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...

Household debt reaches new heights, and somehow the takeaway from the corporate elite is always: try harder, grind longer, and budget your way out of systemic inequality.

The U.S. healthcare system: where continuously treating an illness is a lucrative revenue stream and actually curing a patient is considered a threat to the financial bottom line.

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-...

Turns out tariffs are super effective—if your goal is to raise prices, fuel inflation, and still lose tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs. Feeling ‘liberated’ yet?

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...

"In virtually every case, the actual emissions were higher — often much higher — than the estimates, ProPublica found. At one steel industry plant near Pittsburgh, a potent carcinogen was found at levels more than 30 times higher than estimated." www.propublica.org/article/epa-...

"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...

According to the American Bankruptcy Institute, individual Chapter 7 bankruptcy filings have increased 15% during the first 9 months of 2025, compared to the same time period in 2024.

Late-Stage Capitalism: A system so efficient it convinces you your suffering is self-improvement

"Trump’s attempts at influencing the economic data produced by the US government are clearly authoritarian in intent, and a degradation of current practices in the US." developingeconomics.org/2025/10/15/t...

Art of the Deal!

"On the consumer side, monopoly control over platforms and interfaces allows a single firm to decide what products appear first, which content is amplified, or which services are accessible at all." jacobin.com/2025/10/algo...

🧵When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, 80% of the city flooded, trapping over 100,000 residents. But not everyone was equally affected.

"That law changed strict bright-line media ownership rules that prohibited acquisitions of local stations by chains and moved them to a discretionary system where regulators could approve such acquisitions" www.levernews.com/the-origins-...

So far in our series on Hurricane Katrina, we’ve explored how the storm wasn’t just a natural disaster — it revealed decades of inequality, government neglect, and opportunistic profiteering. populareducationblog.substack.com/p/hurricane-...

"Race, poverty, and limited access to automobiles were key factors that left Black residents disproportionately vulnerable, especially in low-lying neighborhoods where evacuation was nearly impossible." populareducationblog.substack.com/p/demographi...

"New Orleans was constructed and expanded in accordance with economic initiatives that were designed to increase trade and industrial production at the expense of environmental degradation." populareducationblog.substack.com/p/new-orlean...

"Despite advanced knowledge of New Orleans susceptibility to a potential major Hurricane, decades of disinvestment and neglect resulted in an unprepared bureaucracy incapable of delivering humanitarian aid in the moment of crisis." populareducationblog.substack.com/p/hurricane-...