Brooklyn-based entrepreneur. Just joined Twitter in disgust with the collapse of America as we once knew it. RESIST.
Joined April 2020
- Tweets9.2K
- Following4.2K
- Followers2.5K
- Likes6.7K
Mark Osborne retweeted
In February 2026, Ueno Bank reportedly paid US$100,000 for a “Diamond” sponsorship of a conservative gala held at Trump's Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. Brazilian federal deputy Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro and a prominent Trump ally, presented an award at the event.
According to Paraguayan central bank inspection records, Ueno had already exceeded legal limits on lending to companies connected to its shareholders. Between September 2025 and May 2026, the bank extended approximately US$146 million in loans and overdrafts to three related companies, exceeding the applicable lending ceiling by approximately US$41.5 million. Supervisors had documented concerns about these transactions months before the February gala, yet no formal regularisation plan had been demanded.
The US$100,000 Mar-a-Lago sponsorship therefore took place while Ueno was facing serious, unresolved regulatory problems and continuing to expand its financial and political relationships. Four months later, in June 2026, the bank transferred loans involving shareholder-linked companies to another company within the same business group. Central bank inspectors subsequently concluded that Ueno had indirectly financed the purchase of its own loans, contrary to banking regulations.
The Mar-a-Lago payment warrants a deeper investigation because it raises questions about why a Paraguayan financial institution facing regulatory scrutiny was spending substantial money sponsoring a political event associated with the US president and his international allies. Investigators would need to establish who authorised the expenditure, which organisation received the payment, what benefits the sponsorship provided, and whether the bank's executives pursued any additional political or commercial relationships through the event.
Mark Osborne retweeted
Let’s do the actual math of the imperial supply chain.
Take a mother working in a garment factory in Bangladesh.
She works a 12-hour shift.
During that shift, she sews more than 150-200 t-shirts for H&M.
Her pay for the entire day? Less than 5 dollars.
Now look at the other end of the ledger.
H&M takes those exact same shirts and sells them to European consumers for more than 20 Euros each.
That is over 4,000 Euros in retail value. Generated by her hands. In a single day.
Her cut is less than a fraction of a percent. The rest goes straight to shareholders in Stockholm.
What is the human cost of this math?
This mother spends 12 hours away from her child. She works until her body gives out. And she goes home to a wage that barely covers the bare minimum food to share with her family at the dinner table.
This is what Western "free trade" actually looks like on the ground.
The European consumer gets cheap fashion. The corporate boardroom gets record dividends. The Bangladeshi mother gets starvation.
H&M runs massive ad campaigns in Europe talking about "conscious" fashion and "sustainability."
But there is absolutely nothing sustainable about a system that requires a mother to sacrifice her child's childhood just to keep the company's profit margins intact.
This is why the factories are shutting down.
They aren't just striking for a few extra cents. They are striking for the right to actually sit at the dinner table with their kids.
All power to the striking workers of Bangladesh.
They are hitting the empire right in the ledger.
Mark Osborne retweeted
I spent two years working with Stephen Miller.
His appointment as White House chief of staff is among the most dangerous personnel decisions in the history of our republic.
I say that without reservation.
Mark Osborne retweeted
The Democrats may have taken control of the House and the Senate, they may have humiliated Donald Trump and the Republican Party, but the real fight is only beginning. It is not simply a battle to hold the corrupt Trump regime to account, something that can only be done if the Democrats are willing overcome their reluctance to carry out impeachment proceedings against the president. It is also a battle to sweep away the corporate-indentured hierarchy of the Democratic Party, including Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries.
The Democratic Party since the presidency of Bill Clinton, who gave us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the greatest betrayal of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and gutted New Deal-era welfare programs such as the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, is a more polished version of corporate and oligarchic rule, abjectly subservient to the war machine, the Israel lobby and their funders in the billionaire class.
The country is broken. Corruption, in both parties, is endemic. Federal agencies have been hollowed out and destroyed. The courts, including the Supreme Court, have been handed over to right-wing ideologues. The working class is crippled with debt peonage and substandard wages. Constitutional norms and protections have been erased. Billionaires, including Trump, pay little to no income tax. The 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which allows big business to fund their hand-picked candidates, sustains a system of legalized bribery.
