The debated budget is where Medicaid lives. Food assistance is in there. So is the housing voucher your neighbor is on, the clinic that keeps your county from being a medical desert, the school lunch. Every dollar in it is provisional. It gets scored, defended, means-tested, attacked as waste, and eventually cut.

The other budget is interest on the national debt. Nobody votes on it. No committee holds a hearing on whether the bondholders deserve it. It goes out on schedule, and this year it runs about 1.2 trillion dollars, more than the entire military.

The federal debt crossed 40 trillion dollars this week and every outlet ran the number like it was the story. It isn’t. The story is which of those two budgets is allowed to grow forever, and which one they go rummaging through when somebody says the word savings.

Interest cannot be cut without defaulting on the people who own the debt. Eligibility can be cut by writing one sentence into a bill. Money owed to capital is structural. Money owed to labor is political.

Berkshire Hathaway held 339 billion dollars in Treasury bills at the end of last year, the biggest non-government position anybody tracks. Every quarter the government wires it a payment, funded by withholding taxes taken out of paychecks before workers ever see the money. No hearing. No work requirement. No caseworker asking Berkshire to prove it still qualifies.

The wealthiest 1% of American households holds 38.4% of the government bonds households own. The top 0.1%, one household in a thousand, holds about 1.1 trillion dollars of it, roughly half of what the entire top 1% owns. That is who is on the other end of the payment nobody debates.

Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in July of last year. The first half added over 4 trillion dollars to the debt, most of it tax cuts, which means the automatic payment just got permanently bigger. The second half cut 1.1 trillion dollars out of Medicaid and the ACA marketplaces and called it fiscal responsibility. Roughly 10 million more people lose coverage over the next decade.

Same bill. Same signature. Same afternoon. Borrow for the tax cuts, then point at the borrowing and take away the insurance.

The second half is not a forecast. It’s a calendar. On October 1 this year, the administrative cost of food assistance shifts onto state budgets, so states start hunting for ways to shrink their rolls. On December 31, Medicaid enrollees begin re-verifying eligibility twice a year instead of once. On January 1, 2027, the work requirements land.

Arkansas ran that experiment in 2018 and dropped 17,000 people in three months while employment sat still. The paperwork was never a filter for the undeserving. The paperwork is the mechanism. People who qualify miss a notice, miss a deadline, get dropped, and it lands on the ledger as fiscal discipline.

People keep asking about Japan and China selling off Treasuries. Japan’s answer is boring. Its central bank is finally raising rates after decades near zero, so Japanese money has somewhere at home worth going. China’s answer is the one worth your time, and not for the reason it usually gets told.

In 2022 the G7 froze Russia’s foreign reserves. American debt is treated as the safest asset on earth, and that reputation never rested on the United States being able to pay. It rested on nobody being able to refuse to pay you. That weekend established there was an exception, and the exception was political. Central banks have been buying gold ever since, not because gold earns anything, but because gold doesn’t require anybody’s permission to move.

That decision got made in Washington conference rooms. No working family was in the room. The bill still travels downward. Buyers reprice the risk, the Treasury pays more to move its debt, and Treasury yields set the baseline for mortgage rates and car loans. Freezing reserves was an exercise of power, and the cost of exercising it lands on people who hold none.

So the working class pays twice. Once through withholding, which funds the coupon. Once at the bank, borrowing at a price set in a market it has no seat in.

The trade press calls this a debt problem. A problem implies somebody made a mistake. This is a working arrangement, running exactly the way it was built to run, and arguing about which party ran up the number is how you spend your life not noticing the design.

You know which budget you’re in. The working class one. The political one. The one they go looking through when they need to find savings.

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Stephen Feinberg is worth as much as 4.6 billion dollars. He runs the day to day of a Pentagon that spends more than a trillion dollars a year, and the private equity firm he built still owns pieces of the defense industry feeding off that budget.

Howard Lutnick was tied to more than 800 companies through Cantor Fitzgerald. Now he runs the Commerce Department, and his sons run Cantor.

Linda McMahon gave Trump more than 22 million dollars. She got the Department of Education.

There are 57 of them.

Fifty-seven people worth as much as 100 million dollars or more sit inside Donald Trump’s second administration, according to a report out this week from the watchdog group Public Citizen. Eight are billionaires. Forty of them run federal agencies. The rest are ambassadors. Their combined declared assets run from 13.9 billion to nearly 34.8 billion dollars, and that is using their own disclosure forms, the ones they signed under penalty of law.

The average American worker makes about 65,000 dollars a year. The median household is worth about 192,900 dollars. Hold those two numbers next to the first ones and you already understand this presidency better than most cable panels do.

A lot of people voted for Trump because they feel that he’s a businessman. The pitch was simple: he built things, he made deals, he knows how money works, and he thinks the government is corrupt. He will run the country like a company, and working people will finally get someone competent at running a business instead of a career politician.

Here is the part the pitch left out. A businessman protects businessmen. That is not a character flaw, it is the job description. And when you hand a businessman the state, he does not stop being one. He just gets a bigger set of tools.

Look at how the seats got filled. McMahon gave more than 22 million dollars to Trump’s committees, then got Education. Warren Stephens gave more than 5 million, then got the London embassy. Kelly Loeffler gave more than 5 million, got the Small Business Administration, then gave another 2.5 million after she was confirmed. The report counts 30 of the 57 who together put more than 65 million dollars into Trump’s political machine.

Money bought the seat. Now watch the seat make money.

Lutnick left Cantor Fitzgerald to run Commerce and handed the firm to his sons. In January his department cut a deal to take a government stake in a rare earth company, and the placement agent on that deal was Cantor. Democratic lawmakers are investigating. Lutnick has not turned over the records they asked for.

Feinberg co-founded Cerberus, which owns defense companies. The Guardian mapped how tightly Cerberus stayed wired into the Pentagon after he took over. Since he became the Pentagon’s number two, one Cerberus owned firm has pulled in at least 784 million dollars in new or modified Pentagon contracts. He did not sell his stake. He put it in trusts for his kids.

Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, blew past his legal deadline to divest his assets by eight months.

Fortune reported that Loeffler went on Newsmax again and again while holding well over 100,000 shares in Newsmax’s parent company.

None of that is against their interests. All of it is against yours.

You could try to file this under Trump. Ken Griffin would stop you. He is a Republican billionaire who poured tens of millions into the GOP, and even he says this administration has made decisions “very, very enriching to the families” of the people running it. His words, not mine. When the oligarchs start complaining that the other oligarchs are being too obvious about it, the red and blue argument is finished. What is left is the only line that ever mattered. The people who own the economy, and everyone who has to work inside it.

There is a name for a government where the people who own the economy also write the rules that govern it, and write them for themselves. It is called bureaucratic capitalism, and it is the worst structure there is, because there is no longer a line between private profit and public power. The same people control both.

America has done this before. Trump likes to praise President McKinley, and he should, because the Gilded Age was exactly this. Robber barons flooded politics with money, then called on the men they had bought to write the laws that fed their businesses. This is the front of that cycle, not the end of it.

They are not even hiding it. They do not have to.

This does not stop, because the loop does not stop. Power makes money, money buys more power, the tools keep getting bigger. In August, as NPR reported, the president’s own media company started selling Wall Street firms early access to his posts for 100,000 dollars a month, so traders can profit off what he says before you can. That is the model now. The president’s decisions, sold in advance to the people who can afford them.

So here they are. Public Citizen counted 57 people in Trump’s administration worth 100 million dollars or more, and the full list is in their report. What follows are the 32 biggest fortunes, the ones running the largest agencies and holding the most money. Every number here comes from their own financial disclosures and their FEC donation records. They signed these figures themselves.

This list does not even count Trump, or Elon Musk. 57 is the floor.

For scale, here is what came before. Barack Obama’s administration had 3 people worth 100 million dollars or more. George W. Bush had 5. Joe Biden had 5. Trump has 57.

That is not a difference of degree. That is a different kind of government.

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Today, 21% of Gen Z say they are likelier to see World War III break out than to ever afford a house.

That is not a mood. That is a whole generation being told the deal is off.

American capitalism held together for decades on the assumption that if you work hard, you can afford a home, and each generation will keep growing, every generation will be better than the previous generation. Your kids ended up better off than you were. But now all of it is broken.

Buying a home has been pushed back a full generation. The median age for first-time home buyers now is around 40 years old. Back then it was 28, a 12-year difference.

And plenty never make it that far. First-time buyers just fell to a record low, 21% of the market. Close to 1.8 million young households that should have formed last year simply did not. They moved back in with their parents, doubled up with roommates, and called it a phase. It is a generation stuck in this phase of life that was promised.

Because of all this, in the last five years, the share of young Americans who call themselves a capitalist fell from 29% to 19%.

I do not think they read Marx’s Communist Manifesto. They learn everything from their material reality, which is depreciated. They learn it from their landlords’ rent notices every month, and from their wages falling behind. They learn that whatever effort they put in turns into nothing, and they are called lazy. That is why more people have more appetite for socialism right now, or at least the curiosity to pivot to it.

So this did not start with an idea. It started with a promise dying in front of a whole generation, slowly, in real time.

The official story does not record this. History does. Late Rome was not everyone in rags. It was ordinary people nailed in place, to the land, to their father’s trade, every door upward welded shut, effort drained of meaning.

A society does not break when it is poorest. It breaks when most people stop believing in tomorrow.

This promise did not break on its own. Somebody killed it.

American workers once held a valve. The New Deal, the unions, Social Security. None of it was handed down out of kindness. Ordinary people clawed it out over decades of strikes, organizing, and blood. It did one job. It forced capital to hand back a slice of the take.

For 40 years that valve has been unscrewed one bolt at a time. Plants moved offshore. Unions were broken. The corporate playbook flipped from make more and hire more to buy back the stock, cut the headcount, and dress up the numbers for the shareholders. Today only 37% of Americans hold a favorable view of big business, and 62% hold the opposite.

Look at what it produced. The stock index hits record after record. Corporate profit hits record after record. And the paycheck underneath barely moves while the rent climbs past it. Two lines on the same chart, one clawing up, one sinking, and you are told to read it as one healthy economy.

Globalization changed one thing. Capital can move. You cannot. The company drops a line about your taxes running too high and your wages too rich, and it is gone by morning. You cannot move your city. You cannot move your home.

