BrokeCon By Design: The Complete 25-Part Series

A 25-part series on how American life got rigged against the bottom 90% — system by system, with receipts. Healthcare, housing, education, retirement, taxes, the courts, the media: none of the dysfunction is accidental. It’s working exactly as designed, just not for you. Two topics got too big for a single post, so 27 posts cover 25 parts. Read in order, or jump to whatever’s eating you most this week.

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Part 1: USA! USA! USA! — The world rankings nobody puts on the chyron. Where America actually places among developed nations on health, education, mobility, and trust.

Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking — How specific words (“socialism,” “freedom,” “elite”) were engineered to short-circuit the argument before it starts, and who profits when we use them.

Part 3: Follow the Money — Where the wealth went over fifty years. Productivity up, wages flat, and the trillions that quietly moved from labor to capital while everyone argued about something else.

Part 4: The Healthcare Trap — The plan Congress gets versus the plan you get. The cleanest single tell that the system isn’t broken — just working as intended.

Part 5: Employer-Based Health Insurance: Modern Serfdom — The WWII accident that tied American healthcare to your job, and how that quietly locks workers into place ever since.

Part 6A: Healthcare Solutions That Actually Work — Every other developed nation has solved this. The four major models, what they cost, and the lies we get told about each one.

Part 6B: How Universal Healthcare Would Save American Business — Universal coverage isn’t anti-business. It’s the biggest competitive advantage American companies don’t have.

Part 7: The Housing Trap — Zoning, NIMBYism, hedge funds, and the policy choices that turned shelter into an extraction industry.

Part 8: The Education and Childcare Cliff — $1.8 trillion in student debt, and childcare that costs more than rent. Two crises that strangle a generation before it starts.

Part 9: Immobility Nightmare — Housing, education, and healthcare collapsed into one trap. Why the American Dream stopped working as a system, not as individual stories.

Part 10: The Incarceration Industry — How “tough on crime” became a balance sheet. Four percent of the world’s population, twenty percent of its prisoners, and a list of who profits from that.

Part 11: The Military-Industrial Complex — $968 billion a year, mostly to the same handful of contractors. Eisenhower called this from the lectern in 1961, and we did it anyway.

Part 12: The Republican and Democrat Consensus You’re Not Supposed to Notice — Where the two parties actually agree: donor protection, regulatory capture, and no accountability for the very wealthy. The fight on TV is real. The deeper alignment is more real.

Part 13: Not Functioning As Founders Intended — Gerrymandering, the filibuster, lifetime judicial appointments, and the structural gaps the Constitution didn’t anticipate. What’s broken procedurally and what would actually fix it.

Part 14: Rooting For The Wrong Team — Culture war as misdirection. The fights we’re told to have are the only ones that don’t threaten any donor.

Part 15: In Whose God Do We Trust? — The selective theology of American politics. Which scriptures get cited, which get ignored, and what the pattern reveals.

Part 16: In Our Greed We Trust — Prosperity gospel, market worship, and the moral framework that lets us call extraction “freedom” with a straight face.

Part 17: The Systemic Theft Of Our Retirement — How pensions disappeared, how 401(k)s replaced them, and why that swap moved all the risk from the company to you.

Part 18: The Rigged Tax Code — The provisions you’ve never heard of doing the most damage, and the ones in the headlines that mostly don’t matter.

Part 19: The Corporate Tax Dodge — How some of the largest American companies pay zero federal income tax in years they post record profits. Legally.

Part 20: Corporate Socialism — Bailouts, subsidies, and the “free market” that only flows in one direction. Privatized profit, socialized loss.

Part 21: Coordinated Sabotage — The decades-long playbook of starving public services and then pointing at the wreckage as proof government doesn’t work.

Part 22: Media Consolidation and Capitulation — A handful of companies own most of what you watch. The structural reason none of this is on the news.

Part 23: The Efficiency Lie — The myth that the private sector always does it better. Where it’s true, where it’s the opposite, and what technology could do for public services if we let it.

Part 24A: The Environmental Extraction — They profit today; we pay forever. The cleanest example of how the cost of doing business gets quietly transferred onto everyone else, including the unborn.

Part 24B: Rebuilding Worker Power — Unions are the only institutional counterweight that has ever worked, and fifty years of dismantling them got us exactly here.

Part 25: The Bottom 90% Agenda — Not a manifesto. A practical list of what most Americans already agree on across party lines, and what changes if we organize around it.

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If you only read three, read Part 3 (Follow the Money), Part 12 (The Consensus You’re Not Supposed to Notice), and Part 25 (The Bottom 90% Agenda). Three is the diagnosis. Twelve is the trap. Twenty-five is the way out.

If you want to share the whole series with one link, this is that link.