Author: sts
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The Captured Expert
Block 8, Article 8 — The Mechanism Is Who Answers the Phone The official who regulates an industry today is statistically likely to work for that industry tomorrow. Not eventually. Not in some distant career pivot. Within months of leaving the agency, in many documented cases. The knowledge built at public expense, the relationships forged…
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The Price of Labor
Block 8, Article 7 — One in Three in 1955. One in Ten Today. In 1955 one in three American workers belonged to a union. Today it’s one in ten. That did not happen because workers stopped wanting what unions produce. It happened because unions were identified as a threat, targeted by a fifty-year institutional…
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Only Musk Can Fire Musk
Notes from the Field — July 15, 2026 SpaceX went public this year at a valuation north of a trillion dollars. Elon Musk owns 42 percent of the company. He controls 79 percent of the vote. The bylaws are written so that removing him as CEO requires his own consent — meaning, functionally, the only…
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The Room Competes to Shelter You
Block 8, Article 6 — Two Rooms, One Buyer’s Market In 1899 Delaware passed a corporate law built to win a competition nobody had officially announced: which state could offer the least accountability to the people running a company. In 1983 South Dakota won a different round of the same competition, this time for families…
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Suing Yourself and Winning
Notes from the Field — July 13, 2026 In January, Donald Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion. In May, he won — a settlement giving him and his family sweeping immunity from audits, plus a $1.8 billion fund to compensate alleged victims of government “weaponization.” He sued an agency he oversees as president, and…
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The Treasury They Wrote for Themselves
Block 8, Article 5 — Buy, Borrow, Die Fifty-five of the largest companies in America paid zero federal income tax in at least one profitable year between 2018 and 2022. Not a loophole nobody noticed. Not an accident of a badly drafted bill. Every exit was written into the code by the people who would…
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Who Gets to Ask the Question
Notes from the Field — July 13, 2026 Since the 1940s, American science has run on one basic bargain: the government pays, and scientists — not politicians — decide what’s worth testing. Peer review is the whole mechanism. It’s not glamorous. It’s also why the system caught bad research and funded good research regardless of…
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The Social Welfare of the Donor Class
Block 8, Article 4 — The Same Amendment. A Consistent Set of Beneficiaries. The largest political ad campaigns in American history were funded by organizations legally required to keep their donors secret. Not hidden by clever lawyers. Not exposed by investigative reporters. Required by law to stay secret. That requirement did not arrive by accident.…
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No One Left to Call the Game
Notes from the Field — July 11, 2026 By the second week of July, the federal government’s only agency built to run elections had nobody in the room. Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland were fired. Christy McCormick was allowed to resign. The Election Assistance Commission — a four-member board Congress designed so no party could…
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Your Member of Congress Is a Franchise Owner
Block 8, Article 3 — The Member Isn’t Bought. They’re Marinated. Legislators pay $50 to join the American Legislative Exchange Council. Corporations pay tens of thousands of dollars each — collectively, as much as $6 million a year, tax records show. The $50 buys the credential of authorship. The corporate money writes the bill and…
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