Wild how the EU manages longer lives, lower poverty, less violence, and less debt—without turning everything into a for-profit extraction scheme.

Translation: If you’re an educated working-class person capable of identifying how society is structured to extract value upward and concentrate wealth, the state increasingly treats that political awareness as a security threat—criminalizing your existence by labeling you a domestic terrorist.

"ICE’s failure to pay its bills for months has caused some medical providers to deny services to ICE detainees, an administration source, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, told Popular Information." popular.info/p/ice-has-st...

- Billionaires’ wealth reached a record high of $18.3 trillion in 2025 - At the same time, poverty reduction has slowed - Billionaires have an ‘outsized’ influence on politics, and governments have allowed the super-rich to ‘dominate’ the media and social media www.cnbc.com/2026/01/19/b...

This surge isn’t about talent or innovation. It’s about suppressed wages, inflated asset values, and rules rewritten in capital’s favor. When labor loses power, surplus flows upward. That’s not failure—it’s capitalism operating normally.

Trump’s “Board of Peace,” according to the draft charter: • $1B buy-in for permanent membership • Trump as chairman with veto power • Trump controls the agenda and money • Members can be removed • Built as a rival to the UN www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

TVs down 98% Toys down 74% Cellphones down 43% Healthcare up 275% Childcare up 185% Housing up 111% We’ve made it cheaper to escape reality than to live in it.

Trump selling Venezuela’s oil to megadonors isn’t a scandal — it’s textbook imperialism: state power deployed to reorganize another nation’s resources for capital.

Oil CEOs aren’t saying “no” to Venezuela. They’re saying “rewrite the country first.” This article breaks down how corporate demands for legal and economic overhaul may predict the next phase of U.S. intervention. populareducationblog.substack.com/p/what-oil-e...

ICE has evolved — far beyond what most people realize. Leaked documents detail covert operations and intelligence programs hidden from public view. Here’s what’s really happening 👇 www.kenklippenstein.com/p/21-secret-...

Headlines say oil companies are hesitant about Venezuela. After a White House meeting, oil executives made clear before investing they’re demanding legal and economic changes first. This article breaks down what’s being asked for behind the scenes. populareducationblog.substack.com/p/what-oil-e...

Productivity up. Profits up. Wages down. The economy is performing exactly as the 1% designed it.

The EPA isn’t disputing that pollution causes disease and premature death. It’s disputing whether preventing that harm should interfere with corporate profit margins.

Oil executives don’t just want access to Venezuela’s oil—they want control over the rules governing it. This article shows how “investment hesitation” masks demands for deregulation, weakened sovereignty, and long-term legal guarantees. populareducationblog.substack.com/p/what-oil-e...

ICE agents who terrorize immigrants can receive high pay & student loan forgiveness. Nonprofit workers who offer food, legal help, or shelter: loan relief denied for being “improper.” This is how a disciplinary society works—violence is incentivized, care is criminalized.

"The real goal of the Trump operation lies elsewhere: reclaiming Venezuela’s oil rents for the benefit of America’s economic elite—an arrangement that peaked in the 1950s, during the mythic “golden age” endlessly invoked by the MAGA movement"

Stock charts don’t lie. U.S. oil stocks are rising on Venezuela news. This isn’t about democracy or narcotrafficking—it’s about restoring foreign access to oil and profits.

Past U.S. interventions point to a familiar outcome for Venezuela: imposed neoliberal “reforms” that transfer public assets to private investors, crushes unions, and guarantees profit extraction for foreign firms under the language of "democracy" & "freedom".

When countries in the Global South try to control their own resources instead of submitting to the Washington Consensus free-market model, they’re met with sanctions, destabilization, or invasion. Venezuela is being punished for pursuing development through economic sovereignty.

What Katrina revealed was not randomness, but demographic disparities built over decades. Long before the storm, race and poverty determined who could escape and who remained trapped. This article unpacks how that vulnerability was produced. populareducationblog.substack.com/p/demographi...

A last-minute delay of a segment exposing deportation policy isn’t just a scheduling choice. It’s a window into how media power operates: through ownership, access, and the quiet shaping of what’s deemed fit to air. www.thedailybeast.com/60-minutes-s...

Ending EPA greenhouse gas reporting follows a familiar strategy: eliminate measurement to evade responsibility. When climate harm goes uncounted, corporate power becomes harder to confront. truthout.org/articles/tru...

DOGE framed neoliberal austerity as "efficiency". Social programs and oversight were cut, spending stayed high, and corporate power faced fewer constraints. Elon’s objective was never fiscal discipline—it was political realignment further in favor of private power.

