Specific Examples of Extraction

Universal Healthcare: We Already Know How to Do This

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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.

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What Does Medicare for All Mean?

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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.

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Hondurasgate: The Political Plot American Media Isn’t Covering

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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.

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Weakening Unions: The Double-Breasted Trick

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American workers once held a claim on the full value of their labor — wages, pensions, healthcare, job security. A legal structure called the double-breasted employer was built to take that claim apart from both sides simultaneously. One company, two arms, one owner — and the wage floor suppressed no matter which side wins the contract. This piece documents how the mechanism works, who built it, and why it now operates in an environment designed to make accountability impossible.

Marana: Corporate Interests and Political Support

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Extractive Capitalism and the Assault on Constitutional Democracy

The Project and the Public’s Concerns

Arizona’s constitution gives residents a direct tool for pushing back against decisions their government makes on their behalf: the referendum. In January 2026, Marana residents used it.

The Marana Town Council voted unanimously to rezone 600 acres of farmland adjacent to the Arizona Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery and a groundwater recharge zone for a data center campus known as Project Blue. The developer is Beale Infrastructure, controlled by Blue Owl Capital, a $295 billion investment firm. The projected scale: 550 to 750 megawatts of continuous power — enough to supply roughly 57,000 homes.

Residents had specific, documented concerns. The energy demand required new generating capacity, the costs of which would be passed to ratepayers. Water usage drew particular concern in a desert community whose aquifers do not replenish on any timeline relevant to human planning. Hundreds of backup generators raised noise and air quality concerns in a largely agricultural landscape. Residents questioned whether the promised $5 billion investment and $145 million in tax revenue over ten years would materialize, or whether the primary beneficiary would be a $295 billion investment firm. Some critics argued the project supports an AI industry that facilitates surveillance and data extraction for private profit.

These are the concerns that drove nearly 6,000 Marana residents to sign referendum petitions in a matter of days. The constitutional tool was available. They used it. The rest of this piece documents what was done to stop them.

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They’ve Been Picking My Pocket for Six Years

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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

ICE Detention: Racism Meets Extraction

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ICE detention has been restructured into a large-scale system of wealth extraction. Government authority is used to move public money to private corporations, while enforcement practices determine who bears the human and economic costs. In this system, extraction politics—the use of governmental power, budgets, and enforcement authority—works in tandem with extractive capitalism, in which private firms convert public policy into guaranteed revenue.

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ICE Detention Contracts: Public Cover for Private Profits

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Federal-private detention contracts exemplify wealth extraction—channeling public funds to profit-driven corporations. This analysis focuses on ICE detention contracts.

  • ICE routes detention funding through cities.
  • Cities retain a small administrative cut.
  • Pre-selected private contractors capture the bulk of profits without competitive bidding.

This local mechanism forms the third tier of a broader three-tiered extraction system: federal agency diversions, legislative reallocations from social programs, and city intermediaries via IGSAs.

In 2025, Congress appropriated $75 billion to ICE over four years—tripling the scale of this extraction system.

This post expands on a shorter version published on Substack: ICE Detention Contracts: Cities as Intermediaries for Private Profits.

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