Wealth extraction in America runs on two engines. The first is corporate: wealth generated not by building something of value but by capturing, controlling, or stripping value that others produced. The second is political: governmental authority — legislative, regulatory, fiscal, enforcement — used to move wealth from the many to the few. Separately, each has limits. Together, they form a self-reinforcing system that has been reshaping the American economy for half a century.
Systems Analysis
In-depth analysis and multi-part series on political, social, and cultural dynamics. Strategic thinking and big-picture perspectives on systemic patterns and civic challenges.
My Experience with a Transgender Child
A transgender child is a child, not a political position. Most of us learned XX and XY in school. The biology is considerably more complicated than that- and so are the kids.
Total Capture: Israel Owns the American State
The Israeli government is not the Jewish people. This piece is about one, not the other.
The 2027 National Defense Authorization Act is another iteration of the Israeli capture of American politics. The relationship has grown deeper, broader, and more institutionalized over time, to the point that the United States is now committing genocide in service of Israeli objectives.
Following the Money: The Billion-Dollar Tax Cut
The sales pitch focused on workers and families. The largest (and permanent) tax benefits are for the already-rich.
Relief for Whom? Arizona’s “Tax Cut” Bill
Relief for Whom?
The Republican-controlled Arizona legislature opened the 2026 session with a tax bill they call the Arizona One Big Beautiful Bill — a deliberate echo of Trump’s federal legislation. They passed it on party-line votes, twice, and Governor Hobbs vetoed it both times. They call it over a billion dollars in tax relief. It is. For the wealthy and large businesses.
Claims vs. Reality
Universal Healthcare: We Already Know How to Do This
We spend more for fragmented healthcare than comparable countries do for universal care, and get far worse outcomes.
“Medicare for All” is a phrase with a lot of political baggage, so set it aside. What it describes is simpler: extending a system Americans already built to the rest of the population. This piece uses “universal healthcare” from here on, because that’s what it is.
Medicare works. It covers every American over 65, regardless of employment status or health history. It operates with administrative overhead of roughly 2%, compared to 12-15% for private insurers. It negotiates prices, it pays claims, and it has done so for sixty years. We know how to do this because we already do it.
Healthcare doesn’t work like a normal market.
You can’t comparison shop during a cardiac event. You don’t choose when to have a stroke. Every wealthy country that looked honestly at these conditions reached the same conclusion: healthcare cannot be organized around market competition.
The American system has grown around a different goal. The administrative apparatus — prior authorizations, claim denials, billing complexity — exists to protect revenue, not deliver care. The clinical judgment of a trained physician is overruled by a clerk or algorithm with no medical expertise and every financial incentive to deny.
What Does Medicare for All Mean?
The Insurance Pool
Health insurance is a mechanism for pooling risk. Medicare for All is a proposal for extending an existing version of that mechanism to everyone. This piece explains both — how insurance works, where it went wrong, and what “Medicare for All” actually means.
Health insurance is a mechanism for spreading financial risk across a large population so that no single person bears the catastrophic cost of serious illness alone. Everyone pays in, and everyone draws down when needed. Across a lifetime, most people are sometimes healthy, and sometimes need medical care. The function of insurance is to spread the cost of care across users. Insurance functions differently from a normal consumer market.
A productive market system (fair profit for a valuable service) requires something insurance cannot provide: a real exit option. A functioning market depends on customers who can walk away — who can comparison shop, switch providers, or go without. Competition disciplines prices and quality only when exit is possible. Remove the exit and you remove the mechanism that makes markets work.
Social Democracy Is Not Socialism
Social Democracy Is Not Socialism Democrats struggle to make that distinction in the public mind. This piece, published on Substack, examines the difference between social democracy and socialism — two distinct systems that have been deliberately confused for fifty years. It covers the historical record of social democratic governance, how “socialism” became a political weapon, … Read more
Hondurasgate: The Political Plot American Media Isn’t Covering
A set of audio recordings is circulating across Latin America right now. They have been forensically authenticated. They document sitting heads of state coordinating a funded disinformation operation targeting elected governments in the region. The operation is being built on American soil.
You probably haven’t heard about it.
Fifteen States Against Citizens United
This article was originally published on Red, Blue & Real, the author’s Substack publication. The version below includes sources and further reading.
Two Doors for Money Into Politics
Money in politics is a classically American conflict. In 2010, business interests gained an entirely new level of legal power. The change was not simply more money. It was a different kind of money, operating under different rules, in quantities that made the previous system look small by comparison.
Two federal court rulings that year dismantled major parts of a century of campaign finance law. One allowed corporations to spend directly on elections. The other created the super PAC system — unlimited independent spending, unlimited contributions, no effective ceiling.
The results reshaped American politics. Outside groups spent roughly $4.5 billion in the 2024 election cycle.5 Super PACs alone raised more than $5 billion.5 Dark money — political spending that does not disclose its original source — reached record levels approaching $1.9 billion.8
Fifteen states have now developed a legal theory intended to close the corporate spending door. The super PAC door is another matter entirely.