Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently said that Chinese AI is doomed because it comes from government planning, while American AI grew on its own. I understand the logic, but the problem is that at the same time, he was out there in public defending data center construction, and suggesting that the residents fighting those projects might be repeating foreign propaganda. If the market truly grows on its own, it does not need Scott Bessent to step in and handle complaints from all the homeowners and residents.

So let’s take his own question seriously. Is American AI really free of government?

Federal land has been opened for data centers, and energy permits are being fast-tracked for them. The Defense Department is signing contracts with these companies worth hundreds of millions each. Loans, grants, tax breaks, subsidies, and long-term purchase agreements are already authorized and sitting in the toolbox waiting to be used. And Washington already traded CHIPS Act money for roughly 10 percent of Intel, which makes the government a part-owner of the company. Once government takes equity in the chipmaker, the next step is taking equity in the AI companies, and it just makes sense.

The US government is helping this market grow. It never grew on its own.

Is there a mistake in the comparison?

Bessent’s real argument is that Beijing will never give up control. It will never allow a founder to build something powerful enough to threaten the government. Whether that assessment is accurate or not, it also implies something about the American side.

Beijing makes sure tech capital has no hold over policy, so it keeps the companies at a distance. Washington treats tech capital as a partner, so they work together. In both cases the state is standing right there in the room, and the difference is only which direction it is pushing. Bessent calls the American version freedom. I think it is very fair to call it a merger. The state merged with the tech oligarchs.

A government that keeps capital at arm’s length at least still thinks of itself and capital as two separate things, and it does not get its policy written by the corporations it is supposed to oversee.

A government that clears land, approves power, offers grants and takes equity has become part of the corporation. Its policy is shaped by that corporation and by the people who own it. So if Bessent’s concern is a state that refuses to let go of control, He wants you to conclude that America’s system is the better one. It is not. This is a country where the government and private business run the operation together, and where policy direction gets shaped by the people who own the companies. That is oligarchy. America is not a better example.

Nobody kidnapped the government

There is a saying that Washington got captured by the tech companies. I think that version is too simple, and it makes the government sound like a victim. It is not.

Nobody dragged the government onto this train. It got on by itself, and then it sped the whole thing up.

Once you get on the train, you lose the ability to get off. Washington can no longer let this industry fail the way that normal businesses fail, because it has way too much riding on it. Too much of the stock market, too much of its own credibility, and now everything sits with a handful of the same companies.

This is not even a partisan issue. Both sides hold the same position. Sanders wants the government to hold a majority stake in AI companies, for reasons of fairness and distribution. Trump has expressed interest in the government owning a piece as well. They both agree that Washington should be a shareholder in these companies. The only argument left is how much to own and how to split the profit.

This is not a business. It is money nobody is allowed to lose

People usually mix up two separate things. Whether AI is useful, and whether the trillions of dollars already spent on it can actually earn a return, are completely different questions. I think AI is useful. I highly doubt the second one.

The real gap is between what these companies have already promised to spend and what they are actually making. They have signed multi-year compute and data center contracts stretching years into the future, while annual revenue is still in the low tens of billions. At the same time, the price of running these models keeps falling year after year. Usage goes up, revenue per use goes down, and the cost of building keeps climbing.

Now add the Chinese models to that picture. Their tokens are far cheaper than anything an American company can offer, and they are open. That is where the panic comes from. It is not that the American models are worse. It is that the price they need to charge to justify the spending is a price the market no longer has to pay. Meanwhile the data centers still have to run, the infrastructure still has to be built, and the bill keeps growing into the future.

Which leads to the strangest part of all of this. The technology may genuinely change the world, and the people paying for it today may not be around to collect. The technology can succeed while the money fails.

And once the money gets big enough that nobody can afford to admit the loss, it stops following business logic. The question is no longer whether this investment will pay off. The question becomes how expensive it would be to stop. Not expensive in dollars. Expensive in politics.

So who is the one who actually has to be kept quiet?

Opposition to data centers has become one of the few genuinely bipartisan movements in America. The reasons behind it are completely material. Electricity rates, water use, land, noise. There is nothing ideological about any of it.

Which is exactly why it gets answered with ideology. Oppose a data center and you are told you are handing the AI race to China, and maybe doing someone else’s work while you are at it. That is not confusion on their part. They know exactly what they are doing. When people organize around a bill they can actually see, the fastest way to break that up is to turn it into an argument about China, about socialism, about whose side you are on. A material reality has one obvious question at the center of it, which is who pays. An ideological fight has no center at all, and that is the point.

And that is the answer to Bessent’s own question about control. In this arrangement, the side that has to be managed is not capital. It is you. Beijing keeps its companies out of policy. Washington does not need to, because the companies and the government are on the same side. What Washington has to manage is the neighbor who shows up at the county hearing to ask why the power bill went up.

The bill already arrived. It just didn’t come with an invoice

Your retirement account is already in this trade. Data centers cost far more to build than these companies make, so the building is paid for with borrowed money. That debt did not stay in Silicon Valley. It went into bond funds, pension funds, and your local bank. Nobody asked if you wanted a piece of it. You already own one.

The stock market has the same problem. A few companies now make up so much of the index that spreading your money around does not really spread your risk anymore. If you have an index fund or a 401k, a big chunk of it is riding on one story. Open your account and look.

And your power bill is the only part of this that has already shown up. Everything else is still coming. The rate increase is here now.

Stop asking when it pops

If the bubble crashes, the rescue money comes out of public spending. Balance sheets get protected, public services get cut. We have seen this before, in the bank bailouts of 2008.

If it does not crash, then your power bill, your taxes, your property tax, your local budget and your retirement savings keep it alive for the next ten or twenty years. The cost gets socialized onto you, one round of spending at a time, and there is no point in sight where it stops.

Crash and you pay for the burial. No crash and you pay for the life support. Both roads end at the same register.

Which brings us back to the original question. Every government has some control over the companies inside its borders, and every government intervenes in its market to some degree. Intervention is not evil by itself. The question is who it intervenes for.

