The Freedom Illusion — Part II
How they built a system to extract everything—and taught you to blame each other
If we’re going to truly grasp the concept of neo-slavery—the system I described in Part I that extracts your wealth through debt, suppressed wages, and engineered life events—we need to take a step back. We need to look at the systems of slavery that came before, probably in a way you were never taught in school.
This isn’t a detour. This is the foundation.
Because the system extracting wealth from you today didn’t emerge from nowhere. It’s the latest version of a technology that’s been refined for four centuries on American soil. The mechanisms update. The language changes. The targets rotate. But the extractors—the beneficiaries—they’re the same class, the same interests, generation after generation.
Reader Advisory
This series is written more like a short book released in parts than a set of blog posts. Each installment is long, dense, and (at times) dark.
That’s not because the goal is despair. The goal is clarity—because hopelessness thrives when the pattern is felt but never named.
Please pace yourself. Read in chunks. Stop when you need to. Come back when you’re ready.
If you stick with it (even in chunks), this is what you’ll get:
A usable map + real receipts — the story of how the system was built, with specific “wait… what?” facts you can verify, share and even change minds with.
Pattern recognition that changes how you see the present — so chaos stops feeling random and starts looking like the predictable output of incentives and institutions operating as designed.
Language for hard conversations — a way to understand how ordinary people get pulled into harmful narratives (explanation, not justification) without instantly collapsing into partisan/culture-war traps.
Grounded hope + a strategy frame — proof the system is bendable, and a clearer sense of where leverage actually is: what must be constrained, what must be rebuilt, and what a real solution looks like if we actually want out of the extraction loop.
What This Article Is—And Isn’t
Let me be direct with you about what you’re reading.
This is not a lecture about racism. You’ve heard those. This is not an attempt to make you feel guilty about history you didn’t create. And it is absolutely not a claim that racism isn’t real.
The racism is real. The hatred is real. The violence—from the lash to the lynching tree to the police bullet—is real. The intergenerational trauma carried in Black bodies and Black communities is real. The white supremacist who screams slurs believes what he’s saying. The discrimination in hiring, housing, lending, and policing produces measurable, devastating outcomes. None of this is theater.
White supremacy is a self-contained evil. It would be wrong even if no one profited from it. But someone did profit from it. Someone designed it to be profitable. And someone continues to exploit it today—including exploiting the white people who carry the hatred.
And—because both things can be true—the racism serves a purpose beyond itself.
This article traces how extraction systems have used race as a tool for four hundred years. Not because race is fake, but because understanding how racism was built helps us understand what we’re up against—and who the real enemy is.
The poor white farmer who lynched Black men in 1920 was a perpetrator of evil. He was also a mark in a con—paid in the “psychological wage” of whiteness instead of actual wages, taught to punch down instead of looking up at who was robbing him. Both things are true. The moral culpability is his. And the system was designed to produce him.
You’re living in the latest version of that system. The skin colors in the crosshairs shift. The mechanisms update. But if you can’t see the through-line, you’ll never see the cage you’re in.
The Seed and the Fertilizer
Racism didn’t begin with American slavery. European prejudice against Africans predates the transatlantic slave trade—rooted in religious othering, unfamiliarity, and the human tendency to fear difference. The seed existed.
But slavery in the British colonies—and later the United States—industrialized that prejudice. It took a weed and fertilized it into a forest.
Here’s what the economic incentive did: it transformed casual bias into systematic ideology. When there’s money to be made—enormous, generational, nation-building money—from treating human beings as property, you need a story that makes it acceptable. You need your victims to be less than human in the eyes of everyone, including themselves.
By the start of the Civil War, the South was producing 75% of the world’s cotton.1 The economic value of enslaved people exceeded the invested value of all the nation’s railroads, factories, and banks combined.¹ The Confederacy, had it been a separate nation, would have ranked as the fourth richest country in the world.¹
That kind of wealth doesn’t just tolerate moral compromise. It demands ideological infrastructure. You can’t brutalize people for profit if you see them as fully human. So the system built a worldview that made brutalization feel righteous.
This is the feedback loop: economic incentive amplified prejudice into ideology, and ideology protected economic extraction.
The Moral Laundering
Enter Christianity—or rather, a corrupted version of it weaponized for profit.
The “Curse of Ham” became the theological cornerstone of American slavery.2 According to this interpretation, Noah cursed his son Ham’s descendants to be “servants of servants”—and despite zero biblical evidence that Ham was the ancestor of African peoples, Christian slaveholders insisted he was.
This wasn’t fringe theology. It was mainstream. It appeared in sermons, in political speeches, in the catechisms taught to enslaved people themselves. It gave slaveholders permission to sleep at night.
The logic worked like this: We’re not stealing people’s lives for profit. We’re civilizing them. Christianizing them. Bringing them out of African darkness into the light of Christ—even if that light came with chains, whips, and the systematic destruction of families.
This is moral laundering. You take something evil, run it through religious machinery, and it comes out smelling like righteousness.
And if you think this sounds familiar—if you’re hearing echoes of modern evangelical leaders blessing cruelty as God’s will—you’re paying attention. The machinery never stopped. It just found new products to launder.
Slavery as Extraction Technology
Strip away the ideology and look at what slavery actually was: a closed-loop wealth extraction system.
Labor value captured: The enslaved person works. The enslaver keeps 100% of the value produced. The worker receives nothing—not wages, not equity, not skills that transfer to freedom.
Generational wealth blocked: An enslaved person cannot accumulate assets. Cannot pass wealth to children. The children inherit nothing but their parents’ bondage.
Extraction points engineered: Every life event becomes a profit opportunity. Birth produces more “property.” Death settles debts. Sale breaks families while generating revenue. Even the most intimate human experiences are monetized.
Mobility eliminated: Legal, physical, and economic barriers prevent escape from the system.
