FUCK DONALD TRUMP!!!

There are only 8 Democrats (Zero Republicans) who are supporting it. Why so few? Common Sense tells you its because Blackstone and Black Rock have so much money in so many different spaces, they can buy them in numerous different ways. PACS, Super PACS, direct contributions from employees, etc. This is a way to see how utterly corrupt so many Democrats in the House are. We already know all the Republicans are. Who is lying to you and who doesn’t really want Affordable Housing for Americans? Anyone who isn’t cosponsoring this Bill. It’s simple.

There are real solutions to our problems. But this Congress is in bed with Wall Street - AND NOT TRYING TO HELP WORKING AMERICANS. Quit voting for people who vote against your best interests.

We have the opportunity to Create An America That Works For Everyone with the internet and AI (if it is used properly and in the hands of moral people) and not in the hands of the Tech Bro Billionaires only. If it remains in their hands, this world could very easily become a dystopian version of the Hunger Games and the only way to get our freedoms back would be a violent bloody war. Let’s do everything we can NOW to stop that from happening.

One of the most important things we could do would be

to get this bill passed.

It would only take three phone calls and three emails from you to get that to happen - if everyone would share it and make those calls and send those messages. Please commit to do your part! Then please send it to five other people. Text the link to this Article or email it or post it on Facebook, or Instagram, LinkedIn, X, BlueSky, where ever you have accounts.

Here is a link to find out who your House Rep is and their contact information: How to Find and Contact Your House Representative

Here is a link to find the contact information for both of your Senators: How to Find and Contact Your Senators

If everyone reading this would share it with FIVE FRIENDS AND/OR FAMILY MEMBERS we could reach 100 MILLION PEOPLE in a week.

IF YOU WOULD JUST SHARE IT

PLEASE DO YOUR PART

If your Rep is not on the list of Co-sponsors, will you please call them, email them, harass them, embarrass them, offer to max out on donations to them if you have the money, to get them to sponsor it? And then never vote for them again, if the last was what it took to get them to do it.

The ONLY reason someone would NOT want to pass this bill is because they are being paid by the large insurance companies to NOT pass the bill so the insurance companies can keep stealing from all of us.

We have the opportunity to Create An America That Works For Everyone with the internet and AI (if it is used properly and in the hands of moral people) and not in the hands of the Tech Bro Billionaires only. If it remains in their hands, this world could very easily become a dystopian version of the Hunger Games and the only way to get our freedoms back would be a violent bloody war. Let’s do everything we can NOW to stop that from happening.

One of the most important things we could do would be

to get this bill passed.

It would only take three phone calls and three emails from you to get that to happen if everyone would share it and do it also. Please commit to do your part! And then please send it to five other people. Text the link to this Article or email it or post it on Facebook, or Instagram, LinkedIn, X, BlueSky, where ever you have accounts.

If everyone reading this would share it with FIVE FRIENDS AND/OR FAMILY MEMBERS we could reach 100 MILLION PEOPLE in a week.

IF YOU WOULD JUST SHARE IT.

PLEASE DO YOUR PART

In case you hadn’t heard, one of our smallest states, just found the legal lever that could pry corporate money out of American politics. Here’s why it matters — and why it terrifies the people who have bought our democracy.

This is something the mainstream press has buried under its usual both-sides mush: Hawaii just handed the American people a loaded weapon against Citizens United, and almost nobody noticed.

On May 15, 2026, Governor Josh Green signed SB 2471 into law. It doesn’t repeal Citizens United — no state can do that. But it does something arguably more elegant: It uses the one power the Supreme Court forgot to strip away from the states. The power to define what a corporation is.

Here’s the logic, and it’s airtight.

Corporations are not people. They don’t spring into existence from a mother’s womb or some divine act of creation. They are legal fictions — creatures of state law, brought into existence by state charters, given their powers by state legislatures. Thomas Jefferson said people’s rights are self-evident, endowed by their creator, preceding government. Corporations? Created by government. Every single one of them. That’s not a political opinion. That’s a legal fact going back to Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1819 ruling in Dartmouth v. Woodward.

Hawaii’s new law simply states that corporations doing business there do not have the power to engage in local, state, or federal political campaigns — that electoral spending was never among the powers enumerated in the state’s corporate charter. Violators face a range of penalties up to losing the right to do business in the state entirely. (See: Prospect)

The idea originated with Tom Moore, a former Federal Election Commission counsel now at the Center for American Progress. In a paper CAP published last September, Moore argued that the states’ underlying authority to define and limit corporate powers never disappeared — it simply went quiet: unused, untested, and unmentioned. Moore found support in an 1869 Supreme Court ruling that requires corporations to comply with the charter laws of every state where they do business. That means a Delaware-incorporated company has to follow Hawaii’s rules if it wants to sell a single product in Honolulu.

Think about that. California. New York. If they pass similar laws, we’re not talking about a Pacific island novelty act. We’re talking about a choke point that covers the majority of the American consumer economy.

The bill cleared the Hawaii Senate 25-to-0, and the lower house 41-to-9. Bipartisan. Unanimous in the Senate. Because it turns out that ordinary people — Democrats, Republicans, independents — all understand at a gut level that corporations buying elections is a form of corruption. Polling shows roughly 75 percent of Americans would like Citizens United reversed. That’s not a constituency. That’s a supermajority. The problem has always been that the people who benefit from the current arrangement own the institutions capable of changing it.

Hawaii found a door the oligarchs forgot to lock.

The Supreme Court can invent corporate personhood out of thin air — which it did, essentially without explanation, in the 1886 Santa Clara County railroad case — but it cannot erase 200 years of state corporation law. It cannot pretend that states don’t create corporations. It cannot pretend that Alito himself didn’t write in Hobby Lobby that the objectives corporations may pursue “are governed by the laws of the States in which they were incorporated.”

They unknowingly hoisted their own noose!

Since Moore’s paper appeared, CAP has seen bills like Hawaii’s introduced in 14 states, while Montanans — who had a heroic history of forbidding corporate campaign spending for a full century until Citizens United wiped out their law — are working to place a similar initiative on their 2026 ballot. (See: Prospect)

Now let me be clear about what this law doesn’t do. It doesn’t touch individuals. Elon Musk and his ilk, not being creations of state governments, can continue to spend freely on elections. Stopping that would require a high-court reversal of Buckley v. Valeo. That fight is still in front of us. And the current Supreme Court will look for every wriggle room available to protect corporate power — that’s what they do.

But here’s why it still matters: Momentum. Law. Precedent. The states asserting sovereignty over the creatures they created. Every additional state that passes a version of this law adds to the legal record that courts eventually have to reckon with. And politically, every vote like Hawaii’s 25-to-0 Senate vote puts on record who is willing to stand between ordinary Americans and the corporations that are buying their government.

I talk a lot about the housing crisis, the healthcare crisis, the wage crisis. The thread connecting all of them is the same: Industries, monopolies that benefit from keeping things broken have purchased enough political power to keep them broken. Citizens United is the mechanism. Corporate personhood is the theology. Hawaii just hammered a really big nail into the coffin of Citizens United.

The question is whether the rest of the country has the stomach to follow.

I think they do. I think people are a lot angrier than the donors want to admit, and a lot smarter than the consultants give them credit for. A state that usually makes news for its beaches just wrote the most important campaign finance legislation in a generation. That’s not nothing.

That’s a start.

If this piece made you happy, restack it please. Share it. And if you believe what I believe — that democracy is being sold out from under us — Subscribe. We’re not going to fix this by being polite about it. P.S. I am going to have a big surprise for you in the coming days.

Within the span of one week, China hosted the President of the United States and the President of Russia. Back to back. Same host. Same room.

I’m not going to tell you I know what was said behind closed doors. I don’t. But I’ll tell you what I can see in broad daylight, because the public record is loud enough on its own.

The Quiet Withdrawal

On May 1, the Pentagon announced the withdrawal of 5,000 American troops from Germany.

On May 14 — the same day Trump sat down with Xi — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo cancelling the scheduled deployment of the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team to Poland, the Baltics, and Romania. Some of those soldiers were already in Europe. They’re being sent home.

A battalion that specializes in long-range rockets and missiles, scheduled for Germany, was cancelled too. The command that oversees those capabilities is being pulled off the continent entirely.

Last fall, the United States quietly withdrew a rotating brigade from Romania and announced it wouldn’t be replaced. The Pentagon called it “a positive sign of increased European capability.” That’s the language you use when you’re walking away and need a sentence that sounds like you aren’t.

Congress Wasn’t Told…

Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said she wasn’t notified about the Poland cancellation.

The 2026 defense authorization bill requires the Pentagon to give Congress notice and certifications before drawing US troop levels in Europe below 76,000. There are open legal questions about whether this administration is following that law.

Nobody in the majority seems interested in asking them.

Meanwhile…

Ukraine’s air defenses are running on fumes. Tariffs are eating into every American household budget. The Chancellor of Germany is being publicly attacked by the President of the United States on social media. The NATO Secretary General is in Bucharest telling allies not to worry — which is exactly what people say when there is something to worry about.

The War in Iran, the war in Ukraine, Israel’s war with Iran earlier this year, their war in Gaza and Lebanon, all of this has depleted our capacity to wage war and defend ourselves significantly, due to the amount of missiles that have been used.

• The 2025 Israel–Iran war alone likely consumed billions of dollars in interceptors and strike missiles in less than two weeks.

• Estimates from defense analysts and reporting suggest the U.S. fired:

  • 100–150 THAAD interceptors

  • hundreds of Patriot interceptors

  • dozens of SM-3 naval interceptors

  • large numbers of Tomahawks and other precision munitions.

The cost is staggering because these are not cheap weapons:

• THAAD interceptor: roughly $12–15 million each

• Patriot PAC-3: roughly $4–6 million each

• SM-3: often $10–30+ million each depending on variant

• Tomahawk: about $2 million each.

Just the THAAD missiles used defending Israel against Iranian ballistic missile attacks may have cost around $1–2 billion by themselves.

The bigger issue, though, is not just money — it’s production capacity.

Several reports and analyses say:

• The U.S. used roughly a quarter of its THAAD interceptor inventory during the 12-day Iran war.

• Some analysts believe Patriot and THAAD inventories fell to levels that worried Pentagon planners.

• Replacement production takes years, not weeks.

And in Beijing this week, the two men who benefit most from American retreat are sitting across a table from each other, less than a week after the American president left the room.

Call It What It Is

Article II, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution states that: “The President, Vice President, and all civil Officers of the United States shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

The evidence is right in front of us and it supports: a deliberate, accelerating dismantling of the alliance structure that has kept this country safe and prosperous since 1949, conducted by an administration that is clearly more aligned with the interests of Moscow and Beijing than with the interests of the people who elected it.

You can argue about motive. You cannot argue about conduct. The conduct is on the record.

This Is Not Normal

Reasonable people disagree about basing levels, about burden-sharing, about the shape of the alliance. That debate has been going on since Eisenhower.

This is something else.

This is the systematic removal of American power from the places where it deters Russian aggression, conducted in the same week the American president met the Chinese president, conducted days before the Russian president arrives in the same capital, conducted without notice to Congress, conducted in apparent violation of statute.

If a Democratic administration had done a tenth of this, the impeachment resolutions would already be filed.

So why haven’t they been filed? Because almost every member of the Republican Party in Congress and many of the Democrats are, by their actions and voting records, part of this attempt to overthrow our government and destroy the Constitution because they do everything this President asks of them.

That is what the Constitution is for. Impeachment is the remedy the Founders wrote into Article II for exactly this kind of moment.

Members of Congress took an oath. They can honor it or they can explain to their grandchildren why they didn’t.

What the Rest of Us Do

For those of us who don’t sit in Congress, who don’t run the Pentagon, who don’t get a vote on troop deployments — there is still something you can do.

Over the past weeks, we have all seen what people showing up to County Commissioner’s meetings and putting unrelenting pressure on Governors that are clearly aligned with the Administration’s attempts to build Data Centers and ICE Concentration Camps. And I mean frightening pressure that has caused the elected leaders to get the message and cancel Data Centers in Utah and other places. But they still keep coming.

Data centers in Utah, Florida, Maine, Georgia have been cancelled. In Missouri the citizens became so angry the voters said “Like fuck you will” and ousted every single member of their city council who voted to approve the project, forcing an immediate collapse of the deal to develop the Data Center. However, 21 new data centers all over Utah are trying to get approved. These people do not care about the environment or if there is enough water or power. They just want the money and the local people can go without.

All of this is being done on a local level.

Why all the Data Centers and Concentration Camps are being built, really…

I grew up in a small town in Utah during the cold war. In the first three years of school, I had older women for teachers. They all had white hair and had taught for decades. I was the little boy who always finished my assignments before everyone else and was looking out the window while the others were still working. But because those teachers had taught for so many years, they knew what to do with someone like me. They used me to tutor other kids in the class who for whatever reason had more difficulty understanding the assignments. And I liked doing. It kept me engaged and I felt like I was being helpful — a friend to my classmates. And the other students appreciated the help.

I also remember seeing movies of atomic bombs going off at the test sites during that time. Our government for some reason wanted us to see the movies so we would understand how powerful those bombs were and how they could destroy everything around them immediately. And we were just kids in kindergarten, first and second grade, yet they were showing us these movies.

Because we lived so close to an Army Depot, which was the largest employer in town, we had so-called “safety drills” at school. We had to hide under our desks in case there was a nuclear attack. On other days the whole school would go out onto the playground and the principal would blow a whistle and we all had to run home as fast as we could and our mothers would time us to see how quickly we could get there.

I remember as if it were yesterday, hiding under my desk during one of those drills, thinking about the movie where everything — the cars, the houses, the stick people standing in the yards, where all destroyed and blown away in an instant — and asking myself, “Why are we doing this? The Army Depot is just down the street and if a bomb that powerful hit our town, we’d all die anyway.”

I didn’t understand it then. I do today.

Fear… was what our government was trying to create in our minds. When people are afraid, they don’t think clearly. And they are using the same tactic today. But this time, it’s China.

If you had to guess, what do you think the data centers and concentration camps are really being built to do? Understanding that at the same time, Elon Musk is trying to do an IPO for SpaceX at a valuation circa 150 times SALES, ($1.75 trillion - which is obscenely overpriced) so he can fill our skies with low altitude satellites that will be able to see and hear everything we do. Never in history has a government had this type of power to surveil and control others.

I hope the IPO is a complete and total failure — but it probably won’t be because the governments of China, the Saudis, of Russia, and all of the billionaires are going to buy it because they are the ones who want the surveillance and the power it will give to each of them including and especially this Administration — so together they can control the rest of us and the world.

We need to work LOCALLY but together — to stop these people NOW. We need to scare our local and national representatives in Washington so badly that there is no doubt in their minds about what we want, and what we are going to do if they do not do what is in the best interests of America and its citizens — AND NOT FOR THE BENEFIT OF A HANDFUL OF BILLIONAIRES WHO ARE FUNDING THIS TREASONOUS ADMINISTRATION AND THE REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS WHO ARE TRYING TO OVERTHROW OUR GOVERNMENT AND CONSTITUTION.

• Call your senators. Call your representatives. Not once. Every week. By name. About this.

• Show up at town halls. In person. With questions.

• Write to your local paper. Letters to the editor still get read.

• Talk to your neighbors who voted for this and tell them what their vote is buying.

• Don’t let anyone in your life pretend this is ordinary.

The Bet They’re Making

The men who are reshaping the world right now are counting on Americans being too tired, too distracted, and too divided to notice what’s being done in our name.

They are counting on us being too complacent. Too angry at one another. Too separated by stupid, emotionally charged issues, like boys playing in girls sports. Too busy arguing with one another on Social Media sites.

Stop falling for their foolishness and the ways they attempt to divide us.

They have been right about that before.

THESE MEN NEED TO BE STOPPED AND NOW.

THINK ABOUT WAYS TO DO THAT. YOU MAY BE THE ONE TO COME UP WITH THE SOLUTION — THEN ACT!

If you agree with what I have said here, please restack this and share it directly with others, because the algorithms and AI aren’t going to let anyone see it without your help and we need to stop this IPO and everything else they are doing or it really could be too late. And if you have a managed 401K, I would call the manager and forbid them to buy this IPO because I believe it is going to fall out of the sky after they raise the money because of the ridiculously high price they are trying to get to raise the money.

When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in early March, twenty percent of global oil supply went offline overnight. The International Energy Agency called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market. The long-term losers of that moment are not Iran. The long-term losers are every oil-producing nation on Earth, because the world looked at its oil dependence in a mirror and decided it was done.

Chinese exports of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles all hit record highs in March 2026. Solar, battery, and EV exports combined were up roughly 70% year-over-year. Pakistan, which spent the last few years quietly importing cheap Chinese solar, is saving billions while its neighbors panic at the pump. China is now the renewables superpower of the planet — operating three times the wind and solar capacity of the United States and India combined.

America still holds a short-term advantage because of our domestic oil and gas production. But “short-term advantage” is exactly the trap. If we use this moment to double down on drilling instead of racing to solarize the country, we will hand the next century to Beijing while we kill the oceans and cook the climate paying for the privilege.

Solar is the only sane answer. Not because it’s morally pure. Because it is the only energy source that does not require us to keep extracting things from a planet that is screaming at us to stop.

Our Real Neighbors - Mexico and Canada

The Colorado River does not recognize borders. Neither does air, drought, pandemics, wildfires, or toxic dust storms filled with compounds that kill people in dried up lake beds.

The only intelligent response to a continental crisis is continental cooperation. We need to be working hand-in-glove with Canada and Mexico — and with Central and South America — on water management, energy infrastructure, food production, and migration. Mexico and Canada are not threats to be walled off. They are the partners we should be working the closest with to insure our collective survival.

And yet our current administration is doing the exact opposite. They are deporting the very people whose labor feeds us, constructs our homes, highways and high-rises, as Trump and his billionaire friends are building cages for our actual neighbors (and anyone else who opposes them) picking trade fights with the countries we share rivers with, and treating Mexico like an enemy state while Beijing builds solar farms across three continents. This is not strength. This is a strategic catastrophe authored by men who confuse cruelty with toughness.

The current direction of American foreign policy — tariffs against Canada, mass deportations of Mexicans and Central Americans, contempt for the global cooperation we need to survive the climate emergency — is being driven by a small group of extraordinarily rich men who have decided that the rest of us exist to make their portfolios grow. Musk, Thiel, Schwarzman, Fink, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc. and the political class they have purchased are not building the future. They are looting the present so they can rule whatever’s left.

I do not accept that future. I do not believe most Americans accept that future. We have simply been told there is no alternative. Together we can change everything and actually create an America and World that Works for Everyone.

As Americans, we are watching a form of collective insanity unfold in real time.

In the middle of the most significant drought in the recorded history of the American West, when Climate Change is affecting food production and the health of our oceans on a world-wide basis, the “Tech Bro Billionaires” with the help of the Trump Administration are racing to build data centers that will consume more electricity and water than the states that host them. In Box Elder County, Utah, Kevin O’Leary’s “Stratos Project” — a single 40,000-acre hyperscale campus — has been approved to draw up to 9 gigawatts of power at full buildout. The entire state of Utah currently uses about 4. That is not a typo. One data center for one industry will burn more than twice the electricity of every home, hospital, school, and factory in the state combined, and it will swallow an estimated 16.6 billion gallons of water a year while the Great Salt Lake disappears in front of us.

This is not innovation. This is moral bankruptcy dressed up as patriotism. And almost no one in a position of national or local leadership is willing to say so.

That silence is why I have seriously been considering running for the Presidency. Not because I want the job. I do not understand how anyone would want the job — but because there are real solutions to our problems, and this is the conversation we should be having, but no one on a national level is having it. The other reasons I am entertaining the idea is that I DO NOT trust other people’s morality — especially people who have been politicians for years. I do not trust their ability to think about things clearly on a larger scale — nor do I see people who are actually capable of getting things done — Gavin Newsome has spent $14 billion and still has not laid a single mile of track. But that is not what I want to discuss here.

1. The Energy-Water Paradox

The GREED for POWER — electrical, political, monetary — is winning.

These data centers require millions of gallons of water daily for cooling. I know about cooling towers because I have built ethanol plants that produce hundreds of millions of gallons of ethanol that have massive cooling towers that use large amounts of water. And the water they want to use now for the data centers comes from the same basins that feed our drying lakes and our dying crops. We are, quite literally, trading our future ability to grow food for the present ability of a machine to autocomplete a sentence. 40 million people rely on the Colorado River for drinking water — and if it does NOT snow extremely hard this winter, they might run out as early as next year. DO YOU HEAR THAT?

The math has never added up. Yet our national and local politicians are still signing the contracts and cutting the deals behind closed doors thinking that WE collectively are not going to do anything about it, when I think it is getting to the point that some of these politicians are going to start disappearing or ending up dead. They are, as individuals and for their own personal gain, making decisions about the quality of the air and water of entire regions where tens of millions of other people and their children live. Decisions that could affect the very survival of millions of others.

