Laurel Fitzhugh

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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Pernicious Anemia and Subacute Combined Degeneration

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Pernicious Anemia Is a Neurological Disease

I. Pernicious Anemia Is a Demyelinating Neurological Disease

Pernicious anemia (PA) is an autoimmune disorder in which vitamin B12 cannot be adequately absorbed or utilized, leading to progressive neurological injury.

Autoimmune failure of vitamin B12 absorption disrupts methylation and fatty acid metabolism essential for myelin maintenance and repair, producing central and peripheral demyelination, tract-specific spinal cord injury (classically subacute combined degeneration), and widespread cognitive, emotional, and psychiatric manifestations. These neurological effects frequently precede anemia and may occur in its absence.

Pernicious anemia (PA) typically has an insidious onset, with early symptoms that are nonspecific and easily misattributed. As a result, diagnosis is often delayed several years from symptom onset to receive a correct diagnosis, and a substantial proportion are initially misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all. During this period, neurological injury continues to accumulate. Clinicians are therefore often faced with patients who already have advanced neural involvement by the time the underlying disorder is recognized.

Because myelin repair is metabolically demanding and time-dependent, outcomes depend not only on correcting cellular B12 deficiency but on interacting system constraints rather than hematologic markers alone.

Understanding how this injury unfolds, and why its effects vary so widely, requires looking beyond any single pathway.

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B12 Deficiency Across Pregnancy: A Continuous Exposure Timeline

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Note: This outline is a work in progress. Most statements draw on the technical article in Reference 1; items marked “[ref needed]” indicate areas where I plan to add specific supporting studies in a later revision.

Core thesis: B12 deficiency creates a continuous risk window beginning before conception, extending through pregnancy and lactation, and surfacing months later in infants. Without recognition and treatment, this single deficiency causes neural tube defects, recurrent pregnancy loss, preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, infant neurologic crisis, and potentially permanent developmental and metabolic harm to both mother and child.1 Standard prenatal care—which universally supplements folic acid but rarely screens for B12—can mask the deficiency while neurologic damage progresses.1,2,3 Even when B12 supplementation occurs alongside folic acid, standard serum B12 testing cannot confirm adequate cellular uptake, as most circulating B12 is bound to metabolically inactive proteins rather than the transcobalamin required for tissue delivery.1

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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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