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inequality
When the AI Bubble Bursts, Working Families Will Pay the Price
When the housing bubble burst, approximately 10 million Americans lost their homes. What will we lose this time?
Nov 25, 2025
When the AI bubble pops, who’s going to be left holding the bag? Mainstream economists, tech oligarchs, and industry insiders are starting to sound the alarm: the current AI investment cycle is the most dangerous speculative surge in a generation. The question isn’t whether it will burst, but who will pay when it does. History tells us exactly where to look. When this bubble pops, low-income Black and Latine families will be left holding the bag—once again covering the costs of a boom that never included them.
In 2008, when the housing market crashed, it wasn’t the banks that paid the price. They were “too big to fail,” bailed out by the very taxpayers whose lives they ruined. Black and Latine families lost nearly half their collective wealth in a few short years. Entire neighborhoods were hollowed out by foreclosures, predatory refinancing, and austerity that gutted local city and municipal budgets.
We are dangerously close to repeating history. Big Tech is pouring trillions into inflating the AI bubble, venture capital poured nearly $200 billion into AI just this year, and data-center construction has exploded since 2022. Strip those investments out and the US economy would have grown just 0.1 percent in the first half of 2025. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently revised last year’s job growth downward by more than 900,000 (the largest correction since the great recession), and holiday hiring is projected to be the lowest since 2009. In 2008, we bet America’s future on the strength of toxic mortgages and a handful of big banks holding their value. The American people lost, and now we’re going back to the table with tech companies convinced that a technology already underperforming expectations will someday soon deliver profits and prosperity.
When the housing bubble burst, approximately 10 million Americans lost their homes. This time, they could lose the lights. The AI boom is driving a surge in electricity demand, and utilities are scrambling to expand grids and build new plants to power data centers that each consume as much energy as a small city. Residential power bills have already risen by double, sometimes triple digits in states with large data center projects. For low-income families, especially Black and Latine households that already spend a disproportionate share of their income on utilities, that hit is devastating. Studies show data centers are far more likely to be built in low-income and majority-Black areas, with one recent study finding that nine of the ten counties bearing the brunt of new data center expansion are low-income communities with predominantly Black populations. In other words, the communities least able to afford higher bills are subsidizing the boom that threatens to hurt them most.
The communities least able to afford higher bills are subsidizing the boom that threatens to hurt them most.
The same extraction is happening through public budgets. Cities and counties–many in majority-Black or Latine regions–are issuing bonds, upgrading grids, and extending tax breaks to attract data centers they’re told will create jobs and stability. Utilities are planning massive fossil-fuel power plant and pipeline expansions. When the bubble pops and those projects stall, debts won’t vanish. They’ll sit on the books, forcing cuts to schools, transit, and local services that residents rely on every day. It’s the same shell game as 2008, just in a new form: profits are privatized, risk is socialized, and communities already living on the margins are once again left to clean up the wreckage.
It’s not just utility bills and budgets at risk. Pension funds—retirement systems tied to teachers, municipal workers, and public-sector unions—may be the quietest and perhaps most dangerous fault line in the coming crisis. Black and Latine families hold a disproportionate share of their wealth in public pensions, and those funds are now heavily invested in tech and AI equities, chasing short-term gains just as the bubble swells. In 2008, state and local pension funds lost a half-trillion dollars as markets collapsed, forcing governments to cut benefits and services. Pain from the AI crash won’t be felt by venture capitalists. It will be felt by bus drivers in Atlanta, nurses in Detroit, and teachers in Los Angeles – the people our cities and communities rely on every day.
When the crash comes, as it inevitably will, we need to recognize it not as an accident or market correction but as the predictable result of corporate greed without guardrails.
Like many other progressives and economic scholars, I was no fan of how the Obama administration handled the last financial crisis. He bailed out the big banks, shielded Wall Street executives from accountability, and let millions of homeowners fend for themselves. When this bubble pops, Trump will likely do the same by protecting the interests of the folks sitting behind him at his inauguration—the same tech oligarchs responsible for AI’s rise—rather than the Black and Latine communities he's declared war on.
We can still prevent that outcome. We need local action demanding regulators require tech firms to pay the full cost of their energy and infrastructure demands instead of letting them hide behind public utilities. States and cities should build firewalls—clauses that protect local budgets from stranded assets and pension funds from the AI-market crash. And any jurisdiction approving new data-center projects should require binding community benefits: direct bill credits, hiring guarantees, and revenue-sharing with the neighborhoods that bear the brunt of rising costs.
But policy alone won’t be enough. When the crash comes, as it inevitably will, we need to recognize it not as an accident or market correction but as the predictable result of corporate greed without guardrails. And we need to fight like hell to make sure the richest people in the world aren’t rescued yet again while the rest of us are left to clean up their mess.