Just this past week in Lake Tahoe on the California side, NV Energy, the company owned by Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett which has had a monopoly on power in Nevada for years, informed the nearly 49,000 residents living in the community of Lake Tahoe that they will need to find a new supplier for their electricity by this time next year (May 2027) because NV Energy will no longer be able (willing) to supply it. Not for the residents, or for the town’s businesses, including the ski resorts. The power they have historically used is going to be sold to the new data centers being built in Sparks, NV to the east of Lake Tahoe, near Musk’s giga factory where batteries are built. This is NOT a game, and I do not believe the people living in such places are going to sit idly by and let them do such things.

2. Pantry, Or Processor

The private markets in the U.S. are optimized and focused on short-term quarterly, monetary profit. The climate and nature are not. If we want to survive what is already in motion, we have to shift the way we think as a society and country from EXTRACTION to STEWARDSHIP. From COMPETITION TO COOPORATION. Nature can get along just fine without US. We on the other hand cannot survive without Nature. There is NOTHING more important than keeping our air and water as clean as we possibly can.

The need to treat food production as a national utility/priority is real. We should be diverting the energy subsidies that have recently been handed to Big Tech behind closed doors to build data centers which consume gargantuan amounts of energy and water toward Controlled Environment Agriculture — high-tech greenhouses that produce more food using up to 95% less water than open-field irrigation as is done in Almeria, Spain, but with better more durable materials than sheet plastic — and stop producing things like alfalfa, rice, cotton, and other grasses used to feed cattle in the middle of the desert — which consume massive amounts of water at a time when we have done so much damage to the environment that we are running out of water.

Mobilize like we mean it. We should be looking at things like building vertical farms near our cities now, and/or in the Imperial Valley, so that when the Imperial Valley turns to dust — and it will if we keep using the water that we still have in such foolish and insane ways — American families can still eat.

Our clean water programs should be as much a part of our energy policy as clean energy should be, yet we have a President who thinks Climate Change is a hoax and has done away with our clean air, water, and energy policies so that oil producing countries can pay him and his family members money. It is an obscene grift taking place in front of the eyes of the world, when we should be doing what China is — converting our entire energy sources to clean solar, wind, and geothermal as a NATIONAL PRIORITY because it is.

3. Our Real Neighbors

The Colorado River does not recognize borders. Neither does air. Neither does drought. Neither does the next pandemic, the next wildfire, the next dust bowl.

The only intelligent response to a continental crisis is continental cooperation. We should be working hand-in-glove with Canada and Mexico — with Central and South America — on water management, energy infrastructure, food production, and migration. Mexico and Canada are not threats to be walled off. AND I AM FOR SECURE BORDERS, not OPEN uncontrolled highways as was the Biden Administration. Mexico and Canada are our neighbors, our friends — our most vital partners that we need for our very survival.

We have two of the most intelligent, compassionate, forward thinking leaders in Mexico and Canada in Claudia Sheinbaum and Mark Carney that may be the best leaders either country has ever had — people we should be talking and planning with for a far brighter, collective future — friends we could learn from and build with — yet our current administration is treating them like trash, while he is meeting with and praising two of the most vile despots in the world — Putin and Xi, because he wants to be just like them — a little American despot, a foolish tyrant who rules over America along with his demented billionaire supporters after they have destroyed democracy and the values this country was built upon. In his insanity, he is deporting the very people whose labor feeds us, who build and clean our homes, construct our highways and high-rises, package every piece of meat and poultry we consume, manicure and care for our yards, cook the food in our restaurants and care for our hotels — work that most Americans do not want to perform.

This Administration has built his own private police force with ICE and is building cages for our actual neighbors, picking trade fights with the countries we share rivers with, and treating Mexico like an enemy state while Beijing is building solar farms across three continents. This is not strength. This is a strategic catastrophe authored by a small group of small minded men who confuse cruelty with toughness and who are deeply flawed as human beings. Men who think it’s okay to kill people with darker skin and steal their land to push insane and cruel ideas like “Manifest Destiny” and “Building Condos for World People.”

The current direction of American foreign policy — tariffs against Canada, mass deportations of Mexicans and Central Americans, contempt for the global cooperation we need to survive the climate emergency — is being driven by a small group of extraordinarily rich men who have decided that the rest of us exist only to make their portfolios grow. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Steve Schwarzman, Larry Fink, Larry Ellison, Jamie Dimon, etc. and the political class they have purchased are not building the future. They are looting the present so they can rule whatever’s left in their twisted, maniacal, dystopian view of the future. And be very clear that is exactly what they are attempting to do.

I do not accept that future, nor do I believe most Americans. We are simply being told there is no alternative.

4. Radical Neighbors, At Home Too

There is an alternative, and it is already visible if you look for it.

Look at what Zohran Mamdani is building in New York City — a politics organized around whether ordinary people can afford groceries and rent, not around whether a handful of billionaires get another tax cut. You don’t have to agree with every policy to recognize what’s actually happening: A politician is asking the question almost no one in Washington is willing to ask anymore — what would it take for working people to live decent lives? That is the question. Everything else is noise.

“Taking care of one another” Loving one another” gets dismissed as soft sentiment. In 2026, it is a hard necessity. Every megawatt and every acre-foot is now a decision about what kind of country we want to be in ten years from now. Every immigration policy is a decision about whether we face the future with allies or with enemies of our own making. Every energy contract is a vote between cooperation or collapse.

If we do not learn to work together — with our literal neighbors across the southern and northern borders, with our metaphorical neighbors across the political aisle, with our actual neighbors on the same block — the decision gets made for us by Dead Pool at Lake Mead and Lake Powell. By empty grocery shelves. By dead reefs and dead rivers and a sky that finally stops forgiving us.

What This Comes Down To

We can have a living, vibrant planet, that supports us and other forms of biological life, or we can have humming data centers and die along with them. We can have neighbors, or enemies. We can have solar farms across the desert, or we can have empty oil derricks and a dead ocean.

We cannot have both.

I would rather be the generation that chose the living planet. I would rather be the country that chose its neighbors. I would rather lose the next election fighting for that future, than win it pretending the current path leads anywhere but a cliff.

The question is whether enough of us are willing to say it out loud, at the same time, before the choice is made for us.

If this struck a nerve, share it. Forward it to someone in your local water district, your local papers and TV stations. Send it to your representatives with one question: “Does this project help us eat in ten years, or does it simply help a stock price and your own net worth today?”

— Barry

To make it simple and understandable for everyone — economies are people doing people things. The things that people do to provide food, shelter, transportation and other needed and wanted services for themselves and their neighbors. They are living, breathing things, because they are made up of living, breathing people and they can be healthy and alive, or sick and ailing. If economies are to be healthy, each of its components need to be healthy.

There are also basically two ways to run an economy.

In one, a community produces wealth and keeps it within the community. The farmer grows the food and sells it to the local grocer. The grocer banks at the local credit union. The hospital buys its linens from a laundry/company that also provides, makes, or sells linens three miles away. The construction crew lives in the houses it builds. The factory is owned, in whole or in part, by the people who work in it, so when it has a good year, they have a good year. Money circulates. It hits the same hands two, three, four, five times before it leaves town — and then usually only to go on a vacation. That circulation is what an economy actually is.

In the other, wealth is produced locally and shipped out. A hedge fund in Manhattan buys six hundred thousand single-family homes in Phoenix, Charlotte, Atlanta, Las Vegas — houses that used to be how working families built net worth — and converts them into rental income that flows back to limited partners in New York, Miami, London, and the Gulf.

Private equity buys the nursing home, the veterinary clinic, the trailer park, the newspaper, the hospital. It takes out huge amounts of debt to do it. It then fires as many workers as possible to cut costs to show an increased bottom line, reduces services, then pays themselves huge amounts in salary and bonuses, as well as unreasonable amounts in rents after they split the land the business sits on from the business itself, placing the land into an LLC that the executives/general partners own. They then charge the hospital ungodly rents that go directly into the executives’ pockets on top of their salary and bonuses, but its hidden from the less sophisticated who do not understand they are dealing with a bunch of common thieves. In other words, they steal the company blind, they rape it, until there is nothing left to steal and then walk away, leaving the community to deal with the consequences.

The casinos on the Las Vegas Strip are owned by a real-estate trust headquartered two thousand miles away, and the rent the casino pays to operate on its own floor goes to that trust, not to anyone in Nevada. The locals get the jobs. The capital goes into the pockets of someone else far away.

That second model is what most of America live inside of now. Blackstone is the largest commercial landlord (which includes residential ownership because homes are now considered “commerical assets”) in the United States. It also owns the land under the Cosmopolitan and the Bellagio and the buildings themselves. Vici Properties owns the land under Caesars Palace, MGM Grand, the Venetian, Mandalay Bay, and most of the rest of the Strip — and the buildings where a great deal of Las Vegas’s economy actually happens — and collects rent on every square foot. The dealers, housekeepers, cooks, and valets who make the city run see almost none of that rent. It leaves. It goes to shareholders who will never set foot in Clark County and don’t care whether the schools work or the water holds out.

Call it what it is: An Extraction Economy. The town is the mine. The people are the worker bees. The wealth is the ore. And the shareholders are out of state. This is an economic model that always leads to one place only — DISASTER.

It does not have to be this way, and the evidence that it doesn’t is not theoretical. It is sitting in plain sight in places that decided, deliberately, to do something else.

Look at Catalonia. The region around Barcelona is the wealthiest part of Spain, and it has been wealthier than the Spanish average for more than a century, despite — and partly because of — a dense network of cooperatives, mutual societies, and family-owned firms that keep ownership local. Mondragón, in the Basque Country to the north, is the most famous example: a federation of worker-owned cooperatives employing roughly 70,000 people, where workers own the firm, elect the board, and share in the profits. When Mondragón does well, Mondragón’s workers do well, and the towns Mondragón sits in do well. The wealth doesn’t leave because there is nowhere else for it to go. The owners are already home. And as such, the owners have the “pride of ownership” and take care of everything. If there is a problem, they fix it immediately because its theirs, not someone else’s in a far away land. The business is maintained and operated properly by its owners which are made up of every employee there.

Look at Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy, where a third of regional GDP runs through cooperatives and the region has spent decades among the most prosperous in Europe. Look at the Mittelstand in Germany — privately held, often family-owned mid-sized manufacturers rooted in specific towns, paying skilled wages, training apprentices, and reinvesting locally — which is the actual engine of German industrial strength.

These are not folk experiments. They are the most successful regional economies in Europe, and they share a common feature: Ownership stays close to the work.

Scotland just took the boldest step yet to make this the law of the land. And my maternal grandmother was a Stewart from Scotland, whose great aunt was a woman named Mary — Queen of Scots.

In February 2026, the Scottish Parliament passed the Community Wealth Building (Scotland) Act — the first national legislation of its kind anywhere in the world. It places a legal duty on every local authority and a wide range of public bodies to plan and act around five pillars: how public money is spent, how workers are treated and paid, how land and property are used, how ownership is structured, and where finance flows. The aim, in the government’s own words, is the “generation, circulation and retention of wealth in local and regional economies.” Scottish Communities — run by Scottish ministers, who must now publish a national statement and progress reports. Councils must produce action plans. Public procurement must look first to local small businesses, social enterprises, and cooperatives. Land and property must be evaluated for community benefit, not just market price. Worker ownership and cooperative ownership are explicitly favored.

The bill grew out of a real experiment. Preston, in northern England, was a struggling post-industrial town when its council decided around 2013 to redirect its anchor institutions — the hospitals, the universities, the police, the housing associations — to buy locally wherever possible. Within a few years, tens of millions of pounds that had been leaving the local economy every year were instead circulating inside it. Preston went from one of the most deprived areas in the country to one of the most improved. Scotland watched, piloted the model in five council areas, and is now hard-wiring it into national law.

The Scottish stakes are not abstract. By the government’s own measure, the top 10 percent of Scottish households hold roughly 200 times the wealth of the bottom 10 percent. A quarter of Scots have less than a few hundred pounds in savings. The Scots looked at that and concluded that the economic model itself was the problem — that an economy designed to extract will keep extracting until there is nothing left to take — and that a different model had to be written into law before the extraction was complete.

Now Look At America

The American single-family rental market is dominated by a handful of institutional landlords who own hundreds of thousands (I believe it’s millions and they are lying) of homes between them. In some Sun Belt zip codes, corporate buyers were responsible for a majority of all home purchases at the peak. Every house they buy is a house a family cannot. Every rent check they collect is wealth that used to compound on a household balance sheet that now compounds on a hedge fund’s instead.

The first rung of the ladder by which working Americans built wealth for three generations has been sawn off and sold for parts.

In Las Vegas, the same dynamic plays out in commercial real estate. The casinos generate enormous revenue. The rent on the buildings they sit in flows to landlords in New York. The water bill — in a city running out of water — stays here. The wage bill stays here. The profit does not.

Multiply this by every city in every state in the country. Private equity now owns a meaningful share of American hospitals, nursing homes, veterinary clinics, dental practices, daycares, and local newspapers. Each acquisition follows the same pattern: cut staff, raise prices, load the acquired company with debt that is used to pay more to the General Partners. Split the land from the business, now charge the business huge rents that go into the managing partners’ pockets directly, then pay yourself huge dividends and bonuses on top of the rents, and when they businesses go bankrupt, move on. The local community keeps the consequences. The fund keeps the money.

The problem is when the business is a HOSPITAL with a quick care clinic and an emergency room, the entire community suffers and is left without a hospital and the vital services it provides. And the men who did it, should be in jail, but they are looked up to because they have a forty million dollar yacht and a home in Aspen because much of America has been fed Wall Street lies for so long they actually believe them.

This is not capitalism in any sense Adam Smith would have recognized. Smith assumed the merchant lived in the town. He assumed the owner saw the workers’ children at church. The whole moral architecture of his economics rested on proximity. Strip out proximity and you do not get a freer market. You get a more efficient extraction tool.

So what would a wealth-creation economy actually look like in an American city — say, the one I happen to live in Las Vegas?

Do What Scotland Just Did!

Let’s start with housing. The first thing I would suggest is anytime you hear a person say “Work Force Housing” — look at them with a great deal of distain, and say “Fuck You, you arrogant fuck” and then stomp on the arch of their foot really hard with the heal of your shoe and hopefully you break at least one bone. I’m kidding. That would be assault, but you get the point I am trying to make. The mere utterance of such a statement is, by itself, an attempt to create “classes” of people — to separte and divide people as if the “Work Force” is less valuable than the so called “Ruling Class” who own the casinos and the land they sit on and who allow the CEOs running the casinos to pay themselves 400 times what they pay their employees. The casinos would operate much more effectively if every employee had ownership in the business and had a say in how they were run.

The next thing any city or state could and should do in such a situation is pass a City or State Ordinance that places a massive tax on any company that owns more than 50 homes in the City. An extra $5,000 on every $100,000 of value. Then give them a certain amount of time to sell off every home they own above 50 (no more than five years). And they cannot purchase another one, or every home they own is taxed another $5,000 on every $100,000 of value. I could almost guarantee that suddenly there would be lots of affordable homes in Las Vegas that working people could afford.

Extremely strong rent controls should also be instituted so working people who do rent can enjoy their lives. Happy people are far more productive than people who are constantly worried about paying the rent and having the price of everything go up, except their salaries.

Ownership of Housing. The wealth of most Americans has come from equity in the homes they have owned over time. Now that wealth is going to a small group of Private Equity Funds and Reits. This weakens our communities and the local economies. Besides doing what was suggested above, a community should pass laws and ordinances to encourage the use of local banks and credit unions. And encourage those same institutions to provide mortgages for local housing to create low-cost mortgages, by having cities, counties and states underwrite housing bonds to provide such mortgages, which would keep things affordable and the wealth within the local communities, counties and states rather than sending it to Wall Street. The wealth of the community would then stay within the community. This would make our communities, states, and country much stronger. Each of the parts making up the economy would be stronger and healthier making the whole healthier.

Distressed commercial buildings — the half-empty office towers nobody knows what to do with — get converted to affordable apartments, owned by entities structured to keep them affordable, with residents who can buy in overtime and build equity rather than just pay rent forever. (Understanding that very few commercial buildings can be converted into residential housing. They are simply not laid out right to allow for the necessary plumbing, etc. to be built out as it needs to be for an economical price and sometimes not structurally). The mortgage payments (or rents in some situations) would stay in the community and state by doing what was describe earlier with mortgages. (This is the thesis of the Fund I am building. I am not pretending I am a neutral observer.) This way the money doesn’t flow to a New York Hedge Fund who is trying to suck as much money as they possibly can from the tenants.

Procurement. The hospital, the school district, the university, the city government, the convention authority — between them they spend billions a year. Right now, most of it leaves. Direct even half of it toward local suppliers, local contractors, local food producers, local cooperatives, and you have transformed the local economy without raising a single tax.

Stop the Extraction of Billions in Student Loans. Over the years, Wall Street has bribed state regents to raise tuitions by tens of thousands of dollars making getting an education extremely expensive. The result has been that young people have been forced to borrow tens of thousands of dollar to attend school. I wrote bill to fix solve that which can be read here. slfla.org. It would give employer’s tax credits if they pay off the students loans

Business Ownership. Don’t allow monopolies to be created or exist. Make it cheaper and easier for retiring small-business owners (or large business owners) — and there are millions of baby-boomer owners about to retire with no succession plan — to sell to their employees through ESOPs (Employee Stock Ownership Plans) and worker cooperatives instead of to private equity roll-ups. The federal tax code already gives ESOPs significant advantages. State and local policy can do far more. When the owner of the local HVAC company retires, the question of who buys it is the question of where the next twenty years of that company’s profits will go or if the business will just go away. Cities and counties should write ordinances that encourage and help small businesses find others in the community to buy such businesses (including funding for employee ownership) that will keep the business operating and ownership within the the community when such things happen. When the City or County puts bids out for whatever type of work that needs to be done, the first rights to bid on such things should be given to local people and businesses wherever possible and not to large national funds or companies until local options have been given the opportunity to participate.

In Las Vegas, Private Equity and other such funds not only own all of the land on the Strip and charge outrageously high rents, which is why everything costs so much on the Strip, which is why no one wants to come to Vegas anymore, but they also own almost every home that isn’t owned by the people living in it. Such funds own almost every strip mall and every other business in the City. They own the HVAC businesses, the hospitals, the veterinary clinics, the restaurants, the fast food places and on and on, and if they don’t own a small business, they drive tens of thousands of them out of business by charging such high amounts of rents for the spaces needed to operate such a business. The high rents also make it next to impossible for a small business to get started and off its feet. The high rents suck all of the profits the company makes out of the owner’s pockets and into the fund’s pockets in New York or whereever they are located at a time when the owners need as much capital as they can get to get their new business up and running. And every dime of the high rents leaves the community, which weakens it even more. This will never change until local leaders wakeup to the fact that these big funds are not their friends and by allowing them to own everything, the local economies keep getting weaker, not stronger. They are people who do not care at all about the local community or the local economy.

Finance. Public deposits — city money, county money, pension money — sitting in large money-center banks that lend it back into corporate debt and securitized rentals extracts money from local communities. Move the majority of it into community banks, credit unions, and CDFIs (Community Development Financial Institutions) that lend to local businesses and local borrowers. Same dollars. Different gravity and outcomes.

None of this is Socialism. None of it is novel. The Catalans and Basques and Emilians and Germans have been doing it for a century. The Scots just made it law. America was founded on this model and became the greatest country and economy in the world. Doing it is Smart Economics. It has only changed since we allowed the Too Big To Fail Banks to exist and we bailed them out. Doing that was not a good thing and has led to the horrible malaise of unaffordability we now face and has weakened the American Economies immensely.

Of course, the objections will come, and it always comes from the same direction. You can’t tell capital where to go. You’ll scare off investment. The market knows best. Fuck such nonsense.

The market does not know best. The market knows where the highest extractable yield is, and right now that yield is in turning American homes into rental cash flow, American hospitals into debt-laden roll-ups, and American downtowns into rent-collection schemes for absentee owners. That is not the invisible hand. That is a very visible hand, attached to a very specific arm, reaching into very specific pockets — yours, and your neighbors’, and your kids’.

And make Lina Khan the head of the FTC again and let her do her job.

A community has every right to decide that the wealth it produces will, to the greatest extent possible, stay where it was produced. That is not a radical proposition. That is the proposition every functional economy in human history has rested on. The radical proposition — historically novel, historically destructive — is the one we are living under now: That an economy exists to be drained for the benefit of people who do not live in it and who think it is their right to rule.

Scotland chose. Catalonia chose, generations ago. Preston chose. Mondragón chose.

We as Americans have still not yet chosen. But we will, one way or the other. Either we say no to the Wall Street thieves and tell them that Enough Is Enough and then build the institutions — the funds, the cooperatives, the community banks, the procurement rules, the ownership structures — that keep wealth circulating where it is made, or we wake up in twenty years and discover that everything we built has been quietly retitled in someone else’s name.

The extraction economy is a choice. So is the alternative.

I believe it’s time for America to wake up and choose the ALTERNATIVE — the one in its own best interests.