“Work harder” stops functioning as advice when the price of housing and insurance rises faster than wages. At that point, economic precarity is a structural issue and not behavioral.

Katrina wasn’t just a storm—it was the product of centuries of extraction, environmental neglect, and ignored warnings. Our series traces how history and power shaped the disaster long before 2005. populareducationblog.substack.com/p/new-orlean...

Modern capital no longer grows by building productive capacity, but by draining it. A sharp analysis of how investor extraction has replaced long-term economic growth. graceblakeley.substack.com/p/parasiti-c...

Apparently food is affordable now that we’ve switched currencies from dollars to labor.

The carceral state turns detention into a business and once it’s profitable, the system has every incentive to keep people confined.

The only real innovation in the U.S. healthcare system is figuring out how to use new technology to deny you care faster. www.kuow.org/stories/thou...

Katrina revealed what decades of racialized disinvestment, environmental degradation, and hollowed-out public institutions had already created. Our series traces this history—and how elites used the storm to push privatization and displacement. populareducationblog.substack.com/p/hurricane-...

Defense stocks dropping because peace talks are progressing is the perfect summary of capitalism: good news for humanity is bad news for shareholders.

Auto repos up, debt up, defaults up — but stocks are up too, so apparently that’s what a "healthy economy" looks like now.

Imagine looking at record profits, record executive pay, and record inequality, and concluding: yup… the minimum wage is the problem.

Katrina gets called a ‘natural disaster,’ but the real disaster was decades of segregation, poverty, disinvestment, and a city where 35% of Black households couldn’t evacuate. This piece shows what actually drowned New Orleans. populareducationblog.substack.com/p/demographi...

The American healthcare system where your survival depends less on your doctor and more on a hedge fund’s quarterly targets.

In the U.S., billionaires figured out it’s more cost-effective to buy elections than pay taxes. Apparently that qualifies as democracy.

Private equity paywalling kids’ sports is peak late-stage capitalism: even your kid’s memories are just another monetizable asset.

Katrina was not a “natural disaster” — it was 300 years of choices that put profit and extraction ahead of the land. From plantations to oil canals, the catastrophe was built long before the storm hit. Read how New Orleans was set up to fail: populareducationblog.substack.com/p/new-orlean...

Median homebuyer age is now 56. Turns out if you suppress wages and let investors hoard housing, people can’t afford… housing.

New Orleans didn’t drown from Katrina. It drowned because the Bush admin gutted flood protection while writing blank checks for Iraq. FEMA was reoriented toward counter-terror, not hurricanes. The disaster was political long before it was natural. populareducationblog.substack.com/p/the-failur...

"On a national level, 8% of the US population lives in a household that lacks access to an automobile. For comparison the rate in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina was over triple the national rate at 26%" populareducationblog.substack.com/p/demographi...

"New Orleans’ fate was sealed long before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. Through years of neglect and austerity, the federal government delivered New Orleans a verdict of despair and Katrina merely carried out the sentence." populareducationblog.substack.com/p/the-failur...

"Under the current regime of cronyism trickling down from the White House, billionaires like the Ellisons are coming out into the open, publicly chasing their personal agendas." www.cjr.org/the_media_to...

Conservatives love to fearmonger about SNAP, but here are the facts: - Most recipients work — or are kids, seniors, or disabled. - Fraud rate: ~1%. - Avg benefit: $6/day. - <2% of fed budget, yet lifts millions from hunger. - Every $1 in SNAP adds up to $1.50+ in local economic activity.

ICYMI our newest article in our Hurricane Katrina series traces how budget cuts, the War on Terror, and FEMA’s shift under Homeland Security turned disaster relief into a casualty of fiscal and political priorities. populareducationblog.substack.com/p/the-failur...

"The result is not just bad policy but also a cultural blindness: An entire generation has grown up thinking that extraction, as opposed to building, is the path to riches." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/25/o...

"Imagine if a car manufacturer invested in a taxi firm, which used the money to buy only that car manufacturer’s vehicles. The carmaker could claim rising sales, the taxi firm could say it was growing, and investors might conclude the sector was booming." graceblakeley.substack.com/p/the-ai-cir...

"Between fiscal years 2001 and 2005, federal funding was reduced by approximately 44% for flood and hurricane protection projects overseen by the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans." populareducationblog.substack.com/p/the-failur...

The Failure of FEMA: Political and Fiscal Decisions Behind New Orleans’ Vulnerability to Hurricane Katrina 🧵

"Throughout the Bush Administration, a recurring pattern emerged: the federal government wrote blank checks for the war effort in the Middle East while domestic infrastructure projects were relegated to checking the couch cushions for loose change." populareducationblog.substack.com/p/the-failur...