So this is not a bug. It is a feature. The valve did not fail. It was removed, deliberately, because every dollar that reaches you is a dollar clipped off their end. They do not tolerate that for long.

The left and the right are taking the same bullet. The worker who votes Trump and the kid who votes Mamdani curse different names, but the sentence underneath is identical, word for word. This system does not run for me. Every ounce of noise the two parties make is piled on top of that one line to keep you from hearing it.

A system that can no longer buy you off has two doors.

One is to fix it. Tax the rich for real. Pry housing and health care out of capital’s mouth. Share. That door costs the owners money.

The other is to manage you, distract you, and aim your anger somewhere else. That door is free.

They take the free one.

They cannot give you a house. They cannot give you a wage that outruns the rent. They cannot give you a future you can see. So they hand you an enemy instead. Hate the neighbor who is just as broke as you. Hate the immigrant they swear took your job. Hate the one whose skin or god or gender does not line up with yours.

A culture war is cheap. Enforcement staged as theater is cheap. Turning the people at the bottom against each other is the cheapest product this machine still knows how to build.

Watch where the enforcement points. Not up, at the people who unscrewed the valve. Down, at the people already flattened by it. That is not law and order. That is a message. Stay scared, stay split, stay quiet.

The machine has stopped pretending. Enforcement turns into a weapon. The party brawl turns into a smokescreen. And the bill, every time, lands on the people with the least left to give.

A system that can no longer buy you will move to control you.

So stop arguing about whether socialism is on its way back. That question was pressed into your hands on purpose, and they are delighted to watch you fight over it.

A decades-long promise is dead. The people who took it apart knew exactly what they were doing. And now they are working, harder and cruder by the month, to keep you from asking the one question that matters. Who did this.

Stop watching the faces on the stage. Watch the machine. The one thing it fears is you taking the anger on the left and the anger on the right and welding them into one question.

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On CoreCivic’s earnings call in February, a Wall Street analyst had some complaints. The company was doing fine on revenue. Revenue was up. The administration has thrown immigration enforcement wide open. Public tax money was poured into detention.

But something was not right. ICE was holding fewer people than the market expected. Investors were expecting around 100,000 people in detention, but the real number was closer to 70,000. They don’t like it.

Tens of thousands of people already behind bars are not a problem. The government already spending billions to lock people up, that was not a problem. The real problem, from the investor’s point of view, was that the machine was running a little bit below capacity.

So, understand that at a shareholder call, a Wall Street analyst asked a prison company why it was not imprisoning more people. Border security is not the real issue here.

CoreCivic and GEO Group, these two companies are running most of the country’s immigration detention centers. The product is always the human confinement, and the detained people are the volume.

GEO booked a record 254 million dollars in profit for 2025. That’s up 700% from a year before. Its founder, George Zoley, told investors it was the best year for new business in the company’s history. CoreCivic made 116.5 million dollars, up about 70% compared to the year before, and said 2026 would be better. All this money was made off the people who ended up behind bars.

This is how the money works. The government writes the checks from taxpayers’ contributions. The company will fill the beds. The investors are waiting for the beds to be filled and the count to rise. And the only incentive is this: the more people behind the cage, the better.

And the demand is guaranteed. Last year’s budget bill put 45 billion dollars into immigration detention and nearly tripled ICE’s budget almost overnight, making it the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. The target is around 100,000 detention beds, including eight mega-centers built to hold up to 10,000 people each. This is not an emergency response that winds down. It is permanent infrastructure, paid for with public money, and infrastructure builds its own momentum.

And do not let anyone sell you this as one party’s crime. CoreCivic likes to remind people that ICE was its first customer more than 40 years ago. These companies write checks to both parties. Republicans expanded this system. Democrats did not take it apart when they had the chance. The argument everyone is having about who sits in the White House is the argument that keeps you from asking who is cashing the checks underneath.

America has run a version of this before. After the Civil War, Southern states leased prisoners out to private companies for labor, which handed everyone involved a reason to arrest and convict more people. Once locking humans up pays, the system starts hunting for more humans to lock up.

Here is the part the earnings call skips. The pace they want to speed up is the pace that is killing people. 2025 was the deadliest year in immigration detention in over two decades, and 2026 is on track to beat it. One of the dead was Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban man who died at Camp East Montana in Texas in January. The county medical examiner ruled his death a homicide by asphyxia. Witnesses said guards held him down while he told them he could not breathe. ICE gave one account, then changed it. On the earnings call there are no names like his. There are beds, contracts, and growth.

This is the part people get wrong when they reach for the word conspiracy. There is no secret room. The system does not need one. It only needs incentives. You have private companies with a paying interest in confining and tracking as many people as the government will fund, and a government funding it. Nobody has to be evil for this to end where it is ending. The capital does the work on its own. It found something people will pay to have done, it wants more of it, and a death in custody does not enter the math, because the math has no room for it.

And it is already moving past detention. GEO now tracks well over 100,000 people by GPS monitor and calls electronic surveillance its next growth market. Once a government builds a profitable machine to confine and monitor people, the question quietly changes. It stops being who is targeted today. It becomes how far this can be expanded tomorrow. Today it is immigrants. The machinery does not care after that.

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There is no political principle on that earnings call. There is a market, and the market does not ask whether a person deserves dignity. It asks whether there is demand. A bed is an asset. A monitor is a product. A human life becomes a line on a spreadsheet. The people who pay are the ones in the cells and the working people whose taxes cover the bill. The people who profit are on the call.

And if you’re waiting for me to tell you how to fix this, I got nothing. Not because it’s some big secret. Because there’s no one piece you can pull out and fix. The immigration system, the way your tax money gets spent, the profit these companies make off locked-up people, that’s not stuff that got stuck onto the machine by accident. That is the machine. Everybody up and down the line is complaining about something. But the only complaint that ever gets answered is the one from the people making money.

You can’t fix this from the inside. You’d have to tear the whole thing down and build it again, and I’ll be straight with you, I don’t know what that even looks like.

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There was a guy in China who spent more than 10 years building 87 gaming accounts. Assuming he used those gaming accounts to make money, he died last year at the age of 36 from throat cancer. Then the company that ran those games looked at everything he had built and told his mother, “Sorry, all this belongs to the company.”

The court in Beijing told the company it was wrong, and I just want to walk you through why that should matter to you, even if you’ve never touched one of these games. If you’ve ever spent so many hours and so much work on something online, like a game, a social media channel, or any kind of online account, I think this story is for you.

I’m breaking these stories down the way I wish somebody had talked about them. If you’re interested, please subscribe to support my work. And if you can swing it, paid supporters help keep me independent, and I really appreciate that.

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So this is what happened.

Between 2010 and 2021, this gamer had 87 accounts in games run by a Chinese company called Changyou. He put a lot of time into those games over the years, and he also spent a lot of his own money on character gear, in-game currency, and all of that.

All of that added up over more than a decade. Then he passed away, and his mother went to the company and asked them to transfer the accounts into her name.

Well, the gaming company said no. They pulled out the user agreement, the user agreement that you and I never, ever read. It says the company owns everything: the accounts, the characters, the items, the currency, all of it, as far as the gaming company is concerned.

And that was supposed to be the end of the conversation.

The Beijing court disagreed.

Back in April, the Beijing court drew a distinction. The court agreed that the company owns the accounts themselves, but the right to use those accounts has economic value because the gamer, Gu, spent years and real money building them. That value can be passed down to his family.

So the court ordered the company to transfer the accounts into his mother’s name. The judge, Zhang Yinzhou, said that a user agreement may decide who owns an account, but it does not erase a person’s legal right to inherit the value that account represents.

The court also listed this as one of its model cases, meaning other judges can use it as a reference when deciding similar cases in the future.

Look, I’m talking about this because I think it goes way beyond games.

The day he opened those accounts, they were worth nothing. They had no value. That’s the part the company created. The accounts only became valuable later because of his time, his money, and his grind.

Of course, the company built the servers and wrote the software, but the company didn’t build the part that was actually worth inheriting.

Who did? That’s the trick.

These companies run on you. They tell you they own the servers, then they turn around and tell you they own everything you create on those servers too.

The Chinese court wouldn’t let them pull that trick.

The user did the work, so the user has a claim to what that work is worth. That’s the whole idea. This is how these companies get you. They put a user agreement in front of you, you click “I agree,” and that’s it. That’s your entire say.

In this case, the company hired a bunch of lawyers to write a few lines, dropped them in front of millions of users, and claimed ownership over everything built on the platform.

They can yank it back whenever they want and tell you it’s nothing you own. You can’t negotiate. You either accept their terms or you don’t get to use the platform.

And this is more than just one guy’s gaming accounts.

Think about content creators. They spend years making videos and putting in countless hours of work. Companies like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram can sometimes wipe out an entire account, and suddenly all those years of work are treated as if they’re worth nothing because the fine print says the company can take it back.

That’s exactly what the gaming company in China tried to do to this man’s mother.

The user made that account valuable.

The account is worth something, but the owners of the company are sitting behind their computers claiming ownership over that value. They keep pretending that the account itself and the value created by the user are the same thing.

That’s why I wanted to talk about this.

If you look at Steam, for example, it still doesn’t generally allow you to leave your game library to your children when you pass away. The law often sides with the contract, which means it sides with the lawyers who wrote it.

Everything users like you and I build online can end up being signed away because we have to agree to the user agreement before we can even use the platform.

But in this case from Beijing, they did something that I think many Western legal systems struggle with.

The value you create online comes from your labor, and that labor creates something worth protecting. Whatever you think about China, I think this case sets an interesting precedent for future disputes.

Of course, the company owns the servers. What we’re really arguing about is who owns everything you build on top of them.

That’s a conversation we should be having more and more because we’re living in a digital age.

How are we going to deal with digital assets?

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A computer inside the CIA network opened the Wikipedia page on the 2003 invasion of Iraq and added to the casualty count to push the idea that the numbers were only estimated. It tried to soften the death toll of the war, and Wikipedia was supposed to be treated by hundreds of millions of people as a neutral record.

First, thank you to everyone reading and enjoying my work. If you get something out of it, subscribe and restack it, and share it with people who should see it. And if you want to support the project a little further, consider becoming a paid subscriber. That is what keeps this going. Thank you so much.