Sound familiar? It should. This is the same architecture I described in Part I—wages calibrated to subsistence, debt as the new chain, life events that drain equity, generational wealth transfer blocked.
The technology hasn’t changed. Just the interface.
The First Pivot: Emancipation Without Liberation
The Civil War ended “slavery”. But it did not end extraction.
The planter class faced a crisis: How do you maintain a labor force you can no longer legally own? How do you keep extracting wealth when the law says your workers are free?
The answer: sharecropping—slavery with a rental agreement.
Here’s how it worked: A formerly enslaved family “rented” land from the same people who once owned them. They were given seed, tools, and supplies—on credit. They worked the land. At harvest, they owed the landlord a share of the crop (typically half to two-thirds). Whatever remained was supposed to pay off their credit debt.3
But the landlord controlled the books. The landlord set the prices for supplies. The landlord decided what the crop was worth. And somehow—mysteriously, inevitably—the sharecropper always ended the year still in debt.
Once in debt, sharecroppers were forbidden by law to leave until the debt was paid.³ They could be arrested for vagrancy if they tried. They could be forced back to work under the state’s penal system. They were, in every meaningful sense, re-enslaved—just with paperwork.
This wasn’t a failure of Reconstruction. This was the system working exactly as designed. The extraction continued. The mechanism simply updated.
Here’s the lesson the Civil War should have taught us. You can shed blood on the battlefield and put ink on paper—but none of it matters unless you dismantle the underlying ideologies. The Union left the extraction system intact: the planter class kept their land, their capital, their power. And it left white supremacy unchallenged as a social force. With both ideologies still in place, they found each other again. Let either persist, and they will both regenerate—no matter the legal structure in place.
Convict Leasing: The 13th Amendment’s Back Door
The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery—with one exception. Read the text:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, shall exist within the United States.”
That exception wasn’t an oversight. It was a door left deliberately open.
Within months of ratification, Southern states passed “Black Codes”—laws that applied specifically to Black people, criminalizing existing while free.4 Loitering. Breaking curfew. Vagrancy. Not carrying proof of employment. Walking on the wrong side of the street.
Arrest rates soared. And the newly arrested were leased to private companies—railroads, mines, plantations—who worked them, often to death.
By 1898, 73% of Alabama’s entire state revenue came from convict leasing.⁴ Seventy-three percent. The state was literally funded by re-enslaving Black people through a legal loophole.
The conditions were often worse than antebellum slavery. Under chattel slavery, an enslaver had financial incentive to keep their “property” alive. Under convict leasing, if a prisoner died, the company just leased another one. There was no investment in human survival.
This is what extraction looks like when it stops pretending: bodies as raw material, worked until they break, replaced when they do.
Convict leasing persisted in various forms until World War II. The 13th Amendment loophole remains in the Constitution today.
The Psychological Wage
Here’s the question that haunted W.E.B. Du Bois: Why didn’t poor whites and poor Blacks unite?
They had the same economic enemy. The planter class exploited them both—paying poverty wages to poor whites while extracting free labor from enslaved people, then keeping both groups fighting each other instead of looking up. A united working class could have transformed the South. Why didn’t it happen?
Du Bois’s answer, in his 1935 masterwork Black Reconstruction: poor whites were paid in a different currency.5
“The white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness.”
They weren’t paid in money. They were paid in status. In the knowledge that no matter how poor they were, there was someone below them. Someone they could look down on, dominate, exclude. Someone they were legally and socially empowered to terrorize.
This psychological wage was deliberately structured by the ruling class. It cost the planter nothing—you don’t have to pay for a caste system once it’s established—but it bought loyalty that money couldn’t. Poor whites would fight and die to defend a system that was robbing them, as long as that system let them feel superior to someone.
Let me be clear: accepting this bargain was a moral choice. The poor white farmer who joined lynch mobs and voted for segregation was not a helpless victim. He had agency. He chose cruelty. He is culpable for that choice.
And—because both things can be true—he was played. He traded potential class solidarity for psychological comfort. He got the feeling of superiority while the planter class got the money.
The con worked then. It works now. Every time you’re told that immigrants are stealing your jobs, that “woke” corporations are your enemy, that coastal elites look down on you—you’re being offered the same deal. A psychological wage instead of an actual one.
The Feedback Loop Solidifies
Here’s what happened over generations: the racism became real.
Not real in the sense that it was ever justified—it wasn’t. But real in the sense that it became self-sustaining. Parents taught children. Preachers sanctified it. Laws encoded it. Terror enforced it.
By the early 20th century, white supremacy didn’t need capital to push it forward anymore. It had its own momentum. The violence of lynching, the humiliation of Jim Crow, the daily degradations—these weren’t orchestrated by elites in boardrooms. They were carried out by ordinary white people who had internalized the ideology completely.
The extraction system had created a monster it no longer fully controlled.
And yet—the extractors kept exploiting it anyway. Racial division remained useful for preventing labor organizing. The psychological wage kept poor whites voting against their economic interests. The system fed on itself: racism produced division, division enabled extraction, extraction funded the perpetuation of racism.
This is why it’s not enough to say “racism serves capitalism.” It’s more complex than that. Racism is both a tool of extraction AND a self-perpetuating ideology. The two feed each other. You can’t defeat one without understanding both.
Consider what else the white supremacist ideology produced during this era. For the first 145 years of the republic, there were no permanent national origin quotas limiting European immigration. Then the Ku Klux Klan, at the height of its power with as many as four million members, demanded Congress pass permanent restrictions. The Immigration Act of 1924 delivered: racial quotas explicitly designed to exclude "undesirable" nationalities, with Harry Laughlin—a eugenicist—appointed as the House Committee's official "Expert Eugenics Agent."6 That same law created the modern concept of "illegal immigration" by requiring visas for the first time and making unauthorized entry deportable. A century later, we're still treating "illegal alien" as a legitimate framework for debate—a concept created by eugenicists wearing bedsheets for hats. We ended Polio. We invented the internet and quantum physics. And yet, we're still debating whether human beings can be "illegal" purely because of the power of ideology to ingrain itself when allowed to persist.