Please like and restack this if you agree.

Yet the people who have caused most of it keep showing up to work everyday as if nothing is wrong.

Over the past week, I have read many different articles and watched many different pieces on YouTube and I am completely fed up with the BULLSHIT. And I mean fed up from my toes to the top of my head. So here’s my solution to plastic pollution.

The C-suites and Boards of Directors of Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, and every other company of similar scale packaging food and beverages in single-use plastic need to be given a choice:

Stop using single-use, single-serving plastic within 12 months — or spend the next

Twenty-five years of your lives in a federal prison.

And I mean that. I have thought about it for years — but it’s time to really do it!

These three companies have topped the global Break Free From Plastic brand audit as the world’s worst plastic polluters for decades.

They are not bystanders to the crisis. They are the fucking crisis. What they have been doing for decades is A CRIME AGAINST ALL OF HUMANITY — and the people doing it are CRIMINALS!

WHY DON’T WE TREAT THE POLLUTION FOR WHAT IT IS AND THEM FOR WHAT THEY ARE?

For every pound of plastic produced, 3 pounds of CO₂ are created and sent into the atmosphere to warm the planet even more.

Let me share what I saw and read in just the past week.

The Snowpack Is Gone

April 1 is the day Colorado mountain snowpack is historically supposed to peak. It is the single most important date on the water calendar for the American West.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service last week reported that on April 1, 2026, ninety-five percent of its Colorado monitoring sites were at the lowest readings ever recorded in their history.

Dozens of long-term snow courses with sixty, seventy, ninety years of continuous data read zero. Not low. ZERO.

95% of Sites

Were at the lowest readings ever recorded

14 Sites

Bare ground on April 1 for the first time in recorded history

Since 1941

The worst Colorado snow year on statewide record

40 Million Americans

Depend on the Colorado River Basin for drinking water

Five long-term sites with over sixty years of records had previous record-low April 1 readings above four inches of snow water. This year they read ZERO. Fourteen additional sites that had never been snow-free on April 1 — not once in their recorded history — were bare ground this year.

Hydrologists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture are calling this the worst Colorado snow year since statewide recordkeeping began in 1941. Denver Water has already imposed lawn-watering restrictions — and it is only April — and told its customers the deficit cannot be recovered this season.

The Colorado River Basin — which supplies drinking water to forty million Americans and irrigates a huge share of our winter vegetables — is walking into summer with almost nothing in the bank. And the Bureau of Reclamation just this past week ordered the release of 1,000,000 ACRE FEET of water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir in northern Utah. That is 1/3 of the water in Flaming Gorge.

For over 50 years climate scientists have been saying this was going to happen and NOW IT HAS.

Oh, and I forgot to say that we have a President who is so ignorant that he believes Climate Change a Hoax!

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas…

The TECH BROS want to triple our power draw — and they are doing this all over the country!

While the Green River and the Colorado are running dry, the Tech Bros are racing to build so many new AI data centers in Southern Nevada that NV Energy — the utility serving ninety percent of the state — has publicly stated that accommodating the full pipeline would require roughly THREE TIMES the electricity currently used to power the Entire City of Las Vegas. They have openly conceded they cannot deliver it without burning more fossil fuels, meaning Nevada will miss its 2030 clean-energy mandate.

And Nevada is not an outlier. In Abilene, Texas, a single Stargate data center — a joint venture of OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank, announced at the White House by Donald Trump — will draw 1.2 gigawatts of power, enough for three quarters of a million homes. Stargate’s full plan is ten gigawatts and five hundred billion dollars. Texas already has more than four hundred data centers; ERCOT projects state power demand will nearly double by 2030, with data centers driving nearly half the growth, and Texas residential electricity bills are projected to rise twenty-five to seventy percent over the next five years to pay for it. At the Abilene Stargate site, they are building an on-site natural gas power plant just to feed the machines.

3× Las Vegas’s total power use, requested by data centers

$500B Stargate commitment announced at the White House

25–70% Projected 5-year increase in Texas residential electricity bills

The machines proposed for the centers in Las Vegas alone will throw off so much heat they require between 3 - 5 million gallons of water per day in evaporative cooling towers — in a state where the Colorado is running dry. Additionally, the towers aerosolize (spit out into the air) biocides, chlorine, and quaternary ammonium compounds that Las Vegans breathe, and are the single leading environmental source of Legionnaires’ disease outbreaks according to the CDC.

And the backup power is worse. At Elon Musk’s xAI “Colossus” facility in South Memphis, the company is running dozens of methane-burning gas turbines — as many as thirty-five at one point, most of them without permits — to power a supercomputer sited in Boxtown, a predominantly Black neighborhood that already had a cancer rate four times the national average before xAI arrived. The turbines pump nitrogen oxides, formaldehyde, and unburned methane into the air Memphians breathe. The Southern Environmental Law Center has called it likely the single largest industrial source of smog-forming pollution in the city. The NAACP is suing under the Clean Air Act.

And then there’s the part I am sure Musk is aware of: Methane is eighty times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas over a twenty-year window — the exact window that matters most for what is happening to the Colorado snowpack right now. Every leak, every vent, every unburned molecule coming out of those turbines is heating the planet at a rate that makes CO₂ look like a rounding error. They are poisoning Memphis and accelerating the very drought drying up the West — all so a chatbot can answer questions faster and help the Tech Bros finish the job they set out to do: Own all the land, Own all the houses, Own all the water, Own the power grid, Own the AI, Own the robots doing the work — and leave the rest of us renting our lives from them one subscription at a time — with automatic renewal.

A handful of men — with last names like Altman, Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Bezos, Schwarzman, Fink, and others — in their insane quest for more data centers, more money, more houses, more compute, more yachts — all dead, lifeless objects — are killing off the biological life of the planet — of which we as humans are a part.

And what is this quest really about?

It is about making themselves ever richer by putting more and more workers out of work — as if hundreds of billions of dollars weren’t already enough. It is driven by a raging addiction for more money and the dead objects it can buy. A kind of aberrant Necrophilia — an obsessive lust for dead, lifeless things, and a willingness to trade every living thing on the planet to get them.

Consider this timeline. The Earth is 4.2 billion years old. Homo sapiens have been here somewhere between 1.5 million to three hundred thousand years, depending on where you draw the line. And yet in less than a hundred and fifty years (150) — in the blink of an eye — a very small number of men, chasing dirty green paper that you count (now digital numbers on a computer) have warmed the atmosphere, acidified the oceans, drained the aquifers, paved the continents, driven millions of other species into extinction, and filled every river and ocean and every human body with micro-plastics, which is KILLING EVERYTHING. Everything in the oceans and on the land — including us as human beings. And they are now proposing to triple the electricity draw of American cities so they can replace every human worker with a robot and make trillions of dollars. Yet they do not appear to be intelligent enough to realize that 68% of the American economy is CONSUMPTION and when people have no jobs, they have no money, and they can’t consume much at all without money. In my opinion, these people are completely out of their minds and should be STOPPED.

This is not innovation and these people certainly are not visionaries. They are money drunks and what they are doing is: The most spectacular failure of stewardship in the history of the species and a crime against All of Humanity. And they should be treated as the criminals they are!!!

The Great Salt Lake has been turned to poison

Due to twenty-five years of drought driven by climate change, the Great Salt Lake has dried out so much that there is now roughly eight hundred square miles of exposed lake-bed. That is an area the size of the island of Maui. I was born and raised in a small town just 15 miles south of the Lake, so I am very familiar with it.

That lake-bed is laced with arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, copper, and uranium — a century’s worth of industrial deposition from the tailings of the Kennecott Copper mine. All of that industrial waste used to sit safely underwater.

Now it blows onto the Wasatch Front, where 2.6 million people breathe it.

A movie called The Lake was premiered in January of this year at the Sundance Film Festival. It won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award: Impact for Change.

Leonardo di Caprio was behind it and when someone like him, with as much star power as he hasm is behind it, and after it won such a prestigious award you would think it would be out and available for people to see within weeks, yet it CANNOT BE SEEN ANYWHERE.

University of Utah researchers have documented elevated oxidative potential in the dust, meaning it does more biological damage per particle than other major sources of particulate pollution. Utah State researchers have found the metals transferring from airborne dust into leafy vegetables that people grow and eat in their backyards.

The dust also lands on mountain snow. Darker snow melts faster. Faster snowmelt worsens the water shortage that dries the lake in the first place.

It is a negative feedback loop engineered by human indifference.

And we have a President who says climate change is a hoax.

Our Oceans are being emptied

The great white sharks that used to patrol the waters off Cape Town, South Africa, are functionally gone.

One photographer who documented that coastline for decades used to log two hundred and fifty (250) to three hundred (300) individual great whites a year at Seal Island. This year he has logged ZERO.

The cause is debated — but only because the authorities want people to keep thinking there is room for debate. A pair of shark-hunting Orcas (Killer Whales) named Port and Starboard, and other pods of Orcas, have eaten most of them. The oceans are so depleted that Orcas are eating Great whites because there is nothing else left.

Orcas have been doing the same thing to Narwhals in the Arctic Sea over the past few years, because there is far less sea ice and there is so little of the most common foods they have eaten for millennia left in the oceans.

And then there are the commercial long-line fishing nets that have stripped the food chain so completely that Apex Predators are now preying on Apex Predators because there is nothing left for them to eat.

The causes might be debated, but the results cannot! One of the ocean’s Apex predators has been removed from one of its historic strongholds within a very short time period.

Our bodies and our children’s bodies are filled with Microplastics

In peer-reviewed research to date, microplastics have been found in every single human testicle tested. Every One.

The 2024 University of New Mexico study, led by Dr. Xiaozhong “John” Yu and published in Toxicological Sciences, tested twenty-three human testes obtained at autopsy. Every sample was positive. A 2023 study out of China, using different methodology, found the same thing in six of six samples examined. The concentration in human tissue averaged three times higher than in dogs — the “sentinel animal” researchers used for comparison.

They are in placentas. They are in human blood. They have been detected in roughly three-quarters of breast milk samples in the published studies. They are in human brains — which, according to the most recent research, carry the highest concentration of plastic particles of any organ in the body.

Sperm counts in the Western world have been falling for half a century. Some researchers project they will hit zero around 2045.

A 2024 study published in Toxicological Sciences detected polyethylene and PVC — the exact plastics used to make single-use bottles and bags — inside the reproductive tissue of men ranging from sixteen to eighty-eight years old.

Who Put it There?

The Break Free From Plastic coalition conducts an annual global brand audit. Volunteers in dozens of countries collect plastic waste from beaches, rivers, and communities, then count the branded pieces. The same three names top the list every single year.

The World’s Worst Branded Plastic Polluters

1. Coca-Cola

2. PepsiCo

3. Nestlé

Coca-Cola alone has been the single largest branded plastic polluter on earth every year since the audit began. The company produces roughly three million metric tons of plastic packaging annually. That is the weight of about fifteen million male African elephants, in single-use bottles, thrown away every year, forever.

These are not small companies being hassled by activists. These are three of the most valuable consumer-goods corporations in human history. They know exactly what their packaging does. They have been told. Their own internal research has told them. They have signed pledges. They have missed every target!

They have funded front groups to lobby against bottle deposit laws and extended producer responsibility statutes in every state that has considered them.

They have spent decades telling the public that the solution is recycling — knowing full well that less than nine percent of plastic has ever been recycled, that the recycling symbol on their bottles is a marketing device, not a reality, and that the real fate of the bottle is the ocean, the roadside, the landfill, or the microplastic in your bloodstream.

This is not a failure. It is a fucking strategy!

When Trump was first elected President, James Quincey, the CEO of Coke showed up to Mar-a-Lago with a specially made bottle of Diet Coke for the President to commemorate his inauguration. Would anyone like to guess what else they talked about in that meeting?

This is the LARGEST PLASTIC POLLUTER IN THE WORLD. They know what they are doing and they have been doing it for decades. They know they have filled the world’s rivers and oceans with plastic garbage along with our bodies and brains and the bodies and brains of our children.

Americans are plagued with chronic diseases. Microplastics are believed to cause chronic inflammation in many parts of the body. They contain known carcinogens, including BPA, phthalates, vinyl chloride and styrene. They cannot be broken down by the human body and are believed to be associated with everything from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) to an increased risk of heart attacks, dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Think about it. Gobs of microplastics are hanging out in our bodies in our tissues, and some of the smaller ones known as nano-plastics are actually entering our cells. The human body cannot break them down, so they are seen as FOREIGN INVADERS by our immune systems, which cause inflammation that never goes away as the body tries to get rid of them. Inflammation that becomes chronic because the body can’t get rid of what it sees as a foreign invader so the inflammation is never turned off.

I Know How These Companies Think

In 2004, I started a company called Green Plains Renewable Energy and raised two hundred million dollars in debt and equity. I raised the equity primarily from Midwestern farmers and borrowed the rest from CoBank and built the first two plants for Green Plains (GPRE on NASDAQ). I built those plants in the middle of the least expensive corn in the United States, which made me the low-cost producer in the U.S. as soon as the plants became operational. We were paying $.26 a bushel less for corn than our nearest competitors in Nebraska and were grinding 68,000 bushels of corn a day at each plant. That equated to lower costs (greater profits) of $17,680 a day at each plant; $12.9 million more profit a year. When the economy collapsed because of the housing crisis, Green Plains was able to keep its head above water and acquired several ethanol plants out of bankruptcy to become the second largest ethanol producer in the world for a time. It is still one of the largest ethanol producers in the world. Ethanol is added to gasoline as an oxygenate to meet the clean air standards, because gas is such a dirty fuel by itself. On any given day, Green Plain’s ethanol is in the tanks of close to 10 to 20 million cars in the United States and Canada.

I started Green Plains to make the air we breathe cleaner and to decrease our reliance on imported oil.

I mention this simply to point out that I KNOW WHAT IT TAKES TO MAKE A PRODUCT AT SCALE. My mind has always been able to see such things. I know what cost curves look like and what makes things profitable or not. And I know how executive compensation committees think and work.

The leaders of Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé know that plastic pollution is killing everything in our rivers and oceans and that it has entered our bodies, polluting everyone of us, yet still they DO NOTHING TO STOP IT. THEY ARE CHOOSING TO CONTINUE TO POLLUTE OUR ENVIRONMENT AND BODIES! It is a conscious decision.

What kind of people do this? Evil, Arrogant, Short-sighted Uncaring Ones is the Only Answer Any Thinking Person Could Arrive At.

They do not care at all about you or your children. The math works for them as long as the external cost — the ocean, the groundwater, the testicles of the next generation — is paid by someone else. So the external cost to them has to come home. The SOLUTION!

One Year.

— or —

Twenty-Five.

These are the types of things I would do if you would give me the power to do them. If you would support me and I were to be elected President, I would get on TV and explain to the Nation what they are doing and have been doing for years. I would instruct Congress to pass a bill giving the CEOs and Boards of Directors of Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, and every other corporation selling more than a hundred million units of single-serve plastic food or beverage packaging per year in the United States a One-Year Window.

Within that window, they must present and begin executing a credible phase-out plan — glass, aluminum, refill infrastructure, bulk dispensing, compostable materials, any combination that works.

If they do not, the officers and directors who signed off on continued production would face criminal and personal liability. Non-dischargeable. Prison exposure measured in decades.

This is not radical. It is already the law.

It is a direct application of the Responsible Corporate Officer doctrine, which American courts have used since United States v. Park in 1975 to hold executives personally criminally liable for their companies’ violations of public welfare statutes — the Clean Water Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act.

Executives already go to prison for willfully contaminating a single river. There is no principled reason the CEOs and the Boards of the three largest plastic polluters on the planet should not face the same exposure for willfully contaminating Every River.

WHAT THEY HAVE DONE IS A CRIME AGAINST

ALL OF HUMANITY

AND IT SHOULD BE SEEN FOR WHAT IT IS!

The reason they continue to do it is NOT because it is legal. It’s because our Political Leaders do Nothing to Stop Them. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé spend generational fortunes on political donations, lobbying, and philanthropy-washing designed to ensure no meaningful statute ever reaches a floor vote. Both parties take their money. Both parties protect them. Meaning YOUR ELECTED LEADERS IN CONGRESS ALLOW THEM TO CONTINUE TO POISON YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN. The vast majority of our elected leaders are real live PIECES OF SHIT. I think the Republicans are worse than the Democrats, but not by much.

Which brings me to the midterms…

What is it going to take to get Americans as angry as the citizens of Hungary? Our bodies and our children’s bodies are filled with plastic! You would think that would be enough. However, I talked about this for close to five years, running a company called Focus Energy Drinks that refused to use single-use plastic. We used home compostable packaging made by a company in Israel called TIPA. With the Colorado drying up and with ZERO snowpack in the Rockies, all caused by Climate Change, perhaps they will listen now.

Many Americans appear to think that spending their time in places like Substack, Instagram, TikTok and X, writing new pieces every day or making more videos, loudly complaining about our problems is going to change something, when the reality is that nothing is going to change until Americans learn to organize and work together towards the same goal. We need to get new people in Washington. That is what we need to do and that is going to take every person on the social media sites going out and finding the ones who will get us out of this mess and then knocking on doors for them to make sure they win. Or run for office themselves. And at this point, the time to do that for the midterms is over. The filing deadlines have passed.

And I am also not saying that what is happening on social media is not important. It is vitally important to help people become more informed about how corrupt our current system is. I am posting this on Substack and every where else I can. But for people to see it, I NEED YOUR HELP. Posting such things is important, but bitching about things alone isn’t going to change anything unless we get different people in Congress and then scare the ones currently in Congress so badly that they actually vote differently. And I mean scare the shit out of them.

People CANNOT VOTE for whoever the DNC or the RNC tells us to elect. If you vote for their vetted candidates, you can be sure that not a goddamned thing is going to change.

Both parties are captured. By pharmaceutical money. By defense contractor money. By the Big Five Banks. By private equity money. By the packaged-goods giants. By the extraction industries. By the AIPAC money protecting a government conducting what human rights organizations — including B’Tselem, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch — have called Genocide in Gaza and Lebanon.

Anybody who is enthusiastically endorsed by either Party has already been vetted for willingness to do nothing that threatens those revenue streams. That is the job description. It has been the job description for twenty-five plus years.

The only thing the established order fears is an Electorate that stops accepting the menu it is handed.

Find out who is running in your district, who is NOT in that class — people like Zohran Mamdani in New York, James Talarico in Texas. There are others. Talk to them to find out what they stand for and who they are. When you find the right one, help them. Be willing to tell other people about for them and work to get them elected. And that includes being willing to send them whatever money you can to fun their campaigns. Getting new people in Washington is the MOST important thing we can do.

Would You Support Me If I Ran For the Presidency?

I am so frustrated with what is happening that I am considering running for the Presidency myself. I ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012, here in Nevada where I discovered that Harry Reid was paying the ex-husband of Krystal Ball, who I had hired to run my campaign, to sabotage my campaign. That experience showed me even more how corrupt the entire process is.

When I look at the people currently jockeying for positions for a Presidential run, deep down I think I should run, because I don’t believe any of these people. I think most are LIARS that will SAY ANYTHING TO GET ELECTED. Most have been politicians for years and lying is just what you do as a politician. And I DO NOT trust their morality (if they have any) or their worldview. Most of them have never created anything BIG in their lives, so they don’t really understand how things work.

I voted for Bernie twice, and he didn’t win because Americans were not ready to hear what he was saying. They wanted to believe the lies that the leaders in their own parties had been feeding them for years. I am and want almost exactly what Bernie Sanders has always wanted. You can listen to me saying the same things in 2012 here. Just scroll down to the line that says When Barry Ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012.

https://www.youtube.com/@anamericathatworksforeveryone

I wrote a book about the housing situation in 2024 called Wall Street’s War On America and Its Attack on Affordable Housing. It was the Number 1 book in both Private Equity and Venture Capital for the first three weeks is was out and then one day it was as if it hit a brick wall and just quit selling. I assume that someone on Wall Street read it and called someone at Amazon and told them to shadow-ban it. You can read it here: https://a.co/d/0gudCKPJ

I CANNOT BE BOUGHT. I don’t care if people offered me billions of dollars. I can see what the world could be like if we were to use AI as an assistant to help us create a better life for everyone rather than use it to enrich a few who want to make everyone else their slaves — their subordinates as in the Hunger Games. Everyone could live enjoyable, happy lives if we would simply learn to work together for the benefit of everyone.

I understand the financial side of this mess as well as anyone in the WORLD because I have been involved in it for most of my life. I became a stockbroker in the 1980s, in Utah when Utah was known as “The Penny Stock Capital of the World.” I learned from some of the best stock minds on the planet, by observing how the stock promoters in Utah manipulated stocks when I was a young man and the Intermountain Exchange was still in existence. That’s why it drives me crazy when I watch Trump doing what he has with his Meme coins and Truth Social when he merged it into a SPAC that trades under DJT. I can’t help but see it, because I KNOW WHAT I AM LOOKING AT. He is a lying, common thief who has stolen billions of dollars from the people who voted for him and put him in office.