When workers lose their jobs, when rent goes up faster than wages, when the hospital bill shows up, Washington tells you that this is the market and you have to deal with it yourself. When tech capital is facing a few hundred billion in possible losses, Washington turns it into a matter of national security and an ideological fight, and suddenly everybody has to deal with it together.

It is not that the government refuses to step in. It is that you are not on the list of people it steps in for.

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The US government already has a free website where anyone can check their voter registration. It’s called vote.gov. It collects nothing, tracks nothing, sells nothing, and nobody spends a cent advertising it. It’s just a website.

Elon Musk built his own version and named it Vote Safe. The name itself is misleading. It’s not safe. In one week, his America PAC spent more than 180,000 dollars on Meta ads pushing people to the site.

If you go to votesafe.org, it takes your full name, birthday, home address, email, cell phone number, IP address, location, and the device you’re using. It records every page you view and every link you click.

Then it shows you your registration status, pulled from America PAC’s own voter file, not from your state’s records. The real purpose of the website is to collect your data.

Before August 29, Vote Safe’s privacy policy promised your information would never go to advertisers, political groups, or third parties. That is the most basic promise a website can make. They deleted it.

Now America PAC can sell your data to its business partners, along with its inferences about you: your psychology, your attitudes, even your intelligence. With all of that, they have a clear picture of what kind of person you are. Your personal information goes to Facebook and Google. Your activity goes to X, Musk’s own platform. And Musk’s PAC decides who else gets it.

Most users never read a privacy policy. So they rewrote it while nobody was looking. This is how theft becomes legal in a country with no federal privacy law.

He wants to buy the throne. Here is how.

Step one: buy the voters. Learn who they are, where they live, what scares them, and whether they show up.

Step two: work the voters. Decide who gets a door knock, who gets a text, and who gets buried in attack ads. Build an information bubble around each one that pushes them where he wants them.

Step three: collect. Make every politician understand who holds the list.

In April 2025, Musk and his groups dumped more than 20 million dollars into a Wisconsin Supreme Court race. He handed out million-dollar checks on stage, a stunt Wisconsin’s attorney general tried to stop in court. He still lost by 10 points.

In May, he said he’d done enough in politics.

By the end of June, he was threatening every Republican who voted for Trump’s megabill, swearing they’d lose their primaries if it was the last thing he did on this earth.

Politicians understand what that means. When one man can drop 20 million dollars into a single race, lose, and come back richer and louder, they listen to him. They have to.

Elon Musk doesn’t want to sit on the throne. He wants to control it with his money and bend it to his ideology.

Vote Safe can also be white-labeled. Other groups put their own name and logo on it and run it as their own site, while the machine underneath is still Musk’s. Every name, address, and phone number typed into those sites ends up in the same place.

The Heritage Foundation’s super PAC, Sentinel Action Fund, built its own registration site on Vote Safe and spent 650,000 dollars advertising it during Fox News’ coverage of the State of the Union. Its president promised the site would keep voter information out of the hands of “extremist Democrat organizations.” She didn’t mention where it actually goes.

A group called Ready to Register runs on it too. Earlier this year, it mass-mailed voter registration forms across North Carolina, and in July the State Board of Elections had to issue a public warning. The forms were outdated and still listed four parties the state no longer recognizes. Some of the mail reportedly went to dead people. The QR codes could pre-fill a stranger’s personal information onto your form.

This is the same political camp that spent years claiming dead people were voting. An operation running on Musk’s platform was mailing registration forms to dead people.

And all of that data flows back to America PAC’s server.

In 2024, America PAC mailed Georgia voters prefilled absentee ballot applications. You cannot do that. It’s illegal, and the state election board said so. The punishment was a letter. No fine. I call that election interference.

Put it together and this is an election infrastructure project. Musk gets your name, your address, and your phone number, and he pays nothing for any of it. The database knows your fears, your habits, and your supposed intelligence. It tells a campaign exactly how to handle you and how to push your vote where they want it.

This is not just Musk versus the Democrats. In the same Wisconsin race, JB Pritzker and George Soros spent millions on the other side. The rules make all of this possible: unlimited super PAC money since Citizens United, and no national privacy law. Both have survived Democratic and Republican majorities alike. Musk just has the most money, and he doesn’t bother hiding it.

Whatever you believe about democracy, voter information sits at the core of the system.

In China, the state controls citizens’ data. In America, a private billionaire hoards voter information and rents it out to whoever helps his side win. Your data will help him control the election, and the politicians too.

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China just sent 12.7 million university graduates into the job market.

That is the largest graduating class in the country’s history.

In July, the month they hit the market, unemployment for young people jumped to 17.9 percent. For everyone else, workers in their thirties, forties and fifties, it sat around 4 percent.

A degree used to protect you from unemployment. For a young person in China, it no longer does.

And the ones who did find work are not getting much for it. After sixteen years of school, a fresh degree in China buys a starting salary barely above what the average city worker makes with no degree at all.

That is the payout on two decades of tuition, tutoring, and one child’s entire childhood.

Where did the 12.7 million go

Not back to school. Fewer of them are sitting the graduate exam every year now. They stopped believing a second degree would fix what the first one could not.

They went for government jobs instead.

For the first time in a decade, more young people are trying to land a state desk than trying to add another degree. The odds of getting one are about one in a hundred.

That is a verdict. A whole generation looked at private companies, decided there was nothing there for them, and bet on a government lottery ticket instead.

The rest went into gig work. Delivery. Ride-hailing. Livestreaming. Sales.

Even that is full now. This spring, Shenzhen’s transport office told people to stop signing up to drive, because there are already too many drivers and not enough rides.

Driving and delivery were supposed to be the fallback when nothing else worked. Now even the fallback is full.

Why the jobs are not there

Start with what this is not. It is not mainly about AI. Youth unemployment in China was already climbing years before AI could take anyone’s job. The real reason the jobs are not there is that the whole economy is shifting at once, and several things are hitting together.