The Exception That Proves the Rule: The New Deal
Something remarkable happened in the 1930s and 1940s.
When the extraction system slowed—when policy temporarily aligned with workers instead of capital—two things happened in tandem: the middle class was built, and with it, the foundation for the Civil Rights Movement.
The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organized workers across racial lines. By 1940, over 200,000 Black workers had joined CIO unions.7 For the first time in American history, poor whites and poor Blacks were standing together in significant numbers, demanding better wages, better conditions, shared power. The interracial labor militancy of the era spread from “the textile factories of the Piedmont South to CIO outreach programs in Chicano Los Angeles.”⁷
The New Deal coalition brought African Americans into the Democratic Party. The number of Black federal officials rose dramatically. William Hastie became the first Black federal judge. The first Office of Civil Rights was established in the Department of Justice. Executive Order 8802 banned discrimination in defense industries.
This wasn’t utopia. The New Deal had serious racial limitations—many programs excluded Black workers by design. The South remained segregated. Violence continued. Racism persisted as a self-sustaining ideology.
But here’s what also happened—and this is critical to understand, even though it came at an unjust cost: white people started building wealth. Black Americans were deliberately excluded from much of this prosperity. The GI Bill’s benefits were administered by states that denied them to Black veterans. FHA loans built white suburbs while redlining trapped Black families in disinvested neighborhoods. This exclusion was real, it was intentional, and its effects compound to this day.
And yet—the rising white middle class reveals something important about the extraction system itself. When white workers had unions, homeownership, and stable wages, they no longer needed the psychological wage as desperately. When you’re actually getting ahead, you’re less invested in making sure someone else stays behind. When economic extraction slows, the racial pressure valve releases. The tragedy is that Black Americans were locked out of that relief. The lesson is that the relief was real—and it points toward what becomes possible when extraction stops for everyone.
Black Americans, despite continued discrimination, gained footholds in federal programs, political organization, and economic opportunity that previous generations never had. By 1940, African Americans “wielded an arsenal of protest tactics and were marching on a path toward full citizenship rights.”⁷ World War II accelerated these trends—the full-employment wartime economy meant Black workers found “both more and better jobs” than ever before.
The Great Depression and New Deal era, for all its limitations, “laid the groundwork for the postwar black freedom struggle.”⁷ The Civil Rights Movement didn’t emerge from nowhere. It emerged from a generation that had tasted—however imperfectly—what it meant when the system worked for people instead of extracting from them.
When the system works for people, they stop needing to tear each other apart. And when people stop tearing each other apart, they start demanding their rights.
This is the causal chain the extractors understood. And they knew they had to break it.
The Counter-Offensive: The Powell Memo
The extractors watched the New Deal era and its aftermath with alarm.
Labor unions were powerful. The middle class was growing. Racial integration was advancing. Consumer protection movements were gaining strength. And in 1971—with the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the EPA, and OSHA all recently established—corporate America faced a crisis.
Enter Lewis Powell.
On August 23, 1971, Powell—a corporate attorney who had defended tobacco companies against health regulations—drafted a confidential memorandum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.8 Its title: “Attack on American Free Enterprise System.”
The memo was a battle plan. Powell argued that American business was “under broad attack” from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals.” He warned that “independent and uncoordinated activity by individual corporations” would not be sufficient to fight back. What was needed: “organization... careful long-range planning and implementation... consistency of action over an indefinite period of years... the scale of financing available only through joint effort.”⁸
Powell’s recommendations read like a blueprint for the next fifty years of American politics:
Build think tanks to manufacture intellectual legitimacy for corporate interests
Monitor and attack media coverage unfavorable to business
Reshape university curricula and faculty hiring
Create legal organizations to fight in the courts
Mobilize corporate political power on an unprecedented scale
Two months after delivering this memo, Richard Nixon nominated Lewis Powell to the Supreme Court.⁸
The results were immediate and devastating. In 1971, there were 175 companies with registered lobbyists in Washington. By 1982, there were 2,445.⁸ Think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute emerged to give intellectual cover to the corporate agenda. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) began writing model legislation for state governments.
And Powell himself? He got to implement his vision from the bench.
In 1978, Justice Powell authored the majority opinion in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti—a case you’ve probably never heard of, but one that shapes your life every day.9 The ruling held that corporations have First Amendment speech rights, and that the government cannot restrict corporate spending to influence ballot initiatives.
Bellotti was the seed. Citizens United was the harvest.
When the Supreme Court ruled in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) that corporations could spend unlimited money on elections, they cited Bellotti as precedent.⁹ The man who wrote the corporate counter-revolution’s battle plan also wrote the court opinion that would eventually allow unlimited corporate money to flood American politics.
The Institutional Legacy
Look around you. The Powell Memo didn’t just change American politics. It built the infrastructure you’re living under right now.
The memo’s influence was immediate and direct. In 1973—just two years after Powell wrote his battle plan—brewing magnate Joseph Coors read it and decided American business was “ignoring a crisis.” He contacted Paul Weyrich, a young conservative activist, and provided seed funding to create the Heritage Foundation.10 That same year, Weyrich co-founded the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which would go on to draft model legislation for state governments across the country.¹⁰ Weyrich ran both organizations out of the same Capitol Hill townhouse, explicitly stating they were needed to “overturn the present power structure of this country.”
In 1979, Weyrich partnered with Jerry Falwell to create the Moral Majority, weaponizing evangelical Christianity for electoral politics. Working alongside them: James Dobson, who had founded Focus on the Family in 1977 and would establish the Family Research Council in 1983.11
In 1982, the same donor network that funded Heritage—the Olin, Scaife, and Bradley foundations—provided seed money for law students to launch the Federalist Society at Yale.¹⁰ Powell himself had written that “the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.” The Federalist Society was created to fulfill exactly that vision.
