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money in politics
We're Renting Our Lives Away to Enrich Tech Lords and Wall Street Oligarchs
In the new, out-of-control rental economy, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you.
Dec 30, 2025
On Sunday, both President Donald Trump and his secretary of Housing and Urban Development told us that 50-year home mortgages may soon be a thing. While seemingly insane (you could end up paying more than three times the cost of the house and never escape the burden of debt before you die), this is just the latest iteration of one of American businesses’ most profitable scams: the rental economy.
It’s a growing threat to the American middle class that rarely gets named, even as it reshapes our lives every day. Over the past two decades, it’s snuck in quietly, disguised as convenience, efficiency, and “innovation.”
As a result, nothing is “ours” any more. Instead, we’re renting our lives away.
There was a time when you bought things.
It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.
You bought a house, a book, a record, a car, a word processing program. You paid once, took it home or lived in it, and it was yours. If the company went out of business, your stereo still worked. If the manufacturer didn’t get their annual payment, your computer didn’t lock you out of your own words. You could read books on your phone or pad without an internet connection to “confirm your purchase.”
That America is disappearing.
Today, almost everything that used to be a purchase has become a rental.
Take Microsoft Word. Decades ago, you bought it once and used it for years. Now it’s a monthly fee. Stop paying, and you may not even be able to open documents you wrote yourself. Adobe did the same thing. So did music, movies, and television. At first, it felt like convenience; a few dollars a month didn’t seem like a big deal.
Even the latest versions of the two major computer operating systems are essentially spyware, constantly tracking everything you do while demanding that you put all your personal information on their “cloud” servers.
Instead of buying homes, people are renting because, in part, massive New York hedge funds and foreign investors are purchasing as many as half of all the homes that come available for sale in some communities, and then flipping them into rentals. Renters can end up on the hook for their entire lives.
Even the means to get a good job—a college education—has become something you must pay for over a period of decades or even a lifetime instead of the pay-as-you-go model my generation had before Ronald Reagan gutted federal aid to higher ed. We now have almost $2 trillion in student debt—the only developed nation in the world that does this to its students—and I regularly get calls into my radio program from people in their 70s still paying off their student debt.
But this change was never really just about money. It has morphed over the past decades into a new form of corporate control over our lives and our wealth. It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.
When you own something, you decide how it’s used. When you rent, someone else makes that choice. They can raise prices, change terms, remove features, track everything you do with it, or shut it off entirely. Your “choice” becomes compliance.
The billionaire Tech Bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up, and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.
That same model has spread everywhere.
Cars used to be machines you owned. Now they’re rolling computers with features like heated seats, remote start, or performance upgrades locked behind monthly fees. Similarly, cars are increasingly leased instead of purchased. Miss your payment this month and the lender will remotely disable “your” vehicle. Your car doesn’t just take you places anymore: It reports on you.
Phones are even worse. They’re not just devices; they’re gatekeepers. Apps can be removed. Accounts can be banned. Services can disappear overnight. And because so much of modern life runs through that phone—banking, work, navigation, healthcare—being cut off isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a functional exclusion from society.
This extends from major things like our cars and homes to simple things like apps. Louise loves to play Scrabble on her phone, and would gladly pay a one-time fee for an app that doesn’t throw ads at her, track and sell her information, or demand constant interaction. Instead, since the old Scrabble app she’s used for years went to a rental model, she’s gone through a half-dozen apps, each worse than the last at demanding her interactions or throwing ads.
And to add insult to injury, layered on top of this rental business model is a vast, multibillion-dollar industry harvesting our personal information.
Every website you visit. Every app you download. Every product you register just to make it work. Your location, habits, preferences, relationships, and even emotional responses are tracked, analyzed, packaged, and sold. Most often without meaningful consent, and almost always without real alternatives.
This is not how American capitalism worked for over 250 years.
The question business leaders used to ask was simple: “What unmet needs do people have that our company can satisfy with a new product or service?” You built something useful, people bought it, and that was the deal.