The world is in the middle of a big economic shift. The tariff war and the fights over trade and geopolitics have hit China’s factories and export orders. On top of that, China is deliberately moving away from cheap, basic manufacturing toward high-tech industry, electric vehicles, chips, robotics. That shift kills a lot of the old low-end factory and office jobs that used to soak up young workers. And the long property downturn wiped out huge numbers of white-collar jobs in real estate, finance and tech.

So a young person who wants a normal office job or a steady factory job often cannot find one right now, because the industries that used to offer those jobs are changing under their feet.

AI is the newest layer on top of all of it. And it lands in the worst possible place: the entry-level jobs.

Customer service. Junior coding. Copywriting. Translation. Basic design. Data entry. First drafts. These are the jobs a young graduate takes to get into an industry and learn it. Software does a lot of that work now, so companies hire fewer beginners.

The company gets the same work done and pays fewer people. That saved money goes to the owners. The graduate gets nothing.

What Beijing is doing about it

Here is how the Chinese government is dealing with this. It moved in three ways.

First, it went after the number of jobs. It is paying companies to hire graduates. Subsidies, internships, pressure on state firms to take more young people on.

Second, it started counting them one by one. Since July, every local government has to build a real-name list of the young and unemployed. Everyone on the list is owed the same minimum: career help, a few job referrals, a training slot or an internship. Not a statistic. A name, with a file.

Third, it put AI on the record. In June, the central government wrote AI straight into its five-year jobs plan. It ordered a system to track which jobs AI creates and which it destroys, a warning system for the jobs most at risk, and a new rule: before a big project gets approved, the government now checks how many jobs it will cost.

Why this matters

Keep in mind who these young people are. This is not some random unemployed crowd. These are the educated ones. They did everything they were told to do. They studied for twenty years, they got the degree, they held up their end.

Promise a generation a future, take their money and their time, and then hand them nothing, and they will feel betrayed. That is the real danger here. A large group of educated people who feel lied to is one of the most dangerous things a country can create. It might ignite something down the road.

The part that should scare you

None of this stops at China’s border.

In the United States, fresh college graduates are now out of work at a higher rate than the workforce as a whole.

A degree used to protect you from unemployment. For a young American, it no longer does.

It is the same technology deleting the same first jobs, and the same companies pocketing the savings.

The only real difference is what the people in charge do next.

Beijing at least admits it has a problem: it has produced far more college graduates than the economy can use, and a bachelor’s degree does not carry the value it once did. It is building something to deal with that out loud.

This is the biggest economic shift in a generation. Whole categories of work are being pulled out from under young people, and this is exactly the moment a government is supposed to step in and help them move to what comes next.

Washington offers nothing at all. It offers a 22 year old, newly graduated and buried in student debt, and lectures them that the problem is that they are lazy.

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Look at what the United States sells Taiwan and how long it takes to arrive. Taipei wants early warning aircraft, anti-submarine helicopters, self-propelled artillery, a little bit more heavy machinery. What moves fastest is the other stuff: coastal anti-ship missiles, rocket artillery, Stingers, Javelin, sea mines.

Most of what does arrive cannot reach the mainland. It is designed to make the landing expensive and prolong the war.

This is never a debate about defending democracy. None of the politicians, nobody serious in Washington, wants American aircraft carriers to have a hot war with China. No one wins the war, and everybody knows that. What Washington really wants shows up in the arms they try to sell Taiwan.

While the Western media keeps saying that China learned a lot of stuff from the Russian and Ukrainian war, how Russia survived all the sanctions from the Western world, the Western world also learned a lot of things from this war: what kind of damage it does to Russia if the war is prolonged.

The conclusion is very simple: they want China stuck in a war, if possible, in the future.

Everything else has already been tried. The Soviet playbook does not work here. Part of what broke the Soviet Union was that its own people could see how much better ordinary Americans were living. China does not have that problem. The Japan playbook does not work either. Tokyo signed the Plaza Accord with American troops sitting on its soil and no real way to say no. Beijing is not in that position.

I have watched American coverage of China from outside it for years, and the thing that never appears is the budget line. The threat is always the story. Who gets paid never is.

Tariffs came and went. Export controls came and went. Entity lists, chip bans, port fees. The direction barely changed.

Attrition is the only option since pressure stopped working, and the best way to do attrition is on someone else’s ground. And Taiwan is the perfect place.

It is not only Taiwan. We’re talking about the South China Sea, where the Philippine resupply mission is constantly rammed by the Chinese Coast Guard, and there’s Japanese rearmament moving faster now than ever since 1945. Different cases, but the same idea.

What would happen if China were bogged down by any kind of conflict? It would send capital rushing into dollars and Treasuries, which would happen automatically the moment the shooting starts. It would break the global supply chain apart. At that moment, reshoring manufacturing back to America is not a cost question anymore; it is a security question. And it would stop any allies from relying on China anymore. Europe has hedged on Russia for 20 years. It stopped right away when the Russia-Ukraine war started.

All you need to see is who is benefiting from all this. Beijing understands that the current trajectory is working in its own favor, and a war or any sort of conflict would end that trajectory right away. They understand the cost, and by that time you can only get out of that mud by winning, and you will never know how long it will take.

So, what does all this have to do with American working people?

The money from all these operations and postures comes out of the same federal budget as everything else. The Pentagon asked for 10 billion dollars for Indo-Pacific posture in this year’s budget alone, and that is only the part they label. Every dollar of it competes with Medicaid, with housing, and with education. They will turn all the issues into a threat assessment. And if this is a threat assessment, they don’t even need to go through the cost-benefit analysis.

Nobody puts it to you that way. You never get a vote on whether 10 billion dollars goes to airfields on Guam instead of the hospital in your county. You get told there is a threat, and the question closes.

At the end of the day, it’s gonna be the Taiwanese who will be standing on the ground on the island. It’s gonna be their bodies, their children, their factories, and their rubble. Washington’s share of that arrangement is invoices.

