on canine nutrition at the University of Glasgow and around the world. I was in Florida last year and San Diego the year before. I am writing a book on ultraprocessed food for dogs, because someone needs to say plainly what the pet food industry would rather you never thought about: your dog has been subjected to the most sustained ultraprocessed feeding experiment in mammalian history, and almost nobody noticed.

The Cleverest Marketing You Never Saw

Here is how it works, and it will feel familiar to anyone who has followed the corruption of nutritional science in human medicine.

The major pet food corporations do not merely sell food. They fund the university departments in the UK and the US where veterinary nutritional science is researched. They endow professorships. They provide free student packs and educational materials to veterinary schools. They sponsor the conferences where vets gather for continuing professional development. They supply the textbooks. They fund the bursaries. They stock the waiting room shelves and put posters on the surgery walls.

They do this so quietly and so comprehensively that most vets do not even realise they have been swimming in industry-sponsored water since the first day of vet school.

The result is predictable. Almost all large-scale nutrition studies published over the past 50 years have been conducted on extruded, grain-based diets produced by the very companies that funded the research. That research became what vets are taught. 

Raw and fresh diets, by contrast, have received almost no industry funding, which means almost no large-scale trials. Vets are then honestly told there is “no evidence” for raw, because nobody with money has paid for that evidence to exist.

It is rather like sponsoring every study on buses and then declaring there is “no evidence” that bicycles work.

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association’s Global Nutrition Committee now explicitly warns that most pet nutrition studies are industry-funded and says conflicts of interest should always be declared. RCVS Knowledge, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in the UK, which runs the Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine Network, notes that funding source is one of the strongest predictors of outcome in nutrition trials. JAVMA News has run pieces on corporate influence in veterinary education.

This is in the official documents. It is no longer fringe grumbling.

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CORPORATE EXODUS: Woke Target Pays Staggering $110 Million Fee to Terminate Minneapolis Lease

Woke retail giant Target Corp. has reportedly shelled out a jaw-dropping $110 million just to walk away from its massive office space in downtown Minneapolis.

The move marks a final, desperate retreat from the 51-story City Center tower, where the company once occupied nearly one million square feet of prime real estate.

Rather than waiting out a lease set to expire in 2031, Target chose to cut a massive check to wash its hands of the property.

The Star Tribune reported:

After moving out of nearly a million square feet of office space in downtown Minneapolis’ City Center building five years ago, Target paid almost $110 million last month to officially break its lease that ran through 2031.

Now the owner of the 51-story tower at 33 S. 6th St. — an entity tied to South Korean conglomerate Samsung — is preparing to list the property for sale, according to a Feb. 2 loan servicer report.

[…]

The Minneapolis-based retailer has continued to pay rent for the offices as they sat dark, making City Center a symbol of the challenges and uncertainties facing a downtown that relied heavily on its white-collar commuter crowds.

Target did try to sublet the space but didn’t have much luck beyond law firm Fox Rothschild moving into about 40,000 square feet of offices in 2022.

A spokesman for Target declined to comment on the lease-ending agreement but emphasized the company’s commitment to downtown Minneapolis as its second-largest employer. The retailer had been the biggest employer in the area for years until Hennepin Healthcare took the spot in 2024. Last summer, Target called its largest corporate unit back to the office three days a week and consolidated employees into other downtown properties near its Nicollet Mall headquarters.

Several other downtown office towers have sold in recent years, many at deep discounts as they grappled with high vacancies, maturing loans, rising borrowing costs and leery lenders.

Minneapolis, which became the national epicenter of radical “Defund the Police” rhetoric and unrest following the 2020 riots, has struggled to regain its footing.

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Lie-a-Watha Strikes Again! Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Tell the Truth About Tesla Paying Taxes

Senator Elizabeth Warren isn’t exactly known for her honesty. She’s repeated the oft-debunked lie about the SAVE Act preventing women from voting, she lied about the affordability crisis being the fault of the Trump administration (and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent nuked her for it), and she lied about President Trump causing “chaos” by firing air traffic controllers.

Now she’s back, and lying about Tesla not paying federal taxes.

Well, seeing as corporate taxes are passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices for goods and services, yes, it does. But it’s also not true. Tesla simply didn’t refuse to pay federal taxes or anything; under the current tax law, it didn’t have to.

Tesla has been unprofitable for most of its history. How can you pay taxes on money you didn’t make? Of course, Warren and other Democrats like capital gains taxes on unrealized gains, so they’re fine with forcing people to pay taxes on money they didn’t make.

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Trump Admin Threatens to Pull MASSIVE Federal Contract From 7-Eleven After Radical Leftist Employee Denies Service to US Border Patrol

The Trump administration is demanding answers from one of the largest convenience store chains in the world after U.S. Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino and multiple federal agents were reportedly denied service at a 7-Eleven–owned Speedway gas station in Minneapolis late last month.

