Tag: BrokeCon by Design

  • US Against Them : Enough is Enough

    The third song in the Enough Is Enough campaign. It’s not red vs. blue. It’s about the people on top who need us fighting each other so we don’t notice them.

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  • BrokeCon By Design: The Complete 25-Part Series

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    A 25-part series on how American life got rigged against the bottom 90% — system by system, with receipts.

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 25: The Bottom 90% Agenda – How We Fix This

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    On September 3, 2025, a bunch of people who do not agree with each other about anything stood on a stage in the Capitol and unveiled a bill. The lineup was the tell. A Texas Republican from the hard right. A Rhode Island Democrat. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fist-bumped a Tennessee Republican from the Freedom Caucus on…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 24B: Rebuilding Worker Power – Why Unions Are the Key to Everything

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    At seven in the morning on August 3, 1981, the air traffic controllers walked off the job. Almost thirteen thousand of them, out of a union of roughly seventeen thousand five hundred, went out over pay, hours, and the kind of working conditions you do not want the people watching the planes to have. Seven…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 24A: The Environmental Extraction – They Profit Today, We All Pay Forever

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    On August 3, 2015, Alpha Natural Resources filed for bankruptcy. In January 2016, Arch Coal did the same. On April 13, 2016, Peabody Energy — the largest coal company in the country, founded in 1883 selling coal off a cart in Chicago — filed too. Between them, the three had promised to clean up their…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 23: The Efficiency Lie – How Technology Could Make Public Services Better Than Private (And Why They Don’t Want You To Know)

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    At one in the morning on Saturday, March 1, 2025, the federal office whose entire job was making the government work better got an email telling it that it was over. The notices had gone out the day before. The message came from a former Tesla engineer who had just been put in charge of…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 22: Media Consolidation and Capitulation – Why You Don’t Know Any Of This

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    On a Sunday night in April 2025, 60 Minutes ended the way it always does, and then it didn’t. The stories had run. The stopwatch had ticked. And instead of the credits, Scott Pelley was still on camera, talking to the audience about the show itself. He said the company that owns CBS was trying…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 21: Coordinated Sabotage—How They Break Public Services Then Blame Government

    In December 2006 a postal bill sat on the President’s desk, and most of it was the kind of housekeeping nobody reads. Rate rules. An oversight commission with a new name. Ninety pages of it. Buried in there was one provision that didn’t belong with the rest. The Postal Service would have to start setting…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 20: Corporate Socialism

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    On a Friday in March 2023, the California banking regulator closed Silicon Valley Bank and handed it to the FDIC. By then most of the money was already moving out the door, pulled by the kind of customers the bank had: startups, venture funds, companies that kept all of payroll in one account. The accounts…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 19: The Corporate Tax Dodge

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    One morning in late January, Tesla released its annual report, and up where the shareholders look was the number the company wanted them to see. Almost $5.7 billion of income earned in the United States in 2025. Roughly double what it had earned here the year before. A very good year, told the way a…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 18: The Rigged Tax Code

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    On October 22, 1986, Ronald Reagan stood on the South Lawn of the White House and signed a tax bill that did something the United States had not done before and has not done since. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 took the top rate on money you make by owning things — long-term capital…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 17: The Systemic Theft Of Our Retirement

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    On December 9, 1963, the Studebaker Corporation announced it was closing its main automobile plant in South Bend, Indiana. The company had been building things to ride in since before there were engines to put in them — wagons, in the 1850s — and for the people on the line the pension was not a…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 16: In Our Greed We Trust

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    Every June for the better part of two decades, nearly eight hundred people have flown into Grand Rapids, Michigan, for a four-day conference called Acton University. They are not, mostly, the people you would picture. They are seminarians and parish priests, evangelical pastors and Catholic deacons, divinity students, a scattering of business owners, and a…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 15: In Whose God Do We Trust?

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    Caring Well In October 2019, the man who ran the Southern Baptist Convention’s public-policy arm sat on stage at a conference his agency had organized about how Christian institutions handle credible allegations of sexual abuse. The conference was called Caring Well. The man was Russell Moore, president since 2013 of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 14: Rooting For The Wrong Team – How Culture Wars Keep Us Fighting While They Rob Us Blind

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    Two days after the killing, in the second week of September 2025, an X account with more than half a million followers reposted a screenshot of a private Facebook post written by a woman who had taken a new job earlier that month. The post was about the killing. The account’s followers contacted her employer.…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 13: U.S. Politics: Not Functioning As Founders Intended—And How We Can Fix It

