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The Lever’s daily email newsletter.🔥 Today’s Lever story: Before the Texas flood disaster, Congress and successive presidents ignored demands to fully fund a nationwide system monitoring rivers for signs of danger.
👇 Spend three minutes reading this 993-word newsletter to learn about:
- Why Prime Day’s deals are anything but.
- How it just got harder to cancel annoying subscriptions.
- A big win in the war on forever chemicals.
- The new crypto quest that could doom us all.
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TODAY'S NUGGETS
🛒 Amazon Subprime Day. As Amazon rolls out its annual Prime Day deals over the next few days, the shopping giant’s critics are urging folks to skip the gimmick. Amazon, founded by Trump ally Jeff Bezos, has spent years busting its workers’ union efforts, stealing data from its sellers to undermine competition, and manipulating prices, while receiving billions in public handouts. The federal government has paid an estimated $11.6 billion in subsidies for Amazon’s projects, and local governments have paid billions more to bring Amazon to town. In total, governments spend about $180,000 in taxpayer dollars on every $60,000 Amazon job — while the company’s lowest-paid workers rely on welfare to make ends meet. Subprime, indeed.
😵💫 Click to Cancel is canceled. The Biden-era “Click to Cancel” Rule — which requires businesses to make it as easy to cancel their subscriptions as it is to initiate them — was set to go into effect next week after it was delayed in May by the Trump administration. Now, it won’t go into effect at all, after a U.S. appeals court vacated the rule on Tuesday. The three Eighth Circuit judges — two appointed by Trump and one by George W. Bush — concluded that “procedural deficiencies of the Commission’s rulemaking are fatal.” The rule was heralded as a win for consumers, who are often trapped in subscriptions they struggle to cancel.
