Tag: corruption

  • What’s Wrong With the Democrats. What’s Wrong With the Republicans. It Doesn’t Matter.

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    Neither One Will Deliver for You. Let me start with something that should be obvious but somehow never gets said out loud. Neither party won the last election. The other party just lost it more. That distinction sounds like splitting hairs until you realize it explains almost everything broken about American politics for the last…

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  • How an Angry Old MacDonald Became a Protest Song

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    It started with a question: What is actually wrong with this country, and why do we seem so far apart? The division felt real. The anger felt real. But when you actually looked at the polling data, something didn’t add up. Americans agree on almost everything that matters. Healthcare. Wages. Campaign finance reform. Taxing the…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 7: Phone and Internet

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    Part 7 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This installment is about phone and internet service, which has become the cleanest example in modern American life of what happens when a utility-style market is allowed to deregulate into an oligopoly. It is the most unavoidable monthly…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make LessPart 5: The Auto Trap

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    Part 5 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. The first four installments traced cost shifts inside relatively well-defined transactions — wages versus productivity, employer-to-worker benefit transfers, overdraft fees, credit card interest. This one is harder, because the cost being passed to households is built into the…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less. Part 4: Credit Cards

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    Part 4 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. Part 3 looked at the overdraft side of consumer banking. This one looks at the other side of the same relationship — the credit card. Most of the largest credit card issuers in the United States are also…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More. Part 3: Banking Fees

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    Part 3 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. In Parts 1 and 2 I walked through the picture: the math on a typical American household has tightened over fifty years even as productivity has climbed, and several specific costs — housing, healthcare, higher education, transportation, retirement…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More. Part 2: The Baseline Shift

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    Part 2 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. In Part 1 I walked through the math on one specific case — a nurse making $77,000 a year, doing everything right, with $625 a month left after mandatory expenses. The argument was that the math has gotten…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Make Less But Pay More. Part 1: The Impossible Math

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    Part 1 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. A few years ago I started keeping a list. It began with a conversation at the field after one of Henry’s games. A guy I have known for a decade — coaches another team, runs a small landscaping…

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  • Americans Agree on Almost Everything—We Just Don’t Realize It

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    I scroll Instagram mostly because I have to. Crooked Number lives there and you can’t sell baseball mom shirts to an empty room, so I spend more time on it than I’d choose. Which means most of what I see is algorithm-served noise I didn’t ask for. One of those infographics floated past the other…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 5: What This Means for Democracy

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    Part 5 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → This is the last installment of the series, and I want to do something I have been putting off for the previous four pieces — actually try to land the question of what all of it means. Quick recap of what…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 4: Flooding the Zone

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    Part 4 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → In 2018, Steve Bannon gave an interview to Michael Lewis. It was during Trump’s first State of the Union, and Lewis was writing for Bloomberg. Asked about the Trump media strategy, the line that came out — and that has been…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 2: “My Own Morality”

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    Part 2 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → In the New York Times interview published January 8, 2026, Trump was asked whether anything constrained his power on the global stage. He answered: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can…

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  • Vote FOR Something: An Honest Look at Voting Reform

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    The last time I felt good about a vote I cast for president, I was probably in college and the candidate was probably losing. Every election since has been damage control. I’m not voting for somebody, I’m voting against the other guy because my kids have to live in whatever country the next four years…

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  • Do Unto Others Part 1: When Empathy Becomes Transactional

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    Part 1 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → The way I’d planned to start this was with a list of names. Then I tried it and it read like an indictment, which isn’t what I’m going for. Let me back up. What got me writing this was noticing, over…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 10: When Freedom Means Control

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    I was raised on a fairly standard American small-government instinct. Don’t tread on me. The government that governs least governs best. Local control. Keep Washington out of your business. I grew up with that as background music, and a lot of it I still mostly agree with. I prefer that decisions about my kid’s school…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 9: Cancel Culture

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    I spent twenty-five years inside cable television. Bravo, Oxygen, Universal Kids, LOGO, VH1, Sci-Fi, Viacom Brand, R/GA’s broadcast division. I sat through a lot of internal conversations about what we could put on the air, what advertisers would tolerate, what affiliates would carry, what regulators might object to, and what the actual audience would respond…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 7: Climate Change

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    I put a heat pump in my house last year. Bosch 5-ton, replaced an oil-fired system that came with the place. I’m not telling you that to flex green credentials — I’m telling you that because the math finally penciled out, the technology has gotten genuinely good, and the federal tax credits at the time…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 6: Immigration

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    I live in Gardiner, New York — population under six thousand, surrounded on every side by Hudson Valley farms. If you’ve spent any time up here in late summer or early fall, you’ve eaten an apple, drunk a wine, or watched a sunset over a hayfield that exists because of immigrant labor. Some of it…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 2: What Happens After the Laws Change

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    I’ll be honest about where I’m coming from on this one. I thought about abortion the way a lot of people think about it — abstractly — until I didn’t. I had pregnancy scares as a young person, the kind that focus your attention in a hurry. Later I watched my wife actually carry our…

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  • Divided We Fall Part 1: The Culture War

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    This is going to be a ten-part series. Part 1 is the framing post — the thing about the culture war machine that explains the rest. Let me start where I live. I write this blog from a town in the Hudson Valley with a population under six thousand. I spent twenty-five years working in…

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  • Let’s Stop Screaming at Each Other

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    Libtard. Right-wing nut. Snowflake. MAGA moron. Commie. Fascist. We’ve all heard it. Most of us have said some version of it. I know I have. And every time it happens, somebody wins — but it’s not you, and it’s not the person on the other end of it. Americans are more polarized than at any…

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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 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 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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