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Who's Afraid of a Socialist Mayor? The Corporate Media
These editorial boards are not afraid that Katie Wilson and Zohran Mamdani’s policies will fail—they fear that they will work, thus making a “tax the rich” agenda more popular nationwide.
Nov 23, 2025
New York City isn’t the only city to have elected a democratic socialist as mayor. Seattle voters ousted incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell for community organizer Katie Wilson, who had the endorsements of unions, Democratic clubs, and the Stranger (7/2/25), the city’s alt-weekly.
She credited her win to a “volunteer-driven campaign among voters concerned about affordability and public safety in a city where the cost of living has soared as Amazon and other tech companies proliferated,” AP (11/13/25) reported. The wire service noted that “universal childcare, better mass transit, better public safety, and stable, affordable housing are among her priorities”—similar to those of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
Corporate media are not happy about her victory, priorities or rhetoric. The Seattle Times editorial board (11/17/25) said upon her victory that she “painted her opposition as big businesses content with keeping people down,” and countered that residents will “fear that no one will come when they call 911, that parks will be unusable, that small businesses will shutter because of crime and revenues that don’t keep up with expenses.”
‘Woke Republic of Seattle’
The reliably right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (11/13/25) called Wilson “Mamdani West,” and described her as “soft on crime but tough on businesses.” The paper scoffed, “Maybe Ms. Wilson will moderate her views once she is confronted with the responsibilities of office, but the campaign had little evidence of that.” The board ended, sarcastically, “Good luck.”
In a smaller editorial, the Journal (11/17/25) mocked the “Woke Republic of Seattle,” quoting Wilson saying:
I will appoint a cabinet of exceptional leaders whose lived experiences reflect the diversity of Seattle’s Black, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latinx/Hispanic, and people of color communities, as well as that of women, immigrants and refugees, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, people with disabilities, people of all faith traditions, and residents from every socioeconomic background.
The editorial board continued:
Now, that is some coalition. But what’s a 2SLGBTQIA+ community? We looked it up. It’s apparently an acronym for Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, with the + covering anybody who feels left out.
With all of these groups to satisfy, we’re not sure there are enough jobs to go around. But may the Two-Spirit be with the mayor.
The New York Times (11/13/25) gave Wilson’s win tepid coverage, offering an unexciting news piece that failed to put her victory into context or contemplate the gravity of ousting a powerful incumbent. It also, bizarrely, quoted that defeated incumbent—and never quoted the actual winner of the race.
Childcare and other ‘goodies’
But it was the Washington Post editorial (11/16/25) about Wilson’s win that takes the cake here. And that makes sense: Socialist and left-wing activists in the Puget Sound point fingers at Amazon and other corporate giants as the main drivers of inequality.
The Post is owned by Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people on the planet. Since Donald Trump’s inauguration this year as president, the Post has vowed to become more right wing on the editorial page (NPR, 2/26/25). This fall the opinion page took a “massive stride in its turn to the right by hiring three new conservative writers after losing high-profile liberal columnists,” as the Daily Beast (10/2/25) noted.
First, the Post belittled Wilson’s proletarian life and went on to degrade her political priorities for being tied to her economic position. It said:
Who is Wilson? She does not own a car. She lives in a rented 600-square-foot apartment with her husband and 2-year-old daughter. By her own account, she depends on checks from her parents back East to cover expenses. To let them off the hook, she seeks to force residents of Seattle to pay for “free” childcare and other goodies.
“Goodies” in this case mean services that make life affordable for a working parent who doesn’t own much, like Wilson. This is in a town with feudal levels of inequality: “While one-third of residents are classified as low-income, 1 out of every 14 is a millionaire” (KCPQ, 6/12/24). Seattle’s housing rental costs are “among the highest in the nation, ranking 16th among the country’s 100 largest cities,” while the city’s “median rent is now also 47.4% higher than the US average of $1,375, placing it on par with prices in Los Angeles and Oakland” (KCPQ, 3/7/25). An op-ed in the Seattle Times (3/18/25) noted that in the state generally “hunger is on the rise” while “Food banks and meal programs are on the front lines of an unprecedented hunger crisis.”
This is truly a “let them eat cake” moment for the Bezos Post. The Post went on:
The mayor-elect’s plans will simultaneously accelerate the exodus of businesses while making the city more of a magnet for vagrants and criminals. For example, Wilson criticized Harrell’s sweeps of homeless encampments. She backed off previous support for defunding the police, but many officers remain nervous.
Like the mayor-elect in New York, Wilson wants to open government-run grocery stores, despite their record of failure. She suggested during a September event that she won’t allow private supermarkets to close locations that aren’t profitable. Instead, she wants to require them to give more notice and pay generous severance packages to their employees. “Access to affordable, healthy food is a basic right,” Wilson said.
