Category: Broken Frames

Block 10, Article 1 — The Voter Set the Standard. The Committee Rewrote It. Block 1 opened with what was here. This article opens the accounting. A congressional farm bill can nullify the results of a ballot measure. Not in theory. In practice, in the current session of Congress. California voters passed a ballot measure…

Block 9, Article 4 — The Destruction Was Complete Before Most Newsrooms Understood It Local newspapers did not die because people stopped wanting local news. They died because the business model that paid for it was destroyed by companies that had no interest in news at all — and the destruction was complete before most…

Block 9, Article 3 — Not Prevented From Knowing. Kept Comfortable Enough Not to Need To. In 2019 the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion for privacy violations. It was the largest fine in FTC history. It was also, by any reasonable measure, a successful business transaction for Facebook. The company had been expecting…

Block 9, Article 2 — The Wolfman No Longer Needed Mexico Steve Sagnotti · thebrokenframes.substack.com In 1963 a disc jockey named Bob Smith took a job at a radio station just across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas. XERF broadcast at 250,000 watts — five times the legal American maximum. At night the signal…

Block 9, Article 1 — A Republic, if You Can Keep It Philadelphia, September 17, 1787. The Constitutional Convention has ended. Benjamin Franklin makes his way to the home of Elizabeth Powel, one of the city’s most prominent political hostesses, where the delegates have gathered. She asks him what they’ve built. He answers in five…

Block 8, Article 10 — Eliminated to Save Less Than Two Congressional Offices Congress once had its own independent scientific body — and eliminated it to save less than the cost of two congressional offices. In 1972 Representative Chuck Mosher stood on the House floor and said out loud what every member already knew: “Let…

Block 8, Article 9 — Doubt Is Our Product Your uncertainty about climate science, vaccine safety, or pesticide risk may have been manufactured by the same people who spent thirty years telling you cigarettes were safe. Not misinformed. Not confused by complexity. Manufactured. The uncertainty you carry on a dozen settled scientific questions was produced…

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…

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…

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…