Today, the question has changed: “How do we make our product so essential that people can’t function without it, then crush or buy out our competitors so there’s no real consumer choice, then charge a monthly fee forever, all while extracting user data we can sell for even more profit?”
That’s not innovation. It’s parasitism.
If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee.
In this model, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you.
And because the billionaire “Tech Bros” and Wall Street oligarchs control the products, the data, and increasingly our nation’s news and social media, they also control the content and algorithms that shape public opinion.
As a result, social media and even our news (think CBS, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Fox “News”) increasingly doesn’t just reflect reality, they engineer it to get us to think of this new rental economy as normal, as innovative, as The Way Things Should Be.
In addition to profitably amplifying outrage, profitably distorting truth, and polishing the public image of this new rental economy—all to create billions in ongoing month-after-month profits—America’s billionaire tech lords and the right-wing politicians they bankroll (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) are manufacturing our consent (to apply Noam Chomsky’s phrase).
Thomas Jefferson warned that people are inclined to suffer evils while they are sufferable rather than abolish the forms to which they’ve grown accustomed. The billionaire Tech Bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up, and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.
It’s gotten so bad that apps—which also acquire and then sell our data—have emerged that track our “subscriptions” so we can try to get it all under control. They’re advertising them on TV every day: Get this app to find out what apps are secretly extracting your cash because you long ago forgot you clicked on that link.
None of this was inevitable.
The solution is not to smash technology or retreat into the past. It’s for government to once again work for the 99% instead of the 1%. That means once again regulating money in politics, private equity, social media, data harvesting, and the out-of-control rental economy that has replaced ownership.
It means breaking monopolies, restoring regulatory independence, making education affordable, supporting home and car ownership, and reaffirming that democracy—not billionaires—sets the rules of the road.
Technology should serve human freedom, not manage it. Markets should reward service and quality of content, not extraction. People should be able to choose to pay or not to pay for things from apps to the functionality of your car or home’s HVAC system.
Nothing is ours any more. Not the road, not the floor. If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee.
If we don’t act to regulate this out-of-control rental economy, we may one day realize we didn’t lose our wealth and even our democracy all at once: We simply rented our way out of it.
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As the Year Ends, What Did We Choose to Fund?
Cancer and other noncommunicable diseases remain chronically underfunded in low- and middle-income countries. This neglect is not only unjust; it is destabilizing.
Dec 28, 2025
As the year draws to a close, I find myself thinking about what lingers after the headlines fade.
I am thinking about the corridors of a cancer conference in Tunisia, where doctors, nurses, scientists, students, and patients from across Africa gathered with a shared purpose: to reduce the burden of cancer in places too often overlooked. In conversation after conversation, I heard stories of ingenuity and quiet endurance; clinicians delivering chemotherapy with limited supplies, researchers building cancer registries on borrowed computers, patients selling what little they own to stay alive.
One young oncologist from Rwanda told me he is learning to speak differently with his patients about cancer. Not just about treatment protocols, but about fear, dignity, and hope. He explained how language itself can heal, how empathy can ease suffering even when resources are scarce. I called him the prophet—not because he predicted outcomes, but because he understood that healing begins with trust.
A breast cancer survivor from Gaza spoke of women forced to leave home in search of treatment, only to face drug shortages and fractured care across borders. Their struggle is not only against disease, but against politics and geography that interrupt therapy and shorten lives.
If the year ahead is to mean progress, it will depend on whether we choose to align wealth with wisdom and urgency with solidarity.
These stories stayed with me when I returned home; and when I read, almost casually, about tens of millions of dollars spent to influence a single political race in New York City. I could not stop doing the math. How many nurses could that money train? How many pathology labs could it equip? How many mothers could it help live long enough to watch their children grow?