Then in 1994, Dobson and other leaders from the Weyrich network—including D. James Kennedy and Don Wildmon—founded the Alliance Defending Freedom.¹¹
Follow the through-line: The Powell Memo (1971) → Heritage Foundation and ALEC (1973) → Moral Majority (1979) → Federalist Society (1982) → Alliance Defending Freedom (1994) → today. The Heritage Foundation authored Project 2025. The Federalist Society has placed six of nine current Supreme Court justices. The Alliance Defending Freedom has been involved in over seventy Supreme Court cases—and its former senior counsel, Mike Johnson, is now Speaker of the House.
The through-line goes all the way to Dobbs. Alliance Defending Freedom drafted the Mississippi law that became the vehicle for overturning Roe v. Wade—and served on Mississippi’s legal team arguing the case.¹¹ The five justices who voted to overturn Roe were all Federalist Society members.¹¹ The organization born from the Powell Memo wrote the law; the organization funded by the same donors provided the judges. Fifty years from memo to mission accomplished.
Even Fox News traces back to this network. Remember Joseph Coors—the brewing magnate who read the Powell Memo and funded the Heritage Foundation? In 1973, the same year he launched Heritage, Coors also bankrolled Television News Inc. (TVN), a conservative news syndication service.¹⁰ Its VP of News Operations? Roger Ailes—the former Nixon media strategist who had pitched the president on creating “our own news” with “a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition” back in 1970. TVN failed in 1975, but Ailes never abandoned the vision. Twenty years later, he realized it with Rupert Murdoch: Fox News. The most powerful propaganda machine in American history was incubated in the same network that built Heritage, ALEC, and the Federalist Society.
Very little of what is happening today is coincidence. It wasn’t organic. It was a fifty-year project, executed with patience and precision, that captured the courts, the legislature, the media, the academy, and millions of minds.
Here’s what makes the Powell Memo different from everything that came before. The New Deal wasn’t designed to fight extraction or dismantle white supremacy—even though it disrupted both. It was a response to crisis, not a blueprint for transformation. The Powell Memo was a blueprint. It benefited from three things the New Deal lacked: intentionality, a systemic approach, and broad support from beneficiaries across every domain. The extractors understood that unless they could shift the country at the ideological level, their ability to extract could not survive. They understood this shift required changing the balance of power across every institution—education, media, law, culture, religion, and everything in between. They understood it would take decades of sustained investment. And then they did it.
The Powell Memo and the entire web of institutions that emerged from it were created precisely to combat the tactics the left was employing—mass protests, labor organizing, consumer advocacy. They studied what was working against them and built infrastructure to neutralize it. And they’ve been perfecting that infrastructure ever since. Meanwhile, we’re still operating in silos, still employing the same strategies and tactics from fifty years ago, wondering why they no longer work against an enemy that evolved specifically to defeat them.
The social ailments we’re dealing with today—the inequality, the polarization, the institutional rot, the rise of authoritarianism—are not accidents. They are the results of a properly planned, properly funded, properly executed, fifty-year campaign to change how Americans understand themselves and their society. We will not reverse this unless we understand that we are fighting a single ideological war, not a thousand separate battles. Black issues, gender issues, same-sex marriage, abortion rights, wealth inequality, climate change, anti-vaxxing, prison reform, addiction, homelessness—these are not different fights. They are the same fight, viewed from different angles, symptoms of the same problem. Just as the masters of extraction united across industry, geography, and scale, we must recognize the need to fight as a united front.
And here’s the hardest part: that united front must include a solidarity path to the poor white communities that have been so thoroughly weaponized by the extraction machine. Not out of some debatable sense of forgiveness for past or present errors. Forgive them, or don’t, I don’t care; but out of pragmatism, if nothing else. The extraction machine feeds on our division. Every time we treat each other as the enemy instead of the system, we feed it. Stop feeding it.
The same network weaponized both race and religion. They transformed explicit racism into coded appeals—”welfare queens,” “law and order,” “illegal aliens”—that kept white working-class voters aligned with capital against their own economic interests. Simultaneously, they manufactured abortion into a mobilizing issue for evangelicals who had never cared about it before, building a religious voting bloc that delivered elections for decades.
We’ll trace this weaponization in detail in Part III. For now, understand what the Powell Memo accomplished. The Confederacy lost the war. The extraction system won the peace—and all it took was a handful of individuals who successfully convinced their different silos to work together toward shifting the balance of power. These weren’t geniuses. Again, many of them were eugenicists wearing bedsheets for hats. Their victory was not inevitable. We have some of the greatest minds on our side. We have science on our side. There’s no good reason for us to be losing other than refusing to adapt and to cooperate across domains.
Exported Slavery: The Globalization Pivot
The extraction system didn’t just restore itself domestically. It went global.
This didn’t start with NAFTA. The hollowing out of American manufacturing began in the 1970s—Japanese and German competition, the oil crisis, then Reagan’s deregulation and union-busting in the 1980s. By the time NAFTA passed in 1993, the fracturing was already underway.12
But here’s what matters: the decline wasn’t inevitable. It was a policy choice.
Other countries faced the same pressures. Denmark developed “flexicurity”—flexible labor markets combined with robust unemployment benefits and aggressive retraining. When globalization displaced workers, the system caught them. Unemployment dropped from 10% to under 5%.13
The United States chose differently. We let capital capture the gains while workers absorbed the losses.
NAFTA delivered a swing from a $27 billion trade surplus to a $181 billion deficit, with nearly 880,000 jobs lost or displaced in under a decade.14 Then came the “China Shock”: between 2000 and 2015, somewhere between 550,000 and 2.4 million manufacturing jobs vanished.15 Entire communities hollowed out. Not temporary dislocation. Permanent devastation.