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Then an FBI computer was found. Someone removed the aerial and satellite images of Guantanamo Bay prison. From the CIA network again, the page of the former director William Colby was expanded and his career built up. The Vietnam pacification program he ran was given a friendlier description to make him look nicer. There are some other edits from CIA computers, or from IPs that belong to Langley. They touch pages like Iran’s president, China’s nuclear program, and the Argentine navy. If you look at all this, this is exactly where a spy agency would care.

In 2007, a programmer named Virgil Griffith built a tool called WikiScanner. It matched anonymous Wikipedia edits to the networks they came from, basically using the IP of whoever added to Wikipedia. It showed that the CIA, FBI, some corporations, and government offices all turned up in the results.

It is not my job to find out or prove which analyst sneaked in from Langley. But the IP came from the CIA’s own network, and after it was exposed, the agency spokesman would not confirm what they did. He only said that the agency expects its computer systems to be used responsibly. Well, from what I can see, it is not a denial. If it is not a denial, that is a confirmation for me.

A lot of people, for a very long time, have treated Wikipedia as a free and open encyclopedia that is open and neutral. That is exactly how the powerful take it over: governments, corporations, and PR firms running standing operations. A British firm, Portland Communications, was caught editing and rewriting Wikipedia entries for the government of Qatar, the Gates Foundation, and Libya’s sovereign wealth fund. Also, in 2012, a reporter found that nearly one in six British MPs had their pages edited from inside Parliament, removing a bunch of details related to the expenses scandal. A pro-Israel group called CAMERA ran a campaign coaching editors to pose as neutral until they were made administrators, then use administrative authority and power to bury other edits.

Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but whoever controls the resources and the time will be able to control the platform. What does “neutral” mean? It is always something that people with power get to define.

And the problem is spreading. You know, Larry Sanger, the man who co-founded Wikipedia and helped write its neutrality rule before he became its hardest critic, says that the platform’s bias is now being amplified, because a lot of large language models and AI tools that everyone is starting to trust are trained on Wikipedia as a core source.

So basically, the edits influenced by spy agencies do not just stay on Wikipedia anymore. They go into the training data of the machines that your kids will ask: “What happened?”, “Who was responsible?”, “What is true?”. When they ask a question, the answer will carry whatever the best-resourced players spent nearly two decades putting into the record. This is basically cognitive warfare. It slowly changes the perception of the world through all this information that we receive from the internet.

It used to be just people writing the history. People controlled who wrote things down and controlled the record. Now, the powerful, the ones with resources and money, and those who work with the agencies, are able to change history. They change the reality, and feed that information into the technology that regular folks look up every day. This will not stop at Wikipedia. It will continue with the training data behind every model. You won’t see how it happened, but I know you already feel the bias from different language models.

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Let me start with the ugliest fact I know about the United States, and honestly across the board internationally. The people who got robbed blind are usually the ones defending the robbery.

When you find a man working two shifts in a warehouse, no benefits, back broken by 45, and you tell him that he is being exploited, he will not thank you. He will confront you, saying the company gave me a job. If they hadn’t hired me, my kids don’t eat. Nobody forced me. I decided to work for this company. The thing is, he does not see that the boss skims a cut off every hour he bleeds. What he sees is a benefactor. The factory, the boss, they feed him, so he calls it kindness.

The same logic applies to the renters too. The renter would say the building belongs to the landlord, that paying rent is simply the deal, that there’s no theft in it anywhere. He has lived in this arrangement his whole life, and everything feels natural to him. Once something feels normal, it starts to feel fair. So when you come to him and tell him, look closer, the split between what you earn and what you are allowed to keep was designed by the people who benefit from you staying where you are, then the renter is probably gonna treat you not as someone trying to help him. He’s gonna treat you as a troublemaker. He will tell you that he’s doing fine, that he clears his paycheck every week, and he wonders why you have to stir things up.

A worker who has never been taught to look honestly, to look closely at his own position, does not understand that he is being exploited. He does not know that he is a slave to the arrangement he lives inside. This is not an insult. It’s a plain description of where he actually stands. He has been told the same story his entire life, and that story never once tells him what is being done to him. So he will protect the employer. He will treat the person trying to explain the exploitation to him as the enemy. The person being robbed ends up guarding the robber. And that’s the oldest and the most reliable trick in American life, and it still works on tens of millions of people every single day.

And that is why anyone who tries to organize workers is never fighting only one side. He is fighting two sides at the same time. Above him is the employer, who has money, power, lawyers, courts, everything. Below him are the very workers he’s trying to help, who often turn on him and treat him as the troublemaker, the problem. He gets crushed between the owner on one side and the workers on the other side. And it is always the workers, the ones being exploited, who fight him the hardest. And that is why real organizing is exhausting and thankless, and that is why it fails far more often than it succeeds.

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A lot of people don’t talk about this. The core problem is not the conflict between the boss, the ruling class, and the workers. Everyone can see that conflict. We see that. The deeper problem is the distance between one worker and another. Two people stand in exactly the same position, same social level, at the very bottom of the same system, and they still will not stand together. The real gap is not between the landlord and the tenant, it’s between one tenant and the next one. It’s not between the owner and the worker. It is between one worker and the worker standing right beside him. And that’s the gap where the entire system survives. The system wants that gap.

When a worker is injured at work and can no longer do the job, his position opens up, and the management starts looking for a new person. Within a day, there will be a line of people outside of the building waiting to apply. None of those people lining up are there to check on the injured man. They are there to replace him, to get his position. These are his own coworkers, people from the same neighborhood, working the same shift, living the same hard life. The moment one worker goes down, the others step over him to compete for his job.

This is not some cruelty I’m talking about. This is the way the labor market right now was deliberately built. In most of the states, employment is at will, which means that an employer can fire workers for almost any reason on almost any day. The job market right now is designed to keep unions weak and to leave each worker bargaining alone, with no one standing behind him, with no support. Especially in the gig economy, the person working next to you is not a colleague. He is a competitor. He’s competing directly against you for more orders, more runs, for the next job at a lower price, because he needs that money as badly as you do. That’s how the system is set up right now. When one worker falls, the rest are set against each other to fight over the empty position, instead of standing together to protect it.

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The union membership in the United States fell to 10% in 2025. In the private sector, where most workers actually are, it’s down to 5.9%, close to the lowest ever recorded. In 1983, it was 20%. Over the course of a single working lifetime, organized labor was cut by more than half, and a large share of the workers who lost that protection cheered the whole time, because most of those workers had been told that the unions are a threat to their own freedom.

If you look at the other side of the spectrum of the economy, the owners are never divided against each other. The ruling class does not attack each other or tear itself apart over any of this. It usually works together. They are in the same lobbying groups and the same industry associations, and the same donor money flows into both political parties. Because both parties keep this arrangement in place. The goal is always to keep wages down and keep workers divided. At the top of the system, there’s no real fight between red and blue. There’s one class that understands its own interests and defends them no matter what. At the bottom, there are tens of millions of people who have been convinced that the person on the other side of politics is the real reason their life is hard.

This worker-against-worker fight has simply been given a new name. You have red state against blue state, native-born against immigrant, city against rural towns, one generation against the next, boomers versus zoomers. Each of these, they tell you this is one of the most important moral battles of your life. And every one of them convinces you that you should be angry at the person who stands in the same position you do. The immigrant who works in the restaurant does not freeze your wages. Some other worker far away, two states away, did not raise your insurance premium. But you have been brainwashed and trained to treat them as your enemy, while treating the people who actually set your wages and your premiums as neutral, or even as being on your side, just because they talk nice to you.

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Workers of the world, unite. Marx said it, not because unity is easy. It is because unity is one of the hardest things that never really happens on its own. The rich come together naturally because they have a common purpose. They understand their interests are the same. Everyone else has to be brought together slowly and deliberately. One conversation, one difficult conversation at a time, against every instinct the system has trained and brainwashed into them since childhood.

I did not grow up in the United States. I can see, very clearly and plainly, what you have been trained to accept without even noticing. The word class was deliberately pushed out of public life. And the people who pushed it out are exactly the people you should be confronting.

In order to change, you have to understand that it does not change based on who wins the next election. It changes based on what ordinary people are finally able to see. The hardest and the most important work is not marching. It’s not even voting. It is the slow and difficult work of getting a worker to recognize that he is being exploited, in plain terms, that he is a slave to an arrangement built against him. And to see the worker standing right next to him as an ally, not a competitor for the same scraps.

And that is the real fight, and that is why the system spends so much money and effort to keep ordinary people like you and me angry at each other. The people in power are not really afraid of your vote. They are not afraid of your vote. They’re afraid of the day that you stop competing with the people beside you and start standing together with them.

The ruling class, the oligarchs, the corporations, they will win for as long as you keep fighting with each other. That is the mechanism. And now you see how it works.

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AIPAC spent 30.6 million dollars trying to decide who gets to represent Michigan’s Democrats. The money is not about health care, not about rent. It was used on ads to tell the voters which Democrat to pick. The money is about propaganda. It was the most the lobby has ever spent on a single race. However, Abdul El-Sayed won anyway.

In the end, that 30 million dollars all got thrown in the garbage, into the water, wasted. If you add up every outside group, close to 65 million dollars poured in to prop up Haley Stevens and bury El-Sayed, who ran on small donors, only with a Sanders endorsement, and completely got outspent, nearly out of the building. His win was built on 20-dollar small donors against a wall of dark money.

However, you might miss this. The AIPAC money did do something. In Missouri, the same night, Wesley Bell, the man AIPAC spent almost 9 million dollars to install two years ago, beat Cori Bush again. This round was roughly 3 million dollars more, spent mostly to bury her. It’s the same playbook, but a different result. What I’m saying is, this is because AIPAC is still very strong. Be aware. The only difference is that working people have to organize to out-organize the money.

This is what they’re doing. They move money inside the Democratic primaries, against Democrats, to protect one position. Same in Michigan, same in Missouri: it was Democrats against Democrats. So it’s not about a party. Party had nothing to do with it. It was Israel, the donor class, against the people, against the grassroots movement and the small donors with just 20 dollars to support the movement.

Ancient Rome ran elections too, until the wealthy men simply bought the outcomes and the vote became a ritual staged over a decision already made. The democratic process stayed, but Rome is long gone.

