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Welcome to You’re Probably Getting Screwed, a weekly newsletter and video series from J.D. Scholten and Justin Stofferahn about the Second Gilded Age and the ways economic concentration is putting politics and profits over working people.
When Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013, he told us he was saving a pillar of American democracy. He promised financial stability, journalistic ambition, and a newsroom that would hold power accountable. Instead, nearly thirteen years later, what we’re witnessing is not a revival of a great newspaper — it’s a hollowing out of one, all while Bezos doubles down on vanity projects, government war contracts, and billionaire antics that have nothing to do with telling the truth [ [link removed] ].
On February 4, 2026, The Washington Post laid off a staggering one-third of its newsroom — more than 300 journalists, including entire departments and key foreign bureaus (including a war correspondent reporting from a war zone who found out of her job loss via an email [ [link removed] ]) — in what veteran reporters and media critics are calling one of the darkest days in the paper’s history. These cuts obliterated the sports section, gutted coverage of local communities, and shuttered bureaus that mattered for global reporting [ [link removed] ].
If journalism is the lifeblood of accountability in a functioning democracy, then Bezos has just punctured its heart.
Contrast that with the performance of The New York Times had an encouraging 2025. The Times added some 1.4 million digital subscribers, bringing it to roughly 12.8 million total subscribers and generating record digital revenue [ [link removed] ]. That is a journalistic institution thriving, growing, innovating, and winning readers despite the industry’s headwinds — not hollowing out its newsroom under billionaire rule.
Where did The Post go wrong? The answer isn’t simply “technology changed.” The Post’s decline tracks directly with Bezos’s own choices.
In 2024, Bezos intervened politically and editorially, shelving a prepared endorsement of a presidential candidate and imposing ideological restrictions on the opinion section. Those moves reportedly drove hundreds of thousands of subscribers away [ [link removed] ]. This was the first inkling that Bezos didn’t buy The Post to protect its independence but to reshape it toward his preferences. Once that trust was broken, subscribers departed and newsroom morale cratered.
Now imagine this: while The Post is cutting jobs, Bezos’s broader empire is not exactly tightening the belt for necessity. He has presided over Amazon spending tens of millions on a documentary about Melania Trump, a documentary of content critics deride as a vanity project, that Bezos spent perhaps $75 million total to acquire and promote [ [link removed] ] and is largely viewed as a political bribe in the open. This wasn’t vital news. It wasn’t investigative journalism. It was a splashy entertainment project that — in the middle of a newsroom implosion — looks like a billionaire choosing political glossy over people telling the truth.
Hundreds of working journalists — people with mortgages, families, rent — were shown the door the same week people online learned about Bezos’s decisions. The optics aren’t just bad — they’re a scathing indictment of how billionaire ownership distorts priorities.
And while he starves journalism, Bezos’s other ventures are doomed to profit from war and Pentagon largesse. His aerospace company Blue Origin has been positioning itself for lucrative defense contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and Space Force — part of a new militarized space economy where private contractors profit from federal war spending [ [link removed] ].
Do not be mistaken: these contracts aren’t small. Blue Origin is carving out a slice of [ [link removed] ]multibillion-dollar Pentagon launch deals [ [link removed] ] alongside SpaceX and United Launch Alliance [ [link removed] ]. And this is happening at a time when the Washington Post — *the watchdog that should be reporting on this very nexus of private profit and public war spending* — is being gutted.
It’s not just a paper laid low. It’s a warning sign.
Bezos once claimed he wanted to scale The Post to tens of millions of subscribers. But now, under his stewardship, it has shrunk, disinvested, and lost editorial independence — while Amazon and its related ventures chase wealth and government contracts. That’s not stewardship. That’s corporate cannibalism.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t just a business downturn. Traditional media struggles with digital disruption — that’s true. But when a rival like the New York Times can grow by more than a million subscribers in the same year, it tells you that Bezos’s Post didn’t fail because the public stopped needing news. It failed because the owner stopped believing in its mission.