Policymakers had decades of evidence and multiple opportunities to course-correct. They chose not to.
Trade Adjustment Assistance—theoretically designed to help displaced workers—covered only 6% of affected workers.16 The relocation allowance was capped at $1,250. Year after year, as communities collapsed, policymakers faced the choice between expanding worker protections or maximizing corporate profits. They chose profits.
The problem was never globalization itself. Global trade can raise living standards when gains are shared. The problem was globalization without counterbalancing policy. Whether this benefited workers in other countries is a complex question—many saw dramatic improvements, others exploitation. The difference came down to policy: countries that spread the gains fared better than those that let the few extract from the many. The policy choices determine the outcome.
And American workers who lost everything? They were offered the same deal poor whites have always been offered: blame someone else. Not the corporations. Not the politicians. Blame immigrants. Blame China. Blame “coastal elites.”
The psychological wage, once again. Paid in resentment instead of dollars.
This pattern—transformative technology, promises of shared prosperity, gains captured by the few, losses absorbed by the many, displaced workers handed resentment instead of support—isn’t just history.
It’s happening again. Right now. With artificial intelligence.
We’ll return to AI later—because the choices we make in the next few years will determine whether this technology becomes another engine of extraction or something genuinely different. But first, we need to see how the extraction system continued to evolve domestically.
Mass Incarceration: Convict Leasing 2.0
The 13th Amendment loophole never closed. It just went industrial.
Today, the United States incarcerates more people than any nation on Earth—approximately 2 million people behind bars.17 The racial disparity is staggering: Black Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of white Americans.
And once you’re inside? The exploitation is explicit.
Incarcerated workers earn between 13 and 52 cents per hour on average.18 In seven Southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas—most prison labor is completely unpaid.¹⁸
Over 4,100 corporations profit from mass incarceration.¹⁸ Major brands—McDonald’s, Walmart, Burger King, Tyson, Victoria’s Secret, Whole Foods—have used prison labor.
Private prison companies have a financial incentive to increase incarceration. Studies show privatization leads to longer sentences and higher recidivism rates—16 to 22% higher than public prisons.¹⁷
This is convict leasing with a corporate logo. The 13th Amendment’s exception—”except as punishment for crime”—has become a business model.
And who fills these prisons? Disproportionately: Black and brown people, caught in a system of over-policing, mandatory minimums, and the drug war that Nixon advisor John Ehrlichman admitted was designed to target “the antiwar left and Black people.”
The through-line is unbroken. From chattel slavery to convict leasing to sharecropping to mass incarceration—the extraction continues. The targets are marked by race. The beneficiaries are the same extractors that’s been running this con since 1619.
The Current Con
You’re not watching history. You’re living in it.
The same system that extracted wealth through chattel slavery now extracts it through debt bondage. The same system that used religion to justify slavery now uses it to justify cruelty at the border, in the courts, in the stripping of rights. The same system that paid poor whites in explicit racial superiority now pays them in coded appeals—”law and order,” “illegal aliens,” “real Americans.”
But here’s what’s changed: the con has expanded.
The system that once paid only poor whites in psychological wages now pays all of us through a thousand screens—algorithmic outrage machines that keep you furious at your neighbors instead of your owners. The specific propaganda ecosystem varies by demographic; the mechanism doesn’t. You’re being paid in the feeling of being on the correct side instead of in money and power.
Ask yourself: is what’s being placed in front of your eyes offering a tangible path toward stoping the extraction? Or is it a palliative—something to make you comfortable while the system continues, to make you accept the status quo of both parties as inevitable?
The mechanisms update. The language changes. The interface gets friendlier. But the extraction is the same.
And here’s what they don’t want you to see: you’re the mark now.
Not just Black Americans. Not just immigrants. You. The system has expanded its target list. Your wages are suppressed by the same forces that once relied on slave labor. Your debt is the new chain. Your healthcare costs, your education costs, your housing costs—these are the extraction points, draining whatever wealth you might accumulate.
The racial hierarchy still exists. The disparities are real and measurable. Black families hold one-tenth the wealth of white families, a direct result of centuries of explicit extraction followed by decades of implicit barriers.
But the extraction system has grown hungry. It’s no longer satisfied with just devouring communities of color. It wants everyone.
That’s what Part I documented. That’s what this series is about. Not the history of racial oppression for its own sake—but the recognition that you’re caught in the same system, and if you can’t see it clearly, you’ll never escape it.
What the Defenders Will Say
This article makes claims that will provoke predictable objections. Let’s address them.
“You’re saying racism isn’t real—that it’s all just economics.”
No. Read the opening again. The racism is real. The hatred is real. The violence is real. White supremacy is a self-contained evil that would be wrong even if no one profited from it. What we’re saying is that racism was also deliberately cultivated, industrialized, and exploited by people who benefited from it—including by exploiting the white people who carried the hatred. Both things are true. Acknowledging that racism serves extraction doesn’t diminish its evil; it reveals an additional layer of it.
“Slavery was hundreds of years ago. Why can’t we move on?”
Because the specifics of slavery aren’t the point—the mechanics are. We study slavery not just to catalog historical injustice, but to identify the underlying architecture of extraction that persists across every iteration: labor value captured, wealth transfer blocked, life events monetized, mobility eliminated, division weaponized. Chattel slavery, sharecropping, convict leasing, mass incarceration, neo-slavery—the costumes change, the mechanisms don’t. These throughlines aren’t historical curiosities. They are the forces controlling your life right now—more than how hard you work, more than your education, more than which party you vote for. You can’t “move on” from something that’s still operating. You can only fail to see it.
“Poor whites suffered too—this isn’t really about race.”
Poor whites were exploited. That’s the point. They were offered a psychological wage instead of an actual one—status and superiority instead of money and power. The con worked precisely because it gave poor whites just enough to feel superior while extracting their labor almost as efficiently as it extracted Black labor. Recognizing that poor whites were marks in a con doesn’t erase racial oppression; it reveals how racial oppression was used to prevent the class solidarity that could have challenged the extractors.