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Now El-Sayed faces Mike Rogers. Rogers thinks El-Sayed will not win in November. But let’s talk about him. The day after January 6, Rogers said Trump clearly provoked the Capitol attack, and that Biden won 2020 fair and square. His words. Then he wanted the seat. So he went to kiss the ring for Trump’s endorsement, licked the boot, and cleared his primary with it. This man has no principle. He will do anything for his own political power. You expect a man like this to work for the people? He’s part of the machine.

AIPAC just wrote its biggest check ever, and all that money is now in the garbage. It lost the primary. A lobby like that does not fold. It will move the game to November, and all that money will go to Rogers. It might not carry AIPAC’s name, but it will get laundered through some friendly shell.

The thing is, working people in a so-called democratic country like the United States get told that the ballot is the one thing money cannot touch. But the reality is the opposite. A record 30 million dollars in a single primary is the proof. With money, a fair and square democratic election, is a fairy tale. You can only win this with the working class, united and organized together to beat the money.

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These days, whenever China pulls something off, the first reflex in Western media is not to ask what China got right. It’s just, at what cost? Who got sacrificed? Who paid for China’s rise?

Sounds like they’re trying to show some concern. It’s always a trap. The question assumes that when a country gets stronger, somebody underneath, someone on their knees, had to get crushed.

So let me throw the question back. When the United States built the interstate highways, industrialized everything, and put its military on every continent, was anyone asking, day after day, who paid for America?

It’s not that complicated. A person can only explain the unfamiliar by using the world he already knows.

Why does the West automatically go looking for a hidden victim every time somebody else rises? Because that is exactly how Western society got here. Enclosure, driving peasants off their land. The slave trade, swapping human lives for profit. Colonialism, centuries of colonialism. Western wealth was built by standing on other people.

So in the Western mindset, you don’t get rich this fast without sacrificing someone. Every accusation is a confession. When you accuse someone else of something, it’s usually the thing you have done yourself, the thing you know, the thing you believe in your gut has to be true. When the West accuses China of making someone pay, it’s really a reflection of its own history.

Of course, I’m not saying China had no cost. There is a cost. No country modernizes without one. Since 1949, China went from a farming society to an industrial one. Hundreds of millions of migrant workers left their villages for the cities. Families split apart for years. We all talk about the hukou system sorting city residents into two tiers. There was serious air and water pollution. To this day, local governments still have debt problems. All of this is the cost. Nothing to hide about it.

But you have to look at what came next. Once the pollution showed up and got really serious, the state pooled money and resources into renewables, solar, EVs, cleanup. The strain on migrant workers got fixed, slowly, through social security, poverty programs, infrastructure. The cost did not disappear. But most of it got carried and managed by the state, instead of dumped on one person to shoulder alone.

Now look at the United States. The US has been upgrading too, progressing too, these past decades. Globalization, financialization, offshoring the factories. In the end it made a lot of money. But who pocketed it? And who was paying all the bills?

All the gains over the years settled at the very top. A small handful of people, a small handful of capital and donors. And the cost got handed down, bill by bill, to regular working people.

Look at the small things. By the Federal Reserve’s own survey, more than a third of Americans can’t cover a surprise 400-dollar expense. A car crash, a breakdown, a kid who needs an ER visit, and you’re broke. America is not poor. It’s the richest country on earth.

Almost half of American renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing and utilities. More than 12 million of them hand over half their paycheck just to keep a roof over their heads. Then there’s student loans, and medical debt. Medical debt is one of the biggest reasons people go bankrupt in the States. Manufacturing got offshored. Whole stretches of the Rust Belt hollowed out. The jobs are gone, but people still live there, where the jobs used to be.

That is what “who pays” looks like when you actually point at the right target. It’s not country versus country, China versus America. It’s the people at the top deciding how the bill gets passed down.

What scares the Western elite is that China’s existence proves one thing: how you split the cost is a choice. And that choice is made by the people who hold the power. For decades, American elites have told their own people that there’s nothing we can do. It is what it is. That’s just the market. The cost is going to land on you, and you have to learn to live with it.

They keep telling you capitalism is the perfect system for society, and there is no alternative. They want the workers to keep their heads down. But the moment another way of splitting the bill exists anywhere else in the world, that “no alternative” is exposed as a lie. The reason Western elites keep throwing propaganda at China is the thing they’re really fighting for: the power to define what counts as a good society. Whoever gets to define the correct direction gets to tell you to be quiet and accept your place.

To be fair, where did the cost of America’s rise go? The 400-dollar emergency. The half a paycheck for rent. The medical debt. That is the cost of American development. The system just dumps that cost onto its own working class.

Every country’s development has a cost. But the real question is who carried the cost, and who walked off with the gains. Did the wealth from that development get redistributed back to ordinary people? Did the country actually do anything for its own people while it got bigger? I think that is the only way to test, or to judge, whether a country is any good.

It’s never about country versus country. It’s always about the working people, ordinary people on one side, and the ruling class, a small handful at the top, on the other side. And the government is the instrument of the ruling class. That class struggle has never once stopped. Whether you talk about democracy versus authoritarianism, or freedom versus tyranny, those are just labels. The real fight is always the people versus the ruling class.

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Elon Musk is about to spend 120 million dollars on the 2026 midterm election. All this money he made as a capitalist. His fortune is built on the backs of the workers, the people who build his cars, run the warehouses, write his code, and drive the routes. Now he is using all this money to decide their elections. Wealth built on exploitation. America PAC has approved 120 million dollars for a field program in at least eight states. The targets are Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio. As the biggest political donor in American history, he put more than 250 million dollars into the 2024 race. That money is part of the reason Trump won the presidency. His whole fortune is built on the working class, and now he is spending 120 million dollars to control the vote, to control the election.

What can this 120 million actually buy?

They don’t need your opinion. The strategy is to get enough people out to find the right voters and bring them to the polls. They’re gonna do door knocking, digital ads, direct mail, paid canvassers, all of it aimed at people who usually stay home in a midterm. Some of these states only have a few thousand voters who can decide the Senate. Musk understands that changing someone’s mind is slow and expensive. But with enough money, you can get people to the polls. You can get the right people to the polls. And using that money to make sure the other side stays home is cheap and reliable.

Why is Musk back in politics again?

He never left. Years ago Musk was done with the Republicans. He was angry. He talked about starting his own political party, called the America Party. So why is he ready to write the check right now? He needs politics to protect his money. This country only allows two parties. A third party does not make any sense. And Musk does not want to lose access to political power. He made enough enemies in Washington. He wants whoever runs the White House to owe him something. I don’t think he likes the Republicans. He just wants to use his wealth to buy a seat at the table. And the Republican Party, Trump, they are just the ones selling the seats.

This is bigger than Musk

His 120 million dollars is just a small part of a larger play. Trump and his allies have around 1.1 billion dollars ready. That is more than three times what the Democratic Party has. Both parties run the same operation. The same class of rich people writes the checks on both sides. And all this money comes from the same place. It comes from your paycheck. They built their fortune on your back. While you fight each other about red and blue, they just use that to manipulate you.

Free speech

They will call this free speech. But in my opinion, money is the speech. Musk can use 120 million dollars to make his speech. You have speech too. You don’t have 120 million dollars. He can move millions of votes. You can only move one. Free speech doesn’t make sense here. Only power makes sense here. And the power belongs to the people who have assets, who have the capital.

My take

This makes me sick. Not because Musk is rich. People get rich, it’s fine. It makes me sick because the money was never really his. It came from millions of ordinary lives, from the workers, from the people who helped him build his empire. Now it is being used against those same people. They took the value of your labor, and they are spending it to make sure nothing ever changes for you. Stealing money is bad. And the thief, the thief is not only stealing your money, they use that money to lecture you. That’s even worse. They robbed you. Then they told you you should be grateful.

This is not just one election

It has been like this throughout history. As long as rich people can buy the election, buy the operation, they decide who votes and what they hear. The numbers only get bigger. More and more money will pour into the election. It doesn’t matter which team you are on. Both teams are taking the same money from the same people. The only fix is to stop thinking this is some sort of fight between parties. It’s not. It is always the ruling class, the people who own things, against the people who do the actual work.

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New York just promised to make a basket of everyday groceries 30% cheaper for anyone who walks in the door. Within a day, the same voices that cheer billion-dollar tax breaks for corporations were screaming that this is how communism starts.

The fight was never about groceries. It is about who government resources are allowed to help.

Here are the facts. Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the plan on July 27. Five city-owned stores, one in each borough, by the end of his term. A core basket of produce, meat, seafood, eggs, dairy and around 20 categories of pantry staples sold at a 30% discount, with prices locked monthly instead of swinging week to week. The city puts up 70 million dollars in capital, owns the land, covers rent and property taxes, and lets private operators bid to run the stores. City projections put the savings near 90 dollars a month, about 1,000 dollars a year for a household. Grocery prices in New York have jumped roughly 66% in a decade. This is not a bread line. It is a discount aisle with a landlord who does not need a profit.

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China already answered this question

In many Chinese cities, community food markets do not run on pure hands-off approach. Local governments plan where they sit, help manage or subsidize the space, hold down rents, regulate food safety, and lean on supply and reserve systems to keep prices from spiking. The goal is not to erase private business. It is to make sure ordinary households, especially lower-income and elderly ones, can reach affordable fresh food nearby.

And here is the part the fear-mongers never mention. That same country is where Costco, Walmart and Sam’s Club are making a fortune. Public provision and private retail sit side by side, because shoppers do not choose on price alone. They choose on brand, convenience, selection and habit. A person who has trusted one store for 20 years does not abandon it because a cheaper option opened across town.

So the claim that a public grocery option automatically destroys the private market is not economics. It is a scare story.

Notice which help gets a nice name

When critics warn that a public store will wreck private ones, ask a simple question. The United States government subsidizes agriculture. It insures crops. It hands chipmakers tens of billions. It bailed out banks and automakers. It gives corporations tax breaks and calls it industrial policy and investment in the future. None of that gets called socialism.

Help a company build a data center with public money, that is economic development. Help a grandmother buy eggs, that is the road to communism.