We live in a moment when the science to dramatically reduce cancer and other noncommunicable diseases already exists. Prevention works. Diagnostics work. Treatment works. Yet survival remains a cruel lottery of birth. A child with leukemia in Boston, Heidelberg, or Tokyo has more than an 80% chance of survival. The same child in Kampala, Dhaka, Sana’a, or Gaza faces odds closer to 20%; not because science has failed, but because access has.
This inequity is not academic for me. I am living with stage IV cancer. My treatment is possible not because I am exceptional, but because of where I live. My ZIP code granted me specialists, hospitals, and medicines that millions of people around the world cannot access. In an era of breathtaking biomedical progress, this disparity is increasingly difficult to defend.
Meanwhile, vast sums continue to flow effortlessly toward political influence, luxury consumption, and fleeting spectacle; multimillion-dollar celebrations, couture collections, brief trips to the edge of space. Excess has always existed, and it always will. The question is not whether extravagance can be eliminated, but whether it must remain our highest expression of success.
History shows us another option. Coordinated global investment transformed the trajectory of HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. Millions of lives were saved not because the science was perfect, but because resources were mobilized with urgency and moral clarity. When funding aligns with purpose, outcomes change—quickly and dramatically.
Yet cancer and other noncommunicable diseases, now responsible for most deaths worldwide, remain chronically underfunded in low- and middle-income countries. This neglect is not only unjust; it is destabilizing. Untreated cancer weakens families, strains health systems, and erodes trust in institutions. The consequences ripple far beyond individual patients.
As the year ends, it is worth asking what our spending reveals about our values. Conferences like the one I attended in Tunisia are not only scientific gatherings; they are moral ones. They confront us with the gap between what is possible and what we choose to prioritize.
We live in a world of abundance and absence, sometimes within the same news cycle. One story celebrates money deployed for influence; another recounts lives lost for lack of basic medicine. These are not separate realities. They are the result of collective choices.
As the new year begins, we will make choices—about budgets, priorities, and what we choose to celebrate. Those choices will determine who receives care and who waits, who lives and who is left behind. Science has already shown us what is possible. If the year ahead is to mean progress, it will depend on whether we choose to align wealth with wisdom and urgency with solidarity, deciding, at last, that saving lives deserves the same resolve we devote to influence, attention, and prestige.
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History Won't Remember the Crowd: It Will Remember What the Crowd Built
If we want a nation of citizens and not subjects, we must do the slow, steady, unglamorous work of taking back our republic, one precinct, one institution, and one election at a time.
Oct 20, 2025
The No Kings Day protests last weekend were breathtaking. Seven million or more Americans filled streets across the country explicitly condemning the way Trump has been running our country. They carried handmade signs, sang freedom songs, and for one afternoon reminded the nation that resistance still burns hot.
But here’s the hard truth: that energy, that passion, that righteousness means very little if it doesn’t translate into structure and leadership. Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light or fail to produce results.
We’ve seen it before. The Women’s March drew millions. Occupy Wall Street electrified a generation. Black Lives Matter shook the conscience of the nation. But without leadership, durable organizations, funding networks, and consistent strategy, these movements faded from the political field as quickly as they filled it.
Protests without public faces and follow-through are like fireworks. Beautiful, brief, and gone before the smoke clears.
Real change doesn’t happen on the screen or even in the streets. It happens in the precincts, in the county offices, in the long nights where volunteers count ballots or knock on doors. With education, spokespeople, and specific demands.
The last time I saw my late buddy Tom Hayden was when we were both speaking in Dubrovnik, Croatia some years ago. I was doing my radio program live from there and we reminisced on the air about Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the organization he helped start with the Port Huron Statement and I was a member of in East Lansing.
Like the American Revolution, the Civil Rights movement, the union movement, and the women’s suffrage movements before it, SDS’ success in helping end the war in Vietnam didn’t just come from mass mobilizations (although they helped), but flowed out of an organizational structure and local and national leaders who could articulate a single specific demand to end the war.
As Frederick Douglass famously said in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” That demand must be loud, specific, recurrent, and backed by organization and leadership.