Because I know what I do about the financial markets, Wall Street cannot pull the wool over my eyes. And the most important thing for me is: I trust my own morality to actually do everything I have been writing about for years. I will not lie to you to make myself wealthy. That is not why I would run.

But I cannot do it alone, and I will not do it on a hunch. Whether I actually run will depend on how many of you, after reading this, tell me you will support me and if you do, by the number of people you share it with. If you want me in this fight, SAY SO.

And then I would need your financial support because it would take tens of millions to let people know who I am. Is it possible? Yes, with your help!

What I would do!

Single-payer healthcare. Not in five years. Now.

A tax code where billionaires pay a higher effective rate than their secretaries — with no loopholes which is the reason they do not pay any now.

Blackstone and friends would be forced to sell ALL OF THE HOMES they have bought up as financial instruments, and the student housing they have weaponized against the next generation.

A public tuition-low-cost four-year higher education system, including skilled trades, beginning NOW.

Reinstate Lina Khan at the FTC and break up the monopolies that have strangled the American middle class for a generation.

This is not radical. It is Eisenhower Republicanism with a pulse.

Read these 15 Common Sense Reforms that I wrote about:

https://substack.com/@barrye54/p-181018665

If you agree with what I want to do, tell me you would support me.

None of this happens without your help!

None of this happens unless ordinary people decide — the way Americans decided about Vietnam, the way they decided about civil rights, the way Hungary just decided about Orbán. They all showed up to vote and got rid of him. They decide that this is no longer tolerable.

When Is Enough Really Enough?

The oceans are dying. The snowpack is gone. The droughts are not going to cease. They are going to continue to get worse, with perhaps breakups for an extremely wet year. A million acre feet of water is being released from Flaming Gorge Dam as I am writing this because the Colorado River is drying up. That’s 1/3 of the water in Flaming Gorge. It will be good for only ONE YEAR. The Great Salt Lake has dried into toxic dust. The sharks and other fish life are disappearing. 60% of ALL honey bee colonies in the U.S. died last year.

There are plastic particles in the testicles of every man reading this

and in the bodies of every woman. Have you had ENOUGH yet?

The C Suites and Boards of Directors of Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Nestlé, are protected by the elected officials whose campaigns they fund, and are continuing to make the decisions that caused it — because it is profitable for them to continue and costly for them to stop. The playing field HAS TO BE CHANGED.

One year.

Or

Twenty-five.

If You Want Me To Run For President

TELL ME

I said at the end of this essay that I will run for the Presidency if enough people say they would support me and help me. Whether I enter this race depends on whether enough of you read this and say, clearly, that you want me in it. And that will depend on how many people who read this, share it and contact me.

If you want me to run, send me the following to contact@slfla.org:

1. Your name

2. Your city and state

3. Your ZIP code

4. Yes or no: Would you volunteer, donate, or knock on doors?

I will not share your email or your information with anyone. If enough of you write, I will tell you — here, in this same place — what I decide to do next.

Write to:

contact@slfla.org

barrye54.substack.com

© 2026 Barry Ellsworth

Las Vegas has always been a city built on the illusion of infinite natural resources in a place that has few to none. But the latest gamble happening in the Mojave isn’t taking place on green-felt craps tables. It’s happening in the “Apex” industrial parks and the windowless monoliths rising from the dust.

The tech industry, fueled by a Wall Street engine that has become untethered from biological reality, is currently proposing a data center expansion in Southern Nevada that would require “THREE TIMES” the electricity currently used to power the entire city of Las Vegas. Read that again and let it sink in for a minute. THREE TIMES!

They call it “progress.” We should call it what it actually is: A twisted, ridiculously absurd form of economic necrophilia.

And for those of you going WTF is necrophilia, let me explain. The most common definition of necrophilia is the desire or compulsion to have sex with a dead corpse. And surprisingly it is something that has been written about for millennia, just not something commonly discussed at the dinner table. In ancient Egypt, the bodies of beautiful women were not sent to embalmers until their bodies had begun to decay, to prevent workers from engaging in “unnatural acts” with their dead bodies. In the Middle Ages it was lumped in with “bestiality” or “sacrilege” in the legal codes. Joseph Guislain, (1850) a Belgian physician was the first to use the term “necrophilia” in a clinical context. Later (1886) Richard von Draft-Ebin in his seminal work Psychopathia Sexualis formally categorized it as a sever mental aberration.

I am using it to mean “People who love dead things more than living.” People like so many on Wall Street who think that making more money every quarter and buying their fifth house in the Hamptons is more important than paying their employees enough to pay the rent and buy groceries for their children. For many on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, making more money at the expense of others is a kin to showing others how tough and ruthless you can be. That you are a true winner - if you can do that without blinking an eye. Fuck those poor peasants. Making money for my shareholders is far more important than taking care of the people helping me make the money I am making. A true Hungar Games type of scenario.

The Desert’s Breaking Point

The names involved are the usual titans: Switch, Google, Microsoft, Novva, and Vantage. Both Meta and Microsoft already have centers in Northern Nevada. These and others are racing to plant flags in the Nevada soil to house the rows of buzzing H100 GPUs required for the Artificial Intelligence boom.

The math of this expansion is, quite frankly, insane. As global temperatures tick upward and Lake Mead’s “bathtub ring” grows ever wider and higher, these companies are asking for: A Power Surge!

NV Energy is facing a demand spike that could force the state to abandon renewable goals and lean back into fossil fuels just to keep the servers cool.

Water in the Wasteland: Even with “water-free” cooling claims, the infrastructure required to support these hubs places an unsustainable burden on a fragile ecosystem.

The “Tech Bro” Whisperers in D.C.

The most dangerous part of this isn’t just the construction — it’s the narrative. The “tech bros” have successfully convinced the fools in Washington that AI is a national security imperative, a “space race” that justifies any cost.

By framing AI as an inevitable evolution, they’ve secured a blank check from the federal government. But this isn’t an evolution; it’s an extraction. They are selling the American public on a technology that generates “synthetic intelligence” at the cost of the very biological life required to sustain the people using it.

Wall Street’s Necrophilic Logic

Why would they do this? Why build a machine that kills the planet to power the machine?

The answer lies in the mental instability of modern Wall Street and the leaders of our so called High Tech Companies. We are living under a regime that loves “dead things” — spreadsheets, quarterly growth charts, derivative assets — more than living ones.

This is the logic of the “Asset Class.” Just as they turned the American home from a place of shelter into a financial instrument to be traded and hollowed out, they are now turning the climate itself into an “externality” on a balance sheet. They are chasing “ever better” financial quarters by liquidating the habitability of the planet. And they have no fucking idea how insane everything they are doing is.

They are creating an EXTRACTION ECONOMY. When you value a digital “token” or a generative model more than the water in the ground or the stability of the atmosphere, you are practicing a form of necrophilia. You are in love with the static, dead representation of value, and you are willing to kill the living world to see that number go up.

The Empty Data Centers of Tomorrow

If we continue down this path of blind greed, we know where it ends. We will have the most sophisticated AI on earth, capable of writing poetry about the stars, while the billions of human beings it was supposed to serve, struggle for water and breath.

Lake Mead is hitting more record lows every day, and just last week it was reported that the snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, which feeds Lake Mead, reached a historic low for this time of year. ZERO! The winter was so warm and there was so little snowfall that the majority of the Rocky Mountains has ZERO snowpack, when historically the end of March has been the time of the highest snowpack. It does not take a genius to figure out how this is going to end.

Eventually, those data centers in Las Vegas will stand as silent, windowless tombs in a desert too hot for human life. They will be as empty as the greed-powered ideas that built them.

It is time to stop listening to the “Visionaries” who cannot see past the next fiscal quarter. It is time to demand a system that prioritizes the living over the dead.

A community well-being centered system which stops the extraction of wealth from a local community.

FUCK THE TECH BROS, FUCK THE DATA CENTERS, FUCK EXTRACTION ECONOMIES, FUCK BITCOIN AND ANY OTHER TYPE OF MONETARY SYSTEM THAT USES MORE ENERGY TO MAINTAIN THAN A LARGE CITY, AND FUCK THE PEOPLE WHO ARE BUILDING THEM.

Together, we can build communities and pass legislation that keeps the wealth within each of our local communities as Scotland recently did, and thereby create:

A World that Works for Everyone!

When a trucking empire fails — a company that was one of the largest carriers for the U.S. Postal Service — ask yourself who benefits!

I know something about building a business from scratch with other people’s money and trust. Several years ago, I raised roughly $100 million in equity primarily from Midwestern farmers, and then CoBank loaned me another $100 million plus to construct the first two ethanol plants I built when I started Green Plains Renewable Energy (now Green Plains Inc - GPRE on NASDAQ). Green Plains grew to be one of the largest ethanol producers in the World. The ethanol it makes is in 10 to 20 million cars in the U.S. and Canada on any given day. The farmers I raised the money from were not Wall Street. They were people who worked the land, kept their word, and bet on someone who promised to do the same.

My single largest investor was a man named Wayne Hoovestol, who had built a very large company of his own prior to investing in my company. His father started running mail for the United States Postal Service in the early 1950s — a single truck, one route, North Dakota. That grew into three routes, and Wayne took over his father’s business around 1978. Over the next five decades, Wayne changed the company’s name to 10 Roads Express and grew it into approximately: 36 terminals, 4,500 tractors, 5,000 trailers, 5,000 drivers, and one of the largest USPS surface transportation contractors in the country. Honest work. Good paying, working-class jobs. The kind of operation that doesn’t make the business press until it disappears.

On January 30, 2026, it disappeared.

The stated reason? The USPS, which accounted for close to 70% of 10 Roads’ revenue, had been systematically pulling its contracts, shifting work to brokers and insourcing transportation over the prior two years. The result was a 70% revenue loss. The company gave its notice, shut the doors, and put over 2,000 people out of work — the largest trucking collapse since Yellow Freight went under in 2023.

I want to ask a question I haven’t seen anyone else asking, and if they have, it needs to be asked much more LOUDLY:

Who benefits from a hollowed-out postal service — and when?

Let me tell you what I know about the documented record, and then I’ll tell you what I think.

In 2020, newly appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy — a Republican megadonor with no postal experience — dismantled hundreds of mail sorting machines within weeks of taking office, eliminated overtime, and ordered carriers to leave mail behind to keep to schedule. Mail delays surged. A federal judge described his actions as what appeared to be “an intentional effort on the part of the current administration to disrupt and challenge the legitimacy of upcoming local, state and federal elections.”

DeJoy paused some changes under congressional pressure. But here’s the detail that doesn’t get enough attention: the destroyed sorting machines were never fully restored. The capacity was never rebuilt.

Then came the network “modernization” — consolidating hundreds of local processing facilities into 60 regional mega-centers, shifting mail processing across state lines, lengthening delivery times for rural America. Bipartisan members of Congress raised alarms that these changes would impact election mail. DeJoy paused some of those plans too — until after the 2024 election.

And then DOGE arrived. As of early 2025, Elon Musk’s efficiency task force was eyeing the USPS for a major overhaul — privatization, reduction to bare-bones mail-only service, or handing off what the post office “can’t handle” to private players. The agency reported a $9.5 billion loss in 2024. It has maxed out its $15 billion borrowing limit.

It has, by any honest accounting, been set up to fail.

This is the environment in which 10 Roads Express, my friend’s trucking company lost 70% of its USPS revenue and shut down 2,000 jobs.

Now let me tell you what I think!

The 2026 midterm elections are coming. This administration has more political exposure than any in modern history. Impeachment talk is not theoretical. The political math of a midterm loss is existential for what’s being built in Washington right now.

Mail-in ballots are a problem for anyone who wants to control an election outcome. They are paper. They are traceable. They go through a federal system that — until recently — was one of the most trusted institutions in America. Roughly a third of all votes cast in recent national elections have been cast by mail.

I’m not telling you the 10 Roads Express shutdown was ordered by the White House.

What I am telling you is this: If you wanted to degrade the postal infrastructure that delivers ballots — to create delays, capacity gaps, and administrative chaos and an EXCUSE that seems unrelated before an election — you would do almost exactly what has been done to the USPS over the past five years. You would pull sorting machine capacity. You would consolidate processing facilities and extend delivery windows. You would squeeze the contractors who move the mail. You would install loyalists at the top of the agency. You would let the finances bleed until privatization looks like the only option.

Every one of those things has happened. Some by design. Some perhaps by opportunism. Some perhaps by genuine and intentional mismanagement. But the pattern demands a question.

Wayne Hoovestol did NOT lose 70% of his revenue because of bad management. Wayne is one of the best business operators I have ever met. He is the one primarily responsible for the growth of Green Plains after I left the company because I did not want to be an absentee father to my children as my father was. My children were the reason I started the company in the first place — to ensure I had enough money to spend most of my time with them as they were growing up. And I did that. I was at every soccer practice they ever had, every game and every birthday party.

Wayne had to shut down 10 Roads because his primary customer — the United States government — rewrote the rules of the road under his feet. Two thousand working people lost their jobs. The mail infrastructure that 10 Roads was part of is now far thinner, slower, and more fragile than it was five years ago.

With a midterm election approaching, I want to know who is guarding the ballots?

I want to know who controls the trucks that move the mail?

I want to know what happens when there are not enough of them?

These are not crazy questions. They are the questions any builder would ask when he watches someone else’s infrastructure get systematically dismantled and wonders — for whose benefit?

Americans need to WAKE UP. And I don’t mean to wake up by having a few protests once a month. I mean really WTFU like the citizens in Minnesota woke up protesting every single day.

I have never been afraid to say what I see and I think Telling the Truth Matters. I also make mistakes like everyone, but I am not sure I know anyone who will admit his mistakes more quickly than I will once I see them. I voted for Donald Trump because I wanted Bobby Kennedy to fix our food and I was so angry at the Democratic Party for not having a primary (which I am sure Bernie Sanders could have won, whom I would have voted for in a heartbeat) and for taking the Green Party off the ballot in Nevada. I voted for Trump as a big Fuck You to the Democrats. I certainly regret doing that now.

However, I can see very clearly at this moment that:

Our postal system has been gutted with intention.

An election is coming up, and the power structure that has gutted it has a HUGE incentive to control the outcome of that election — including spending the rest of their lives in jail if they fail.

The war in Iran and the Epstein files are huge distractions - for all kinds of things.

But I think the most important one is something no one has been talking about. WHAT IS HAPPENING AT THE U.S. POST OFFICE!

And if you think it is something that is yet to happen, think again. I believe there should be recounts of every special election that has occurred this year where mail in ballots were part of the election. Elections in Tennessee, Georgia, and others.

Ask the questions. Demand the answers. And if you still vote by mail — track your ballot like your vote depends on it.

BECAUSE IT DOES!

I would also like to mention one thing and suggest two more.

The people doing this have been thinking about it for years. That’s where Project 2025 came from. They are now just carrying out their plan. They own most of the excess housing. They control our food and its transportation (See: Wall Street’s War On America and Its Attack On Affordable Housing - https://a.co/d/0fhkmKRQ) They have turned our young people and their parents as co-signers into indentured servants with high interest student loans. If you think any of this has happened by accident, think again. This is long-term planning.

If you agree with what you just read and think it is important - RESTACK THIS AND SHARE IT WITH EVERYONE YOU CAN BECAUSE THE FUCKING BILLIONAIRES AND AI WILL STOP ANYONE FROM SEEING THIS UNLESS YOU SHARE IT DIRECTLY.

Heed the wisdom of our Founding Fathers when they wrote the Amendments to the Constitution - and as I learned in the Boy Scouts – BE PREPARED!

INVEST IN OUR CHILDREN

Our Children are the country’s future.

The United States does not have a student loan problem.

We have a cost of education problem.

For decades, tuition has risen far beyond inflation while easy federal lending has allowed Universities to raise prices without restraint. Young Americans are now forced to borrow tens — sometimes hundreds — of thousands of dollars simply to obtain a college degree.

The system is unsustainable, unfair, and economically destructive. It has also been well thought out by Predatory Lenders and members of the United States Congress to enslave our children economically, many for the rest of their lives.

It is time to redesign the American higher education from the ground up.

The Solution: A National Community-Based Undergraduate Model

America already has a model that works:

Community colleges.

Community colleges provide:

• Affordable tuition

• Practical workforce education

• Local accountability

• Strong ties to employers

• Two-year associate degrees at a fraction of university costs

I am simply proposing expanding this proven model into a National, low-cost undergraduate system.

What This System Would Look Like

1. Public Undergraduate Colleges Modeled After Our Community Colleges

• Locally governed, publicly funded institutions

• Focused on teaching — not bloated administrative overhead

• Standardized, accredited bachelor’s degree programs and skilled trade programs

• Transparent cost controls

2. Tuition-Free or Near-Free Undergraduate Degrees

Like Finland, Norway, and Denmark, the United States can and should treat undergraduate education as a public investment — not a private luxury.

These nations provide:

• Tuition-free or heavily subsidized university education

• Strong workforce alignment

• High educational outcomes

• Low student debt burdens

America can do the same.

3. Cost Discipline and Accountability

The new model would:

• Cap administrative overhead

• Tie funding to performance and graduation outcomes

• Require transparent budgeting

• Eliminate unnecessary capital expansion arms races

4. Integration of Trades and Professional Pathways

This system would include:

• Electrical

• Plumbing

• Carpentry

• HVAC

• Advanced manufacturing

• Nursing

• Technology and engineering pathways

We elevate trades alongside academic degrees — because both are essential to national prosperity.

How We Fund It

We already spend hundreds of billions annually on:

• Federal student loans

• Loan servicing

• Defaults

• Interest subsidies

• Complex grant systems

Instead of funding debt, we fund education directly.

By redirecting federal loan expenditures into institutional operating support, we lower total system costs while eliminating student debt dependence.

Education becomes pay-as-you-go — not borrow-and-repay.

Why This Matters

Student debt:

• Is Mean, Uncaring, and Not What We Should Be Doing for Our Children

• Delays homeownership

• Suppresses family formation

• Reduces entrepreneurship

• Limits geographic mobility

• Creates financial anxiety for decades

When young Americans begin adulthood buried in debt, the entire economy slows. And this has happened only because predatory lenders have bribed our elected representatives state run regents into raising tuitions and fees and then allowing such predatory lenders to bury our children and their parents as co-signers in debt

If we want affordable housing, strong families, and upward mobility, fixing our educational financing system is one of the most important things we could do.

The Goal

No American student should have to borrow $50,000, $80,000, or $120,000 just to earn an undergraduate degree.

We can build a system where:

• Education is affordable.

• Taxpayer dollars are transparent.

• Schools focus on teaching.

• Students graduate without crushing debt.

• Trades and academic pathways are equally respected.

America built the interstate highway system.

We built the greatest research universities in the world.

We can build a higher education system that does not bankrupt our children simply to make Wall Street and other such predatory lenders money.

It’s time to stop financing debt.

It’s time to start financing education and investing in the futures of our children and our country.

I’ve been thinking about something lately. Look around you.

On any given day, Substack is simultaneously a support group, a classroom, a confessional, a soapbox, a marketplace, and a very long, very loud primal scream into the void.

Some people are looking for community. Others are trying to make a living. Some are trying to be helpful and educate others about things they know and care about deeply — things they’ve lived, studied, built, or watched collapse — because they can see connections that others can’t yet see. Others who don’t have the background. They don’t have the context. They haven’t been close enough to the fire to smell it.

And then there’s the venting.

Oh God, THE VENTING!!!

We’re angry. We’re afraid. We’re watching the democratic experiment in America — imperfect, maddening, and irreplaceable — being deliberately dismantled by a small group of extraordinarily wealthy men who decided that buying a president was a reasonable use of a Tuesday afternoon.

And we are watching Congress do almost nothing.

Which leads to the uncomfortable thought that many are dancing around but not quite saying out loud:

Most of our elected officials are part of this.

Not necessarily in a conspiratorial sense. But in the plainest, most mundane sense possible: they are not stopping it. They are not organized against it. They are holding press conferences and sending fundraising emails and appearing on cable news to express their very serious concern — and then going home.

And if you’re paying attention, that tells you something important.

Because the most charitable explanation — and it might also be the correct one — is that many of the people we’ve sent to Washington to represent us have spent the majority if not the entirety of their professional lives learning exactly one skill: How to run for office and win. Not how to govern. Not how to fight a constitutional crisis. Not how to outmaneuver billionaires who have been playing four-dimensional chess with democratic institutions for two decades while most of us were living our lives.

They don’t know what to do. Because they’ve never had to know.

They have never started and run a business. They have never built anything but a campaign. Their minds don’t see what needs to be done next.

They are hesitant to tell anyone what they are really thinking because they might be shunned by the powers that be.

And they really only know how to do one thing: Take the money and do what they are told. Besides, doing that has worked out pretty well for them.

They are given inside information on which they can trade and make millions of dollars for themselves and their families. All they have to do is play along.

The people they interact with most of the time are all doing really well, which makes it much easier to forget the “worker bees” who voted them into office.

But here’s the question that keeps going through my mind...

Is that all this is?

Or is something else happening?