This is not an economic argument. It is a class argument wearing an economic costume. Government touches the market every single day. The only thing up for debate is who it touches the market for. Aim the help upward at shareholders and it gets a respectable name. Aim it down at people struggling with a grocery bill and out comes the socialism label.

Who this store is actually for

This is what gets buried under the panic. A 30% discount is not a luxury for the people it reaches. For a senior on a fixed income, cheaper groceries can decide whether there is money left for the pharmacy or the electric bill. For a family stretching SNAP benefits, the same dollars cover more real food. That is not dependence. That is dignity. For a neighborhood with no full supermarket and no easy transit, a nearby store is not about ideology. It is about whether fresh food is reachable at all.

Yes, a public option will pressure some private grocers. That is real, and it deserves to be taken seriously. But weigh it honestly. Squeeze a handful of competing stores, or leave hundreds of thousands of residents paying prices they cannot carry. That is a trade-off. Pretending only one side of it exists is the whole trick.

Watch the pattern, not the panic

None of this makes the plan a guaranteed win. Five stores is small against a city this size. Supply chains, cost control and long-term funding are real risks, and government-run stores have failed in other towns. So the honest question is not whether this exact plan is flawless. It is whether, in food and housing and healthcare, once the market has priced ordinary people out, the public is even allowed to build an alternative.

That is the fight underneath the grocery fight. Subsidies flow up and get called strategy. Relief flows down and gets called a threat. Watch how fast the word socialism appears the moment a policy might lower your cost of living instead of a corporation’s. That timing tells you exactly who the system was built to serve.

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Close to 30 million dollars. That is what the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its allied groups have spent to shape one Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, according to the Associated Press, and it is the largest amount the lobby has ever put into a single race. Not a swing seat in November. A primary. To decide which Democrat you are allowed to pick from.

Stop treating this as a routine money-in-politics story. The August 4 primary pits Congresswoman Haley Stevens against Abdul El-Sayed. Count every outside group and total spending in the race has passed 41 million dollars, more than half of it boosting Stevens or attacking El-Sayed, per federal disclosures compiled by Bridge Michigan. El-Sayed is raising more from actual voters, over 4 million dollars last quarter, more than double Stevens’ own haul. He is drawing the small donors. She is drawing the machine. Those are two different contests.

Now the part the party label is built to hide. The money has names. Paul Singer, a longtime Republican donor and former board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition whose giving runs almost entirely to Republicans, put 2.5 million dollars into AIPAC’s super PAC this cycle. Jan Koum, the WhatsApp co-founder who gave 5 million dollars in stock to Trump’s super PAC in 2024, added 1.6 million through an affiliated fund.

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Neither man is a Michigan Democratic voter.

The pattern holds past the headline names. The Quincy Institute’s Eli Clifton went through the large donations, 50,000 dollars and up, to the super PAC. Setting aside the roughly 30 million dollars AIPAC routed to it directly, 22% came from donors who usually fund Republicans and only 36% from reliable Democratic givers. Just 1.7% of the super PAC’s money came from Michigan at all.

Read that again. Republican billionaires are helping decide who the Democrats of Michigan are permitted to nominate.

This is not a slip. It is not a Democratic operation and it is not a Republican one. It buys reliable votes wherever it can find them, and the party label on the candidate is beside the point.

Stevens’ seat was one of these purchases. In 2022 the lobby spent nearly 4 million dollars to take out Andy Levin, a Jewish congressman and self-described liberal Zionist whose offense was supporting a Palestinian state. AIPAC celebrated the result as removing a detractor and strengthening pro-Israel ranks in Congress. Stevens thanked AIPAC publicly after she won.

Ask her about any of this and she has a line loaded. “No one owns my vote and no one owns my policies.” Back in 2019 she went further, insisting her beliefs “will never be bought and paid for.” Her words. Set them next to 30 million dollars. You do not spend that to rent a vote. You spend it to own the seat.

Then look at what she does with the vote nobody supposedly owns. In the July debate she called Benjamin Netanyahu a danger to Jews everywhere and said he had failed on peace. Three weeks later, on July 15, she got the chance to turn that criticism into policy. The House voted on an amendment to cut the 3.3 billion dollars in annual aid to Israel. In that vote, 103 Democrats moved to end it. Stevens voted to keep it.

The criticism changed. The vote did not. A politician will say anything into a microphone, and in a primary where the base has turned on the war, of course she did. Talk is free. But intent shows up on the vote, and at the end of the day that is the only tell that counts. Stevens stood with the 3.3 billion.

And here is what makes it a machine, not a coincidence. The amendment Stevens voted down was written by Thomas Massie, a Republican the same lobby had just run out of Congress. AIPAC and allied pro-Israel groups poured more than 15 million dollars into beating Massie in his Kentucky primary this spring, the most expensive House primary in American history, and celebrated the night he lost. Watch what the money rewards and what it punishes. It buys the Democrat who keeps the aid flowing, and it destroys the Republican who moves to cut it. The party label is not the tell. The Israel vote is.

And notice how the money is sold. The lobby enters the race because of Israel. Its ads, by the group’s own record, barely mention Israel at all. The foreign-policy litmus test picks the candidate, then local advertising about manufacturing and Michigan jobs dresses the transaction up as something homegrown.

So who pays. You do, if you vote in Michigan. The primary is the one moment you choose before the general shrinks it to yes or no. Bury it under 41 million dollars of outside ads, and the things that actually hit your life, the premiums, the wages, the roads, never get argued.

And everyone pays the precedent. Levin was disciplined for stepping out of line. El-Sayed is being spent against in a state with the largest Arab American population in the country. Once a Senate seat clears for 30 million dollars in legal, disclosed, routine spending, the price is set, and your representation goes to whoever writes the biggest check.

This is what it looks like when the pretense drops. Not a coup. A price list. The fight you are handed is one Democrat against a more progressive one, and underneath it a donor class is securing a reliable vote before you reach the booth. The party fight is the packaging. The purchase is the product.

This will not stop at Michigan. AIPAC has already shown that 30 million dollars can dominate the information environment of a Senate primary, and on August 4 the state finds out whether it can buy the result too. But look past the one race. The 2026 midterms and the 2028 election are the working class election, whatever the ballot calls it. The parties will sell you culture fights and personality wars, because that is what keeps you from asking the only question that scares them: who funds this candidate, and what do they expect for it. The real split in every race between now and then is simple. On one side, the donors who write the 2.5 million dollar checks and expect a vote back. On the other, everyone who cannot, and who gets buried under that money in the one race that was supposed to be theirs. Watch the money, and you will know which side a candidate is on.

And be clear about what these donors are buying. Not a party. They fund Democrats and Republicans and they end the careers of both, so party was never the point. They are paying for one thing: a candidate who treats support for Israel as settled and keeps the aid flowing, no matter whose name is on the door.

Here is the bottom line. If you let Haley Stevens win, the money wins. It means Israel wins. It means a donor class that never set foot in Michigan wins. And it means you, the voter who was supposed to own this seat, walk away with nothing.

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Start with the ugliest part. They will not tell you who paid for it. The agency floated the name of a dark-money group, that group denied it, and the Stevens campaign says it had no idea and no involvement. Fine. So ask yourself who benefits from a pile of fake moms talking up Haley Stevens. Funny thing about these accounts, they only ever help one candidate. I do not have to hand you the missing piece. You already know where it points.

Here is what actually got stolen: your struggle. Rent going up, groceries going up, a paycheck that does not stretch, that is the real life of millions of people. Somebody took that real hardship, dubbed over it, and sold it back to you as an ad for a candidate sitting on a mountain of dark money. One pop-up super PAC alone has dumped around 14 million dollars into ads for Stevens, and almost all of it came from a dark-money group run by corporate lobbyists with drug-industry money in it. Add up all the outside groups and they have spent more than 34 million on her. The rent you cannot cover and the money that bought your feed come from two completely different worlds.

This is what a bought election looks like. The money did not stop at TV ads. It crawled into your feed and put on the face of a tired mom who cannot make rent, and then it pointed at your ballot. Spend enough and you can muddy the water, you can push a narrative into millions of heads and make people think they are hearing a neighbor. And all of it is legal. Sell face cream without saying you got paid and the FTC comes after you. Sell a United States senator with the exact same trick and there is no rule against it at all. That is not a bug in the system. That is the system working as designed.

The creators who took the gig, I will be straight, it is sad and it is a little shameful. A few hundred dollars, 30 posts for around 400 bucks, and they rent out the one thing that was theirs, their credibility, without even knowing who they are really working for. Who is the money? No idea. What is the play? No clue. They just put their face out there and shill for a machine they never got a look at. One person was the exception. Her name is Kendall Boyle. When the agency came to her, she asked one question, who is paying for this. The answer traced back to dark money, so she walked, said it would feel fake to shill for a dark-money PAC, and then she started documenting the paid posts and calling them out. One person asked the question. Everybody else cashed the check.

So now, scrolling your phone, you have to add a layer of doubt to everything. Is the person behind this account even real? Is any of what she is saying what she actually believes? That is the part that should bother you most. What they put a price tag on is not one ad. It is your ability to trust that a voice sounds like you because it is you. The consensus of a country is supposed to be millions of people arguing and living it out. Now it can be manufactured to order, 30 dollars a post. You think you are listening to the public. You are listening to an invoice.

Do not let anyone sell you the “Democratic infighting” line. The real divide was never this establishment candidate versus that progressive one. The real divide is the people rich enough to buy your struggle and sell it back to you, and you, the one getting bought and sold. They are counting on you to keep watching the left-right slap fight so they can quietly load this stuff into your feed again and again. They are betting you can't tell the difference between what's real and what's not, so you make the wrong decision.

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Ask most people in the West what happened in China between 1959 and 1961 and you get the entire history in one breath.

Mao brought in communism, took the farmers’ food, killed 70 million people.

Done. History solved. Now you never have to think about it again, which is the point.

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The number does not survive contact

The 70 million figure comes from Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s 2005 biography of Mao. It covers his entire time in power, not the famine. Their own famine figure is 38 million.

When a seminar at UC San Diego tried to reconstruct how 70 million had been calculated, they found no method in the book at all. Guesses, double counting, circular reasoning. Andrew Nathan at Columbia called the authors magpies, putting every shiny piece into the nest regardless of where it came from.