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    Two Yeas A senator from Wyoming and a senator from California vote yes on the same bill. Roll call vote. Two yeas. The clerk records them as equivalent. Nobody on the floor notes the difference. Nobody is supposed to. The Wyoming senator represents about 588,000 people — somewhere between the populations of Milwaukee and El…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 12: The US Political System: The Republican and Democrat Consensus You’re Not Supposed to Notice

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    Watch the floor of either chamber on a December afternoon when the National Defense Authorization Act comes up for a vote. The bill is 1,800 pages long and nobody has read all of it. The members who will speak against it are mostly junior, mostly from safe districts, and mostly not on Armed Services. The…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 11: The Military-Industrial Complex: $968 Billion in Wealth Extraction

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    There’s a food pantry on a base near you. There’s a food pantry on most of them. Operation Homefront, the Armed Services YMCA, the local Feeding America affiliate, sometimes the chaplain’s office running a closet out of a side room. The volunteers know which weeks are bad — paydays, PCS moves, deployment gaps that didn’t…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 10: The Incarceration Industry: How We Built a System That Profits From Failure

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    You Don’t Get Out Say you did eighteen months. Drug offense, low-level, the kind that gets you four years in some states and twenty in others depending on which side of which line you were on when the cops showed up. You served your time. Today is the day you get out. Now find an…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 9: Immobility Nightmare: How Three Failed Systems Killed the American Dream

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    The Door Is Already Locked Say you’re thirty-two. You have an idea for a business. Maybe a good one, maybe not, but you want to find out. So you sit down and run the numbers. The first thing that kills it is the healthcare math. Your employer pays most of your premium right now. Walk…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 8: The Education and Childcare Cliff: $1.8 Trillion in Debt + The Childcare Crisis That Starts It All

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    The story we still tell about student debt is wrong. It’s not a young person’s problem. The fastest-growing segment of borrowers is over 60, and roughly 452,000 of them are in default and receiving Social Security checks — checks that can be garnished by up to 15%, leaving a $750 monthly floor that was set…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 7: The Housing Trap: How Zoning Laws and Investment Firms Stole the American Dream

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    This is Part 7 in BrokeCon by Design, a series on how American systems are rigged against regular people. Part 1: USA! USA! USA! | Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking | Part 3: Follow the Money | Part 4–6: Healthcare Series The median first-time homebuyer in the 1980s was 29 years old. In 2025 it’s 40 — a…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 6B: How Universal Healthcare Would Save American Business (And Why Some Fight It Anyway)

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    Part 6A laid out the three honest paths to fixing this — Medicare for All, a public option, or a Swiss-style regulated multi-payer — and closed by pointing out who else is paying for the current setup besides you and your family: American business. This is that post. For about twenty-five years I worked at…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 6A: Healthcare Solutions That Actually Work (And Why We’re Told They Won’t)

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    This is Part 6A in BrokeCon by Design, a series on how American systems are rigged against regular people. Part 1: USA! USA! USA! | Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking | Part 3: Follow the Money | Part 4: The Healthcare Trap | Part 5: Employer-Based Health Insurance: Modern Serfdom Part…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 5: Employer-Based Health Insurance: Modern Serfdom

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    This is Part 5 in BrokeCon by Design, a series on how American systems are rigged against regular people. Part 1: USA! USA! USA! | Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking | Part 3: Follow the Money | Part 4: The Healthcare Trap: What Congress Gets vs. What You Get Imagine your…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 4: The Healthcare Trap: What Congress Gets vs. What You Get (And Why That Matters)

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    This is Part 4 of BrokeCon by Design. Part 1: USA! USA! USA! | Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking | Part 3: Follow the Money Back in Part 3 we ran the receipts: Americans pay around $13,500 per person for healthcare and rank 36th in the world on life expectancy. First…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 3: Follow the Money: How the System is Rigged Against 90% of Us.

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    This is Part 3 in a series. Part 1 ran the numbers — America comes out near the bottom of every developed-world ranking that matters and near the top of every one that doesn’t. Part 2 walked through how language gets weaponized to keep you from noticing. This one is just accounting. Now That You…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 2: The Words That Stop You From Thinking: How Language is Weaponized to Keep Us Fighting Each Other Instead of Those in Power

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    The Words That Switch Off Your Brain BrokeCon by Design, Part 2. Part 1 showed where America actually ranks. This one is the inoculation before we follow the money. How this post came about I was working on the next piece in the series — the one that traces who profits from America’s failures —…

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  • BrokeCon by Design Part 1: USA! USA! USA!

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    The first time I really clocked the USA chant in the wild was at a NASCAR race. Flags everywhere — not just flying, but as bandanas, t-shirts, full Stars-and-Stripes jeans, patches sewn onto things that did not previously have patches. (Aside: the U.S. Flag Code technically prohibits using the flag as clothing, bedding, or drapery.…

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