Because I keep thinking about the tech oligarchs — the ones orbiting this administration, the ones who’ve decided that democracy is inefficient and that they, being very smart and very rich, should be the ones to fix it. These are people who understand platforms. Who understand attention. Who understand that the most effective way to neutralize opposition isn’t always to silence it.

Sometimes you just have to give it somewhere to go.

What if Substack — and Twitter, the podcasts on YouTube, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and all the rest of it — is partly functioning as a pressure release valve? What if the plan, conscious or not, is to give intelligent, engaged, frustrated people a place to be intelligent, engaged, and frustrated… so that their energy stops there?

Write the post. Get the likes. Feel heard. Close the laptop.

I’m not saying that’s the intent behind every platform. I’m asking whether it’s the effect. And I’m asking whether we should be more honest with ourselves about the difference between processing our anger and converting it into something that actually changes anything.

Because the anger is legitimate. The fear is legitimate. The analysis — on this platform and others — is often genuinely brilliant. People are connecting dots that mainstream media won’t touch. People are teaching each other, in real time, how power actually works.

And then… what?

Here’s the provocation I want to leave you with.

What if we used this platform differently?

Not just to document what’s broken. Not just to be right about things in public. But to build something — together, systematically, across newsletters and comment sections and communities — that actually produces a roadmap.

A step-by-step, concrete, unsexy, shareable, arguable, refinable plan for how citizens — not saviors, not billionaires — restore functional democratic governance.

Not a manifesto. A process.

What would it look like if the smartest, (and the not so smartest — you never know who is going to come up with the best idea and there are all different kinds of smart) the most informed, the most connected people on Substack stopped writing in parallel monologues and started writing in genuine dialogue? Or at least started asking questions? If the goal wasn’t to grow your subscriber count but to solve a specific, defined set of problems? If every piece ended not with “share this” but with “here’s what we’re doing next, and here’s how you plug in”?

I don’t know if Substack can be that. I don’t know if we have the discipline for it, or the humility, or the patience.

But I know this: If all we ever do here is get better at describing the problem, then yes — we are wasting our time. And someone, somewhere, is counting on exactly that.

So… what are we all doing here?

And more importantly — what are we going to do about it?

Leave a comment. Not just your reaction — but your ideas too. And if you don’t have one now, think about it. One concrete thing. Let’s see what we’re actually capable of when we try.

What kind of world do we want to create? What do we want it to look like? And what are the steps we can take together to build it?

Here are some things I would like in it and I’d love to hear your ideas.

How Wall Street Bankers, the U.S. Congress, and a Few Oligarchs Have Turned America Into a Country of Indentured Slaves

There is a historical parallel that few Americans understand, but one we should all be concerned about. The United States has become what Germany was after World War I — A DEBT COLONY — systematically exploited by New York bankers that profit from perpetual indebtedness.

The Versailles Precedent: When Debt Becomes Bondage

After WW I, the Versailles Commission was established to draw up the Treaty of Versailles. In that document, the world blamed Germany for the war and imposed crushing reparation payments on the country. J.P. Morgan Jr. had put together a consortium of circa 2200 banks and loaned the governments of France and Germany roughly $500 Million to fight the war and an additional $12 Million to Russia. Debt that in today’s dollars would be in the hundreds of billions. The treaty wasn’t designed to be just remunerative. It was designed to punish. It was set up to put the German people into state of perpetual debt indefinitely, while making J.P. Morgan Jr. and his banker friends even richer than the already were. This is how most bankers on Wall Street think. Their only motivation in life is TO MAKE MORE MONEY!

The Treaty, as was the war, was brutal beyond measure. It extracted almost everything the German people produced and required them to take on more debt to pay back the money spent to fight the war. Morgan Guaranty Trust managed the payments, and for nearly two decades, the German population lived like rats in a cage, working endlessly to pay off debts forced on them for a war started by the Ruling Elite, while New York bankers grew filthy rich on the interest. The anger and resentment this created didn’t just simmer — it boiled for years in the collective psyche of the German people and then EXPLODED. This systematic financial oppression was a major factor in the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party.

Additionally, for anyone who has ever wondered where the deep hatred for the Jews came from that Hitler and the German people had, this was big part of it. Many prominent bankers that were part of the coalition of banks formed by Morgan Jr. were Jewish — men with last names like Solomon, Lehman, Kuhn, Loeb, and others. This ate away at Hitler for years as it did Henry Ford, who hated Jewish bankers and the high rates of interest they charged. Hitler was keenly aware of how many German people felt about Jews. He used this dislike to his advantage by telling people it was the Jewish bankers who were causing the pain they were experiencing by extracting the resources of the German people. He used it as a focal point for German rage. Hitler amplified this rage in his propaganda to make Germans see the Arian Race as a race of people Above All — Uber Alles — as the Jewish bible implies the Jewish people are chosen and favored by God and above other people. This certainly doesn’t justify the Holocaust’s unspeakable evil. It does, however, help explain how financial exploitation and GREED can fuel genocidal hatred and where the hatred for the Jews came from that was so prevalent in German society. Nor does it imply that Jewish people should be hated. Jews were not the problem that created the horrible living conditions the German people were living in. GREED was the cause of the problem. A lack of concern for your neighbor created the problem. And anyone can be greedy. That’s why every religion in the world defines GREED as SIN!

World War II taught some leaders in America (most importanly George Marshall — the man who was the Commander in Chief of the United States Armed Forces during the War) a huge lesson — the one that created the Marshall Plan, which did the exact opposite of the Treaty of Versailles. The Marshall Plan was devised so America could rebuild Germany and Japan and by doing so, turn former enemies into allies and trading partners. Its designers understood that prosperity, not punishment, creates real, long-term stability.

Yet, while Marshall learned one thing, Wall Street learned something entirely different. Wall Street isn’t in the caring about other people and building a better society business. As I said above, Wall Street cares about one thing and one thing only — making more money. And most people have NO IDEA how truly sick and fucked up many on Wall Street are. They are like Putin and Xi and Trump. Out of their fucking minds with GREED. They are completely addicted to wanting more of everything YOU HAVE. Many of the people running the big Wall Street firms suffer from a twisted, perverse form of Necrophilia — which in its most explicit form is a compulsive fantasy of having sex with a dead corpse. In this case, I am referring to it as — a love of dead objects over living, sentient beings. Many people on Wall Street are afflicted with this type of mental derangement and have no idea they are as mentally and emotionally divergent from the rest of the world as they are. They are also horribly addicted gamblers. Every perverse leader in the world suffers from the same type of mental derangement. Putin, Xi, Trump, Hitler, etc. The are addicted to Power and Money and they DO NOT care about people, and they will kill millions of them to get and keep wealth and power.

After the War, Wall Street, due to their Necrophilia, learned how profitable war can be on so many different fronts. They learned that billions in interest can be made by providing DEBT to buy arms and supplies to fight wars — and with the Marshall plan, there would be even more debt to pay for the rebuilding after the war.

How Wall Street Has Colonized America

Over the past 25 years, Wall Street has done to America what the Versailles Treaty did to Germany. The country has been systematically and intentionally turned into a DEBT COLONY, with the American working class bearing the financial burdens while elite financiers extract trillions in wealth.

The Modern Timeline of Wall Street’s Financial Conquest of America

1. 1999 - Sandy Weill Breaks Glass Steagall after merging Travelers Group with Citibank, which violated Glass Steagall. If FDR would have still been alive he would have told him, back out of the merger or go to jail. But we had Clinton as President.

Sandy Weill knew Clinton was “buyable” so he had two bills written that became known as Gramm Leach Bliley and the Commodities Futures Modernization Act and hired Gerald Ford and Robert Rubin to bribe Clinton and both sides of the Isle in the U.S. Congress to pass the bills. He enlisted Ford (a Republican) and Rubin (a Democrat) by putting them on the Board of Citibank/Travelers after merging the companies and paying them obscene sums as Board Members. Their jobs were to buy and corrupt the majority of the elected leaders in the U.S. Government to get the legislation passed.

The revised Glass Steagall Act was an Act put in place by FDR after the 1929 Crash to stop Wall Street from ever doing what they had done in the Roaring Twenties which caused the Crash and the Great Depression. And it had worked for 70 years. Clinton and the U.S. Congress destroyed those protections by enacting these two bills. And anyone who tells you they didn’t know what would happen, your answer to them should be BS. Here is Senator Byron Dorgan on the floor of the Senate explaining exactly what was going to happen. And it did just as he said it would. https://bit.ly/3MT1EoN

2. The Second Bush’s Tax Cuts and the Wars. The following year, George Bush Jr. cut taxes for the wealthy, which slashed revenues to the U.S. Treasury by hundreds of billions of dollars annually - TRILLIONS over time. At the same time, wars throughout the middle east were launched that cost the American taxpayer TRILLIONS more. The tax cuts gave hundreds of billions of dollars to the Uber Wealthy each year, and caused the U.S. deficit to explode. The Uber Wealthy paid (and still do) far less in taxes than working class Americans, while refugees from the wars flooded into Europe which led to the destabilization and weakening of both their economies and societies. The weakening of their societies was part of the plan of the Uber Wealthy.

3. The Housing Boom. The boom of the early 2000s came about from Manipulating the Housing Market just as the Stock Market had been Manipulated in the Roaring Twenties. The Housing Boom led to the Housing Crisis. (See: Wall Street’s War on America https://a.co/d/0dK7bjNw). The crisis was engineered by the largest banks on Wall Street through predatory lending. We are all now familiar with the infamous LIARS LOANS and other fraudulent securities that Wall Street was selling in many shapes and sizes. MBS (mortgage backed securities) that were compromised of absolute shit, rated AAA by both Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s because they had been bribed to do so by Wall Street Banks. Credit Default Swaps sold as insurance policies by the trillions to make people think they were safe and that they were hedging their bets and investments. Fuck if you were 18, could breathe and had a pulse, you could borrow as much as you wanted with NO income verification. You could buy one house to live in and 50 more to rent and many people did.

When everything blew up, it nearly destroyed the economies of the world because so many of the Credit Default Swaps and other securitized debt instruments that were complete garbage had been sold. They took people’s GOOD MONEY in exchange for the trash Wall Street was selling everyone. You can’t get more fraudulent than that. But because there was NO REGULATION whatsoever after the two bills referred to above had been passed, there was NO over sight on the amounts being sold, therefore NONE of the banks selling them had the reserves to pay the claims and losses that were incurred, so everything collapsed. All of this was done to allow Wall Street to steal everyone else’s money, just as they did in the Roaring Twenties, and no one was held accountable.

4. The Housing Crisis Created Trillions More in Debt for the American Taxpayer. The bankers who created the housing crisis should have spent at the very least 2-5 years in prison and been permanently banned from working in finance ever again. But that isn’t what happened. Our President and Congress had all been bought off by that time and were part of the plan to enslave Americans with DEBT. So, what did Obama do? He gave Wall Street TRILLIONS in bailouts, using working class Americans taxes to bail them out, leaving Main Street Americans hung out to dry. Main Street Americans that were committing suicide at the rate of about four a day here in Las Vegas during the end of 2008 into the early part of 2009. He then allowed the executives on Wall Street to pay themselves hundreds of millions (tens of billions in total) in salary and bonuses the very same year, with taxpayer dollars and they were given Cabinet Positions in Obama’s administration. Does anyone really think this happened by accident? FUCK NO IT DIDN’T.

Wake Up America. Obama was the editor of the Law Review at Harvard Law School. This lying POS knew exactly what he was doing when he made those agreements. He is a brilliant man. This was all planned out behind closed doors and the Obamas were promised what they were with book deals and drink deals with hedge funds after they left office just as Bill Clinton was promised huge sums for doing what he did. Breaking Glass Steagall. Then they asked Bush to do the tax cuts and start the wars and gave him huge amounts of money for doing so. And I am not saying he didn’t fool me. I voted for him twice and maxed out on my contributions to him because I believed he would actually fix things as he said he would.

And Wall Street is doing the same thing again as I am writing this, but they are now doing it inside of people’s 401Ks by selling them more garbage that they call “Private Credit.” They even have people like Tony Robbins selling it for them telling people how much better private investments are offered by Private Equity than anything in the stock market. And all of this Private Credit it’s on the verge of blowing up again. Just this week there was a run on a Black Rock fund of $28 Billion. And CNBC had one of the heads of Moody’s on TV saying that everything was just fine. The same thing they had been paid to say in 2006 during the housing crisis when they were rating the garbage Wall Street was selling as AAA paper, when it was C- Junk.

There is a stage play being acted out in Washington. THEY (the men and money behind the bigger scheme) have the Democrats do certain things and the Republicans do others, so they appear to be different, to give people HOPE, when in reality there is none. It’s ALL AN ACT. The Republicans do what they do and the Dems act like they are fighting for their constituents and when nothing changes, they both blame the other side and Americans believe their BS which is why they (the voters) keep voting for the same people over and over. There is only ONE PARTY IN WASHINGTON. The Party of the Wealthy fucking the working class.

6. Trump’s First Tax Cuts added hundreds of billions more to the annual deficit. A deficit that is charged interest by the big Wall Street Banks that own and manage the Federal Reserve and that deficit is paid for by the Working Class Americans. And the big Wall Street Banks make money off of every dime of debt created as dividends on their stock ownership in the FED.

7. The Pandemic. There is a tremendous amount of evidence to support the idea that the Pandemic was planned by a certain faction of the Uber Wealthy. The virus was developed and paid for by U.S. Tax Dollars in a lab in Wuhan, China and then it was let out into the world. The U.S. Government’s Pandemic response was basically to force everyone to get vaccinated with vaccines that didn’t work. That was proven by Biden saying he had just been vaccinated on TV and two weeks later he came down with the virus. And he was probably never vaccinated with anything but water because he knew how the vaccines were damaging people. Both Trump and Biden encouraged Americans to get vaccinated. Those vaccinations were paid for by the U.S. Treasury (the American Taxpayer) and given to the big pharmaceutical companies, who in turn paid Congress with massive contributions. The Federal Reserve then digitally created and printed trillions more dollars of DEBT and flooded the country with it, as Pandemic Relief. This added trillions more to the national debt increasing the deficits, while corporations bought back stock, and gave themselves more bonuses. At the same time, millions of small businesses were forced to shut down and driven out of business, while the ESSENTIAL BUSINESSES like Amazon, Target, Walmart, Kroger’s Albertsons, companies that were for all intents and purposes monopolies already, made massive amounts of profits, enriched shareholders and their Boards, while our own government destroyed most of their competition. THE FED THEN NEARLY TRIPLED INTEREST RATES SO AMERICANS ARE NOW PAYING OVER A TILLION DOLLARS A YEAR IN INTEREST ALONE.

8. Trump’s Tax Cuts in his Big Beautiful Bill have added hundreds of billions of dollars this year alone to the debt, (possibly over a trillion) once again benefiting the wealthiest Americans and corporations, while giving the Big Banks that own the Federal Reserve monstrous profits, leaving the working class with what is at the time of this writing - $38.66 Trillion in Debt. And his tariffs are destroying untold numbers of additional small businesses along with thousands of American farmers, while alienating each and everyone of our long-term trading partners and allies.

IF YOU HAVE READ THIS, YOU CAN NOW CLEARLY SEE WHAT IS BEING DONE TO AMERICA! IF YOU HAVE READ THIS, YOU CAN’T HELP BUT SEE IT - WHICH IS WHY I AM ASKING YOU SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILIES DIRECTLY VIA EMAILS AND TEXTS BECAUSE THESE PLATFORMS WON’T LET PEOPLE SEE THIS. THEY ARE OWNED BY THE BILLIONARIES TRYING TO OVERTHROW THE GOVERNMENT AND WEAKEN THE ECONOMY. POOR PEOPLE HAVE A HARD TIME FIGHTING BACK.

We are approaching $39 trillion in national debt. As a country we are now paying more in interest as taxpayers than our nation’s yearly budget. Who pays for this? The American working class, through reduced services, stagnant wages, and a degraded quality of life. And we could make it all just disappear if we would quit playing Wall Street’s ridiculous game as if it is the only way to live. IT ISN’T! But it is going to take the majority of Americans to join together to change it.

9. The Student Debt Trap. In a sane and functional society, run for the benefit of the majority of its citizens, as Norway and Finland are, we would have a higher education system that was very low cost and operated as a highly efficient government run program to benefit the citizens of America. It could easily be run as efficiently as the U.S. Armed Forces. It would be paid for by the pooled resources of our citizens like our Community Colleges are paid for now, because we all understand the importance of having a highly educated society that can tell when they are being conned by people like the ones on Wall Street and in the halls of the U.S. Government now. A system that would educated our children about business and entreprenuership so they would understand the capitalistic system we live in and how to navigate it. Wall Street and Congress have burdened our children with over $1.8 trillion in student loan debt — long-term, compounding obligations with interest rates sometimes reaching as high as 20%. This is USURY, plain and simple. When I was growing up, people went to jail for charging these kinds of rates.

Again I ask, why do we accept this? It is because we are so divided. For many, it’s because they have been taught things by the monied interests on Wall Street that tell them that America has the best of everything, when the opposite is true. It would benefit the entire country if we had a highly educated populace. Countries like Norway and Finland provide free higher education. They understand that investing in young people is the most important thing they can do as a society. Many Americans on the other hand have been so completely indoctrinated by Wall Street’s poisonous propaganda that we have allowed them and the members of the U.S. Congress to turn higher education into a profit center for banks and they have been able to turn an entire generation into indentured slaves when they are just starting out in life.

Going to College is Not a Waste of Time. Going to college is how a person gets an education. I have heard many people on the Internet say this and have recently heard a few younger people I am close to say they could get a college education for the cost of a library card and a few late fees because they could just read the books themselves. Sounds great on the Internet, but in the real world 99% of teenagers will never read the books if they aren’t going to college and reading them as a requirement for a class. Therefore, the statement is untrue. But it is being put out there on purpose to create separate classes, by making lower classes (the work force that live in “workforce housing”) less educated so they can be fucked over by the Uber Wealthy. We have also allowed some idiots on the Internet which are really Wall Street’s minions to tell kids that going to college is a waste of time and money. Having said that, at today’s costs, going to college to get a degree in something like women’s studies or philosophy is NUTS because a person will come out of the experience with a huge amount of debt and no way to find a job in the field they have chosen. The solution is to fix the system. — SO LET’S FIX IT TOGETHER!

The Federal Reserve: A Private Banking Cartel

Here is another big part of the problem that most Americans don’t understand: the Federal Reserve is not part of the U.S. Treasury. It is a privately operated banking system that creates money out of thin air as debt both digitally and as printed paper money and then charges American citizens interest to use it. Additionally, every dollar created and used as debt becomes an obligation that American taxpayers must service with interest payments.

The Fed is owned and operated for the benefit of Wall Street and the big banks that own the FED, not the American people. The banks that own the FED profit from every dime of debt issued because they are shareholders in the FED and are paid MANDATORY DIVIDENDS ON THE SHARES THEY OWN IN THE FEDERAL RESERVE. It’s the perfect scam: Create money from nothing, charge interest on it, and let working Americans pay the bill.

The Subtle and Hidden Return to Feudalism

The King and His Court Once Again Own Everything - But Most Americans Aren’t Paying Attention and Don’t Understand the Financial System Well Enough to See What Is Right in Front of Them

Credit card companies now charge up to 30% interest. The Department of Education and other private Wall Street Lenders charge interest rates as high as 20% on student loans, starting out at 6+% acting like this is low when student loan rates used to be lower than 3%. This would have been criminal USURY when I was young. We had USURY laws that protected people from predatory lending. Those protections have been systematically dismantled over the past 25 - 50 years. 30% interest rates have become normalized. I think people like Jamie Dimon who runs J.P. Morgan Chase and the heads of the other large banks and credit card companies who charge such rates should be in jail and the members of our own Congress should be voted out for passing the laws to allow this to happen.

This country thinks Dimon is the best banker alive when in reality he is what I would define as a common thief. J.P. Morgan was caught manipulating the municipal bond prices in 37 different states. The bank was caught manipulating LIBOR Rates in England which the majority of the world’s commercial loans are based on and he charges single mother’s who bounce a $100 check to feed her kids a overdraft fees as high as $48 and the world calls him a good banker. When his bank was caught manipulating the munis and LIBOR rates no one ever went to jail, because our legal system is bought and paid for by the big banks and the majority of both parties in Congress are part of the scheme. Trump mentioned capping credit card interest rates at 10% as I wrote in my 15 Common Sense Reforms that Would Transform America https://substack.com/home/post/p-181018665 and Jamie Dimon said it would be horrible for the American economy.

This is how the Ruling Class has always controlled the masses: with religion, ownerhship, debt, and taxes for millenia. Before the American Revolution, kings extracted taxes to finance their luxurious lifestyles — from hunting trips for big game to yachts and harems and palaces and everything else they had. Today the Uber Wealthy have massive private yachts, private ski resorts and are being protected from having sex with underaged children, some as young as years of age — while common people struggle. We fought a revolution to escape this same type of system and we may have to fight another one if we don’t vote the horribly corrupt people we have in Congress out of office NOW. Every single one of them that have been back there for more than two terms. Anyone who refused to endorse Zohran Mamdani.