This is the logical consequence of billionaire ownership of essential public institutions. A newspaper designed to speak truth to power becomes a silenced, stripped-down shell when the billionaire at the top has other interests — documentary deals, military contracts, AI investments, and ways to expand corporate influence.
The Washington Post layoffs aren’t some random business decision. They are the result of a fundamental misalignment of incentives, where the public good is secondary to personal wealth, political favor, and corporate profit.
And the cost isn’t measured in stock price or subscriber counts. The cost is paid in democratic accountability, in stories untold, in communities ignored, and in a citizenry less informed.
Jeff Bezos failed the Washington Post — and in doing so, he failed us all.
YOU’RE PROBABLY (ALSO) GETTING SCREWED BY:
Walmart
When it comes to e-commerce and retail Amazon has been the focus for years, but an old standby is still alive and well. Walmart is now a $1 trillion company. As small business expert Stacy Mitchell pointed out in a thread [ [link removed] ], Walmart’s massive capitalization is “the product of decades of anticompetitive behavior — enabled by antitrust non-enforcement.”
Amazon
Speaking of everyone’s favorite tech titan, the Bezos-owned Washington Post has continued to be gutted [ [link removed] ] with hundreds of layoffs announced earlier today. This includes closing [ [link removed] ] the Post’s entire San Francisco Bureau, focused on covering the tech industry. Among those laid off is Caroline O’Donovan who primarily covers Amazon. Big Tech’s advertising monopolies destroyed journalism and are now gutting what remains.
Corporatization of Sports
More Perfect Union has a dive into how sports teams are ripping us off at the concession stand, but more importantly also dive into what states and cities can do about it. This includes cracking down on price gouging through use of state unfair practices laws or cities using funding agreements and other licensing to extract lower prices.
In addition to the More Perfect Union investigation we highly recommend folks check out the special “Business of Sports [ [link removed] ]” edition of The American Prospect which dives into all the ways sports have fallen victim to the concentrated power and anticompetitive conduct plaguing the rest of our economy.
But this is not just a problem in professional sports, independent journalist Joon Lee dug into the expanding reach of private equity into youth sports and what has happened to the little leagues and rec leagues of the past.
ICE Surveillance
Last week we looked at the growing marriage between our security state and surveillance economy. While Minnesota continues to deal with the aggressive tactics of ICE and CPB, the Minnesota Reformer dug into [ [link removed] ] the many tech tools those agencies are using to spy on Americans. In addition, the most recent episode of the Fair Fight Pod with Alvaro Bedoya and Max Miller looked into the billions going from ICE and CPB to Silicon Valley.
Meatpackers
A clear call [ [link removed] ] from Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborn.
SOME GOOD NEWS
Support for Right to Repair
Farmers should have the right to fix their damn tractor. Unfortunately on tactic farm equipment manufacturers have used to limit farmers rights is by claiming repair is limited by the Clean Air Act (CAA). This week the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued guidance [ [link removed] ] clarifying that the CAA actually supports, does not limit, the right to repair. Now to be fair, EPA issued similar guidance under the Biden Administration, but this means support for right to repair has now spanned two presidential administrations. In addition a high-ranking USDA official voiced support for the Federal Trade Commission’s ongoing antitrust lawsuit against John Deere for monopolizing the market for repair, which was originally filed by Lina Khan during the Biden Administration. Maybe bipartisanship can still happen in DC.
Antitrust Reform gains support in California
The California Law Review Commission has undertaken a multi-year comprehensive study of the state’s antitrust law and voted unanimously this week to recommend a major overhaul [ [link removed] ] to state legislators. While the Cartwright Act, California’s antitrust law, is one of the stronger out there California is also one of only four states without a ban on “single firm conduct” or anticompetitive abuses by a single, powerful company. While this is a major step forward in strengthening the antitrust laws in the nation’s largest state, now legislators must act.
BEFORE YOU GO
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Standing Tall for All,
J.D. Scholten

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