“The New Deal had racist exclusions, so it wasn’t really progress.”
Correct—the New Deal was deeply compromised. Agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from Social Security and labor protections, deliberately targeting Black workers. And yet: the period still produced unprecedented interracial labor organizing, the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, and measurable gains for Black Americans. Imperfect progress is still progress. The question isn’t whether the New Deal was pure—it wasn’t. The question is what happened when extraction paused, even imperfectly. The answer: solidarity became possible. That’s why the extractors spent fifty years dismantling it.
Notice the pattern: every defense either minimizes the ongoing harm, denies the deliberate design, or demands a purity that no real-world progress can meet. The system’s defenders don’t have to win the argument. They just have to muddy it enough that you give up and go back to blaming each other.
There’s more below, but first…
If this work—tracing the through-line from slavery to your paycheck, showing you who’s been running this con for 400 years—feels worth having in the world, please consider supporting The American Manifesto. Paid subscriptions make it possible to keep exposing the architecture of extraction.
The Next Extraction Frontier: Artificial Intelligence
If you’ve been paying attention, you can already see the pattern. A transformative technology emerges. The extractors move first. Workers are displaced, gains concentrate at the top, and ordinary people are given someone to blame.
Artificial intelligence is the next inflection point. AI is coming whether we like it or not. Those with capital and political power are already deploying it. The question isn’t AI or no AI. The question is: do we surrender this technology entirely to those who want to maximize its use for extraction?
The concerns are real. AI data centers consumed up to 211 billion gallons of water in 2023.19 AI systems train on artists’ and writers’ work without consent or compensation. The World Economic Forum projects 92 million jobs displaced by 2030—and the workers who lose jobs won’t be the same people who get new ones if they come.20
These aren’t objections to dismiss. They’re reasons we can’t afford to cede AI entirely to the extractors. The same forces that will exploit AI are already exploiting everything else. Corn ethanol—pure corporate welfare—consumes 20 to 265 times more water than AI data centers.21 IP theft predates AI by decades. Job displacement is about policy, not technology. We failed that test with manufacturing. We failed it with the gig economy.
So what’s the alternative to surrender? Contestation. It starts with those of us who oppose extraction actually using AI to fight extraction, to gain institutional power. Then come the policies: compensating creators, building worker power, ensuring displaced workers don’t become acceptable losses.
The very article you’re reading exists because of AI. The American Manifesto—all of it—would not exist without these tools. I use AI for research, editing, for turning my thoughts into something you can digest. I’m autistic; my natural writing style loses readers halfway through. AI helps me reach you.
I used AI to build an activist event mapping application that’s been live for months. The same with AllThe.Services—over 100,000 lines of code to help people reclaim the internet from corporate extractors is underway. I could never have afforded to build these before; they would have cost me a small fortune. Money only extractors have and would never spend on tools designed to dismantle their power. Yet here they are. AI can provide us an advantage that the extractors are not expecting, if we choose to use AI to build people power.
Right now, two battles are being fought. The first: “AI or no AI.” The second: “who captures the value?” Those fighting the first battle are surrendering the second.
We watched this happen with globalization. Critics fought to stop trade deals entirely. The extractors wrote the rules. The deals passed anyway—and the people who might have demanded worker protections weren’t at the table. They were outside, holding signs. The extractors won both battles.
The same thing is happening now. AI is coming. The only question is whether we’ll show up to fight for how it’s used—or surrender that fight while waging a war we lack the political and capital power to win, for now.
The Path Forward
We’ve now seen the architecture: how extraction systems were built, how they adapted, how they persist.
In Part III, we’ll examine the Democratic surrender—how the party of FDR became the party of Clinton, why they capitulated to an economic model they should have fought, and the ideological trap that made them incapable of mounting effective resistance.
In Part IV, we’ll document the consequences—the deaths of despair, the fraying social fabric, the turn toward authoritarianism when hope is foreclosed.
And in Part V, we’ll provide the map forward—a catalogue of the work that traces where we’ve been, how we got here, where our current path leads, and the alternative paths available to us.
The first step was seeing the cage. Now you see how it was built.
The question remains: what are we going to do about it?
Your Move
This article makes a difficult argument: that racism is both a genuine evil and a tool of economic extraction. That white Americans who embraced racism were morally culpable for that choice, AND were manipulated into serving interests that harmed them economically.
Does holding both truths simultaneously feel coherent to you, or does it seem like a contradiction?
If you’re white, how do you reckon with the concept of the “psychological wage”? Does it describe something you’ve seen or experienced?
If you’re Black or brown, does this framing of extraction feel accurate to your experience? What’s missing?
What would cross-racial class solidarity actually look like today? What prevents it?
The comments are open. This is the hard conversation. Let’s have it.
Greg Timmons, “How Slavery Became the Economic Engine of the South“, History.com, August 28, 2025; Benjamin T. Arrington, “Industry and Economy during the Civil War“, National Park Service, August 23, 2017.
The History.com article documents that by the start of the Civil War, the South was producing 75% of the world’s cotton, and that the Confederacy, had it been a separate nation, would have ranked as the fourth richest country in the world. The National Park Service article establishes that “the economic value of slaves in the United States exceeded the invested value of all of the nation’s railroads, factories, and banks combined.”
Paul Ham, “The ‘Curse of Ham’: How People of Faith Used a Story in Genesis to Justify Slavery“, The Conversation, 2024.
Analysis of how the biblical story of Ham was distorted to provide theological justification for African slavery. Despite zero biblical evidence that Ham was the ancestor of African peoples, the “Curse of Ham” became the cornerstone of Christian defense of slavery for four hundred years. The curse gave slaveholders moral permission—you weren’t brutalizing humans for profit, you were “Christianizing” them.