A whole industry has grown up around this fight. John Moolenaar, a Republican from Michigan, chairs the House Select Committee on China. Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, is his ranking member. They sign letters together. The Bureau of Industry and Security decides what American technology can be sold to China. Think tanks write reports about the danger, paid for by the companies that build the weapons. Lockheed Martin builds the rocket artillery. Raytheon builds the Stingers. Boeing builds the anti-ship missiles. Every weapon on that list has shareholders behind it.

None of them need an actual war. They need the war to always feel close. That is what keeps the money coming.

The Soviets went into Afghanistan and spent nine years bleeding out over ground that did not matter to anyone in Moscow. What killed them was not the defeat. It was the decade.

Arguing about whether this administration is tougher on China than the last one is theater. That machine was built under one party and expanded under the other, and it will keep expanding no matter who wins in November, because the budget does not depend on an outcome. It depends on tension.

And tension is cheap to manufacture.

Meanwhile the same institutions that cannot find money for insulin will find money for this, on time, every year, with applause from both parties.

Threat justifies budget. Budget builds constituency. Constituency needs threat. Once that loop closes, nobody inside it has to be a villain.

They only have to be paid.

Watch how the machine works, not the personalities, not the speeches. The name will always change every four years, but not the warmongering. The idea behind it will never change.

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New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani banned generative AI for New York public school students from Pre-K through 8th grade for one year. So, there are about 600,000 kids who are not allowed to use chatbots, which applies to every grade from Pre-K through 8th grade.

I understand his reasoning. He said that six-year-olds are too young to understand how to slice an onion or use it safely, and by 16, they should be old enough to know, so they don’t. He doesn’t want the kids to touch AI too early. I completely understand the reasoning. He also said that the children need teachers and need each other, and they should sit together with the problems that they cannot solve yet.

He also mentioned something very important that other mayors did not mention: the purpose of an AI company, whether they build for sports betting or even an education tool, is always for profit. So, if you put this instrument into public schools, it won’t be good for the children.

And the one year is not meant to be forever. It is a year to study. Mamdani said he has not seen a single study showing AI helps elementary or middle school students, except for research paid for by the same companies that stand to profit from selling it. So the city is setting up a group of students, teachers, parents, the union and outside experts to look at what these tools actually do to learning, and they will publish a report at the end. He is not saying AI is banned forever. High school students are still getting AI lessons, and a small number of them are still in supervised pilot programs. He is saying nobody has proven this works on young kids yet, so stop until somebody does.

I agree with him about the companies. I do not agree with what he decided to do about them.

AI is a tool for productivity, whether you like it or not. Taking the tool away from the kids, I think, is not fair to them, and they should know how to use it in the future.

It is very important to understand what China is doing about this issue.

In China, in elementary school, school kids are not allowed to use open-ended AI on their own at all.

But schools will introduce AI to them. For example, they play a drawing game and watch the AI guess what they drew, or talk to a voice assistant. The teacher will then ask some questions that actually matter. Why does the AI understand you? How is it deciding? Where does it get the question or the answer wrong?

In elementary school, it’s more of an introductory phase. In middle school, it is to understand how it works. By that time, the children are looking at what the machine can produce and whether the result is what they are looking for. In high school, it is when the kids are allowed to use AI to build things, so there are phases.

With Mamdani’s policy, the difference between the schools in Beijing and the schools in New York is that one is being told what AI actually is and how it works, and the other one, at least right now, is being isolated and protected from it.

This is the part that we should mention: Mamdani and the Chinese Ministry of Education are both afraid of the same things. Both decided that AI must not do the children’s thinking, and both said that you cannot use AI to replace educators. Nobody trusts the companies that are selling AI, and they agree that AI is dangerous to the education of children.

They have different answers to it. New York shut the door and asked for one year. In China, they have a plan and schedule to introduce AI to the children step by step, until they are old enough to use it by themselves.

As the mayor of New York, there is something Mamdani cannot fix with what he has. He can ban New York public schools from using AI, but it does not cover the schools in Lower Manhattan, those private schools charging $65,000 a year to teach children with AI tutors, which is very popular right now, or the families that pay for AI tutoring at home. Whoever can pay the money can teach their children what AI is about.

So, a year off is not for everybody’s kids. A year off is not for the parents who cannot afford to buy their way around it.

I completely understand why Mamdani did it. The pressure most likely came from parents who are frightened about AI, and they have all the reasons to be frightened. Nobody asked them whether they wanted a chatbot inside of their kids’ reading program.

But keeping AI out of the classroom does not keep it out of childhood, or out of their reach. These kids are going to meet it anyway. They’ll meet it on the phone by themselves somewhere. And at that time, nobody will be there to explain what AI is about. They will get more confused.

So, which way do you prefer? Ban the AI. Isolate the children from AI. Or introduce AI to children step by step and get them into the AI, which is inevitable.

Remember, the families who can afford to teach their children AI will do it anyway, and that actually might create a class issue.

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On August 31 Donald Trump wrote that the only reason a community would refuse a data center is that it wants to end up backwards and poor. He promised far lower taxes and jobs all over the place. He told Americans to let Data Reign. He warned them not to kill the Golden Goose. Then he said China could not be happier about the opposition.

Start with the jobs. Building one of these places takes 2,400 to 5,000 workers and about a year and a half. Then the crews leave. The finished building runs on 25 to 50 permanent staff. Illinois passed a law saying a data center has to create 20 jobs to get its tax break. Out of 27 subsidized data centers in the state, 22 created exactly 20 jobs. Not 21. The number is the legal floor, and capital is just doing the bare minimum to meet that requirement. Workers are the thing you use up during construction and let go when construction ends.

Now the taxes. In Orangeburg, New York, JPMorganChase is getting 77 million dollars in tax breaks for one permanent job. That money does not disappear. The school district and the county are the ones who pay for that tax break. Working families cover the hole through property taxes, and through community services that quietly get worse. The tax break is claimed by the capitalists, and the tax bill goes up for the people.

