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.
middle class
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.
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.
Hard Work No Longer Pays Off
Real People, Real Lives Jake fixes heating and air-conditioning systems. It’s skilled work, always needed. He shows up, puts in full days, and comes home worn out. He’s still behind on rent. His truck needs repairs he can’t afford, and without it he can’t get to jobs. Last year he sold most of his furniture … Read more
Foxconn: Perpetual Motion of the Extraction Engine
The project changed form, but the extraction did not end. It evolved and continued—with ever-increasing imbalance between benefits and costs.
When Despair Drives Violence: Looking for Root Causes
A friend recently made some important points about violence in America. He’s right that we’re seeing widespread nihilism – people losing faith that life has meaning or that their actions have positive consequences. The question is: what created these conditions? When people work full-time jobs that still leave them one emergency away from homelessness, something breaks down inside. The nihilism makes sense when legitimate paths to security are blocked off.
Wealth transfer: income inequality
Key Points Research suggests that since the 1980s, regular workers’ incomes have largely stagnated, while higher-level salaries, especially for executives, have grown dramatically, with CEO pay increasing over 1,000% compared to modest gains for typical workers. It seems likely that regular workers have seen a decline in traditional benefits like pensions, shifting to less secure … Read more
Protecting Communities and Business from Housing Market Dysfunction: How Values-Based Decision Making Serves Shared Prosperity
The Propaganda Machine Has Hijacked Our Brains
We are being played, and we are losing the game. We are being played, and we are losing the game.. The propaganda machine has hijacked our brains. It keeps us fighting each other while the powerful rig the system against us. We need to see what’s happening—and take our minds back. Propaganda is dividing us … Read more
The Manipulation Machine: How Extraction, Inequality, and Polarization Threaten American Democracy
Introduction
The United States faces an unprecedented crisis. For eight consecutive years, the Economist Intelligence Unit has classified America as a “flawed democracy” rather than a full democracy, with the nation’s democratic institutions under sustained attack from multiple directions. The United States has been rated a “flawed democracy” by the Economist Intelligence Unit since 2016, reflecting declining trust in media and institutions, political gridlock, and sharp inequalities that threaten the foundation of democratic governance.
This crisis stems from a complex interplay of technological manipulation, economic inequality, and political polarization that has fundamentally altered how Americans receive information, form beliefs, and interact with one another. AI has opened a potential propaganda gold mine. Large language models like ChatGPT can learn to mimic human speech, while algorithmic systems designed to maximize engagement have created information environments that exploit human psychological vulnerabilities. The result is a population increasingly divided against itself, unable to agree on basic facts, and vulnerable to manipulation by those seeking to consolidate power and wealth.
Understanding this threat requires examining three interconnected phenomena: the technological infrastructure that enables large-scale manipulation, the economic forces that benefit from societal division, and the democratic breakdown that results when citizens lose faith in shared institutions and common ground.