Gerald D. Jaynes, “Debt Slavery“, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2025; Britannica Editors, “Sharecropping“, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2025; HISTORY.com Editors, “Black Codes“, History.com, December 4, 2025.
Three sources document how sharecropping functioned as slavery’s continuation. The debt slavery article establishes that landlords “weighed harvested crops themselves, which presented further opportunities to deceive or extort sharecroppers,” and that “sharecroppers were forbidden by law to leave the landowner’s property until their debt was paid.” The sharecropping article specifies that sharecroppers received “generally about half of what had been produced under decent arrangements.” The Black Codes article documents that Southern states “passed strict vagrancy and labor contract laws” and that “Black people were given heavy penalties for vagrancy, including forced plantation labor”—those who left before contracts ended “were subject to arrest.”
Equal Justice Initiative, “History of Racial Injustice: Convict Leasing“, Equal Justice Initiative, 2024; African American Registry, “The American Convict Leasing Program, a story“, African American Registry, 2025.
Comprehensive history of convict leasing and its connection to the 13th Amendment’s exception clause. Southern states quickly passed “Black Codes” criminalizing Black existence, then leased arrested Black people to private companies. By 1898, 73% of Alabama’s entire state revenue came from convict leasing (AA Registry). Conditions were often worse than antebellum slavery, as companies had no financial incentive to keep leased prisoners alive.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Black Reconstruction in America“, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935, p. 700.
Du Bois’s masterwork examining Reconstruction and its betrayal. Contains his influential concept of the “public and psychological wage”—the non-monetary compensation white workers received through social status, public deference, access to better schools, and the courts’ favorable treatment. Du Bois argued this psychological wage, structured by the ruling class, prevented cross-racial working-class solidarity that could have transformed the South. The direct quote from page 700: “the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage.”
Indiana History Blog, ““America First:” The Ku Klux Klan Influence on Immigration Policy in the 1920s“, Indiana Historical Bureau, April 3, 2024. HISTORY.com Editors, “Ku Klux Klan“, HISTORY, November 4, 2025. Rachel Gur-Arie, “Harry Hamilton Laughlin (1880-1943)“, Embryo Project Encyclopedia, December 19, 2014. USCIS, “Era of Restriction“, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, January 24, 2025.
The Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) established the first permanent numerical limits on immigration to the United States. The law created national origin quotas designed to preserve the existing ethnic composition of the country, effectively excluding immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. Committee chairman Albert Johnson appointed eugenicist Harry Laughlin as the committee’s official “Expert Eugenics Agent” (Embryo Project). The Ku Klux Klan, at peak membership with as many as four million members (HISTORY.com), was a major political force pushing for these restrictions. The 1924 Act also created the modern concept of “illegal immigration” by requiring visas for the first time and making unauthorized entry deportable—the Border Patrol was created that same year to enforce it (USCIS).
Britannica, “African Americans: The Great Depression and the New Deal“, Encyclopedia Britannica, 2024.
Historical analysis of racial progress during the New Deal era. The CIO organized large numbers of Black workers into labor unions for the first time—over 200,000 by 1940. The period saw unprecedented interracial labor militancy and the beginning of African Americans’ shift to the Democratic Party. Demonstrates that when economic policy aligns with workers rather than capital, class solidarity and racial progress advance together.
Lewis F. Powell Jr., “Memorandum: Attack on American Free Enterprise System“, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, August 23, 1971.
The confidential memorandum drafted by corporate attorney Lewis Powell for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, outlining a comprehensive strategy for corporate America to reclaim political and cultural power. Powell argued that business was “under broad attack” and called for coordinated, long-term action: building think tanks, reshaping university curricula, monitoring media, and mobilizing corporate political power. Two months after delivering this memo, Nixon nominated Powell to the Supreme Court. The memo’s recommendations became the blueprint for institutions like the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and ALEC.
First Amendment Encyclopedia, “First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti (1978)“, Middle Tennessee State University, 2024.
Analysis of the 1978 Supreme Court decision authored by Justice Lewis Powell, holding that corporations have First Amendment speech rights and that governments cannot restrict corporate spending to influence ballot initiatives. Called “the most important Supreme Court case no one’s ever heard of,” Bellotti established the legal foundation that Citizens United would later build upon. The same man who wrote the corporate counter-revolution’s battle plan authored the court opinion that would eventually allow unlimited corporate money to flood American politics.
Arn Pearson, “After 50 Years, This Right-Wing Law Factory Is Crazier Than Ever“, The American Prospect, October 4, 2023; Philanthropy Roundtable, “Birth of the Federalist Society“, Philanthropy Roundtable, 2025; Wikipedia, “Television News Inc.“, Wikipedia, 2025; John Cook, “Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News“, Gawker, June 30, 2011.
Documents the direct through-line from the Powell Memo to conservative institution-building. Joseph Coors read the Powell Memo in 1973 and provided seed funding to Paul Weyrich to create the Heritage Foundation. That same year, Weyrich co-founded ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), running both organizations out of the same Capitol Hill townhouse. Weyrich stated they were needed to “overturn the present power structure of this country.” In 1982, the same donor network—the Olin, Scaife, and Bradley foundations—funded the launch of the Federalist Society at Yale, fulfilling Powell’s vision that “the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.” Also in 1973, Coors bankrolled Television News Inc. (TVN), a conservative news syndication service designed to counter “liberal” network news. Roger Ailes—who had pitched Nixon in 1970 on creating pro-administration news with “a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition”—joined as VP of News Operations in 1975. TVN failed that year, but Ailes realized the vision two decades later with Rupert Murdoch: Fox News. The same money that built the Heritage Foundation incubated the most powerful propaganda machine in American history.
Southern Poverty Law Center, “Alliance Defending Freedom“, SPLC, 2025; USC Dornsife, “By ‘focusing on the family,’ James Dobson helped propel US evangelicals back into politics“, USC, 2025; Alliance Defending Freedom, “What You May Not Know: How ADF Helped Overturn Roe v. Wade“, ADF, 2022.
