Politics and Systems

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.

Stephen Miller: Racism as a Governing Tool

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Ideological brokers provide the narrative framework that makes extractive policies appear reasonable and even necessary. Stephen Miller exemplifies this role by framing immigration as invasion and rights as conditional. His positions supply the justification for enforcement expansion, visa limitations, and resource redirection—enabling wealth extraction through structured policy while limiting political participation for targeted groups.

Government Breakdown: 2025

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The Trump administration in 2025 has broken the systemic capacity of the United States federal government. The administration cannot make coherent decisions, execute policy competently, maintain constitutional guardrails, or coordinate across government. Major failures are documented across national defense and public safety, rule of law, public goods delivery, economic regulation, fiscal management, civil liberties protection, social welfare, administrative capacity, data integrity, and international relations. The evidence shows the systemic failure of governmental capacity in the last 12 months.

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Hakeem Jeffries and Extraction Politics: Rhetoric, Fundraising, and Leadership Choices

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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries claims to be a champion against corporate influence in politics. Last month, he criticized Republicans for prioritizing “MAGA billionaire donors” over everyday Americans. This month he endorsed Democratic proposals to curb “corporate influence in our broken campaign finance system.”

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Political Donations Are a Wealth Extraction Tool

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Political Donations Are a Wealth Extraction Tool

Political donation requests are constant. They arrive by email, text, social media, and direct mail. Almost all of them come with urgency: a critical moment, a final push, everything on the line.

Many of the people being asked to give are already stretched thin. Donating isn’t casual for these households. It means tradeoffs, on top of rising costs and tight budgets.

Frustration, hopelessness, anger, and disgust are common.

This response is sometimes called donor fatigue or messaging excess. It is fatiguing and excessive — not because people don’t care, but because it is driven by wealth extraction.

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Everything Needs a Fundraiser Now

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I was noticing some fundraisers when I realized this is just another example of wealth extraction — fundraising for expenses that should be covered by systems we already pay for.

Online fundraising has exploded as a replacement for public systems that collect funds but fail to deliver.

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What the Presidency Means to Me

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For a more readable, condensed version of this research, see How Decent People Supported Trump: Understanding the Unthinkable
> Understanding How Decent People Supported Trump

What the Presidency Means to Me

The office of President of the United States represents something fundamental to my understanding of democracy and citizenship.

The Constitutional Foundation:
The presidency sits at the center of our constitutional democracy. The President is elected by the people, then enforces laws made by the people’s representatives in Congress. Representative democracy in the United States is constitutional because it is both limited and empowered by the supreme law, the Constitution, for the ultimate purpose of protecting equally the rights of all the people [Annenberg Classroom].

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Regime Change Wars: The Public Ledger

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For decades, the United States has fought costly wars to overthrow foreign governments—mostly in oil-producing countries—without delivering oil, security, or lower energy costs to Americans. This summary shows how those wars became massive public losses and private profits.

II. Scope, Definitions, and Accounting Rules

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This report is an accounting of outcomes — not an argument about motives, ideology, or intent. To ensure clarity and fairness, this section defines the report’s scope and the criteria used to evaluate costs and benefits.

Scope of the report

This report examines U.S. actions that meet all three of the following conditions:

  • The United States directly intervened to overthrow, remove, or decisively weaken a foreign government
  • The country targeted was a significant oil producer or held major proven oil reserves
  • The intervention was justified in part by claims related to security, stability, or strategic energy interests

The report focuses on modern U.S. interventions beginning in the mid-20th century, when oil became central to global economic and military planning. Earlier conflicts fall outside this scope because oil did not yet play the same structural role.

This report does not evaluate every U.S. military action worldwide. It focuses only on regime-change or regime-destabilization efforts in oil-producing countries, because those cases are most often linked—explicitly or implicitly—to energy narratives.

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III. Promised and Implied, Measured Against Outcomes

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U.S. regime-change wars in oil-producing countries were rarely officially described as “wars for oil.” Yet oil was almost always part of the background logic. The public was told—directly or indirectly—that these interventions would protect energy supplies, stabilize prices, or prevent hostile control of critical resources.

This section explains why those expectations were misplaced, and why they repeatedly failed when tested against real outcomes.

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