Some estimates run from 15 million to 55 million depending on the years counted and how an excess death is defined, with newer work clustering between 30 and 46 million. And from Chinese report, it was around 10 millions death related to the famine. It is also not the same claim as one man deliberately killing 70 million people, and only one of those two claims is supported.

China criticized this officially, in writing

Another piece of the Western story says Mao is untouchable inside China. That is false.

In 1981 the Communist Party adopted its official resolution on Party history. The economy fell into severe difficulty between 1959 and 1961, it says, mainly due to the errors of the Great Leap Forward and the struggle against Right opportunism, together with natural calamities and the Soviet government’s scrapping of contracts.

Errors first. Weather second.

The same document calls the campaign against Peng Dehuai entirely wrong and says it cut short the correction of left errors. Deng Xiaoping’s remarks on the drafts state that Mao bore the chief responsibility.

The Party’s own verdict is more detailed than the slogan built on top of it. That tells you what the slogan is for.

What the country had to work with

The People’s Republic was founded in 1949 on a ruin. Decades of invasion and civil war. Wrecked rail and irrigation. Hyperinflation that had destroyed both the currency and the tax base.

And as the Nationalists retreated to Taiwan, they took the one asset that could actually be spent abroad. Somewhere between 3 million and 5 million taels of central bank gold crossed the strait, along with silver and foreign currency reserves. Factories cannot be loaded onto a ship. Farmland cannot. Gold can.

That distinction decided what China could do in an emergency. Land, labour and coal do not buy Canadian wheat. Hard currency and foreign credit buy Canadian wheat.

China had almost none. Beijing’s published figures show foreign exchange reserves of 157 million dollars at the end of 1950, and 46 million dollars at the end of 1960, at the very worst of it.

And it was locked out of the market anyway

Washington revoked the general export licence for China in December 1950 and ran a total trade embargo. Not a targeted sanctions list. A total embargo, with pressure on allies, shipping restrictions and controls on financial transactions.

Britain and Western Europe dropped the harsher China-specific controls in 1957. The United States kept its own running into the 1970s.

The embargo did not create the shortage. It decided what a shortage would cost. A country with reserves and open credit lines meets a failed harvest by buying its way through it. China was denied that option by design, and Washington understood that was the point.

The Soviet rupture

Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956 and opened an ideological gap that never closed. Mao rejected the idea that China should copy the Soviet industrial model and began arguing for a Chinese road, driven by mass mobilization, that would move faster than Moscow said was possible.

The Great Leap launched in 1958 with that argument inside it. Political competition helped set the targets, and the targets were fantasy.

In 1960 Moscow pulled its experts and tore up contracts. The Politburo responded by accelerating repayment of Soviet loans, compressing the schedule from 16 years down to five, and setting up a trade group to hold down imports and gather goods for export.

Read that again with a famine already underway.

What the weather explains, and what it does not

There were genuine droughts and floods. The 1981 resolution lists them, and it is not inventing them.

Yang Jisheng went through the meteorological records directly and put the maximum contribution of natural disasters at roughly a third of the shortfall in grain production. A third is severe. In a farming economy with no reserves and no way to import, a third can kill people on its own.

It also leaves two thirds.

Where the shortage became mass death

Economists Xin Meng, Nancy Qian and Pierre Yared found that in 1959, the year the famine began, Chinese food production was still nearly three times what the population needed to survive. And rural areas producing more food per person died at higher rates, a reversal that appears in no other period.

The grain existed. It was taken.

Procurement quotas were set against inflated harvest reports and could not adjust downward when the real harvest came in short, so the most productive villages were stripped hardest. Meng, Qian and Yared attribute 32% to 43% of famine mortality to the procurement system by itself. Meanwhile the grain kept leaving the country: 1.92 million tons exported in 1957, 4.1 million tons in 1959, an all-time high, in the middle of the collapse.

Local cadres inflated their harvests because the system paid them to. When Peng Dehuai raised the alarm at Lushan in 1959, he was destroyed for it, and every official watching learned that reporting hunger was a political act.

The official Party history published in 2011 still carries the consequence: nine counties in Henan’s Xinyang region recorded death rates above 10% in 1960. Henan’s own first secretary submitted a self-criticism to Mao in January 1961 reporting more than 2 million dead in his province, over a million in Xinyang alone.

Beijing was not doing nothing. Beijing was blind, and had blinded itself

Economists Ziying Fan, Wei Xiong and Li-An Zhou traced the mechanism. Local officials competed to inflate grain yields to match what Mao wanted to hear, and the central government, reading its own falsified numbers, did not organize systematic famine relief until roughly two years after the famine began. During those two years the center was still moving grain out of the worst-hit provinces, while local cadres inside those same provinces quietly handed local stock back to the peasants.

When the center finally saw it, the policy turned hard. Urban populations were sent back to the countryside from September 1960. Central inspectors went into Xinyang county by county. In 1961 China reversed course and became a net grain importer, taking in 4.4 million tons, paid out of reserves it could barely spare.

And the dying stopped.

Weather and the embargo are both in this story, and both made it worse. Drought and flood cut production. The embargo removed the exits. But neither one explains the timing. The American embargo was still fully in force in 1961. The weather had not transformed. What changed was policy, and when the policy changed the dying stopped.

A system that could be switched off two years late could have been switched off two years earlier. What stood between those two dates was not the harvest and not Washington. It was a machine that had made truth-telling a career-ending act, and then believed the lies it had paid for.

What the West was doing while this happened

Nothing. And not because anything was being hidden from it. Because nobody’s decisions depended on knowing.

In February 1961 Agriculture Minister Alvin Hamilton told the House of Commons that the Canadian Wheat Board had sold 40 million bushels of wheat and barley to China, roughly 60 million dollars, soon expanding into credit sales and a far larger deal. John Diefenbaker was a committed anti-communist and approved it over American objections, because the prairies had surplus grain and China had turned into a buyer.

Files released by Library and Archives Canada show what the men approving it believed. A confidential foreign ministry assessment on Chinese food shortages found no evidence that the country as a whole was starving, and described China as “practically immune from the dangers of drought and flood.” A Canadian grain delegation toured five cities in 1961, ate bread in all of them, and reported that people looked adequately clothed and fed. In Washington, an April 1961 intelligence estimate told the President that widespread famine did not appear to be at hand.

That is not a cover-up. A cover-up would at least require somebody to have looked. Washington kept a total embargo running through the entire catastrophe, and as late as May 1962 its stated position was that it would be prepared to reconsider if Beijing came and asked.

Not one Western government moved because Chinese farmers were dying.

Twenty years later those same farmers became the West’s leading exhibit that communism kills. Nobody counted them while they were starving. They became countable the moment they were useful. That is the cheapest moral capital there is, and it is still being spent.

What the slogan is for

Put the whole thing back together and you get a wrecked treasury, no hard currency, a total American embargo, a collapsing alliance and an accelerated debt, real droughts, fantasy targets, falsified harvests, rigid extraction, a general destroyed for telling the truth, and a government that could not see through its own reporting system for two years.

Then watch it compress into three characters. A dictator, victims, and an ideology described by western media.

That is not education. It is crowd management. The audience never has to learn what a procurement quota is. It only has to remember a name, an ism and a number.

And the technique does not stay in China. A public trained to receive foreign suffering as one villain and one number will accept that sanctions are bloodless, that poverty is a character flaw, that any country standing in the way is a hostage-taker. The same reflex works at home. Institutions that can flatten a famine will flatten a wage collapse, a premium hike or a police shooting the same way. One bad actor, one headline, no mechanism, nothing left to examine.

Ordinary people pay for that habit every time. In 1959 the men who set the quotas did not go hungry. The men who filed the false harvest reports did not go hungry. The farmers who grew a surplus and handed it over did.

Whoever holds the rules, somebody else pays the bill.

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Start with a claim that sounds soft and turns out to be the hardest thing in the room. Artificial intelligence should belong to the people. Not to a country, not to a company. To people, all of them.

Last week that idea got said out loud on a world stage. In Shanghai, Xi Jinping called AI the common wealth of all mankind. Whether Beijing delivers on that is another matter, and the models and compute over there still sit under the state. But at least the goal got named. The American plan names a different one. It is titled “Winning the Race,” and it means exactly what it says.

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So before we get to who is paying for what, sit with the question underneath it all. Why should AI serve people in the first place?

Here is why. AI was not conjured out of thin air by a handful of firms in California. It was trained on us. Every model runs on the collective output of billions of human beings, everything we have ever written, drawn, filmed, and figured out, scraped up for free. It runs on public electricity, public water, and decades of publicly funded research, including the internet itself, which your tax money built. AI is the commons, refined and sold back to you. Something built by everyone has a real claim to belong to everyone. That is not sentiment. It is a question of ownership.

Now put it in the line it belongs to. Steam, electricity, the computer, the internet, and now this. None of those were just products. Each was a means of production, a new way to make everything else, and whoever owned it set the terms for everyone who had to work with it. AI belongs on that list for a plain reason. It is a tool you make things with. You write with it, code with it, design and build and plan with it, so it does not just sit in the economy, it multiplies what a single person can produce. And it is being born almost entirely privately owned. So ask the only question that has ever mattered with a leap this size. Do the gains go to the people who do the work, or to whoever owns the machine?

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Here is the part the American side will never say out loud. Their problem with “open source,” with “shared,” with calling AI a commons, is not about security, and it is not really about China. It is older than that. Capital does not share the means of production. It never has. So when one government says the machine should be held in common and the other says the whole point is to win, you are not watching two countries compete. You are watching the oldest fight there is, the people who want the tool owned by everyone against the people who intend to own it themselves. On that one, I know which side I am on.

The American plan is capital doing what capital does. A fully American tech stack, exported to allied countries to lock them in. 500 billion dollars aimed at a single private data center campus. A goal, written in plain language, of dominance. You do not need dominance to help people. You need dominance to control them.

And you are already paying to build it, start to finish. The cost starts in the mines that feed the chips and ends in the electronic waste, with the data centers burning public power and water in between. But the costs are not the story. The direction the money moves is. The company takes the profit. The public eats the cost, socialized onto people who will never own a share of what they are subsidizing. That is the machine in four words. Privatized gain, socialized cost. People on one side, the data center on the other.