Now we’ve allowed the same system our forefathers fought against to be recreated with billionaires and bankers playing the role of aristocrats, extracting wealth and owning everything, while the working class falls further behind. We have an Administration that ia now EXECUTING people on the streets of America then getting on TV and lying about what we are seeing with our own eyes. And with the power they could have with AI, stopping them could get ugly.

What Needs to Happen

We need fundamental reform:

What Trump has done in Minnesota has gotten the American People Angry Enough for the first time since the Vietnam War that they have become POLTICALLY ACTIVE IN THEIR DEMOCRACY. But it has taken immense amounts of brutality and two people being violently executed by ICE to get people angry enough to DO SOMETHING. Americans are finally seeing that FREEDOM ISN’T FREE. FOR A DEMOCRACY TO WORK, IT’S CITIZENS NEED TO PARTICIPATE. But the ways to change it are simple. We just need enough people to want a JUST AND EQUITABLE SOCIETY TO DO IT.

Again, I would refer you to the 15 Common Sense Reforms I wrote about earlier. They can be read here:

Barry Ellsworth

15 COMMON-SENSE REFORMS THAT WOULD TRANSFORM AMERICA

We live in a country where billionaire tech CEOs are celebrated as “visionaries,” while teachers ~ one of the vertebrae in the backbone of our society ~ can’t afford rent…

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6 months ago · 2 likes · Barry Ellsworth

America has become a nation of Oligarchs while pretending to be a democracy. The $38.6 trillion national debt isn’t an accident or the result of necessary spending — it has been created on purpose to allow Wall Street to extract wealth from working people.

Our children deserve better. They deserve education without debt servitude. They deserve a financial system that serves them, not the Uber Wealthy and Wall Street. They deserve a government that works for the people, not the billionaire class. They deserve to be able to afford a roof over their heads.

The system we have now is broken by design. It’s time to elect leaders who will genuinely represent the American people’s interests, break up the financial monopolies, restore protective regulations, and create an economy that works for everyone—not just the wealthy few who’ve turned our nation into their personal debt colony.

____________________________________________________________________________

Over the past several weeks, after watching people like Gavin Newsom, AOC, Ro Kanna and others, I have been contemplating if I should run for the Presidency. Do I want the job? No!. It is extremely demanding and ages people horribly. But I would do it as my duty as an American if enough people wanted me to, and there wasn’t anyone else that could do it as well? And of all the people running now, I would a much better job than any of them, and I have the skill set to do it.

When I look at people like Newsom, I believe he is completely corrupt due to the $24 billion missing in California that was supposed to be used to build housing for the homeless or he is completely incompetent due to his inability to build a few hundred miles of high speed rail.

I once upgraded 18 miles of rail running from Red Oak, Iowa to Shenandoah, Iowa for an ethanol plant I was building and it isn’t that hard. I did it for about $195,000 a mile and used union labor to do it and crews from Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Having done that, I know I could build 200 miles of high speed rail for less than $10 Billion in California, yet they have spent between $10 to $15 billion and still DON’T HAVE A SINGLE MILE OF ACTUAL RAIL LAID. They have stolen it all by giving consultiing contracts to friends and then getting kickbacks. The political structure of the entire state is corrupt. But so are most other states, both Democratic and Republican.

Ro Kanna said a few days ago on a podcast with Shawn Ryan that “We have 3 more years of Trump.” That’s what he is thinking. Impeaching Trump doesn’t appear to even be on his mind. Trump should be impeached immediately after the mid-term elections. Perhaps he is thinking that there would have to be a 2/3s majority in the Senate who would try and convict him and the Democrats would have to win 20 seats to get that many votes or have enough Republicans join them so he has given up all hope in his mind. Either way, his statement made me distrust him. There is a WAR being waged against working class Americans by a group that is trying to overthrow our government and democracy in this country and it needs to be fought by people willing to do the fighting and calling it what it is.

I could fix all of these things because I understand what needs to be done and how to do it, but people would have to vote out the current members of Congress and give me people like Bernie Sanders and Palmila Jayapal and Marie Perez from Washington state. Alexandria Ocasio and Thomas Massie. James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett from Texas, (and I wish the two of them would sit down and figure out a way to keep both of them in Washington).

I could fix things because I could care less about money, therefore, I can’t be bought. I also have the moral willingness to do it, and I have enough expertise in business to know how to do it. Additionally, I have an extensive, indepth understanding of the financial markets and know how they steal from Americans in miriad different ways from being a stock broker in Utah when it was known as the Penny Stock Capital of the World and watching stock promoters manipulate stocks for years.

I am also the founder and former CEO and Chairman of GPRE on NASDAQ - one of the world’s largest ethanol producers. The ethanol in your gas tank to meet the clean air standards. I raised $200 million to build the company’s first two plants when I started Green Plains and I built them in the middle of the least expensive corn in the United States which made me the low cost producer as soon as the plants started operating. Green Plains ethanol is in the gas tanks of ten to twenty million cars in both the United States, Canada, on any given day. Green Plains started as an idea in my head and wouldn’t exist without me. I DO have the skill set, the experience, and the intelligence to do it, and I know how to pick the right people to run things, so I will leave it up to you and your friends.

The only reason I am even considering running is because I don’t trust anyone else’s morality except Bernie’s and he has already said he is getting too old and is too tired to do it again. And I don’t think others have the intelligence or the financial sophistication to understand how the Uber Wealthy are manipulating things like housing and how they have gained control over our food supply and what they are doing to weaken American businesses. I also think anyone who actually wants to be President has to have a few screws loose and be addicted to power and money, because it is such a demanding, all hands on deck type of job. But as I said, I don’t see anyone else that seems to have the morality along with the expertise, the willingness and the intelligence to do it. Most people in politics have been politicians for 40 or more years and have never done anything else. The only thing they know how to do really well is rationalize, lie and get elected.

If you read this and the others things I have posted here, (which aren’t that many but they are a good outline of what I think and believe) and then look at my https://slfla.org site that I had built last year to cap student loan interest rates. And you could read a book I wrote in 2024 about the housing crisis: https://a.co/d/02ZwrL2L you will see what I think. After doing so, if you would like me to run and would support me and contribute whatever you could to a campaign (because I would not take money from billionaires or large corporate interests that are polluting the planet and part of the group trying to overthrow democracy in this country and the world) then please subscribe AND SHARE THIS AND MY 15 COMMON SENSE REFORMS to let me and others know that you would like me to run.

The choice is yours.

The massive drop in gold and silver overnight — and again this morning — instantly brought me back to 1979–1980, when the Hunt Brothers tried to corner the silver market and nearly blew up Wall Street.

Their scheme was so large it almost bankrupted Bache Halsey Stuart Shields where I later worked when it was known as Prudential Bache.

Back then, Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt used enormous leverage to hoard physical silver and dominate futures markets, driving prices from around $6 an ounce to nearly $50.

It looked unstoppable.

Until regulators tightened margin rules.

Liquidity vanished.

The leverage cracked.

And the whole thing collapsed almost overnight.

One Speculative Bet Nearly Took Down a Major Wall Street Firm!

That day became known as Silver Thursday.

Watching markets move this week feels eerily familiar — because today’s stock market is built on the exact same dangerous foundation: massive leverage, artificial price inflation, and the belief that money will always keep flowing.

It’s the same game.

Just bigger.

The Market Isn’t Free. It’s Controlled.

Most Americans think the stock market is millions of independent investors buying and selling based on company performance.

That’s a fairy tale.

In reality, a handful of financial giants now sit at the center of almost everything:

• BlackRock

• Vanguard Group

• State Street Corporation

• Fidelity Investments

• Blackstone

Together, they are the largest shareholders of most major corporations in America.

They control enormous voting power. They manage retirement funds and pensions. They sit on both sides of the capital markets. And through Wall Street’s credit machine, they help supply the debt corporations use to borrow billions.

So let’s be clear:

They own the stocks. They influence the boards. They fund the borrowing.

This isn’t a competitive free market.

It’s a concentrated financial empire.

The Great Wall Street Leverage Loop (The Real Scam)

Here’s how the modern system really works:

Wall Street makes borrowing cheap and easy. Corporations take on billions in debt. But instead of investing in workers, innovation, or long-term growth…

👉 they use the money to buy back their own shares.

Buybacks shrink the share count.

That automatically boosts earnings per share — even if the business itself doesn’t improve.

Stock prices rise. Wall Street celebrates. Executives get richer by paying themselves HUGE SALARIES AND BONUSES. Sums that would have been seen as embezzlement in any other era.

Rinse. Repeat.

CEO pay is overwhelmingly tied to stock performance.

So every artificial stock pop delivers:

💰 massive bonuses

💰 stock windfalls

💰 generational wealth for insiders

Meanwhile, the same institutions that own the stocks are also earning interest on the debt used to inflate those stocks.

• They profit coming and going.

• They then push for more buybacks.

• More borrowing.

• More leverage

This Has Nothing to Do With Productivity

That’s the lie everyone’s been sold. Today’s market doesn’t depend on:

❌ better businesses

❌ higher efficiency

❌ real economic growth

It depends on:

✅ cheap money

✅ debt

✅ constantly rising asset prices

Just like the Hunt Brothers’ silver play didn’t depend on real demand — only leverage and momentum.

As long as new money flows in, the illusion holds. When liquidity tightens? Everything shakes.

A System Built to Collapse

Corporations are now loaded with trillions of dollars in debt largely taken on to pump stock prices.

Pension funds are deeply tied to these inflated markets.

Banks are exposed to corporate credit.

Hedge funds stack leverage on top of leverage through derivatives.

It’s all connected. So when markets fall hard, it’s not just investors who get hurt. The entire financial system trembles.

That’s why we keep seeing “emergency” interventions every time something breaks.

The system can no longer survive real price discovery.

It requires permanent support.

And every bailout only guarantees the next bubble will be bigger.

Executives Get Rich. Everyone Else Gets the Risk.

While companies drown themselves in debt, executives walk away with obscene compensation packages. Tens of millions. Sometimes hundreds of millions. Short-term stock inflation equals personal jackpots. Elon Musk becomes the world’s first TRILLIONAIRE. Not because of great, consistent productivity. Because of great stock promotion and BULLSHIT.

Long-term financial risk gets dumped on:

• shareholders

• workers

• retirees

• taxpayers

When the music stops, insiders are already out the door.

Sound familiar?

That’s how every Ponzi ends.

Same Scam, Different Asset

In 1980, a few men nearly broke the system by cornering silver.

Today, the system is being cornered by: Concentrated ownership, endless leverage, and financial engineering. It’s hidden behind ETFs, buybacks, and corporate jargon.

But the mechanics are identical: Borrowed money inflating prices in a self-feeding loop.

And like every leverage-driven scheme in history, it looks brilliant…

Right up until it implodes.

The One Thing Wall Street Actually Does Right

To be fair, Wall Street is good at one thing:

👉 FUNDING NEW COMPANIES AND FINDING REAL INNOVATION

Early-stage investing and capital formation matter.

But once companies mature, the mission changes.

The system stops building value.

And starts extracting it.

Public markets today are less about growing businesses and more about:

• leverage

• stock manipulation through buybacks

• executive enrichment

It’s financial engineering — not capitalism.

A Market Propped Up by Faith

Just like the Hunt Brothers believed silver could only go up, today’s market runs on blind faith:

“The Fed will always step in.”

“Stocks always recover.”

“Liquidity will return.”

History says otherwise.

Leverage always feels safe — until it isn’t.

And when it breaks, it breaks fast and really fucking hard.

The plunge in gold and silver this week isn’t just about commodities.

It’s a warning.

A reminder of what happens when markets built on borrowed money lose support.

We’ve seen this story before. The Panic of 1907, (which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve, a privately owned central bank that only wants more of ONE THING — DEBT) The Crash of 1929, 1973/74 (Oil Crisis and stagflation leading to a 45% decline in the markets over two years), 1980 (silver), 1987, 1999, 2008/09, ????

The only difference now is the scale.

In 1980, one corner almost collapsed a brokerage.

Today, the entire financial system is sitting on the same kind of leverage — just spread everywhere.

This isn’t productivity.

It’s a Ponzi game!!!

And like every Ponzi in history, it only works as long as new money keeps flowing in.

Americans pay more for healthcare than any other nation on Earth — two to four times more per person depending on whose numbers you use — yet our outcomes are worse. Millions are denied the care they need by insurance companies who tell their doctors they will not cover certain tests and procedures, while charging the insured outrageously high premiums. Over 650,000 families go bankrupt over medical bills each year. It is the highest cause of bankruptcy in the country.

This is not healthcare. It is a profit extraction system.

The United States knows how to run massive, complex systems efficiently. We operate the most advanced, effective Armed Forces in the world. We run the U.S. Treasury, which reliably delivers Social Security checks to tens of millions of Americans every single month. We have operated the U.S. Post Office for decades, delivering mail daily in rain, snow, sleet, and hail. And we have sent men to the moon and back. When we decide something is a national priority, we make it work.

Healthcare should be one of those priorities.

A single-payer healthcare system — operated by the U.S. government — would eliminate the private insurance middlemen who currently siphon off (STEAL is a more accurate word) hundreds of billions of dollars each year in premiums that pay for executive salaries, bonuses, private jets, vacation houses, limousines — all administrative waste. Some healthcare CEOs take home as much as $50 million to circa $150 million annually, while patients are denied life-saving care and die.

All of the money being stolen should be going to doctors, nurses, hospitals, research, and patient care — not shareholders and executives who are incentivized to steal from premium payers.

The smartest path forward isn’t guesswork. Countries around the world already provide universal healthcare: Canada, France, the UK, Germany, Japan, Mexico, everyone but America.

We should study every successful system and ask those countries two simple questions:

1. What works best that you love and would never give up?

2. What doesn’t work as you would like and what would you improve?

We then take the best ideas from every system, avoid their mistakes, and build the most effective healthcare model on Earth — designed specifically for America.

And how do we come up with solutions and a better system to fix their mistakes or weaknesses? EASY! We hold a NATIONAL CONTEST.

We have the Secretary of Health and Human Services along with the President get on national TV and clearly explain the issues/problems (there will only be a few) and tell the entire country THESE THINGS ARE THE PROBLEMS. Please think about how to solve them. The person with the best solution and the first to submit the solution wins $10 MILLION. Any other solutions that are used as part as the solution to the problem wins $5 MILLION each. That’s how we devise:

THE BEST HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IN THE WORLD!

Imagine a system that rewards doctors sufficiently to encourage people to go into medicine. A system not just for treating illness, but for keeping patients healthy. A system that offers performance bonuses based on improved patient outcomes. If a doctor’s patients are healthier at the end of the year than they were at the beginning, the doctors are paid a $200,000 bonus.

Alongside the new and better system, we launch a NATIONAL PRINT AND AD CAMPAIGN TO PROMOTE HEALTHY LIFESTYLES. One that promotes exercise, walking, lifting, etc. Tai chi in our parks. Neighborhood kickball games, pickleball, the benefits of going to the gym, and why eating clean whole foods — organic fruits, vegetables, clean, grass-fed meats and eggs — REAL NUTRITION FROM NATURE — is the absolute best way to stay healthy, instead of allowing our airways to be filled with ads for ultra-processed foods loaded with chemicals, endocrine disruptors, and carcinogens that are driving chronic disease and obesity in our country.

Healthier people mean fewer medical costs. Prevention is always cheaper than treatment.

A single-payer system would also negotiate fair drug prices — the same way every other country does — instead of allowing pharmaceutical companies to charge Americans several times more for the exact same medications.

THE RESULT?

✔ Universal coverage for every American

✔ Better health outcomes

✔ No claim denials driven by profit

✔ Massive cost savings

✔ A simpler, more humane system

✔ The healthiest nation and people on earth

Healthcare should not be a private profit machine — just as prisons should never be run for profit. When corporations are incentivized to make money off human suffering, the system will always fail the people.

By removing the middlemen, prioritizing prevention, rewarding better outcomes, and learning from the best systems worldwide, the United States can deliver better healthcare to everyone — for a fraction of what we pay today.

It’s time to build a healthcare system focused on care, not cash. If you really want this to happen, please like, share and subscribe. Please share this article with as many people as possible. Together we could really make this happen, but it will take each of us sharing this and doing what we can to let others see how easy to do it could be.

We live in a country where billionaire tech CEOs are celebrated as “visionaries,” while teachers ~ one of the most important jobs in our society ~ can’t afford rent.

Where lifesaving EpiPens and basic inhalers can cost hundreds of dollars, while corporate tax loopholes drain trillions from public coffers.

Where the “American Dream” has been purchased by Private Equity, gutted, shrink-wrapped, and sold back to us at prices tens of millions of people cannot afford to pay.

The truth? Most of America’s biggest problems are not complex. They’re the predictable outcome of a system engineered to maximize profit for the uber wealthy at the direct expense of ordinary people. We live in an EXTRACTION economy.

And despite what Silicon Valley moguls and Wall Street titans pretend, wealth does not equal wisdom ~ it simply means they’ve mastered a game rigged entirely in their favor.

It’s like watching adults cheat at poker while they are playing against children who don’t know the rules ~ and then congratulating themselves for being “geniuses.”

Below are fifteen unapologetically straightforward reforms that would materially improve life for hundreds of millions of Americans.

1. BREAK UP THE MONOPOLIES

When just a handful of corporations control entire sectors, competition dies and prices skyrocket.

One of the most obvious and important places this can be seen is in our grocery stores. It seems almost weekly, prices go up on most things we purchase. And often not by just a little. Many times by as much as 10%-20% or more.

Another is housing. Corporate ownership of housing has more than doubled rents and home prices over the past five to eight years in most major cities. By focusing on almost complete control of these two sectors as the uber-wealthy have done, they are attacking the very essence of what it means to be a human being living in a free and democratic society.

Building supplies, healthcare, hospitals, strip malls, student housing, education. The list goes on and on.

Controlling food and housing in America has not happened by accident. It is part of a well-thought out plan to control the masses by the uber-wealthy. If you can control a human’s basic needs, you control the person.

The FTC under Lina Khan understood this. When I first wrote this, she was still at the FTC. She was doing her job better than anyone in Washington. One of the first things Trump did upon entering office was remove her. Lina Khan needs to be reinstated to run the FTC, and real antitrust enforcement needs to be carried out immediately.

2. BAN CORPORATE OWNERSHIP OF HOUSING

Congress needs to enact H.R. 1745 and S. 788 immediately with amended versions to require the divestiture to occur within five years, not ten as they are written now.

Wall Street firms are buying entire neighborhoods and converting homes into permanently monetized assets for rent.

This should also include Student Housing. Blackstone is now the largest owner of Student Housing in the country. The purpose of such housing is to give students an affordable place to live while they are going to school, not to provide Blackstone an opportunity to make the lives of our children more costly so Steven Schwarzman can purchase another mansion in the Hamptons.

Housing should exist for human beings as places they can call home. It should not be for hedge funds to pad their quarterly reports and profits.

3. IMPLEMENT A WELL-RUN, SINGLE-PAYER NATIONAL HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

Every major developed nation has figured this out but us. In America, Healthcare is a monopoly run for the benefit of a handful of Uber wealthy men, who bribe our politicians to keep them in power. In other countries, it is a way to care for their citizens.

Healthcare is not a luxury item, yet our system treats it like one — enriching middle-man insurers, while patients in American have to make choices between buying their overpriced medicines, paying their rent, or declaring bankruptcy.

A single-payer model wipes out the waste, slashes administrative bloat, and centers care around people instead of profit-hungry parasites.

The status quo in this country is a moral failure.

So how do we create the best healthcare system in the world? Easy. We pass H.R. 3069 with the Amendments I have added to it to fund it. We ask other countries like Norway, Sweden, France, Canada, Mexico, etc. what they love about their systems and copy the good stuff. We also ask them what they wish they had done differently and fix the weaknesses in their systems so we have the BEST HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IN THE WORLD. This is not rocket science. It is simply caring more for people than profits.

4. REFORM THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

Cap administrative salaries at $250,000 permanently with no future raises for anyone making $250,000 or more, (with rare exceptions TBD ~ such as the Superintendent or the CFO of school districts, but not more than $300,000) unless an individual were to do something absolutely extraordinary that benefits the entire system, then bonuses could be paid. No more 3% a year raises just because.

Direct all savings toward teacher pay and other physical, tangible needs, i.e. school supplies, building maintenance, etc.

We have built a bureaucratic skyscraper (an inverted pyramid) administered by an overpaid elite group, while the people actually teaching America’s children need to work two jobs to survive.

This is backward, corrupt, and completely fixable. The same type of thinking needs to be incorporated into our city, county, state, and national governments. Pay them good salaries for good work, but do not allow them to abuse and misuse taxpayers (their neighbors) dollars.

