HeyJaredMean, Stupid Money
Trying to understand the consequences of an economic system based on debt-money
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
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- Jul 23, 2026
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- Jul 7, 2026
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Post 45 (The Final): Organized People (opens the original)
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Ye are many — they are few. — Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Mask of Anarchy,” 1819The last post left the series exactly where the machine wants everyone left: with a clear map of what should change and no route to change it. The near reforms are reversed as fast as they are won; the durable reforms are blocked by the institutions they would reform; every road runs through a captured government. If that were the whole truth, the honest thing to write would be an elegy, and this series would end in t
Post 44 What Holds (opens the original)
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Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass, 1857The last post assembled the whole machine into a single shape — an engine that demands perpetual growth, a world that can no longer supply it, a gap filled by extracting from the many and capturing the state, and a double wall of legitimation and constitutional design that keeps the many from voting it away. And it ended on the conclusion that governs everything from here: that no single reform, ho
Post 43 The Shape of the Thing (opens the original)
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We have come a long way, and through a lot of territory — sovereign debt and student loans, private equity and public banks, the Federal Reserve and the Federalist Society, eugenics and the Electoral College. It would be easy, forty-odd posts in, to experience the series as a catalog: a long list of the ways the rich are winning, one damning arc after another. That is not what it has been, and before turning to what might be done, I want to show why. The arcs were never separate investigations.
Post 42. By Design (opens the original)
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The rich dominate us not despite democracy, but through it. — Jeffrey Winters, The Blind Spot, 2026The previous post told a fifty-year story: Lewis Powell’s 1971 memorandum, Charles Koch’s machine, the courts and think tanks and astroturf, the whole apparatus arriving at 2024. Told that way, the story has a hidden implication I want to examine here, because it is the kind of error that shapes what people think can be done. A fifty-year story invites the sense that the machine is a modern distort
Post 41 Organized Money (opens the original)
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Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Madison Square Garden, October 31, 1936The last two posts were about what the rich believe and how they justify it — the four legitimations, the return of good blood, the stories that make a particular distribution of wealth feel like the order of the world. But a justification is inert until something carries it. A belief that the market’s verdict is just does not, on its own, cut anyone’
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