According to a letter obtained by Fox News, Michael Lynch, Deputy Administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA), formally contacted 7-Eleven Chief Operating Officer Doug Rosencrans requesting information about any internal investigation into the now-viral January 21 incident.

The letter reportedly warned that the company’s lucrative federal partnership could now be in jeopardy.

Speedway locations, which operate under 7-Eleven ownership, currently accept the GSA SmartPay Fleet Card, a government-issued payment system used by federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security to purchase fuel and authorized vehicle maintenance for official operations.

In his letter, Lynch raised serious concerns:

“As 7-Eleven, Inc./Speedway LLC locations accept the GSA SmartPay fleet card for fuel and other authorized purchases on behalf of Federal fleets —i ncluding those operated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — these actions raise concerns about the ability of Federal vehicle operators to access necessary fuel and services at convenient locations.”

The reported refusal allegedly included both in-store purchases and fuel transactions, potentially interfering with mandatory procurement protocols for all non-tactical federal vehicles leased through the GSA Fleet program.

According to the GSA’s own website, the Fleet Card is accepted at roughly 95% of fuel stations nationwide, making reliable access to participating merchants operationally critical for federal enforcement missions across all 50 states.

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The Lost Dog That Made Constant Surveillance Feel Like a Favor

Amazon picked the Super Bowl for a reason. Nothing softens a technological land grab like a few million viewers, a calm voice, and a lost dog.

Ring’s commercial introduced “Search Party,” a feature that links doorbell cameras through AI and asks users to help find missing pets. The tone was gentle despite the scale being enormous.

Jamie Siminoff, Ring’s founder, narrated the ad over images of taped-up dog posters and surveillance footage polished to look comforting rather than clinical. “Pets are family, but every year, 10 million go missing,” he said. The answer arrived on cue. “Search Party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs.”

This aired during a broadcast already stuffed with AI branding, where commercial breaks felt increasingly automated. Ring’s spot stood out because it described a system already deployed across American neighborhoods rather than a future promise.

Search Party lets users post a missing dog alert through the Ring app. Participating outdoor cameras then scan their footage for dogs resembling the report. When the system flags a possible match, the camera owner receives an alert and can decide whether to share the clip.

Siminoff framed the feature as a community upgrade. “Before Search Party, the best you could do was drive up and down the neighborhood, shouting your dog’s name in hopes of finding them,” he said.

The new setup allows entire neighborhoods to participate at once. He emphasized that it is “available to everyone for free right now” in the US, including people without Ring cameras.

Amazon paired the launch with a $1 million initiative to equip more than 4,000 animal shelters with Ring systems. The company says the goal is faster reunification and shorter shelter stays.

Every element of the rollout leaned toward public service language.

The system described in the ad already performs pattern detection, object recognition, and automated scanning across a wide network of private cameras.

The same system that scans footage for a missing dog already supports far broader forms of identification. Software built to recognize an animal by color and shape also supports license plate reading, facial recognition, and searches based on physical description.

Ring already operates a process that allows police to obtain footage without a warrant under situations they classify as emergencies. Once those capabilities exist inside a shared camera network, expanding their use becomes a matter of policy choice rather than technical limitation.

Ring also typically enables new AI features by default, leaving users responsible for finding the controls to disable them.

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Queer Lobby Reports 65% Drop In Fortune 500s Celebrating Corporate DEI

The number of Fortune 500 companies willing to publicly disclose their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices has dropped 65 percent in the last year, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).

The HRC, likely the most powerful gay and “transgender” lobby in the country, typically keeps track of which companies are doing its political bidding. According to a 2026 report, only 131 Fortune 500 companies in 2026 are participating in HRC’s Corporate Equality Index — the primary measure of corporate ideological compliance for HRC.

That is down from 377 Fortune 500 companies in 2025. Part of the decrease, HRC says, is so companies can maintain federal contracts as the Trump administration has cracked down on DEI and awarding taxpayer dollars to companies that advance the ideology.

The mere fact that these corporations drew back from their public display of DEI initiatives should not elicit conservatives’ praise. After all, the index is not measuring whether these companies are still participating in DEI, but rather whether they are willing to publicly brag about their efforts.

“Year‑over‑year analysis of 2025 and 2026 submissions show that implementation of policies and practices measured by the CEI was sustained or increased, with no declines across any criterion,” the report states. At best, the organizations that are no longer participating publicly are ones that blow with the political wind, and can be expected to return to their left-wing propagandizing the moment Democrats return to power.

This reality points to the potential reason for HRC choosing to publish this data. At first glance, it may seem that the radical gender ideology movement is losing steam, but in reality, HRC’s data is a shot across the bow reminding companies that their disloyalty will not be forgotten.

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