When the Occupy movement, for example, was taken over by a group of well-intentioned people who insisted that no leaders or institutions emerge within it, they doomed it to obscurity.
Trump’s neofascist administration understands this dynamic; it’s why they came down so brutally on student leaders in the campus anti-genocide protests. They succeeded in preventing either institution or leadership from emerging in a meaningful way.
Modern protests often reward attention, not action. Social media loves the march, the chant, the sign, and the photo that goes viral. Trump’s people complain and mutter about “hate America marches” but generally tolerate them, assuming they’ll fizzle out like Occupy did. The click feels like participation.
But power never bends to viral content. While the George Floyd protests did produce some changes, those (particularly diversity, equity, and inclusion) are aggressively being rolled back by Republicans with little protest because there’s no institution or leadership to lead the protest against their retrograde actions.
Authoritarian politicians understand this better than anyone. They know that a protest can be permitted because as long as it limits itself to protest it burns itself out. A million tweets feel like movement, but they evaporate by morning. The noise is cathartic, and the system stays the same.
Real change doesn’t happen on the screen or even in the streets. It happens in the precincts, in the county offices, in the long nights where volunteers count ballots or knock on doors. With education, spokespeople, and specific demands.
The campaign of Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor is a great example; here we’re seeing real leadership and an effective organization that he’s built around his candidacy. It’ll be an inspiration for an entire new generation.
That’s the difference between the America that not just marched in movements but also created organizations with structure, leadership, and a specific vision of the future they’re fighting for.
The movements of the 1960s, for example, changed America because they had leadership, structure, and strategy. The civil rights, labor, and anti-war movements were powered by organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SDS, and the United Farm Workers. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Tom Hayden, and Dolores Huerta trained others, built networks, and turned protest into policy.
Those marches were not spontaneous. They were the culmination of years of organizing in churches, union halls, on campuses, and in living rooms. King’s March on Washington was not the movement; it was the exclamation point on a decade of strategy.
Today, our movements are broader, younger, and more diverse, but also largely fragmented and leaderless. Social media spreads outrage faster than ever, but it can’t replace the disciplined institutions that have historically held movements together. If we’re to save American democracy, we can’t only have bursts of energy without long-term direction.
It is not that people lack courage; they lack coordination. The right-wing oligarchs intent on destroying our democracy built their empire from the ground up with the Powell Memo and, more recently, Project 2025 as specific blueprints.
For more than 40 years, the Republican Party has been playing a long game. While Democrats chased the next election cycle, conservatives built a media empire.
They invested in talk radio, cable news, think tanks, and local media outlets. They funded the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and a constellation of dark-money groups that shape laws before most people even hear about them. They worked the school boards, city councils, and state legislatures. They didn’t just build candidates. They built infrastructure.
And it paid off.
When a bought-off, well-bribed Clarence Thomas delivered the deciding vote in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 to legalize bribery of judges and politicians, that decision’s infrastructure became their weapon of choice. Suddenly billionaires and corporations could pour unlimited, even anonymous, money into the political bloodstream. And, most significantly, the right already had the arteries and veins in place.
While progressives held rallies, conservatives bought the megaphones, built the institutions, and found, elevated, and empowered leaders and spokespeople. The result is a minority right-wing movement that dominates America through structure and leadership, not popularity or protest.
Democrats have good people, good policies, and good intentions but lack a unified strategy and clear leadership. Too often, the party reacts instead of leads. It posts instead of plans. It wins headlines and loses legislatures. It’s most senior people often dither rather than project power and leadership.
Right now, when the right pushes disinformation and chaos, the left too often offers silence or even confusion. We need a structure that says: Here is the America we would govern, and here are the people ready to govern it.
Money is speech, the court told us. But that was a lie designed to cement oligarchy. Citizens United allowed the wealthy to flood elections with cash, to buy influence, to capture regulators, and to shape policy without accountability.