The public may clamor for a raise in the minimum wage, Medicare for All, regulation of the big banks and private equity firms, an end to arms shipments to Israel and campaign finance reform, but no one in the leadership of the Democratic Party listens or cares. They serve their paymasters.
Will cutthroat capitalism, sold to us under the sanitized name of neoliberalism, be allowed to continue to impoverish the citizenry and funnel wealth upwards into the hands of the 1 percent? Will corporations be regulated and policed? Will corporate criminals be brought to trial? Will our democracy be restored? Or will the grotesque sight of a trillionaire, Elon Musk, gutting federal agencies and pouring hundreds of millions into elections to try and control the outcome be normalized?
The handful of politicians who attempt to confront the corruption and the devastation visited on the American working class through deindustrialization and deregulation, such as Bernie Sanders, see their campaigns sabotaged by the Democratic Party leadership, including Barack Obama.
We must demand that progressive candidates, including Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson, build coalitions to oust the Democratic Party leadership, raise the minimum wage, enact universal health care, prosecute corporate crime and impeach Trump. It will be up to us.
The Democratic Party hierarchy will see the results not as a repudiation of Trump, but an endorsement of the flaccid and ineffectual position of a party that stands for little and fights for less. This would be yet another betrayal by the Democrats of voters. It would keep alive the very real prospect of another fascist, one better organized and more intelligent, taking the White House in two years.
Of course, this fight will mean not only jettisoning a corrupt Democratic Party leadership, but turning on the mega-donors, lobbyists and corporations that fund and control the Democratic Party.
The effort to wrest the party back from the hands of corporations and oligarchs will be vicious and difficult. It will require us to rely on the power of mass movements to sever these bonds. Nothing else will work.
If we fail, our anemic democracy will not be saved by these midterm elections, but doomed.
Mark Osborne retweeted
Why should Congressional Democrats investigate corporate America if their mandate is to deliver real economic change? Because investigations are a key catalyst for securing reform and legislation. For much of the last century, Congress used to be the main institutional player working to secure an economy that serves working people. A key tool was oversight. Lawmakers routinely investigated complex markets and major corporations, identifying problems and exposing wrongdoing. A major goal of these investigations was to learn what was driving certain problems and figure out how to fix them.
After Democrats took back the House during the first Trump administration in 2019, I joined the House Judiciary Committee as a staffer on the Antitrust Subcommittee. Under the terrific leadership of @RepJerryNadler and then-Rep @davidcicilline, we pursued an 18-month investigation into Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, securing key evidence of how their business practices were undermining competition and harming people, setting the basis for both lawsuits and proposed legislation.
A few lessons from that experience:
1. The quality of legislative oversight depends on the staff and the support of top members to confront power. Committee and Subcommittee Chairs that are focused on getting answers and unafraid to take on powerful corporate interests will make the difference between oversight that doesn’t surrender to their evasion tactics and oversight that aims low or flames out.
Even a relatively small number of dogged, talented lawyers ready to dive in can make a big impact. In the 1930s a single congressional lawyer, Ferdinand Pecora, helped reshape our entire banking system by subpoenaing records and interrogating top financiers, including J.P Morgan. The investigation exposed self-dealing, market manipulation, and tax avoidance, and laid the groundwork for foundational New Deal legislation, including the Glass-Steagall Act and the Securities Exchange Act.
2. Eliminating bottlenecks to moving investigations forward is key. For example, the House should make sure that Subcommittee Chairs can issue subpoenas rather than needing the sign-off of the full Committee or its Chair. A credible threat of sending subpoenas is critical for credible oversight.