Congress has a bill that is supposed to fix this, and it tells you everything. It has not passed. It only asks states to consider making big electricity users pay their own way, and states are free to say no. Even the protection is built to be optional. The tech giants back that toothless version happily, because a fix that fixes nothing costs them nothing, while the versions with real teeth die quietly. The public pays. The private owner keeps the machine.

So here is where it lands. AI is the compressed knowledge and labor of the entire species, a means of production built by all of us, and a thing like that has no business ending up as the private property of a few dozen corporations. Serving people and seeking dominance were never two roads to the same place. The American system picked one on purpose.

We share this world. We built its knowledge together, over thousands of years, and AI is stacked on top of all of it. A tool that came from everyone should answer to everyone, and it should not be split up by class any more than the air is. Anything less is theft dressed up as innovation.

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In July, protests against data centers hit 42 states. Look at who showed up. MAGA voters. Former Tea Party organizers. Environmentalists. Union workers. Suburban homeowners worried about their wells and their bills. These people fight about everything, every day, online and off.

Not this.

What put them in the same county meeting rooms? Not Trump. Not immigration. Not the culture war. The electric bill. The water. A company from Silicon Valley moving into their county without asking anyone who lives there.

A utility bill does not care how you voted.

This is not just anti-AI. This is anti forced subsidy.

The tech industry wants you to believe these protesters fear technology. Listen to what they actually ask. Who pays for the grid upgrades? How much tax did this company get waived? How much water will it draw? How many permanent jobs stay in town?

Here is one answer. JPMorgan Chase got nearly 77 million dollars in tax breaks for a data center in New York. Permanent jobs promised: one. At the public hearing, nobody showed up. Officials sat through 20 minutes of silence, closed the meeting, and approved the deal two weeks later.

Not a fluke. An Ohio expansion worth 136 million dollars is projected to create 10 full-time jobs, and even Republican Senator Bernie Moreno demanded the company hand its subsidy back. Nationally, these deals cost the public over 2 million dollars per permanent job.

For decades, the deal was simple: tax breaks buy jobs. Data centers killed that deal.

The China shield

Ask about the cost and watch what happens. They reach for China.

Kevin O’Leary is backing a data center project in Utah reported at 100 billion dollars, spread across 40,000 acres. When locals raised water and power concerns, he went on TV and said states slowing data centers down are handing the AI race to China. Opposition became obstruction of national defense.

Here is the part that gives it away. O’Leary himself admits that when a normal data center taps the grid, “the electrical costs for their church and the community and the residents all go up.” His words. That is why people push back, he says.

So he knows the cost is real. He just wants you to swallow it for the race.

From Musk’s xAI to the compute plans worth hundreds of billions sold as American AI leadership, the script repeats: wrap the private interest in the flag. A man with a fortune riding on server farms tells you the real threat to America is your question about your water bill. This was never about China. China is the word they deploy so that asking who pays sounds unpatriotic.

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Your utility company is the second winner

You probably think the power company is stuck in the middle, forced to raise your rates. It is not.

American utilities are regulated monopolies, and the law guarantees them a rate of return on infrastructure they build. Every power plant and transmission line built for Big Tech is guaranteed profit. The more they build, the more their shareholders make. Serving data centers is not a burden on your utility. It is the best business opportunity it has seen in decades.

Harvard researchers went through nearly 50 regulatory proceedings and found utilities cutting discounted deals with data center companies through special contracts, reviewed in processes so opaque the public cannot follow them, then spreading the costs across ordinary ratepayers who legally cannot switch providers. Their conclusion: subsidies for trillion-dollar companies are being hidden inside your power price, a wealth transfer to the shareholders of Big Tech and utilities alike.

The servers are theirs. The profit is theirs. The bill is yours, and both sets of shareholders collect on it.

That is the mechanism no cable segment will walk you through.

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You may comment. You may not say no.

Someone will point to the public hearings. Yes, you can speak. The question is whether you can decide.

When residents say yes, developers call it community support. When residents say no, developers reapply, lobby the state, rezone, rename the project, or sue. A Michigan township rejected rezoning for a 16 billion dollar project tied to Oracle and OpenAI. The developer sued. A settlement followed. Construction proceeded.

Communities are allowed to comment. They are not always allowed to decide. Local democracy is respected when the answer is yes. When the answer is no, the lawyers arrive.

They share an enemy. Not a future.

Do not romanticize this coalition. The right wants local control and an end to backroom deals. The left wants clean energy, union jobs, and corporate accountability. They oppose the same projects for different reasons, and they will split when the fight turns to solutions.

But this moment already proved something. When politics runs on cultural identity, ordinary people treat each other as the enemy. When it runs on water, power, land, and bills, they start seeing a common interest.

For years, AI was an abstraction: chips, compute, national rankings. Now it is concrete. It shows up in the electric bill, the water dispute, the industrial park going up next door. Tech companies promised investors a productivity revolution. Residents received an infrastructure invoice first.

The question of the AI age is not whether America builds more computing power. It will. The question is whether that infrastructure gets governed as a public system, or whether the public simply gets ordered to pay for someone else’s private empire.

The servers are private. The bill is public. That is what people are revolting against.

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Here is what that means in practice. The provision orders the Secretary of Defense to put one official in charge of fusing the two countries’ defense technology and keep it fused: artificial intelligence, drones and counter-drone systems, missile defense, cyber, and building weapons together. Not America buys, Israel sells. America and Israel develop it jointly, own it jointly, and build it into each other’s systems. No end date. No exit.

The reason nobody gets to vote on it is the same reason it is permanent. Those two facts are one fact.

It started as its own bill, with sponsors, out in the open, where it would have to be debated and voted on. It went nowhere. It could not pass. So the same language turned up inside the Pentagon’s budget bill, which is the one thing Congress cannot refuse to pass. Vote against the Pentagon budget and you voted against the troops.

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Then nobody’s name went on it. In committee, Ro Khanna moved to cut it out and they killed it with a voice vote, where everyone shouts yes or no at once and nothing is written down. Two members backed him. He and Thomas Massie tried again on the House floor, but a small committee decides which amendments are even allowed to be voted on, and they left this one off the list. Not defeated. Never permitted to exist. By then Massie was finished anyway, wiped out in a Kentucky primary where pro-Israel groups spent more than 15.8 million dollars against him. Trump wanted him gone too. But every member of Congress watched that money work.

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Now the part that outlives all of them.

Countries do not have friends. They have interests. That is not an insult aimed at Israel. It describes every government that has ever existed, including the one writing this bill.

Around 2000, Israel was about to sell China a set of radar planes worth roughly a billion dollars. The kind of aircraft that helps China see American planes coming in a fight over Taiwan. Washington came after Israel hard, and what it threatened was the money. Cut the aid. Israel ran the numbers, backed out, and paid China 350 million dollars in penalties to walk away from the contract.

That is the only thing that has ever worked. It worked because there was a check to cancel.

America sends Israel about 3.8 billion dollars a year, and Congress has to touch that number every single year. That is the leash. That is the whole leash.

A merger has no number. It is contracts and licensing and Pentagon paperwork. Nothing to cut, nothing to threaten, nothing that comes up again next year or ever. Turkey got thrown out of the F-35 program and untangling it has taken years, because supply chains are not built to come apart. This one gets tied together on purpose.

Netanyahu says he wants Israel off American aid within ten years. Read that as independence if you want. It means the check disappears and the technology stays.

And if you think the leash is unnecessary, look at what is happening without it. A Chinese state owned company runs a shipping terminal in Haifa today, about a mile from where Israel keeps its submarines and where American warships tie up. Three American administrations told Israel not to. Israel did it anyway, reportedly refused to let Americans inspect it, and last year approved doubling it in size. Nothing happened to them. When the US Army asked for the source code to Iron Dome, the missile system Americans helped pay for, Israel said no. Nothing happened then either.

That is a country choosing itself, which is what countries are for. So stop asking what is wrong with Israel. Ask what is wrong with the Americans holding the pen.

They will tell you it sharpens America’s edge in defense technology. That is the cover story. Here is what is actually running this.

Some of them cannot see past the next election, and they have mistaken today’s warmth for a permanent condition, which is the oldest mistake in the business.

Some of them are into the religious stuff. Believe whatever you want on a Sunday, that is your business. But international relations is not a church service. The day you start making national security calls out of scripture, that is not faith, that is stupidity. American missile data is not a Bible commentary. Nobody in that building swore an oath to a verse. They swore one to a constitution.

And all of them watched 15.8 million dollars remove the one man who wanted a vote.

The Republican chairman and the senior Democrat on his committee wrote this thing together. Massie is a Republican, Khanna is a Democrat, and they are the two who tried to kill it. Whichever way you vote in November, you are buying a permanent foreign policy that somebody richer than you already paid for, out of the same check that just absorbed another premium hike.

One thing is still in the way. On July 14 Senate Democrats blocked the defense bill from even opening for debate, 50 to 46, and said the Israel provisions were part of why. That is the only reason this is not law yet. It is also procedural, which means it gets traded away in a back room, not beaten on a floor. Watch what comes out of that room.

My read. One day those interests will split, over China or Iran or something nobody has thought of yet, and Israel will choose Israel, because that is what Israel is for. Washington used to know that. It threatened the money and the sale died. The day the split comes, the technology is already inside their industry, and there is nothing left to withhold.

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That is the part I cannot get past. The Houston shooting was seven days old and I had the notes open. Before I finished, an ICE agent in Biddeford, Maine put four bullets through a windshield at seven in the morning and killed a 25-year-old delivery driver who was not the man they were looking for.

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On July 7, an ICE officer shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo at a traffic stop in Houston. He was 52 and had been in this country more than 35 years. ICE said he weaponized his van. The men riding with him say that is false. He was not the target.

On Monday, an ICE agent shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford. He was 25, raised in Bucaramanga, Colombia, working two jobs, father to a three-year-old. DHS says he entered in September 2023 and was granted a work permit in May 2025, and made a point of adding that a work permit is not legal status. He was not the target either. A neighbor with a clear view of the intersection says he heard Johan Sebastián say, I tried to stop.

Then watch the story move. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told Senator Angus King that Johan Sebastián had weaponized his vehicle. King repeated it to reporters because it came from the secretary. Hours later, Mullin told King the man was not the target after all. That evening, roughly 12 hours in, DHS put something in writing and the word weaponized was gone. Now the car had attempted to flee and an officer fired fearing for public safety.