The result is an American political economy that serves the powerful and distracts the rest. Billionaires fund propaganda networks that pretend to be news. They back think tanks that write laws to protect monopolies and suppress wages. They fill campaign coffers so thoroughly that elected officials become their employees.
This is not a conspiracy theory: It’s an accounting statement. Follow the money and you’ll find the fingerprints of the same handful of billionaire and corporate donors behind almost every regressive policy of the last two decades.
The GOP didn’t just accept this system. They engineered it. And they exploit it to this day.
The right has been building its machine since the Powell Memo in 1971. The left must start today.
If democracy is to survive, Democrats—and small-d democrats—must build an infrastructure that competes on a similar footing. That means fundraising systems that depend on millions of small donors instead of a few billionaires. It means community-level leadership development. It means institutions that outlast elections. And it requires specific demands.
Real resistance begins with message discipline. Every Democrat, every progressive organization, every citizen who believes in democracy must be part of a single, steady chorus: Defend democracy, restore the middle class, protect the planet, guarantee healthcare and education for all, and—most important—get big money out of politics while establishing a legal right to vote.
The right repeats its talking points until they become accepted truth. We must do the same, only with facts, compassion, and moral clarity.
Endurance is just as essential, and in that sense Indivisible—the one organization that’s really emerged so far to lead this movement—has gotten us off to a great start.
The movement, however, can’t fade when the crowds disperse or when social media moves on. It has to grow in the offseason, in county offices, at organizing meetings, in living rooms, and in campaign trainings that prepare the next generation of leaders.
Change starts locally, which is where you can volunteer and show up. Conservatives understood long ago that power begins on school boards, city councils, and election commissions. They built from the ground up while progressives often looked to Washington. If we’re serious about reclaiming democracy, it must start in those same local arenas where laws are written and values are taught.
We must also be clear about what we stand for. Protest is not policy.
Real policy means repealing Schedule F, protecting voting rights, restoring oversight, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing concentrated wealth, defending reproductive freedom, guaranteeing healthcare and education for every American, making it as hard to take away your vote as it is to take away your gun, and finally removing the corrupting influence of money from our political system.
These are not slogans: They’re the foundation of a functioning democracy, which has been dismantled bit by bit over the years by the billionaires who own the GOP.
And none of this will succeed long-term without strong progressive media. We need to restore and support newsrooms and platforms that report truth, tell stories that matter, and counter the billionaires’ propaganda networks. If we fail to shape the narrative, those who profit from lies will continue to shape it for us.
Finally, real resistance requires action with purpose. Outrage alone changes nothing. When the powerful refuse to listen, we must act with the same courage that fueled the labor movement and the fight for civil rights. Strikes, boycotts, confronting violence with nonviolence, and coordinated economic pressure are how ordinary people force extraordinary change.
As Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Douglass, Jane Addams, King, Cesar Chavez, Huey Newton, and Hayden (among others) taught us, history moves when citizens organize, persist, and make injustice impossible to ignore.
The right has been building its machine since the Powell Memo in 1971. The left must start today. We must be as disciplined, organized, and relentless as they are, but with a moral compass that points toward democracy to counter their fascist project.
The No King Day protesters reminded the world that America still has a conscience. But a conscience without a plan is a sermon without a church.
The next phase of this movement must be structural. We need think tanks, training programs, legal defense funds, local newspapers, coordinated communication networks, and candidates ready to lead at every level. We need to replace despair with design and get inside and animate the Democratic Party.
Democracy is not defended by hashtags. It’s defended by hands, millions of them, building, voting, organizing, and refusing to quit when the cameras are gone.
The No King Day marches were righteous and inspiring. But history will not remember the crowd: it will remember what the crowd built.
If we want a nation of citizens and not subjects, we must do the slow, steady, unglamorous work of taking back our republic, one precinct, one institution, and one election at a time.
Volunteer for your local Democratic Party and become a precinct committeeperson. Join Indivisible. Run for local office and participate with local pro-democracy organizations. Show up.
That is the revolution worth marching for.
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