3. Ensuring that members can develop the muscle to effectively interrogate CEOs requires investing in real preparation. In the lead up to the hearing with Bezos, Pichai, Cook, and Zuckerberg, the Antitrust Subcommittee spent months reviewing millions of documents collected from the firms, interviewing affected parties, briefing members on key evidence, and conducting practice hearings. Members came into the hearing deeply informed and able to rebut and call out CEO dissembling. The result was some of the most effective member questioning of executives we’ve seen in decades. @TheProspect wrote up a great overview: prospect.org/2020/07/30/triu…
4. For decades, institutional capacity in Congress has been extremely weak. Much of this traces back to the Gingrich Revolution, which was effectively the 1995 DOGE-ing of Congress. Republican leadership fired over 600 professional staffers, eliminated the Office of Technology Assessment, and gutted research capacity. None of that capacity was ever meaningfully restored.
As a result, members have way fewer resources to develop serious expertise or go deep on a new topic. Members should start rebuilding that capacity so the institution can fully play its Article I role, where Congress can again do serious policy development and legislating and serve as a real check on the executive and judicial branches.
5. AI markets should be high on the list of investigations. The business decisions of the major AI firms have huge public ramifications, yet the public is at a severe informational disadvantage when it comes to how these markets work and the choices these firms are making. A congressional investigation will help ensure future legislative action is based on a more complete view of what is going on rather than selective and partial corporate disclosures.
Mark Osborne retweeted
Raskin: This meaningless false dichotomy comes from the media, which is: Are you going to do accountability or are you going to do affordability? As if they were in any way different from each other.
If Think about the French monarchy and when Marie Antoinette says, Let them eat cake. Is that a problem for the people of accountability, or is it a problem of affordability? It’s the exact same thing. It’s government in the interest of a tiny group of people, so nobody can afford to buy their bread. And so when the monarchy says, Let them eat cake, that is a statement of what the priorities are of a tiny privileged few who serve oligarchs and nobles and so on, and not the vast majority of the American people.
I mean, the American Revolution began with the Boston Tea Party because the East India Company, which was this chartered, bloated corporation from the Crown, had decided that they should get tax advantages for the importation of tea that the colonists could not get.
Now, is that a problem of corruption and authoritarianism and tyranny, or is it a problem of affordability and the cost of living? It’s the exact same thing, and it’s the same with us, right?
So what’s the main dramatic price increase people have been complaining about? Well, it’s gasoline, which is up $1.50 a gallon since before the Iran War started, right? In some places, it’s still $4.50, $4.60 right now. Diesel is up to, I think, $6.70.
Is that a problem of affordability or accountability? Affordability or corruption? Well, let’s see. The person who was supposed to be negotiating with Iran was centrally involved with the Donald Trump team in destroying the JCPOA. Jared Kushner was very involved in taking down the nuclear agreement that kept Iran, for at least more than a decade, from investing in any nuclear development.
And then Trump came in and wanted above all to destroy that. Well, who else had an agenda of trying to destroy that so the lack of a nuclear agreement could be used as a pretext for war? Well, Iran’s principal enemies in the region—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Israel—all of those countries targeted Iran. They wanted that nuclear agreement to go away, and it was working. Great. There were all kinds of investigative enforcement mechanisms that were taking place, and it was working fine, and they wanted to tear it down.
Then the lack of that agreement became the justification for this illegal, unconstitutional war, never declared by Congress, that has cost the American people more than, I think, $55 or $60 billion at this point and cost dozens of American lives. I don’t even know how many thousands of Iranians now, but certainly more than a thousand Iranians, as a girls’ boarding school was destroyed on the first day of the war.
Mark Osborne retweeted
Raskin: This meaningless false dichotomy comes from the media, which is: Are you going to do accountability or are you going to do affordability? As if they were in any way different from each other.
If Think about the French monarchy and when Marie Antoinette says, Let them eat cake. Is that a problem for the people of accountability, or is it a problem of affordability? It’s the exact same thing. It’s government in the interest of a tiny group of people, so nobody can afford to buy their bread. And so when the monarchy says, Let them eat cake, that is a statement of what the priorities are of a tiny privileged few who serve oligarchs and nobles and so on, and not the vast majority of the American people.
I mean, the American Revolution began with the Boston Tea Party because the East India Company, which was this chartered, bloated corporation from the Crown, had decided that they should get tax advantages for the importation of tea that the colonists could not get.