5. TAX BILLIONAIRES AND LARGE CORPORATIONS APPROPRIATELY

A wise and prudent progressive tax system that might go as high as a 50% on billionaires and large multi-national corporations (and wise, prudent spending by the governement) and 30% on capital gains UNTIL OUR DEFICITS ARE REDUCED AND STABILIZED, is not radical — it’s rational. And we need to remove ALL of the loop holes that allow the uberwealthy to pay next to nothing. Taking passive income a lesser amount than labor is obscene and should be reversed.

Extreme wealth is not built in a vacuum. It is built on the backs of millions of other people working everyday to build the businesses for the owners, as well as the infrastructure of the entire country - the roads, power lines, water systems, etc. Extreme wealth concentration produces extreme political distortion, giving the ultra-rich the ability to bend government to their will and that never ends up well.

6. CREATE A TRUE FEDERAL RESERVE TO SERVE AMERICAN CITIZENS, NOT WALL STREET

Today’s Federal Reserve overwhelmingly prioritizes the interests of large banks and financial institutions — because it’s owned and operated by large private banks, not by the U.S. Government, and operated for the benefit of its citizens as it should be.

America should create a Central Bank that serves the public, not the system we currently have that is disguised as one serving the public, but which is actually designed to enrich Wall Street. The Federal Reserve as it is set up now makes money in one way or another off every bit of debt that exists for the benefit of the large private banks that own it. It uses leverage to extract profits from the working class for large Wall Street financial institutions and is filled with unhealthy conflicts of interest.

7. AUDIT THE PENTAGON ANNUALLY

We spend nearly $900 billion a year on defense, and the Pentagon has never passed a full audit.

Accountability is not anti-military — it’s the baseline expectation for any institution funded by taxpayers.

8. ESTABLISH NATIONAL USURY LAWS

Cap interest rates at 10% nationwide.

Predatory lenders exploiting desperate people with 30%–400% interest rates should not exist in a civilized society.

Ending legal loansharking would stabilize millions of families. And for anyone that violates the USURY laws, a minimum of 12 months in jail, performing community service the entire time.

9. IMPLEMENT TERM LIMITS & EXPAND HOUSE TERMS

No more than two consecutive terms for any and all national Senators and House Representatives.

Extend House terms from 2 years to 4, ending the nonstop fundraising treadmill that makes politicians dependent on donors instead of voters.

10. CREATE A SYSTEM OF AFFORDABLE PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION

A national community college system funded publicly and costing no more than $500 per term for participating attendees. The program should also include education in trades that are badly needed, such as plumbing, electrical, construction, etc.

Cap current student loans at 2%, and give tax write offs to employers that pay off their employees’ loans. Ban corporate ownership of student housing.

Education should be a public good — not a multibillion-dollar extraction industry for private equity funds and predatory lenders.

11. ABOLISH PRIVATE PRISONS

The profit motive has no rightful place in deciding human freedom.

When companies make money by keeping cells filled, justice is warped beyond recognition.

Abolish the model entirely.

12. OVERTURN CITIZENS UNITED

Corporations are not people.

Money is not speech.

This disastrous Supreme Court ruling unleashed a tidal wave of dark money that drowned the political voice of ordinary Americans.

And there is a way to stop it on a state level. Simply pass a statute saying that corporations formed in or doing business in the state CANNOT contribute to political candidates.

13. PROTECT WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

Abortion is healthcare.

Decisions about a woman’s body belong to her and her doctor — not to lawmakers, committees, governments, leaders of churches, or anyone else but the woman.

14. LAUNCH A NATIONAL HEALTH INITIATIVE

Fund a massive, sustained public campaign championing daily exercise, eating whole foods, and clean living over chemically loaded processed foods. Teaching the same in our schools. Tai Chi in the park. Pickleball. Group hikes. Etc. Encouraging people to get out of the house and move.

Prevention is cheaper, healthier, and far more humane than treating preventable chronic illness.

15. REGULATE SOCIAL MEDIA, AI & TECH GIANTS

A few unelected tech billionaires currently control the flow of information, public discourse, and personal data for billions of people. This same group is also doing everything they can to advance AI as fast as possible with NO regulation, so they can make trillions of dollars and control the rest of humanity. Much of their efforts are centered on creating AI to replace human workers to reduce costs, rather than making AI systems that would enhance life for all of us, not just the already uber-wealthy. They should NOT be allowed to do this.

Guess who the largest owner of data centers world wide is? BLACKSTONE.

They are building DATA CENTERS that consume massive amounts of fresh water and electricity and they are bribing local, state, and national politicians to allow them to do this in secret then pushing the costs off to everyday working people, when they should be paying for it. And they are doing it at a time when Climate Change is already destroying the environment on a massive scale. In Memphis, TN, as an example, Elon Musk is using UNLICENESED NATURAL GAS TURBINES to power his COLLOSUS AI for GROK.

That level of power demands meaningful oversight, aggressive antitrust enforcement — breaking up the monopolies outright.

THE BOTTOM LINE

These reforms are not extreme — they’re common sense.

Most Americans, across party lines, would support them if the facts weren’t buried under billions in corporate lobbying and PR.

The only reason these ideas feel “impossible” is because powerful interests have convinced us that their exploitation is inevitable.

Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Peter Theil, and others are not superhuman geniuses.

They’re simply richer than everyone else, but their wealth has been built on the backs of workers, taxpayers, small businesses, stock manipulation and a political system they manipulate with their wealth because they are allowed to operate freely as monopolies and take advantage of others.

It’s time to stop treating billionaires as untouchable deities and start demanding a country that serves all of us — not just those at the very top.

The question isn’t whether these reforms would make America better.

The real question is whether we will finally summon the courage and the common sense to demand them and make an America that Works for Everyone!

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

After watching all of the people jockeying to run for President, acting as if they are not, I have come to a simple conclusion. I am confident I could do a better job than anyone else currently jockeying for position to run or running. I also understand the financial world well enough that Wall Street will not be able to confuse me. And I am the only one thinking about running for office whose morality I trust, with the exception of James Talarico, Zohran Mandami, and Bernie Sanders. But Talarico is running for Senate and I am not sure he understands the financial world enough to understand how Wall Streets manipulates everything and they could fool him in ways he doesn’t understand. I certainly do not doubt his morality though. Zohran can’t run for the Presidency because he wasn’t born here, and Bernie has said he is too old.

I have watched Gavin Newsom, and arrived at the conclusion that he is either as corrupt as anyone in the country because of the $24 billion missing in CA designated for the homeless that can’t be accounted for; or he is incompetent and incapable of doing what is necessary to make something happen, due to the complete fiasco their highspeed rail project has become.

With $24 billion I could build a new apartment in Bakersfield for every homeless person in California and he can’t find it.

I once had to upgrade 18 miles of rail running from Red Oak, Iowa to Shenandoah, Iowa for an ethanol plant I built. I used union labor and only paid $195,000 per mile. It wasn’t that hard of a thing to do, because they have huge machines that lay the track. California has spend $14 billion and still hasn’t laid a single mile of track. He is either corrupt or incompetent. Either way, I certainly don’t want him as President.

Over the years, I have watched the current members of Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, destroying our educational system in the country by enslaving our children with student debt. In the last election, the Democrats refused to hold a primary so someone like Bernie couldn’t run again. This proves to me they are as corrupt as the Republicans in many ways.

Additionally, when Zohran Mamdani (who I would vote for in a heart beat for anything he wanted to run for) ran for the Mayor of NYC, no one from the Democratic Party would endorse him, even after he won the primary and was the Democratic candidate, except for AOC and Bernie Sanders, who is actually an Independent. I believe that should show anyone how corrupt the elected members of the Democratic Party are who are in Congress now. The current members are owned by Wall Street and Israel and work for the same people backing Trump. For these reasons, and because I understand how to create things from nothing and how business operates and just care about people more than money, I have been thinking about running myself if enough people wanted to do the things I have outlined in this paper. I would do them.

I am currently the President of First Home Inc, an affordable housing company. I am also the founder and former CEO/Chairman of GPRE on NASDAQ. GPRE was the second largest ethanol producer in the world for a while and is still now one of the largest. It makes the ethanol in gasoline to meet the clean air standards. If you drive a gas burning car, chances are you have Green Plains ethanol in your tank right now. I mention that because it is a public company and people can read about it and see that I was the founder and former CEO by reading their filings on Edgar, the SEC’s reporting platform. I raised $200 million and built the first two plants for the company when I started it. I built them in the middle of the least expensive corn in the country which is what allowed us to acquire so many bankrupt plants to grow as fast as the company did. I became the low cost producer in the United States as soon as the plants became operational. And I found the perfect guy to run it who knew more about ethanol than just about anyone else in the country other than Jeff Broin. The company wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for me, and the ethanol it produces is in 10 to 20 million cars in both the United States and Canada on any given day. I DO have the skill set to be President, the intelligence, and most importantly I cannot be bought.

This paper outlines the type of things I would do if elected and demonstrates what I see as moral. If you want the type of country I have described in this piece, and you would support and work with such a person and my campaign, share this with your friends and family because the billionaires who own these sites certainly don’t want others seeing this and they will block it from being seen by others unless you share it. Then let me know in an email or the comments that you would support me and I will run if enough people want me to.

Today, November 20, 2025, a coalition of nine states announced a $7 million settlement with Greystar over allegations that it joined a cartel of very big landlords using an algorithmic pricing scheme (RealPage) to coordinate and drive-up rents.

Seven Million Dollars?

For a company that sits on top of an industry that has helped double rents in many markets since 2016, while wages have barely moved?

That’s not justice. It’s a fucking licensing fee to keep abusing people.

Algorithmic Price-Fixing Isn’t “Innovation” – It’s Collusion by Software

State complaints and the U.S. Department of Justice describe exactly what renters have felt in their wallets: big landlords pooling their private rent and occupancy data into a single algorithm, then “independently” following the same rent recommendations.

In a real market, landlords compete. In the RealPage world, they move together:

• Shared non-public rent data

• Shared occupancy and concession data

• Algorithms and “rules” that discourage discounting and negotiation

If a couple of landlords sat in a smoke-filled room and agreed on rents, we’d all call it what it is: price-fixing. Doing it through an algorithm doesn’t magically make it fair or legal.

The Playbook: Steal Big, Settle Small, Nobody Goes to Jail

We’ve seen this script before.

Look at the student loan mess in this country. Navient, the successor to Sallie Mae, was nailed with a $1.85 billion multistate settlement for steering borrowers into very expensive options and originating predatory loans. And they were doing this to kids who were just trying to get an education.

Later, the CFPB moved, under the direction of Rohit Chopra, to ban Navient from most federal student-loan servicing because of years of abusive practices and ordered it to pay another $120 million in penalties and redress. That was closer to justice. However, Mr. Chopra was immediately removed as the head of the CFPB by Trump as soon as he came into office.

Billions in harm –Trillions in lifetime impact.

Yet:

• No CEOs in handcuffs.

• No personal fines.

• No executives of boards barred from the business.

• No personal accountability for the people who signed off on the abuse.

Greystar is running the housing version of the same game. They engage in illegal conduct that negatively affects tens of millions of renters, American Citizens, and the “punishment” is a fine that’s a rounding error on their balance sheet, plus a promise to behave better next time?

That isn’t a deterrent. It’s a business expense.

Don’t Tell Us You’re “Protecting Consumers” While You Shield the Cartel

In a press release for the Trump Justice Department today, it said this:

“American greatness has always depended on free-market competition, and nowhere is competition more important than in making housing affordable again,” said Attorney General Pamela Bondi. “We will continue to vigorously pursue President Trump’s pro-consumer agenda.”

“The Trump-Vance Administration is committed to promoting competition to help working class Americans pay for life’s necessities — including rent,” said Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. “Whether in a smoke-filled room or through an algorithm, competitors cannot share competitively sensitive information or align prices to the detriment of American consumers.”

Any Justice Department or White House – Trump, Biden, or whoever comes next – that claims to be “fighting for working families” has a simple test:

• Will you personally fine and ban the executives and board members who preside over this type of abusive misconduct from the industry, for at least five years, and in the most egregious cases for life?

• Will you put people who rig markets at this scale and negatively affect the lives of millions in jail, the same way you would a street-level criminal?

If the answer is NO, then all the press releases about “standing up for consumers” are just noise.

Because here’s the truth: You don’t stop a $7 trillion housing machine with a $7 million slap on the wrist.

What Real Reform Looks Like

If we’re serious about ending this abuse, we need laws with teeth:

1. Automatic criminal liability

   • Executives and board members who knowingly participate in rent-fixing or predatory schemes should face personal fines including mandatory jail time for egregious abuses at a scale like this, not just corporate fines.

2. Industry bans from years to life

   • If you use your position to exploit renters, you should be barred from being in the business of managing such rental properties for at least a few years. If you do it on a scale as large as Greystar has, bans should be for life. Such bans for this type of scale abuse could be from owning, managing, or setting prices for rental housing.

3. Strong rent protections

   • Local and state rent control / rent-stabilization and caps on algorithmic “revenue management” tools to stop coordinated price hikes masquerading as data science.

4. Full ban on collusive pricing algorithms

   • Outlaw any system that lets competing landlords share sensitive data and move in lockstep on rents.

Enough Is Enough

In just a few short years, many Working Americans have watched their rents double while their paychecks stayed the same or gone down. They’ve been evicted over junk fees, strangled by student debt, and told it’s all just “the market.”

It’s not the market.

It’s policy choices that protect billionaires and their algorithms instead of families, their homes and money.

Until the people who design and approve these schemes face personal consequences — handcuffs, personal fines, bans, and in the most egregious situations like this, real prison time — Greystar and its peers will treat fines as a minor cost of doing business.

And the rest of America will keep paying the price, every single month, when the rent is due.

For decades, Las Vegas has grown because it was affordable, exciting, and fun.

Affordable for workers.

Affordable for tourists.

Affordable for conventioneers.

A place where a regular family could come for a long weekend, stay in a decent room, enjoy a buffet, catch a show, and not feel robbed.

That Las Vegas is disappearing — and not because of “mysterious market forces.”

It’s because of a Wall Street real-estate model that is mathematically incapable of sustaining a working city.

1. The “Rent the Land, Squeeze the Operator” Model

Over the last 10 years, Las Vegas has quietly turned into a landlord city.

VICI Properties, a publicly traded real-estate investment trust (REIT), has become the dominant owner of the land under the Strip. After acquiring MGM Growth Properties and other assets, VICI now controls roughly 660 acres of land along the Strip, covering a dozen major resorts and tens of thousands of hotel rooms.

Now VICI is expanding beyond the tourist corridor into the locals market.

In November 2025, the company announced a $1.16 billion sale-leaseback with Golden Entertainment for seven Nevada casino properties, including The STRAT and two Arizona Charlie’s casinos.

According to VICI’s own press release and SEC filing, the new Golden Master Lease will:

“…have an initial total annual rent of $87.0 million… representing an acquisition cap rate of 7.5%, and… rent under the Golden Master Lease will escalate annually at 2% beginning in Lease Year 3.”

In plain English:

Golden sells the land and buildings to VICI for $1.16 billion.

VICI becomes the landlord and collects $87 million in rent per year, every year, with automatic 2% annual increases starting in year three.

Golden (now being taken private by its CEO) continues to operate the casinos but must now service this rising rent bill indefinitely.

This is the same basic structure used across the Strip: a REIT or private equity landlord such as VICI or Blackstone owns the dirt and the walls; the casino operator signs a triple-net lease — meaning the operator pays rent plus taxes, insurance, and maintenance — and agrees to built-in rent escalators, often 2% annually.

2. MGM’s Daily Rent Bill for the Bellagio and the Cosmopolitan Alone is Over $1.2 Million

We don’t have to guess how this model works. Look at MGM’s and VICI’s deals.

In 2019, MGM sold the Bellagio real estate to a joint venture led by Blackstone’s BREIT for $4.25 billion and agreed to initial annual rent of $245 million a year, with a 2% escalator for the first 10 years.

In 2021, MGM agreed to acquire the operations of The Cosmopolitan while a partnership of BREIT, Stonepeak (which is a spinoff of Blackstone) and the Cherng Family Trust (the owners of Panda Express) kept the real estate. MGM pays $200 million per year in initial rent, “escalating annually at 2% for the first 15 years.”

Combined, that’s $445 million per year, or about $1.2 million a day in rent for just two properties — before paying a single employee, before cleaning a single room, before handing a single guest a bottle of water (which only happens nowadays if the guest is willing to hand over $20)

From Wall Street’s perspective, this is a triumph: long-term contractual cash flows with built-in growth regardless of what happens to actual visitors or real wages.

From the standpoint of a real city and anyone who cares and is still in touch with fucking reality, it is a time bomb waiting to go off.

3. Why You Can’t Just Raise Prices Forever

For REITs like VICI and funds like Blackstone, the landlords behind Bellagio and Cosmopolitan, the formula is simple:

1. Do a big sale-leaseback at a 6–8% cap rate (the amount of annualized return on the total purchase price of the asset acquired).

2. Lock in 2%+ annual rent increases in the lease.

3. Promise Wall Street that renters (casino operators) will keep paying, no matter what.

The only way an operator makes that math work is to constantly push prices up:

Higher room rates.

Constantly rising Hidden Resort fees.

Parking fees – then Higher Parking Fees.

Higher prices for food, drinks, and entertainment. Prices that can now move higher on the same day depending on the temperature outside or the time of day. Another sure-fire way to piss off customers, making them not ever want to return.

Constant, Relentless Price Gouging of Customers.

But visitors’ incomes have not been rising at 2% every year in real terms. In fact, nationwide, home prices since 2000 have risen far faster than inflation-adjusted incomes — home prices are up roughly 177% versus just 8.5% growth in real income. And those home prices and the rents associated with those homes are up that much because they have been manipulated up by Wall Street’s Real Estate Buying Cartel, which are publicly traded companies that own and/or control millions more homes throughout the country (and in Las Vegas) as Beneficial Owners than they are reporting. I swear that was accounting and securities fraud back before Cortez Masto turned to the dark side after a meeting in Washington with Eric Holder and said, “Hell yes. I’ll take the Senate Seat and stop looking at the felonies. Make me rich.” The rest is history.

Today the middle class is not just being squeezed from all sides. The middle class is being DESTROYED.

AND NOW LAS VEGAS IS SUFFERING THE CONSEQUENCES

4. The Tax Numbers Are Already Flashing Red

In the last quarter, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) reported a sharp decline in key revenue sources:

Room tax and gaming fee receipts were down circa 14% ~ $73.9 million less for the quarter.

Overall LVCVA revenue is down a similar 14%.

Local reporting summarized it bluntly: room-tax and gaming-fee receipts are “off 14 percent,” forcing the tourism agency to trim its budget and rethink spending.

At the same time, visitor volumes to Las Vegas are down, with LVCVA statistics showing mid-single-digit to double-digit percentage declines in several recent months compared to 2024.

In other words: revenues are falling even as the cost of being in Las Vegas keeps going up. That is not a small fluctuation; it is a structural warning that if not stopped, could become suicide by GREED.

5. Housing: When Wall Street Comes for the Workers

The extraction doesn’t stop on the Strip. It extends into the neighborhoods where the workforce lives.

A recent Las Vegas Review-Journal report noted that Invitation Homes — a Wall Street-traded landlord created out of Blackstone’s single-family rental push — owns 3,397 rental homes in the Las Vegas Valley, making it one of the largest homeowners in the region. But the Cartel is still hiding the REAL NUMBERS THEY OWN AND CONTROL AS A SYNDICATE. American Homes 4 Rent is funded by Blackstone. Tricon is owned 100% by Blackstone. The Cartel of which Blackstone is a part, owns who knows how many homes, because they and/or their nominees have been funding the young people on TV and social media offering to buy your homes for cash for years in all those Wyoming LLCS. Then there is Starwood Properties that works hand in hand with Blackstone. Much like the Buying Syndicates on Wall Street in the Roaring Twenties that caused the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression, who working together bought up the majority of the shares of hundreds of companies that traded on the New York Stock Exchange from RCA to GE to U.S. Steel and hundreds more.

Today, working together, these modern companies form what is in essence a monopoly that engages in antitrust behavior every day in the housing markets across the country including Las Vegas.

Local property management data indicate that rents for single-family homes in Las Vegas rose nearly 40% from 2019 to 2022. From 2016 to 2022, rents in Las Vegas doubled, while there was very little if any income appreciation because the casinos were constantly trying to lower costs to pay the high rents to Wall Street. The easiest way to do that is to cut the salaries of the work force.

And why do the Executives of the Casinos go along with all of this and not lower prices at the casinos to bring back customers? Because they can’t and meet the 2% annual rent increases. They also play along because by doing so, they are allowed to pay themselves tens of millions of dollars every year in salaries and bonuses. And they are people who don’t give a flying fuck about their workers or their customers. Their actions prove that.

Bill Hornbuckle, CEO of MGM was paid $15.8 million in 2024, Tom Reeg, CEO of Caesars was paid $18.4 million in 2024. Hornbuckle’s pay was 332 times more than the median salary of an MGM employee ($47,607) and Reeg’s pay was 419 times more than the median salary of a Caesars’ employee ($43,880).