Then the bill comes a second time. PJM runs the power grid for 13 states, and its own market monitor found that data center demand added 9.3 billion dollars in costs in a single year. Every household on that grid pays it back through the electric bill. Ohio families are already paying about 16 dollars more a month for power they never used. In July, the Congressional Research Service found that roughly 97 percent of the water these buildings use on site comes out of public drinking water systems. The same pipes that serve your kitchen and your hospital. They take that water because it is already treated, which makes it the cheapest water to run through a cooling tower. So you get exploited at work, and then you pay again at the meter and at the tap.

Trump’s line about plenty of other places that want them is the honest sentence in the whole post. Capital can move. Your town cannot. The threat of leaving is how a town gets pushed into accepting a deal it would never pick on its own.

He brought up China, so let’s go there. In China, a data center inside a reclaimed water service area has to cool with reclaimed water instead of drinking water. And a 2025 rule from the National Development and Reform Commission says new industrial load has to build new generating capacity to match it. You size the power supply to the thing you are plugging in, instead of dumping it onto a grid everybody else is already using. It settles something simple. The residents, the people, get first claim on the water and the power. People come first, and the state is the one that decides it. That’s what this is about. The United States hands that decision to capital, and capital gives the answer it always gives.

So why can’t the richest country on earth build clean power for its own people? Trump’s Energy Department used emergency powers to keep the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan running, and renewed that order again on August 14. It used the same emergency powers to shut down 5 offshore wind projects that were already under construction. It killed the 4.9 billion dollar federal loan for a transmission line built to carry 5 gigawatts of wind and solar power out of Kansas. Think about what that means. A coal plant that needs a government order to stay alive is a coal plant that already lost on price. Cheap green power would wipe out billions of dollars in coal and gas assets that the ruling class still owns, and the capitalists don’t want to lose it. So the state keeps those broken assets breathing, and the working class covers the difference every month. Profit comes first and usefulness comes second. That is not incompetence. That is the system working the way it was built to work.

61% of Americans oppose a data center in their own community. Republicans and Democrats, they all oppose it. Governors from both parties have hit the brakes. But the President’s answer to that majority was to call them backward and poor, and tell them a foreign country is enjoying their resistance.

China is enjoying this. Not the data centers, and not the protests. What Beijing is watching is an American ruling class that cannot build infrastructure, cannot plan an energy system, cannot lower one household’s electric bill, and cannot think outside the framework that pays it. A class that can no longer produce anything for its own people has one product left. Blame another country.

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On the tenth day of his second term, Donald Trump’s brokers bought private prison stock. They kept buying and selling GEO Group and CoreCivic all year, 29 trades, somewhere between 281,029 and 990,000 dollars. Then his administration went out and built the demand.

Is this a conflict of interest? sure is. But it works differently than that, because he does not just hold the stock, he controls the policy that sets the revenue. So he skips the whole conflict of interest conversation and goes straight to the power. He signs the order. ICE fills the beds. The company books the margin, and the share price moves. Then his broker places the trade, and he never has to pick up a phone. His holdings sit in a revocable trust with his son as trustee and himself as the sole beneficiary. That is not a blind trust and was never built to be one. Every president from Carter to Biden either went blind or stayed out of the market. He did neither, on purpose.

The companies said it out loud, on earnings calls, in his first month. They told their investors this administration would be the best thing that ever happened to them. They were not guessing, and they were right. GEO’s profit went from 32 million dollars in 2024 to more than 254 million in 2025, close to a 700% increase. This month GEO and CoreCivic reported 1.4 billion dollars in revenue between them, for a single quarter.

And the people running the enforcement came out of the same industry. Tom Homan consulted for GEO Group before he became border czar. Pam Bondi lobbied for GEO before she became Attorney General. David Venturella was a GEO executive, then he moved to ICE to handle detention contracts, and now he runs ICE. Homan helped hire him. Nobody hid any of this, because nobody had to.

And nobody can prove he steered a single contract to GEO. Looking for that proof is the mistake. He does not have to steer anything, because he signs the policy and the policy is the earnings report. Waiting for a smoking gun is how an arrangement like this stays legal.

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ICE makes the arrest. GEO does not arrest anyone and does not need to, because the government hands the man over and then pays GEO by the bed, by the night. That is the first stream, and it is public money.

Then the man goes to work. The people being held cook the meals, run the industrial laundry, wax the floors, scrub the bathrooms, cut the hair, do the maintenance. Everything in the building except the guarding. They are paid one dollar a day, a rate Congress set in 1950 and never touched. So the payroll never appears. Every job that would cost a wage in any other building in the country costs a dollar in this one, and that gap is the second stream. The margin comes from a workforce that cannot quit.

Last July, Congress handed ICE 45 billion dollars for detention alone, more than the government spent holding migrants under Obama, Biden and Trump’s first term combined. Most of it ends up with the contractors.

GEO reopened Delaney Hall in Newark on a 15 year contract, in a sanctuary city, the same year the administration moved to cut sanctuary cities off from federal money. This spring the people held there went on a hunger and labor strike. They said the food was moldy, that medical care was refused, that it was so crowded they were sleeping on the floor. A labor strike, which tells you what they had been doing in there.

The 13th Amendment allows forced labor as punishment for a crime. The people in ICE detention have not been convicted of one. Most of them have no criminal record at all.

The American South leased its convicts to private companies after 1865, and arrests went up whenever the companies needed hands. Same design. New statute.

And people die in there. Last year more of them died in ICE custody than in any year in two decades. A bed pays whether the person in it is healthy or not.

Privatization did not put a limit on the coercion. It gave the coercion a revenue model, a quarterly earnings call, and a shareholder base that wants the number to go up.

None of it was built in one term. Venturella worked inside this system under Bush and under Obama. Both parties funded the beds, signed the contracts, and left the dollar a day alone for 75 years. Trump did not invent the machine. He bought a piece of it, staffed it with the vendor’s people, and stopped pretending.

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On June 9, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed a law that makes sleeping outside a crime. Not stealing. Not fighting. Not trespassing on someone’s property. Sleeping. Up to 500 dollars and six months in a cell for the act of having nowhere to go.