Now, is that a problem of corruption and authoritarianism and tyranny, or is it a problem of affordability and the cost of living? It’s the exact same thing, and it’s the same with us, right?
So what’s the main dramatic price increase people have been complaining about? Well, it’s gasoline, which is up $1.50 a gallon since before the Iran War started, right? In some places, it’s still $4.50, $4.60 right now. Diesel is up to, I think, $6.70.
Is that a problem of affordability or accountability? Affordability or corruption? Well, let’s see. The person who was supposed to be negotiating with Iran was centrally involved with the Donald Trump team in destroying the JCPOA. Jared Kushner was very involved in taking down the nuclear agreement that kept Iran, for at least more than a decade, from investing in any nuclear development.
And then Trump came in and wanted above all to destroy that. Well, who else had an agenda of trying to destroy that so the lack of a nuclear agreement could be used as a pretext for war? Well, Iran’s principal enemies in the region—Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Israel—all of those countries targeted Iran. They wanted that nuclear agreement to go away, and it was working. Great. There were all kinds of investigative enforcement mechanisms that were taking place, and it was working fine, and they wanted to tear it down.
Then the lack of that agreement became the justification for this illegal, unconstitutional war, never declared by Congress, that has cost the American people more than, I think, $55 or $60 billion at this point and cost dozens of American lives. I don’t even know how many thousands of Iranians now, but certainly more than a thousand Iranians, as a girls’ boarding school was destroyed on the first day of the war.
Mark Osborne retweeted
If you wake up this morning and see the surge of black voters across the Deep South and the bold response of Latinos who came out despite the threats, and the presidential level participation of young folks, and conclude that the scale of our victory was solely because “we had the discipline to stay on message about kitchen table issues” - you should not be given a dime of our ActBlue donations for your guaranteed future mediocre strategies.
That was a rights based surge. A democracy surge. Gas prices, irrational tariffs, and broad cost of living played a huge role. But we cannot ignore what animated the souls of our surge voters. And we absolutely cannot continue to ignore corruption as an issue even within our own Party “until the polls catch up”
Mark Osborne retweeted
NEW: Meet incoming speaker Hakeem Jeffries’ donors: Anduril and Palantir executives, Wall Street investors, crypto lobbyists, and donors funneling contributions through AIPAC.
We followed the money behind Hakeem Jeffries. readsludge.com/2026/11/04/th…
Mark Osborne retweeted
"Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it."
-- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis (#1)
Mark Osborne retweeted
“I don’t want to be just sitting there for two years vetoing everything.”
President Donald Trump picked up a call from @DashaBurns on POLITICO Elections Live and talked to us about the blue wave and how he’s willing to work with incoming congressional Democrats.
Watch live now: politi.co/4AgCofb
Mark Osborne retweeted
Over the last 2 years, Elias Law Group has litigated and won scores of voting and election cases. Tonight, we saw the results -- Democrats won free and fair elections.
In the days ahead we will protect these results from DOJ and GOP attack. When we fight, we win.🗳️⚖️💪
Mark Osborne retweeted
Apple putting all the destroyed buildings back in Gaza on Maps isn’t just wrong to do because it’s an inaccurate depiction, it’s terrifying. If a company with as much notoriety and influence as Apple wants to whitewash a genocide, what’s next? Shame on you, Apple.
Mark Osborne retweeted
It begins. theguardian.com/us-news/2026…
Mark Osborne retweeted
Hi #MAGA
Russia is not our friend.
Canada is not our enemy.
What we did in Venezuela is not power, it's piracy.
Greenland is not for sale.
Abdul El-Sayed is not a jihadist.
James Talarico is a Christian, not a freak.
Gas prices are higher because Trump started a war.
Grocery prices are higher because of Trump's tariffs.
It's illegal for non-citizens to
vote.
The incidence of voter fraud in America is 0.0001%
In a Constitutional republic, States control their elections.
And Trump is still in the Epstein files.
Have a nice day. 🇺🇸
Mark Osborne retweeted
"I don't understand why they're pushing AI so hard when we can all see it's making everything worse."