Traces the religious right institutional network from the 1970s to today. James Dobson founded Focus on the Family in 1977 and the Family Research Council in 1983, working alongside Paul Weyrich and Jerry Falwell. In 1994, Dobson co-founded the Alliance Defending Freedom with D. James Kennedy (Coral Ridge Ministries), Bill Bright (Campus Crusade for Christ), and Don Wildmon (American Family Association)—all figures from the same Weyrich-era religious right network. ADF has been involved in over 70 Supreme Court cases, and its former senior counsel Mike Johnson is now Speaker of the House. In 2017, ADF drafted the model legislation that became Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act, then served on Mississippi’s legal team arguing the case at the Supreme Court. All five justices who voted to overturn Roe—Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—are Federalist Society members. The organization born from the Powell Memo network wrote the law; the organization funded by the same donors provided the judges.
Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Forty Years of Falling Manufacturing Employment“, BLS, 2020.
Analysis of manufacturing employment decline from 1979-2019. Manufacturing peaked at 22% of nonfarm employment in 1979 and fell to 9% by 2019. The early 1980s saw particularly sharp declines due to Reagan-era policies, high interest rates, and a strong dollar that made exports uncompetitive. Documents how the hollowing out of American manufacturing began well before NAFTA.
Wikipedia, “Flexicurity“, Wikipedia, 2025.
Overview of the Danish “flexicurity” model combining labor market flexibility with strong social safety nets. Denmark allows liberal hiring and firing but invests more than any other country in active labor market programs and retraining. The model cut unemployment from 10% in the early 1990s to under 5%, demonstrating that globalization’s costs to workers are policy choices, not inevitable outcomes.
Public Citizen, “NAFTA’s Legacy: Lost Jobs, Lower Wages, Increased Inequality“, Public Citizen, February 2018.
Fact sheet documenting NAFTA’s economic impact over 25 years. The U.S. trade balance with Mexico and Canada swung from a $27 billion surplus before NAFTA to a $181 billion deficit. Nearly 880,000 American jobs were lost or displaced by 2002. The threat of offshoring was used to suppress wages and discourage union organizing even in industries that never moved.
Wikipedia synthesis of Autor, Dorn, Hanson research, “China Shock“, Wikipedia, 2025.
Summary of influential economic research documenting the impact of Chinese import competition on U.S. manufacturing employment. Between 2000 and 2015, the “China Shock” eliminated between 550,000 and 2.4 million manufacturing jobs. Unlike previous trade dislocations, affected communities showed little recovery even 15+ years later.
International Institute for Sustainable Development, “How to Recalibrate Trade Adjustment Assistance“, IISD, March 2021.
Policy analysis of Trade Adjustment Assistance program failures. Only 6% of workers displaced by trade received TAA benefits. The relocation allowance was capped at $1,250—insufficient to cover actual moving costs. Training programs often prepared workers for jobs that didn’t exist in their regions.
The Sentencing Project, “Private Prisons in the United States“, The Sentencing Project, 2024.
Data on the private prison industry and mass incarceration. The U.S. incarcerates approximately 2 million people—more than any nation on Earth. Studies show private prisons lead to longer sentences and recidivism rates 16-22% higher than public prisons. Private prison companies have financial incentive to increase incarceration, creating a modern echo of convict leasing.
ACLU, “Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers“, American Civil Liberties Union, 2022.
Investigation into prison labor practices. Incarcerated workers earn between 13 and 52 cents per hour on average; in seven Southern states, most prison labor is completely unpaid. Over 4,100 corporations profit from mass incarceration. The government takes up to 80% of prison wages for “room and board,” court costs, and other fees. Documents how the 13th Amendment’s exception clause has become a business model.
Brookings Institution, “AI, Data Centers, and Water“, Brookings, October 2024.
Policy analysis of AI data centers’ water consumption. Direct water usage for cooling reached approximately 17 billion gallons in 2023. When including water used for electricity generation, the total indirect water footprint reaches approximately 211 billion gallons.
World Economic Forum, “Future of Jobs Report 2025“, World Economic Forum, 2025.
Comprehensive analysis of AI’s projected impact on global employment. The report projects 92 million jobs displaced by 2030, but also 170 million new jobs created—a net gain of 78 million positions. However, the workers displaced are rarely the same workers who gain new positions, creating winners and losers in distinct populations.
U.S. Department of Agriculture, “2015 Energy Balance for the Corn-Ethanol Industry“, USDA, September 2015.
Official government analysis of corn ethanol production. The energy return on investment (EROI) for corn ethanol is barely positive. Combined with water usage estimates of 130-530 gallons per gallon of ethanol, the ~15 billion gallons of corn ethanol produced annually requires approximately 4.5 trillion gallons of water—20 to 265 times more than AI data centers.
Exceptional synthesis tracing the extraction architecture from chattel slavery through to AI. The psychological wage concept really clarifies why cross-class solidarity keeps failing even when economic interests align perfectly. What I don't see discussed enough is how the DemocraticParty's shift from New Deal coalitions to Third Way neoliberalism basically handed the extractors everything they needed without a fight. The Powell Memo succeeded because one side understood institutional power coordination while the other fragmented into single-issue activism. We're still making that mistake.
What we don't want to admit is that the people who benefit from this situation really ARE doing their best to keep it in place.
I worked at a large corporation. The pay was pretty good, except when compared to what the execs got. Everything about the execs was wrapped in secrecy because The Rest of Us would rebel if we knew what they were getting away with--they didn't want us to go public. That situation was pretty well exemplified once by an elevator at work. I pushed the button; & as the elevator ascended, I could hear a lively but muffled discussion going on inside. When the doors opened, I saw the 3 top execs in the company. I stepped inside & they immediately clammed up for the rest of ride. Gee, I wonder what they had been talking about? :/