They named it the Streets to Success Act. The sponsor, Representative Debbie Villio, said the goal was helping people, not jailing them. So the law also creates something called a Homelessness Court, where a judge can route you into a 12-month treatment program instead of prison.

Here is the part nobody put in the headline. Those courts are optional. Local governments decide whether to build them. The designated camping areas are optional too.

The crime is not optional. It took effect statewide the moment the governor signed.

And the treatment is not free. You pay for it. If you cannot pay, you work it off, unpaid.

A judge is allowed to waive the cost. Allowed. Not required.

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Follow the chain

Start where it actually starts. You cannot make rent. Nobody takes you in. You end up on the street, because the street is what is left when the money runs out. Sleeping on the street is now a crime. So the police come. So a court takes you. So the court hands you a bill for your own treatment, which you cannot pay, because not being able to pay is the entire reason you were out there. So the state takes your labor instead.

That was never really a bill. It was a way of taking your labor and calling it a debt.

Call that what it is. A person too poor to pay is ordered to work and paid nothing for it. That is slave labor. Not a metaphor for slave labor, not a slippery slope toward it. Slave labor with paperwork.

All the state needed was a crime to hang it on. It just wrote one, and the crime is being poor outdoors.

What is the work? The law does not say.

So when a Louisiana judge tells a broke man he will work off what he owes, do not picture a soup kitchen. Picture a ditch in August. Picture roadside cleanup on a highway shoulder with cars going by at 70. Picture no wage, no lawyer, and nobody keeping count of who came back.

The statute does not promise any of that. I am telling you what I expect from a state that just built itself a fresh supply of people who cannot say no.

Dangerous work goes to whoever is not allowed to refuse it. It always has.

Then ask the question the legislature will not. What happens to someone run through arrest, a cell, unpaid work, and a criminal record that follows them onto every rental application for the rest of their life? Housing advocates in Louisiana said it directly when the bill was moving: this law blocks the people it catches from ever getting housing again. They get sicker, poorer, and harder to house every single year.

You do not need a plan to get rid of poor people. You just need a process that grinds them down and never stops running.

Who actually pays

For people living on the street, the word being sold to you is “choice.” You can choose treatment. But when the alternative is a cell, that is not a choice. That is a plea deal. Coercion does not stop being coercion because somebody put a social worker in the room.

For working people across Louisiana, one of the poorest states in the country, your money now funds cops, court dockets, jail beds, and supervision contracts instead of housing. Nobody in that legislature ever showed you the bill. The fiscal analysis gave no cost estimate at all. They built an entire criminal apparatus and did not even pretend to price it.

For everyone else, look at what just got established. The state did not criminalize an action. It criminalized a condition. Once a legislature learns it can arrest people for a status instead of a behavior, that category is expandable.

This is not Louisiana being uniquely cruel

The Supreme Court made it legal in June 2024, in the Grants Pass case, ruling that cities can punish people for sleeping outside even when there is nowhere else to sleep. In the two years since, the National Homelessness Law Center counts more than 350 cities and 14 states that have moved to criminalize homelessness. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, publicly backed that ruling and pushed sweeps in his own state.

The template did not come from either party. It came from the Cicero Institute, a think tank founded by Joe Lonsdale, the billionaire Palantir co-founder. Its model legislation has been copied into statehouse after statehouse, and its stated position is that money should be pulled away from permanent housing.

So the man who built surveillance software for the government also writes the laws deciding what happens to people who cannot make rent. He is not a Republican problem or a Democrat problem. He is a class problem.

They know housing ends homelessness. They know the research is not close. They know arrests do not produce apartments. And they are doing it anyway, because the goal was never to solve it.

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What comes next

It is already moving. The Trump administration rewrote federal homelessness funding rules and cited Grants Pass to push communities toward criminalization. Advocates say the change threatens to push at least 97,000 people back onto the street. More states will copy Louisiana, and every one of them will call it help.

A country that cannot house its people has two options. Build housing, or build cages.

You already know which one it picked.

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In March, a defense manufacturing startup called Hadrian won a 900 million dollar commitment from the U.S. Navy to build submarine parts at a new factory in Cherokee, Alabama. The money came out of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Four months later, in July, Hadrian’s CEO Chris Power gave 443,000 dollars to Republican National Committee accounts, hitting the maximum individual limit on every single one. That same month, two partners at 1789 Capital, one of Hadrian’s investors, gave another 300,000 dollars to the RNC. Their names are Paul Abrahimzadeh and Joe Voboril.

743,000 dollars, from the people on the receiving end of a federal contract, back to the party that wrote the law that paid for it.

1789 Capital is Donald Trump Jr.’s venture firm. He is a partner there. In a little over a year, the firm went from roughly 200 million dollars in assets to about 3.5 billion.

Every step of this was legal. The donations were disclosed. The contract went through a process. The Navy structured the deal so that private capital went in first and the government followed.

Nobody sent an email. Nobody made a phone call. Nobody said give us the contract and we will take care of you.

They never do. You get the contract, and you already know what comes next. A memo is what a crime looks like. The favor gets done, the return is understood, and not one word of it is spoken out loud.

Power did not write a token check. He maxed out every account he was legally allowed to touch. That is not a thank you note. That is a subscription payment.

Vulcan Elements, a rare earth magnet startup, received a 620 million dollar loan from the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, the largest that office has ever issued, roughly three months after 1789 Capital took a stake in it. ProPublica reported that the request to make the loan came from Peter Navarro, the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, who is a friend of Donald Trump Jr. Out of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top White House aide.

Unusual Machines is a drone maker where Trump Jr. held a multimillion dollar stake personally, not through a fund. Last October it won the biggest Pentagon contract in its history.

Two different ways to hold the shares. Same outcome both times.

The 900 million dollars came out of a tax bill. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act paid for itself by taking things away from people. By CBO estimates, it cuts federal Medicaid spending by about 911 billion dollars over 10 years and leaves 10 million more people without health insurance. It cuts roughly 187 billion dollars out of SNAP, about 20% of the program, the largest cut to food assistance in its history.

One law. Two directions.