That's because it's not being marketed to you; it's being marketed to governments and plutocrats. They're the real target audience for these products, not you.
You are not receiving the real sales pitch for AI, because the real sales pitch would not appeal to your sensibilities. The real sales pitch for AI isn't "Hey check out this product, it makes some web searches slightly easier and it can maybe write your emails for you." The real sales pitch for AI is "This product allows you to surveil the entire population of your country. It can be built into autonomous surveillance drones and killing machines. It can allow you to monitor and control every aspect of your society. It can reverse the decentralization of information brought on by the internet age. It can take away the collective bargaining power of workers and give you the skilled services your company requires. It can nullify strikes, civil disobedience, and even full-scale revolutions, and lock humanity into your capitalist dystopia forever."
That's the real sales pitch. It doesn't sound appealing to any normal person, but it makes sense when you remember who these technologies are really being sold to, and why.
Mark Osborne retweeted
What happened with that viral Red Baron Pizza worker is not a feel-good story, it's a feel-bad story. Everything about it says horrible things about where our society is headed.
Some obnoxious prick films a guy working his fingers to the bone for a "prank" hoping to get social media clicks, and the worker flips out at him because his shitty, abusive job had stretched him a hair's breadth from snapping. The video goes viral because people sympathize with a father shouting at a creepy live-streamer about how his shift was supposed to end an hour ago and he needs to get up at five in the morning to do it all again so his family doesn't get evicted from the home he's struggling to pay for, and then a fundraiser is launched which winds up giving the man half a million dollars.
Sounds like a happy ending, until you look at it. None of the other Red Baron workers are getting fundraisers to help them make ends meet; they're all toiling and suffering along with everyone else in similar socioeconomic positions, just as the man in the video would have been if he hadn't gone viral. Turns out the guy who set up the fundraiser for the Red Baron employee was himself a homeless veteran of the US military, who received his own far less successful fundraiser when this revelation came out. When you zoom out, this is just a story about how incredibly bleak life is for ordinary people in the heart of the US empire.
And yet capitalism proponents have seized on this story as an example of the system working perfectly while portraying it as a victory in their weird culture war theater. Conservative media platforms like The Daily Wire, The New York Post and Barstool Sports have framed the worker as a people's champion standing up to an entitled coastal liberal while working hard for his employer as Judeo-Christian God intended. Red Baron posted on social media that they are part of their employee's "fan club" and that he is their "employee of the month", causing conservative figures like Laura Loomer, Benny Johnson, Kevin Sorbo and Tim Burchett to swoon with approval.
They want you focusing on this one particular instance where it all worked out fine so that you don't think about the exponentially greater number of instances in which it doesn't. Billionaire corporations are exploiting workers around the world for appallingly meager wages, causing a combined amount of suffering too vast for the human mind to comprehend. People resonated with that worker pouring his heart out into that click slut's Meta glasses because so many of us have been there and know what it's like to be stretched to the breaking point just trying to feed your kids.
The capitalist class squeezes the life out of workers, and then they manipulate working people's thoughts at mass scale so they don't understand what's happening to them. They tell them their suffering is because of immigrants, or welfare recipients, or an amorphous cabal of "elites" who always conveniently belong exclusively to the opposite political party. They feed them media convincing them that the system is working fine and that if they can't hack it it's because something is wrong with them. They offer them the occasional "feel-good" viral story about someone who got lucky, like feudal serfs listening to fairy tales imagining that they too might one day marry a prince or discover that they are a member of the royal family who was lost at birth.
They pour all this energy into convincing workers to accept the status quo because they are at all times acutely aware that as soon as the workers stop accepting the status quo, it's over for them. The most under-discussed political reality in the world is that there are a whole lot more people suffering under the status quo than there are people profiting from it, and that the sufferers are fully capable of overturning the status quo by force whenever they decide to.
Our entire society is built around the need to manipulate our attention away from this political reality. All our mainstream culture. All our news media. All our politics. All our education systems. It's all designed to direct our gaze away from the reality that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that they need us infinitely more than we need them.
They don't want us to look at this reality. They don't want us thinking about it.
But we really, really should.
