Author: sts
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Care and Respect
Notes from the Field — Dispatch, June 29, 2026 British American Tobacco is cutting 9,000 jobs. It expects the move to save $793 million a year by 2028. The company will eliminate 5,500 roles outright and hand another 3,500 to outside partners like Accenture — about a fifth of its global workforce, though not, the company…
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The Forty-Year Project
Block 7, Article 1 — Nobody Voted on the Powell Memo. Nobody Had To. Steve Sagnotti · thebrokenframes.substack.com In August 1971, corporate lawyer Lewis Powell wrote a confidential memo to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calling for a coordinated, generational apparatus — funded think tanks, academic chairs, legal organizations — to retake American institutions from…
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The Captain Who Said No
Notes from the Field — Dispatch, June 25, 2026 Captain Lugo said no, and it cost him his post. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has operated under federal court oversight since 2013, when Judge G. Murray Snow found that deputies under then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio had systematically racially profiled Latino drivers. The settlement, Melendres v. Arpaio, put…
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222 of 270
Block 6, Article 3 — The End Run Around the Electoral College © 2026 Steve Sagnotti. There is a way to fix the Electoral College without a constitutional amendment. It has been available for twenty years. Sixty-three percent of Americans support it. Not one Republican governor has ever signed it into law. That gap —…
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Nine Defeats, One Objective
Notes from the Field — Dispatch, June 22, 2026 In nine months, the federal government has tried at least nine different ways to find out who is allowed to vote in November. It has lost nine times. The mechanisms keep changing. The target does not. On June 22, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan blocked the…
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Five Times the Loser Won
Block 6, Article 2 © 2026 Steve Sagnotti. When did you last see a presidential candidate campaign in your state? In the 2024 presidential election, approximately 97 percent of all campaign events and advertising spending were concentrated in seven states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina. California — the largest state in…
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The System That Was Never About You
Block 6, Article 1 Has your vote for president ever been equal to anyone else’s? The answer depends on where you live. It always has. Wyoming has three electoral votes and approximately 580,000 residents. California has 54 electoral votes and 39 million. Run the arithmetic: a Wyoming voter carries roughly 3.6 times the weight of…
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The Reform That Worked and the Money That Killed It
Block 5, Article 4 © 2026 Steve Sagnotti. Ranked choice voting does one thing: it lets voters rank their preferences. First choice, second choice, third. If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, the last-place candidate is eliminated and those voters’ second choices are counted. The process continues until one candidate holds a majority.…
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The Immune Response
Block 5, Article 3 © 2026 Steve Sagnotti. The two-party system has one reliable response to every serious challenge: it neutralizes the vehicle and buries the structural demand. The grievance gets acknowledged. The constituency gets absorbed, exhausted, or redirected. The arrangement survives. This has happened in every generation for 130 years, through every instrument a…
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The Wall Nobody Else Built
Block 5, Article 2 © 2026 Steve Sagnotti. Every functioning democracy made a choice about what its electoral system should produce. Germany chose coalition government — no party governs alone, which means every party has to be governable with. The selection pressure runs toward the center: a party that spends four years performing ideological purity…
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