Category: Broken Frames

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…

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.…

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…

Block 8, Article 2 — The Argument Feels Spontaneous. It Is Not. Same think tank. Same talking points. Same op-ed in three different papers the same week. Same expert on three different networks the same morning. The argument feels spontaneous. It is not. It is the output of an infrastructure that Powell called for in…

Block 8, Article 1 — He Was Not Describing a Conspiracy. He Was Writing a Business Plan. On August 23, 1971, a corporate attorney named Lewis Powell sent a confidential memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He was not a fringe figure. He sat on the boards of eleven corporations, served as the Chamber’s…

Block 7, Article 4 — The Door That Doesn’t Require the Bench Steve Sagnotti · thebrokenframes.substack.com Citizens United v. FEC asked one question: can the government restrict how corporations spend money on elections? The Court answered no. It never asked the prior question: where does a corporation get the authority to spend money on elections…

Block 7, Article 3 — The Referee Was Appointed by the Team Steve Sagnotti · thebrokenframes.substack.com By 2010 the pipeline was producing. The bench was six seats held by Federalist Society affiliations. The legal architecture Article 2 documented — corporate personhood, money as speech — was in place. What remained was to use it. The…

Block 7, Article 2 — Same Amendment. Different Outcomes. Consistent Beneficiaries. Steve Sagnotti · thebrokenframes.substack.com In 1868 Congress ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. Section 1 established the citizenship and constitutional rights of formerly enslaved people. The language was direct: all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens. No state shall deprive any person…

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…

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 —…