It’s bad enough that a paper owned by a Bond villain is mad that the next mayor of an expensive city has too much compassion for the homeless. But the dismissal of the grocery store idea isn’t based in fact, as Civil Eats (8/20/25) noted that “publicly owned grocery stores already exist, serving over a million Americans every day, with prices 25 to 30% lower than conventional retail.” Civil Eats said that “every branch of the military operates its own grocery system, a network known as the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA),” with more than 200 stores around the world generating $5 billion in annual revenue. The outlet added, “If it were a private corporation, it would rank among the top 50 chains in the nation.”
‘Identifying Class Enemies’
The editorial was an echo of the Post’s earlier pearl-clutching (11/8/25) in response to Mamdani’s victory speech:
Across 23 angry minutes laced with identity politics and seething with resentment, Mamdani abandoned his cool disposition and made clear that his view of politics isn’t about unity. It isn’t about letting people build better lives for themselves. It is about identifying class enemies—from landlords who take advantage of tenants to “the bosses” who exploit workers—and then crushing them. His goal is not to increase wealth but to dole it out to favored groups. The word “growth” didn’t appear in the speech, but President Donald Trump garnered eight mentions.
Bezos, as part of the billionaire class, finds himself as the target of this year’s leftward electoral swing. “Affordability” was Mamdani’s buzzword, an offense to the Bezos board, who wanted to hear “growth,” a catchphrase for the financial elite. Bezos’ position makes sense from his rarefied position, but that is precisely why billionaire-owned media, whether it’s the Ellison family’s consolidation of TikTok and CBS or the Murdoch empire of Fox News and the New York Post, are bad for democracy. These are media that are materially situated to side with landlords and bosses over tenants and workers, but there are no outlets in major media with editorial boards that consistently lean in the other direction.
Once again, these editorial boards are not afraid that Wilson and Mamdani’s policies will fail—they fear that they will work, thus making a “tax the rich” agenda more popular nationwide.
These media don’t grapple with why voters aren’t scared of socialism and want the rich to pay more for services. It is up to them to make a case that voters should choose a political platform of consolidating political power with the billionaire class.
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Trump 2.0 Exposed the Rot at the Top; Now We Must Work to Fix It
Playing the long game requires that the rest of us learn from this revolting era—learn why the wealthy and powerful must be constrained, and learn how to constrain them.
Nov 23, 2025
Ten months of this shit. Enough to make one scream, run stark naked in the streets, mount a revolution.
But we have to play the long game. In that long game, America learns from this catastrophe—and turns those lessons into laws, rules, and norms that prevent this from ever happening again.
Much has been revealed lately, both about President Donald Trump and the rot at the top of our system.
Trump’s attempted cover-up of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has riveted the nation’s attention to the moral depravity of many rich and powerful men who raped children, with impunity.
None of this is entirely new to American politics, but it has never happened on this scale—or with this much shameless abandon.
Trump’s celebration of the Saudi crown prince who ordered the brutal killing of a Washington Post reporter has shown the moral vacuity of the CEOs who flocked to the White House dinner to honor the prince because they want his investments.
Trump’s blatant threats against corporate media whose journalists ask him hard questions and whose comedians ridicule him—and media executives’ chickenshit, obsequious responses to those threats—are exposing the dangers of giant media corporations controlling our access to the truth.
Trump’s wheeling and dealing with tech company oligarchs are revealing the cozy, incestuous ways wealth and power are concentrating in fewer and fewer hands.
Trump’s acceptance of gifts, bribes, payoffs, kickbacks, and perks from those seeking handouts shows how a demagogue cashes in on his power.
His awards of pardons, government contracts, regulatory exemptions, tax subsidies, and lower tariffs to those who bribe him reveal how an authoritarian builds power through favors.
His uses of criminal investigations, tax audits, regulatory enforcement, withholding of government funds, and vicious public smears exhibit how a neofascist punishes opponents.
None of this is entirely new to American politics, but it has never happened on this scale—or with this much shameless abandon.
Most average working Americans abide by laws and norms. Most are kind and decent.
But there is growing rot at the top of our system. And its stench can no longer be ignored.
It’s the essence of Trump and his regime. It’s also, sadly, the moral squalor of too many rich and powerful Americans.
Playing the long game requires that the rest of us learn from this revolting era—learn why the wealthy and powerful must be constrained, and learn how to constrain them.
Learn what integrity requires at the highest reaches of our government, in the c-suites of our corporations, in our universities, law firms, nonprofits, and media.
Learn that the most significant divide in America is not between the left and the right but between the bottom and the top—between the vast majority of Americans without wealth or power, and a tiny minority holding most all of it.
And resolve to prevent such moral rot from ever again taking over our nation.
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