The money that built that factory in Cherokee and the money taken out of somebody’s insulin coverage are the same money. It did not vanish into thin air. It changed direction.

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette of the Project on Government Oversight told CNN that taxes taken out of your paycheck and mine are going straight into these companies, and by extension into the Trump family.

A president’s family is supposed to step back. That is the entire point of the norm. Instead, being in that family has become the fastest route to a federal contract in America.

And these are military contracts. The man who decides whether the United States goes to war has a family holding positions in the companies that get paid when it does. War is not a risk to that portfolio. War is the upside.

The Pentagon says outside affiliations and political connections play no role in its funding decisions. The White House says this is the same tired narrative Democrats have been pushing for a decade.

Those are not answers. They are a way to end the conversation. Watch what these people do, not what they say, because what they say is built for an audience that agrees to stop looking.

None of this required a crime.

Working people in the US did not lose their health coverage because somebody stole it. They lost it because it was voted away, legally, by people who then received legal money from the legal beneficiaries of that vote. The rules were followed the entire way down.

That is not a broken system. That is a system doing exactly what it was built to do, by the class that built it.

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Sky Tucker is 25, a community college student in St. Louis, and for seven years she sold her plasma twice a week. Asked what went through her head during those sessions, she did not talk about saving lives. She talked about whether she was going to get her next meal, and whether she could feed her cats.

That plasma went into an industrial fractionation line and came out as human albumin. Some of it reached a hospital in Henan province, in central China, where a store worker named Ge Lan paid about 46 dollars a bottle to keep her mother alive after stomach cancer surgery. Her mother used 72 bottles in two months. That came to seven months of Ge’s income.

Two working people on opposite ends of the same supply chain. Neither of them is the one making money. The people making money are four multinational corporations and the shareholders behind them.

CNN ran that story on August 23 and framed it as a Chinese vulnerability. More than 60% of China’s albumin market is supplied by foreign manufacturers, and every drop of it is made from plasma drawn in the United States. All true. Also the least interesting fact in the piece.

Here is the question the framing walks straight past. Why does one country control 70% of the world’s plasma supply?

Not because Americans are unusually generous. Because American capitalism went looking for a commodity, found one inside the bodies of poor people, and built an industry on it. The raw material is poverty. There were 601 collection centers in 2016. There are more than 1,200 now, roughly the number of Denny’s locations in the country and nearly double the number of Costcos. Collection climbed from over 35 million liters in 2015 to about 62.5 million liters last year. The global industry is worth 43 billion dollars. In 2023, blood products were America’s ninth largest goods export at 37 billion dollars, ahead of coal and gold. American donors can sell twice a week, 104 times a year. Chinese donors are capped at once every two weeks, 24 times a year.

And the centers do not land randomly. John Dooley and Emily Gallagher found that even after controlling for local poverty and unemployment rates, the strongest predictor of where a new plasma center opens is how many payday lenders and pawn shops are already operating there.

Read that again. Capital treats the density of predatory lending as a market signal. Somebody sat down, built a model of where Americans are desperate enough to sell pieces of their own body, and opened storefronts on those blocks. That is not a scandal inside the system. That is the system working exactly as designed. The people who walk in skew under 35, unemployed, without a college degree, Black and male.

For about 150 years, socialists have said that capitalism sucks the blood of the working class. It was supposed to be an accusation about wages and hours, about what gets drained out of a person over a lifetime of labor.

It is not a metaphor anymore.

A needle goes into the arm of a poor American twice a week. The fluid comes out. Four corporations refine it, price it, and ship it to three continents. The worker gets 50 dollars and a scar. Capitalism has always taken the surplus off your labor. That was the arrangement, and it was already a bad one. This goes past that. It takes the surplus, and then it comes back for what is inside the body that did the work.

Then it sells the medicine back. Immunoglobulin made from American plasma is billed in American hospitals at roughly 100 to 350 dollars per gram. Sell the raw material for 50 dollars, buy the product back by the gram. Working people get exploited going in and coming out, and both ends of that circuit are somebody’s margin.

Now the part that should end every conversation about Western values.

The World Health Organization argues for unpaid plasma collection on ethical grounds, partly to shield poor communities from coercion. Most of Europe agrees. European governments restrict or ban payment because they have decided that the human body is not a commodity.

Then they import from America.

Four companies run most of the American collection system: Grifols of Spain, CSL of Australia, Takeda’s BioLife of Japan, Octapharma of Switzerland. Every one of them is headquartered in a country that restricts at home precisely what it does in the United States. The Economist reported that the French government, which has taken a public stand against a commercial European blood industry, is the sole shareholder of a company that owns six paid plasma centers on American soil, collecting fluid for use in France.

That is liberalism with the receipts attached. The principle stays home. The exploitation gets outsourced to somebody in St. Louis who needs 50 dollars this week. European capital did not reject the commodification of the human body. It just decided the bodies should be American.

China’s shortage is real, and it has a specific origin. In the 1990s the government of Henan province built an economic strategy on plasma and pushed hundreds of thousands of poor farmers to sell. Needles were reused. The province reported its first HIV case in 1995. By 2004, Henan officials admitted that 25,000 former plasma sellers had been infected, and Gao Yaojie, the doctor who exposed it, spent the rest of her life insisting the real number was far higher.

What followed was a clampdown. Not an end to payment, China still pays plasma donors, but a cap of 24 donations a year and collection locked to designated areas. A country of 1.4 billion now has somewhere between 1.5 and 3 million active plasma donors. The United States, with a quarter of that population, has around 4 million. China runs short by roughly 6,000 tons a year.

So here is the comparison nobody in the coverage wants to draw. One country had a catastrophe and made it harder to extract plasma from the poor. The other never had the catastrophe, built a 43 billion dollar industry on the same act, sold the output back at a markup, and now gets to describe the arrangement as leverage.

Whether the paid plasma industry exploits people or rescues them is treated in the reporting as an unsettled debate. It is not unsettled to Michele Goodwin, the 60 year old single mother in Massachusetts who sold plasma twice a week for over a year to help put two kids through college and was too ashamed to tell anyone where the money came from. It is not unsettled to Sky Tucker. It is only unsettled to the people who never have to walk into one of those buildings.

