Tag: greed

  • My GMO Concern Confusion (Until I Finally Looked It Up)

    For years, I walked past products screaming NON-GMO! and thought… so what? I’ll be upfront: I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. I’m also an optimist — or maybe a pessimistic optimist? An optimistic pessimist? I’ve never quite nailed that down, and honestly, that tracks with the fact that I spent years vaguely confused…

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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 9: Death, Taxes, and Everything In Between

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    Part 9 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This installment is about all the other fees: the ones below the line on the bills I have already written about, the surcharges and convenience charges and service fees and resort fees and processing fees that have become…

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  • Passing the Buck: Why We Pay More But Make Less Part 8: Insurance

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    Part 8 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. On the morning of December 4, 2024, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was shot and killed on a sidewalk in Midtown Manhattan on his way to his company’s annual investor day. The bullet casings recovered at 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 Less Part 6: Food Monopolies

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    Part 6 of Passing the Buck, a 15-part series on why we make less but pay more. This series has been working its way through the categories of household spending where the cost has been quietly shifted away from corporate balance sheets and onto households. Food is one of the larger ones, and one of…

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  • How MTV Killed the Video Star (And Cable/Network Greed Finished the Job)

    I’m not a media analyst. Smarter people than me — like Evan Shapiro, who you should follow on LinkedIn — dissect this industry for a living. But I spent years working inside broadcast television, and I’ve been chewing on this particular problem for more than a decade. So here’s my slightly obsessive take on how…

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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 3: Both Sides Are Hypocrites

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    Part 3 of Do Unto Others, a 5-part series. Read the complete series → Last installment I said I’d take up the question you hear at every Little League snack bar and every Thanksgiving table the second you start documenting things one party has actually done. But Democrats do this too. The asymmetry isn’t real,…

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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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  • 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 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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