Amna Akbar interviews Joe Soss and Joshua Page about how the criminal legal system extracts resources from the nation’s most oppressed communities and converts them into public and private revenues.

As we work toward a durable democratic future, a commitment to legislative primacy can serve as an orienting north star. Reaching that goal, however, will require using both legislative and executive tools, especially while we are working with an imperfect, hobbled, and significantly co-opted legislature.

A selection of worthy additions to your “important PDFs” folder.

Coined by a German economist in 1926, Fordism came to describe the dominant political-economic order of the mid-twentieth century. Could “Muskism” play a similar role in the twenty-first? How should we understand its distinctive regime of accumulation, and what kind of social contract does it propose?

The conviction of Anti-ICE protestors on terrorism charges represents a dangerous new front in the Trump administration’s war against the left. Yet it also highlights a longer history: over the past several decades, legislatures and courts have enacted a form of guilt by association that is antithetical to collective political action.

As Republicans tightened work requirements and eligibility rules for Medicaid and SNAP last year, Equifax’s CEO openly celebrated the profits to be made from administering this deprivation. Means-testing and administrative complexity have turned America’s safety net into a lucrative revenue stream for monopolistic private contractors, underscoring the need for public data infrastructure and simpler eligibility rules.