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Those are two different claims, not two versions of one. A car aimed at an officer is a threat. A car driving away is a car driving away, and ICE’s own policy tells agents not to fire at vehicles. Representative Chellie Pingree says DHS acknowledged the man was driving away and the officer was not endangered. There is no footage, so the story that changed twice in 12 hours is also the only record there is.

So ask the real question. Why did he not hesitate.

Hesitation is not a character trait. It is what a consequence feels like from the inside. An officer slows down because somebody will pull the footage, because a prosecutor will read the report, because someone will make him explain why he fired at a car that was driving away. Take all three away and you do not get a worse man. You get a man doing different math.

Monday morning had none of the three. No body camera, so no footage to pull. King says he was told cameras might show up in 45 days. Maine’s attorney general is investigating, but from the outside. If a Biddeford cop had fired those shots, the case would be Maine’s. This one belongs to the FBI and to the DHS inspector general, which is DHS looking into DHS, and King said why in plain terms. Because it was a federal operation.

Then add the pressure. DHS leadership and Stephen Miller called for 2,000 arrests a day. Last month, weekend arrests averaged around 600. This Saturday it was more than 1,300, and Sunday more than 1,100. That target tells every officer what gets counted. Nothing in the building tells him what it costs to be wrong.

So it does not much matter who that agent is. Put the most careful man in the country in that uniform on Monday morning and nothing in that building would have slowed him down either. A police force that answers to the public builds the brake in on purpose. A force that answers to the power that sent it out has no reason to, and ICE did not. Killing a man in the street with no real consequence is not a modern government having a bad week. It is what enforcement looked like before anyone had to answer for it.

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Which brings me to Susan Collins.

Collins chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, which holds jurisdiction over every dollar of discretionary spending in the federal government. She calls it the most powerful committee in the Senate. That is her line, delivered in front of a new fire station last month, and it is the whole argument for sending her back.

In June she voted 70 billion dollars to ICE. Asked why, her office pointed at what was inside: 20 million for body cameras, 2 million for de-escalation training, 20 million for detention oversight. Five weeks later a man was killed 20 miles from her district office by an agent who did not have one. She says a shutdown slowed the paperwork.

Either she is the most powerful appropriator in Washington, or she could not get a camera onto an ICE agent in her own state. She put a fire station in Sweden, Maine. The 70 billion arrived on time. They are still waiting for the cameras.

On Monday a man died. That night she called Mullin to ask him to stop non urgent vehicle stops. By Tuesday she announced she was encouraged that he agreed. Protesters were outside her Biddeford office by the afternoon chanting vote her out. Nirav Shah, one of the Democrats running for her seat, said the only thing there was to say: “a single late-night phone call isn’t going to cut it.”

You vote the money through. You name the guardrail. The guardrail does not show up. A man dies. You put out a statement saying you are encouraged. The 42 million was never a guardrail. It was what made 70 billion votable. One of those numbers was real the day it was signed. The other one was a schedule.

A 25-year-old man left his apartment at 7 in the morning to go to work. He had a work permit the federal government issued him. He was not the man they were looking for. A minute later he was being pulled out of the car onto the pavement, his face covered in blood. Footage shared online shows agents pulling his arms behind his back to cuff a man who was no longer moving. Neighbors described his wife and daughter crying in the street. One watched a little girl in pajamas, beside herself, held back from the tape. The man with the clearest view of it said, nobody should have to see what I saw. By that night the intersection was open again. The only thing left was blood on the crosswalk, and somebody had written THIS IS BLOOD next to it in chalk.

Whatever the inspector general concludes six months from now, here is what happened on Pool Street on Monday. A government killed a working man on his way to a shift, in front of his neighbors, and then took 12 hours to decide what to say about it. That is the fact. Everything else is procedure.

Mullin paused vehicle stops on Tuesday, which is an admission that Monday’s tactic was already unsafe on Sunday. But the pause covers vehicle stops. It does not cover home arrests, worksite arrests, or foot pursuits. The 2,000 a day target has not moved. The pressure did not go anywhere.

Defund ICE.

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40 billionaires put 1.57 billion dollars into American elections since 2010. That is the top line of a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund. It is a big number, until you read the second one. That 1.57 billion is 0.09% of what these people are worth. Not even a tenth of one percent. For the median American household, the same slice of net worth is about 180 dollars. A week of groceries.

40 Epstein-Tied Billionaires Have Injected $1.6B Into US Elections, Report Finds | Truthout

So 16 years of elections, courts, tax fights, and wars got shaped by 40 checkbooks, for less than what you spend on food in a week.

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The report is being read one way: 84% went to Republicans. True. That framing is the trap. It makes this a story about the other team instead of a story about you.

Here is what the 84% hides. The billionaires themselves split almost evenly between the parties. Several of them wrote checks to the Clintons for years. And the two political families America is trained to fight over, the Trumps and the Clintons, both turn up in the same dead man’s birthday book. Trump’s page, the one with his signature that the House Oversight Committee released last year, is one he says is not his. He sued the Wall Street Journal over it. A judge threw the suit out in April. Bill Clinton has a page in there too.

At the top there is no left and no right. There is a donor class that funds the whole show and does not care which actor is on stage.

Look at who they are. The Adelson family, casino money, spent 745 million dollars, all of it to the right. Elon and Kimbal Musk, 365 million. Trump’s own campaigns and the super PACs behind him pulled 282 million out of this single pool of Epstein-tied money.

That 84% skew is not tribal loyalty. The money runs right because the right cuts their taxes hardest. The report says as much. Even the partisan number is not about ideology. It is a return on investment.

Then there is Epstein himself. He was worth around 600 million dollars, and that money bought him a sweetheart deal in 2008 and years of freedom he should never have had. The same class now buys the same immunity at scale. Senator Ron Wyden and the Senate Finance Committee found 4,725 wire transfers, about 1.08 billion dollars, moving in and out of a single one of Epstein’s accounts between 2003 and 2019. Some of it went to women and girls. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is sitting on those records right now, and Senate Republicans blocked the bill that would pry them loose.

They do not fear the law. They price it.

This is the divide that matters, and it is not left against right. It is the people who own the machine against the people who feed it. You paid your 180-dollar share of net worth into nothing. They paid their 0.09% and got two Trump tax laws that handed this same class back many times over what they spent. That is not corruption in the movie sense, with a briefcase in a parking garage. It is a subscription. The rules are a service, and they are the customers.

They know the elections are a market. They know your vote is priced in. They know the fight over borders and pronouns keeps you busy while they close on the tax code. And they are doing it anyway.

None of this is new. In the last century of the Roman Republic, the rich bought offices and juries in the open, everyone knew, and the Republic held elections right up until it was a corpse in a toga. The forms outlived the thing they were meant to protect.

America’s myth is that its billionaires are private citizens who got lucky, not rulers. In China the arrangement is explicit. When Jack Ma criticized the state’s financial regulators, they pulled his company’s public offering and he went quiet for months, then came back smaller and careful, lesson learned. The billionaire there does not cross the state. Here the state answers to the billionaire.

This is what the slide toward authoritarian rule looks like. You don’t even need tanks in the street. A government of the people that keeps running the ceremony while answering to 40 checkbooks. The mask is not slipping by accident, and both parties are staffed by the same hands. The cost lands where it always lands. Your wage that has not moved in years, your premium that keeps climbing, your rent, all of it downstream of a tax code written by the people who bought the writers.

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Trump just fired every sitting member of the one federal agency built to keep either party from rigging how elections are run. That is not a personnel move. It is a takeover of the rulebook.

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The agency is the Election Assistance Commission. By law it has four members, two Democrats and two Republicans, so no single party controls it. That balance is the entire point. This week Trump fired the two Democrats by email, and the lone Republican resigned. A fourth seat was already empty. So the board now has zero members, and a board with zero members legally cannot act.

He could do this because the Supreme Court just handed him the power. In late June, in Trump v. Slaughter, the Court threw out a 91-year-old rule and said the president can fire the heads of independent agencies at will. The same week, it went out of its way to protect the independence of the Federal Reserve. The bankers keep their firewall. The people who guard the ballot do not.

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Here is what the agency actually does, because it matters. It does not count votes. It sets the standards for testing and certifying voting machines. It controls federal election funding. And it maintains the national voter registration form that every state has to accept.

That form is the prize. Trump has been trying for months to bolt a proof-of-citizenship requirement onto it. His own executive order tried it. A law firm aligned with him petitioned the commission to do it. The bipartisan board was the thing standing in the way. Now there is no board, and he gets to nominate the replacements. This is the same requirement Congress would not pass, done through the back door instead.

On the surface it sounds reasonable. Only citizens should vote, and that is already the law. But look at what proving it takes. You need a birth certificate, a passport, or your naturalization papers. About 21 million eligible Americans do not have ready access to those documents. Roughly half the country does not hold a valid passport. A replacement naturalization certificate costs $1,385. And the people who can produce these papers on demand are, by the data, the wealthier and more educated. If you have money, someone pulls your documents for you. If you are retired, you have the time to dig them out. If you are working two jobs, 7 days a week, or you naturalized 30 years ago and your papers are in a box in another state, that is a wall.

And here is the part that breaks the official story. The fraud this is supposed to stop is not happening. Utah reviewed roughly 2 million voters and found one noncitizen registered and zero who actually voted. Georgia checked 8.2 million and found about 20. When Kansas tried a proof-of-citizenship law, it blocked more than 30,000 eligible citizens before a court struck it down. Noncitizen voting has been a federal felony since 1996. The numbers are not close.

So stopping fraud is the excuse. What is actually happening is the effect. Add enough paperwork in front of the ballot, and you do not catch fraud, because there is almost none. You wear down the people who are already stretched thin, working long hours, watching every dollar, with no spare day to track down a document from decades ago. That is one more hurdle stacked on the people who have the least room to clear it. Some of them will not bother, and they will not vote. Strip out the language about election integrity, and what is left is voter suppression aimed straight at the working class.

This is aimed at 2028. The polling is not good for them, and when you cannot win the vote, you take control of the people who write the rules for the next one. The machine standards, the funding, the registration form. That is what this agency touches, and Trump just cleared every obstacle to controlling it.

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