In the City of Las Vegas, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in 2024 was about $1500 ($18,000 per year). Take home pay after federal taxes and FICA was roughly $33,000 to $38,000 for Caesars’ and MGM’s employees. Rent alone would be 47% to 54% of an employee’s take home pay. How is a person expected to be able to pay those types of rents on those types of salaries, along with a car payment, insurance, utilities, clothing, food, etc.? THEY CAN’T WITHOUT GOING INTO DEBT! And that makes Wall Street lenders even happier. Now they can extract more in interest payments on the debt.

During this time, the median home price in 2024 in Las Vegas was circa $485,000. In 2019 the median home price was around $255,000. In 2025, the median price of a home in Las Vegas has fallen by a massive amount — a whole $15,000 to the bargain basement price of $470,000, contributing to what one local analysis called a “buyer’s market” in price but not in affordability — while inventories of houses for sale are up to the highest levels EVER. Yet there are very few sales taking place because monthly payments are still out of reach for most working families. Nor do they have any money saved to make a downpayment.

Local analysts, journalists, and politicians are constantly dancing around the real issues to keep Blackstone and the other Wall Street vampires happy. There is NO BUYER’S MARKET. The majority of the working class can’t afford to buy a home at these prices, and they struggle all day long to pay rent.

When Is Enough ~ Enough?

So now the Strip workers who clean the rooms, mix the drinks, cook and serve the food are being hit twice:

At work, where their employers are strangling them as the companies the casino execs operate are being choked by rising rent obligations to the Blood Suckers on Wall Street.

And at home, where corporate landlords (who are the same people sucking the casinos on the Strip dry) push housing costs to levels that their wages can’t support. But nothing changes because the funds are allowing the Executives of the Casinos to extract tens of millions each year from the companies, so together, they can continue to suck the worker bees dry.

When are the worker bees going to get angry enough to do something about it and quit taking the abuse?

6. Add AI and Automation, and the Math Totally Breaks

Now layer in the impact of AI and automation.

Every month, new tools are pitched to remove the need for humans in service jobs:

Self-check-in kiosks instead of front-desk staff,

Automated bartending systems,

Robot food delivery,

AI-driven customer service, and so on.

In tech and white-collar fields, AI is already replacing or devaluing coders, designers, analysts, and support staff.

Many of these attempts at cost cutting are the epitome of stupidity.

Gaming in Las Vegas is a PEOPLE-TO-PEOPLE BUSINESS. It is a SERVICE INDUSTRY. Pretty young waitresses, bartenders, and dealers with big smiles, hot bods, and sparkling eyes who flirt and interact with the players have always been an extremely important part of the GAMING ECONOMY in Las Vegas. It has always been a big part of the allure of Vegas. But not anymore because we have people running the casinos who don’t care about anything but how much they are making as individuals TODAY.

It’s part of the poison Wall Street has been peddling for years. Short term thinking concerned only about the COMING QUARTER.

THEY WANT TO MAKE THEIR BONUSES.

We have a bunch of addicted Money Drunks running the large Las Vegas Casinos who have no vision and who don’t care about the casinos, the people who work there, or the customers that used to come to Las Vegas because they didn’t create the casinos. Therefore, they have no emotional attachment to them as founders do. They are men who are more concerned with Wall Street, Macau, the Chinese, and Dubai than they are with Las Vegas. Men who are political animals trying to climb the ladder to extract as much as they possibly can while they can, kowtowing to some other addicted Money Drunks from Wall Street who have a lot more money than they do. Men who think they are special and smarter than everyone else because they have learned to manipulate stocks and housing by rigging the markets to their benefit and thinking people are too stupid to notice and calling it CAPITALISM!

THEY ARE KILLING THE GOOSE THAT LAYS THE GOLDEN EGGS!

But they don’t care. They just want another yacht, or plane, or another house in the Hamptons so they can impress their friends, while the lives of millions of working people are diminished because of their greed and their inability to feel and care for others.

If they keep replacing human workers while simultaneously baking in 2%+ annual rent escalations and ever-rising housing and living costs, where does the money come from for people to:

Pay rent or a mortgage?

Buy show tickets, dinners, drinks, or resort weekends?

Take convention trips or family vacations to Las Vegas at all?

Pay for tickets to local events - when Super Bowl Tickets are $8,000 and F-1 Tickets start at $650 for a seat in the Grandstands

Or to pay the salaries and bonuses of the CEOs at the casinos?

IT DOESN’T!

The math only works inside a spreadsheet, not in a real human economy. At least not over the long-term.

7. A City Should Never Be Seen As Only A Financial Product For Extraction

REITs like VICI are legally structured to pay out at least 90% of taxable income as dividends to shareholders. Funds like Blackstone just want their stock to keep going up. That’s great for investors, but it means the company can’t easily sacrifice rent growth to support affordability or long-term community stability. Its fiduciary duty is to grow rent rolls, not to keep Las Vegas livable. So, they manipulate home prices to inflate their balance sheets and raise rents to keep their stocks going up so they can keep raising more money to buy more houses to rent for their investors. But in real life, things don’t work like that. And people are not just objects made to make these uncaring people running the funds richer than they already are.

Economies are vibrant living organisms, created by people doing people things. If the people doing the things people do, don’t have the money to trade for goods and services, the economies contract and become sick. They don’t function as well as they could and people hurt. Homelessness increases as does crime as people become more desperate, stressed and depressed.

If the elected officials of such cities do not have the foresight to see what the consequences of their actions (or inactions) are going to be, if they continue to let the money drunks on Wall Street doing business in Las Vegas, do whatever they want and keep abusing the citizens of our community, things can get really screwed up for everyone.

One of my favorite financial quotes is:

“Give a small group of money drunk capitalists, enough rope, in an unregulated market, and they will eventually hang everyone.” (Wall Street’s War On America - And Its Attack On Affordable Housing; Ch 1, Pg 12)

That is what I submit is happening in Las Vegas right now. And in the country for that matter.

The result is that the City of Las Vegas itself and the people who work here have been turned into financial products/objects:

The Strip is valued primarily as a stream of rent checks, not as a destination where people come to have fun and be entertained and socialize.

Housing is valued primarily as an asset for corporate landlords, not as shelter for the people who make the city function, where they feel safe and secure in a home they can call their own.

Every part of the local economy is expected to throw off ever-increasing cash flows, even as the people behind those flows see stagnant or falling real incomes.

This is not sustainable, nor is it smart.

It is slow-motion self-cannibalization.

8. What Needs to Change

If Las Vegas is going to survive — not as a logo, but as a real city where real people live, work, have fun and enjoy life — we need to confront the core delusion:

Every quarter cannot be better than the last if customers’ and workers’ incomes are not rising.

A sustainable Las Vegas would require:

1. Political Leaders at both the State and local levels with the courage to take immediate action.

2. Affordable workforce housing needs to be created

– Rent controls should be put in place and are the quickest way to accomplish that goal.

3. H.R. 1745 should be Sponsored by the Reps and Senators representing Nevada so the bill can be passed in the U.S. Congress. Nevada’s politicians need to represent the people that voted them into office, not Wall Street — or every single one of them need to be voted out of office and replaced with younger people with morals who care about the people who live in the community more than money and Wall Street. H.R. 1745 would force Corporate Landlords to sell every single-family home they own (more than 50) which would go a long way to create affordable housing quickly. It would also not allow them to buy anymore in the future.

4. Real scrutiny of sale-leasebacks and rent escalators

– State regulators and policymakers should analyze the systemic risks of locking in 30-year leases with automatic 2% rent escalations in a city so dependent on discretionary spending and do something to stop the destruction of Las Vegas, due to the greed of some money drunks on Wall Street who don’t live here and therefore don’t care about the people of Las Vegas.

5. Value-driven pricing, not endless price gouging

– People the world over love to gamble. Betting on your favorite sports team is fun. Playing cards with others is fun. Shooting craps when someone gets HOT is a type of excitement that is almost indescribable. IT’S FUN! Especially, if you pull those presses down just before they roll that seven. The Vegas that won the world was about value and access, and sometimes WINNING BIG, not $30 cocktails, $55 hidden resort fees, slots that are wound so tightly no one ever wins, 6-5 Blackjack, and triple zero roulette. People won’t keep coming to a place the makes them feel robbed every fucking time they come. Local leaders have already begun to warn that high prices are driving visitors away; but they need to follow that logic through and take real action.

6. A renewed commitment to the middle class

– 68% of the American Economy is CONSUMPTION. If tipped workers, hotel staff, line cooks, dealers, and teachers can’t afford to live here, then the entire regional economy will hollow out.

Las Vegas can either continue down the current path — with landlords and REITs from Wall Street extracting ever higher rents/wealth from the local community, while visitor numbers and local living standards erode — or it can choose a different model grounded in affordability and a strong middle class and tell Wall Street to make the necessary adjustments or GTFO.

If we want Las Vegas to remain the world-class destination it has always been, the solution is not higher rents, higher prices, and higher extraction.

The solution is simple:

Make Las Vegas affordable and FUN again — for visitors, and for the people who keep the lights on!!!

*Notes / Sources

1. VICI–Golden Entertainment sale-leaseback: $1.16B purchase price, $87M initial rent, 7.5% cap rate, 2% annual escalator from Year 3 – VICI press release & SEC filing, Nov. 6, 2025.

2. VICI ownership of ~660 acres on/near the Strip – Nevada Independent and Las Vegas Review-Journal coverage plus VICI investor presentations (2022–2024).

3. Bellagio sale-leaseback: $4.25B price, $245M initial rent with 2% escalator – MGM and Blackstone press releases, SEC filings, and REIT industry coverage (2019–2020).

4. Cosmopolitan deal: $200M initial annual rent, 2% escalator for first 15 years – MGM and landlord partnership announcements, regulatory and trade coverage (2021–2022).

5. LVCVA revenue declines: room tax and gaming fee receipts down ~14%, overall revenue down a similar amount – recent budget and statistical reports and local media coverage (Nov. 2025).

6. Visitor declines and tourism slump in 2025 – recent reporting based on LVCVA data (AP, Investopedia, others).

7. Invitation Homes ownership of 3,397 rental homes in the Las Vegas Valley – Las Vegas Review-Journal, Aug. 20, 2025.

8. Las Vegas single-family rent increases (~40% from 2019–2022) and current housing statistics – local property management and real-estate market analyses.

9. National divergence between home prices and incomes since 2000 – constructioncoverage.com research, Census and Zillow data (Oct. 2025).

10. Typical rent escalation structures in VICI leases (1–2% fixed or 2%/CPI structures) – VICI 10-Q, 10-K, and financial supplements.

Key Transaction Dates & Figures

1. Bellagio (Las Vegas Strip) real-estate sale-leaseback

   • On October 15, 2019, Blackstone/BREIT and MGM Resorts International announced a joint venture (95% BREIT / 5% MGM) to acquire the real-estate assets of the Bellagio for US$4.25 billion in a sale-leaseback transaction.

   • The transaction closed on November 18, 2019.

   • Under the lease: MGM would pay initially about US$245 million/year in rent, with annual escalations.

   • In August 2023, BREIT announced that Realty Income Corporation invested ~$950 million to acquire a minority interest (~21.9%) in the joint-venture that owns Bellagio real estate; BREIT retained ~73.1%.

2. MGM Grand Las Vegas & Mandalay Bay real-estate stake sale to VICI

   • On December 1, 2022, Blackstone/BREIT and VICI announced that VICI would acquire BREIT’s 49.9% interest in the joint-venture that owns MGM Grand and Mandalay Bay for ~US$1.27 billion in cash plus assumption of ~US$3.0 billion of property debt.

   • The transaction was expected to close in early Q1 2023.

3. The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas real-estate transaction

   • Blackstone purchased the Cosmopolitan in 2014 for ~$1.7 billion.

   • On September 27, 2021, Blackstone announced a deal to sell the operations of the Cosmopolitan to MGM and the real‐estate assets to a joint venture (Stonepeak + Cherng Family Trust + BREIT) for ~$5.65 billion.

   • The closing of this transaction was completed on May 17, 2022.

4. Formation of VICI Properties

   • VICI was spun off from Caesars Entertainment Corporation’s real-estate arm on October 6, 2017.

By Barry Ellsworth

There’s a story unfolding across America that most people sense, but very few can articulate. It lives in skyrocketing rents, eviction notices as part of the corporate landlord business model, unaffordable homes nationwide, and the disappearing middle class. It lives in cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix, Charlotte, Atlanta, Nashville — places where wages stay flat while housing costs behave like luxury goods.

And now, strangely, it also lives in the global race for data centers, cloud power, AI compute, and the infrastructure of digital surveillance.

If you connect the dots, a disturbing pattern comes into focus:

The same financial empires that helped break/destroy housing in America are now quietly becoming the landlords of the digital world.

And if you think those two realities are separate, you’re not paying attention.

1. The Housing Crisis Didn’t “Happen”— It Was Engineered

For more than a decade, private equity — led by Blackstone — has been transforming housing into a tradable, securitized financial product.

After the 2008 crash, millions of foreclosed homes were bought at pennies on the dollar. Instead of being sold back to families or first-time buyers, they became inventory for what Wall Street now calls “institutional single-family rentals.” SFR!

This new class of landlords operates nothing like traditional mom-and-pop owners. They raise rents with algorithmic precision. They file evictions as a routine business practice. They charge illegal “junk fees” for everything from paying rent online to having a pet. They under-maintain homes to preserve margins. And they treat human beings as yield streams, not tenants.

The result?

Millions priced out.

Neighborhoods destabilized.

Homeownership delayed or denied for an entire generation.

In Las Vegas — my backyard — this model has overrun the housing market. Rents and Home Prices have doubled. Fees multiplied. Evictions surged. Blackstone, Invitation Homes, Tricon, Starwood, Siegel — they turned shelter into a revenue-management algorithm.

Housing became a subscription service. A recurring charge. A toll.

And the average American became the revenue stream.

2. Meanwhile, in the Shadows, a New Asset Class Emerged

While Americans were struggling to pay rent, Wall Street discovered another gold mine: DATA CENTERS.

And just as they did with housing, private equity raced to buy it all.

Blackstone alone has spent tens of billions acquiring hyperscale data centers from Australia to Singapore to Tokyo to India — along with the power plants needed to run them. They boast openly about becoming one of the world’s largest data-center owners. They’re not wrong.

But here’s the part that should stop you cold:

Data centers are the physical infrastructure of the surveillance economy.

That’s where AI models run.

That’s where facial recognition gets processed.

That’s where casino surveillance footage goes.

That’s where law enforcement databases sit.

That’s where advertising profiles, credit scores, location histories, and consumer logs live.

These are not just server farms—they are the beating heart of modern information control.

And they’re being consolidated, rapidly, by private equity.

3. Housing Control + Data Control = Behavioral Control

For the first time in American history, the same financial forces that control where you live are now controlling the data flows that evaluate your risk, your value, your behavior, your purchasing history, and in some cases, your “threat score.”

The same firms that evict you can also analyze your face.

The same firms that set your rent can also decide which algorithms monitor your neighborhood.

The same firms that squeeze tenants now own the servers where those tenants’ digital lives are processed.

Think about what that means.

Think about how much of your life is already captured:

• Your location patterns

• Your consumer habits

• Your political inclinations

• Your browsing behavior

• Your credit signals

• Your camera and microphone data

• Your face, gait, biometrics

• Your online identity

Now imagine that the infrastructure storing and analyzing all of that data is owned by the same entities that profit when you are precarious, indebted, and surveilled.

That’s not a conspiracy.

It’s a business model.

4. Las Vegas as America’s Canary

Las Vegas is the perfect case study because it combines:

• A housing market dominated by institutional landlords, and

• A service economy saturated with some of the world’s most advanced surveillance systems.

Blackstone owns or co-owns major pieces of the Strip’s physical real estate — the Bellagio, the Cosmopolitan, and the rest of the real estate underneath the casinos operated by MGM and Ceasar Entertainments, etc. — and leases it back to operators for hundreds of millions a year in rents. Blackstone is paid more than $1.2 million per day for just these two properties alone — the Bellagio and the Cosmopolitan.

These astronomically high rents charged by the Black Hearts at Blackstone are the reason everything at the hotels (hidden resort fees, nightly parking fees, $20 bottles of water, $30 cocktails, etc.) on the Strip are so ridiculously high, and the reason they cannot be lowered. So not only has Blackstone destroyed the housing market in Las Vegas, they are now destroying the economy of Las Vegas because visitor ship is dropping like a lead balloon.

No one wants to come to Las Vegas because everything costs too much. Visitors feel like they are being ROBBED — and they are simply to pay Blackstone’s rent demands.

At the same time, they are building global data centers, buying power plants to feed them, and expanding into markets that specialize in 24/7 monitoring, AI pattern recognition, and mass data ingestion.

And what industry does Las Vegas specialize in?

Surveillance!!!

Casino surveillance is the most sophisticated civilian monitoring network in America.

When a Las Vegas resident works in casino surveillance, lives in an economic model shaped by institutional landlords, and watches his city’s affordability erode under the weight of global finance — he is living inside the system as it is being built.

He sees what most people don’t.

5. What Happens When Extraction Meets Computation

The merger of financial engineering + algorithmic monitoring creates a new form of control:

• You control housing → you control mobility

• You control data → you control visibility

• You control compute → you control behavior

• You control power → you control access

• You control surveillance → you control compliance

This is a new kind of infrastructure monopoly.

Not on roads and bridges, but on memory, identity, and reality.

6. I Almost Forget, They (Blackstone and Friends via Stonepeak and Lineage Inc) Control Most of America’s Refrigerated Food

In 2024, LINE (Lineage Inc) went public.

The largest IPO of the year circa $4.2 billion.

LINE owns the majority of the refrigerated (cold storage) warehouses in Europe and North America along with the Trucking Line that transports that food to the grocery stores in your city — Lineage Transport.

In those stores, what you buy, when you buy it, how much you buy, how much you spend buying it, including the sources you use to buy it (cash, credit cards, etc.) are all recorded along with your face with the best facial recognition software available by the most advanced surveillance technology available.

Stonepeak Partners was Blackstone’s Infrastructure Division until being spun off in 2011.

Stonepeak Partners NOW owns at least 25% of LINE (and possibly much more) because it has two board members on the Board of LINE, although that ownership and control is hidden via various entities that are partnerships owned by Stonepeak Partners.

Most retail investors would never notice this ownership.

Most journalists scanning 13Fs would never see it.

What if a decision was made NOT to transport the food?

7. A Warning, Not a Conclusion

I am not claiming that every tragedy or every violent act is directly tied to housing policy or data consolidation. Motives are personal. Lives are messy.

I am saying this:

When millions of Americans are squeezed economically and monitored digitally by the same small group of financial giants, society becomes unstable.

When people are pushed to the edge — by rent increases, evictions and threats of eviction, wage compression, surveillance pressure, medical costs, and corporate indifference—some break. Some snap. Some lash out.

We should not be surprised.

We should be alarmed.

On July 28, 2025, a 27 year-old young man named Shane Devon Tamura entered the Global Headquarters of Blackstone and killed four people. One of those people was Ms. Wesley LePatner, the Head of Core+ Real Estate and the CEO of Blackstone’s Real Estate Income Trust - BREIT. This is the division of Blackstone who has broken the housing market in not only Las Vegas, but many other cities and states throughout the nation. Shane Tamura worked for Ceasars Entertainment in Las Vegas as a Surveillance Specialist.

My heart goes out to the family of Ms. LePatner.

BREIT is the division that last year purchased AIRTRUNK the largest data center platform in Asia, making Blackstone the largest data center owner in the world.

If anyone reading this wants to believe the story that the killings had nothing to do with Blackstone, Las Vegas real estate or surveillance, and that they took place because the shooter was mentally deranged and angry at the NFL ~ be my guest.

8. What We Need to Do Next

This country needs a new public conversation about:

• Who owns our homes

• Who owns our data

• Who owns our servers

• Who owns our energy grid

• Who owns our digital infrastructure

• And who benefits when ordinary people suffer

Because right now, it’s the same answer to every question.

And until we face that, nothing changes.

Wall Street broke housing.

Now it’s building the backbone of the surveillance state.

If we don’t intervene, the next phase will be worse:

They won’t just own your rent.

They will own your reality.

THE SOLUTION — Call your Rep in the House of Representatives and ask them to Sponsor H.R. 1745 Read the Bill here: Text - H.R.1745 - 119th Congress (2025-2026): HOPE for Homeownership Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress

You can locate your Rep and get their contact info here: Find Your Representative | house.gov

Call both of your Senators and ask them to Sponsor the Bill in the Senate. You can find their names and contact information here: U.S. Senate: Contacting U.S. Senators

NOW PLEASE DO IT!!! IT ONLY TAKES A FEW SECONDS TO CALL AND YOUR ACTIONS COULD CHANGE THE DIRECTION OF OUR COUNTRY FOR THE BETTER.

When this bill is passed it would force Blackstone and every other corporate landlord to sell every single-family home they have. And the bill should be amended to make them do it within four years, not ten as it is written now, so tell them to do that also.