This is not a left or right story, and it is not really a China story either. Nobody in Washington is moving to shut this down, because in neither party does it register as a scandal. It registers as an export. The division that matters here has never been Democrat against Republican. It is the people who sell plasma against the people who own the centers, and only one of those groups has anybody in that building working for them.

Peter Jaworski of Georgetown says the industry grows 6% to 8% every year and nothing looks likely to slow it for the next decade. Understand what that sentence actually is. It is a financial forecast that depends on Americans staying broke. If wages rose, supply would fall. The business model requires the hardship. That is not a side effect of the model, that is the model.

So the next time you hear that America has found new leverage over Beijing, check where the leverage comes from. It is not innovation and it is not productivity. It is 4 million working people selling the fluid out of their arms twice a week to cover rent and groceries, and a hegemon counting that as a strategic asset.

And look at what this arrangement requires you to be. It needs wages flat, or the 50 dollars stops mattering. It needs rent climbing, or you do not come back on Thursday. It needs the block stocked with payday lenders and garbage food so there is nothing else within walking distance. The poverty is not a failure the industry works around. The poverty is the supply.

Do you understand how bleak that is? Not the hardship, you already know about the hardship. The design. Somebody sat in a meeting, drew this, and it is running on schedule.

Under this system the working class is not just labor. It is a blood bag. That is capitalism, stated plainly, with the needle still in the arm.

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Scott Bessent went on CNBC Thursday and told the second largest economy on earth to fall in behind an American blockade. China gets half its energy from the Gulf, he said, so it would do them a big service to “get with the programme.” A day earlier Trump had promised an “economic D-Day” against Iran and warned every other government that continued business with Tehran would carry consequences.

The demand underneath the language is this. Washington is instructing a foreign government to enforce American statutes on its own territory, against its own companies, in service of American policy. Not a treaty. Not a Security Council resolution. One country’s domestic law, applied to everybody else’s soil.

It is being asked of the country Washington has spent a decade trying to wall off. Huawei went onto the Entity List in 2019, and when that did not finish the job the foreign direct product rule was rewritten so a chip fabricated in Taiwan or South Korea on American tooling could no longer be sold to it. Allies in London, Berlin and Canberra were pressed to strip Huawei equipment out of their 5G networks. SMIC was cut off from the machinery it needed for advanced chips. DJI was blacklisted. Hundreds of Chinese firms sit under export controls, and the stated goal was never disguised: preserve technological superiority, reduce dependence on China.

Notice that it is the same principle. The foreign direct product rule is an American statute telling a Korean company what it may sell to a Chinese one. Washington has been claiming jurisdiction over other people’s commerce for years, and it is now asking Beijing to accept that claim one more time, and to help enforce it against one of Beijing’s own suppliers.

For most of the past twenty years, that claim held.

American sanctions law only binds Americans. What gives it global force is dollar hegemony. Almost all cross border trade eventually passes through a dollar account, and dollar accounts sit in banks that need access to New York. Designate a company, and any bank anywhere that keeps serving it risks losing that access. Losing it is corporate death. Nobody is charged with anything. Nobody goes to court. One government decides, and the rest of the world complies because the alternative is being locked out of the currency it has to trade in.

That is American hegemony in practice. Not the carrier groups. Control of the money everybody else is required to use.

It worked inside China too. Chinese state oil majors quietly stopped buying Iranian crude. In January 2025 Shandong Port Group announced it would turn away US sanctioned vessels, and Beijing was left explaining that it had ordered no such thing. No treaty required any of it. The dollar did.

Then it stopped working. The China to Iran oil trade has spent years moving out of dollars. It settles largely in yuan, through small independent refiners in Shandong that hold almost no exposure to the American financial system, routed through middlemen who never touch New York. When Treasury designated Hengli Petrochemical and four other refiners in April, it was cutting off companies that had built themselves to barely touch the dollar in the first place.

Beijing then went further. On May 2 the commerce ministry issued its first blocking order in the five years those rules have existed. Inside China, complying with those American sanctions is now itself illegal.

So Washington stopped relying on the payment system and sent the Navy. The Strait of Hormuz has been effectively closed since late February and under formal US blockade since April 13. When the financial weapon cannot reach, enforcement turns physical, and physical enforcement costs ships, money, and eventually people.

The dollar is not collapsing. It still holds roughly 57% of global reserves, down from above 70% at the start of the century, and it sits on one side of nearly 89% of all currency trades. Nothing replaces that soon. What changed is narrower and worse for Washington. Obedience became optional for an economy large enough to take the punishment.

Hegemony of this kind runs on one calculation. Obeying an American sanction has to cost less than refusing it. That math only holds while whoever refuses stands alone. Iran alone can be cut off. Iran and China together is a different problem. Iran, China, and every government watching this and taking notes is the end of the arrangement. American dominance has never required obedience from everyone. It requires that a bloc big enough to survive the punishment never forms.

Hegemony was never built for the man filling a tank in Ohio. It lets the Treasury borrow at rates no other government on earth can get, and routes global finance through American banks that take a fee on the way past. What working people in the US get from it is the enforcement bill: the deployments, the blockade, the price shocks, and now a standoff with their largest trading partner that nobody put on a ballot. In Iran the same weapon lands on shopkeepers and pensioners, not on the men who set policy. Sanctions get sold as the alternative to war. This round produced a naval blockade in five months.

That machine was built out across Obama, Trump, Biden and Trump again. The secondary sanctions bill moving through the Senate right now carries both parties.

Xi is expected in Washington in September. The question before then is whether Treasury designates a major Chinese bank for keeping those refineries funded. That would stop being about Iranian oil and become the two largest economies on earth attacking each other through the financial system. If Washington holds off, the demonstration is finished, and every capital watching writes down what it saw.

The number that matters is not the dollar’s share of reserves. It is how many governments now treat compliance with American hegemony as a choice rather than a fact.

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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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