Evidence-Based Information and Analysis
Laurel FitzhughEvery government we’ve removed in an oil-producing country was replaced by something just as bad or by chaos that was worse. We don’t have the ability to fix what we break, and it’s not our place to try. If we actually wanted to help these people, we’d find ways that work, and don’t involve destroying their country.
We are good at destroying governments. We have never successfully replaced one in the Middle East.
Review: The Copper Courier’s “Who is the richest Arizonan?” PHOENIX — Fifteen Arizona residents have landed on Forbes’ 2026 World’s Billionaires List, according to new reporting from The Copper Courier, which reviewed the latest rankings and wealth estimates. Leading the group is Ernest Garcia II, identified as the richest Arizonan with an estimated net worth … Read more
Every time the government says we’re going to free people by starting a war in the Middle East, those people end up worse off.1 Every single time.
We have been here before. The justifications shift from war to war — weapons of mass destruction, regional security, counterterrorism — but the humanitarian argument is always in there somewhere. It’s a reliable hook because Americans genuinely do care about people living under brutal governments. It’s just how we are. And it gets used every time.1
In 2012, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback promised his state a “shot of adrenaline.” Cut taxes deeply on businesses and wealthy households, he said, and the economy would surge: new businesses, more jobs, rising prosperity.
I live in Arizona, and for six years we have been targeted by a coordinated national campaign to scare voters with propaganda about election fraud. It has never produced a shred of evidence, because there was never any evidence to find. The Department of Justice is now demanding the voter files of five million Arizonans. … Read more
In March 2026, the VA and the Department of Justice signed an agreement to put homeless veterans under permanent legal guardianship. They called it protection.
It isn’t.
America’s post-9/11 wars produced more than 1.8 million disabled veterans. The economic cost will last generations.
White nationalist anxiety about demographics and feminism is misdirected rage. Something is actually collapsing — the economic foundation that made the American family possible. Wealth extraction did that. Not women’s choices.
Attack ads will say Governor Katie Hobbs vetoed 401 bills. The public record shows what those bills were, what the veto blocked, and it has cost Arizona taxpayers. Seventy of those vetoes were ordinary legislative friction, the kind that happens between any governor and any legislature regardless of party. The remaining 331 followed a pattern that is documented in the public record and consistent across three legislative sessions.
Americans tend to think about the economy in sectors. The defense industry. The oil industry. The banking sector. The tech giants. This is a useful shorthand for what these industries produce — weapons systems, energy, credit, software — but it describes function, not ownership. The question this piece examines is a different one: at the level where the money actually accumulates, do these sectors exist as separate things at all?
The answer the ownership record suggests is largely no. The same concentrated pools of capital sit at the top of the shareholder lists across industries that are supposed to be distinct, supposed to compete, supposed to be governed by separate regulatory frameworks built around their differences. This piece assembles that picture — not sector by sector, but all at once — and asks whether economic activity at that scale is better described as productive or extractive.
| Title | Price | Purpose | Condition | Build Date |
|---|