Wealth extraction in America runs on two engines. The first is corporate: wealth generated not by building something of value but by capturing, controlling, or stripping value that others produced. The second is political: governmental authority — legislative, regulatory, fiscal, enforcement — used to move wealth from the many to the few. Separately, each has limits. Together, they form a self-reinforcing system that has been reshaping the American economy for half a century.
wealth extraction
Relief for Whom? Arizona’s “Tax Cut” Bill
Relief for Whom?
The Republican-controlled Arizona legislature opened the 2026 session with a tax bill they call the Arizona One Big Beautiful Bill — a deliberate echo of Trump’s federal legislation. They passed it on party-line votes, twice, and Governor Hobbs vetoed it both times. They call it over a billion dollars in tax relief. It is. For the wealthy and large businesses.
Claims vs. Reality
Universal Healthcare: We Already Know How to Do This
We spend more for fragmented healthcare than comparable countries do for universal care, and get far worse outcomes.
“Medicare for All” is a phrase with a lot of political baggage, so set it aside. What it describes is simpler: extending a system Americans already built to the rest of the population. This piece uses “universal healthcare” from here on, because that’s what it is.
Medicare works. It covers every American over 65, regardless of employment status or health history. It operates with administrative overhead of roughly 2%, compared to 12-15% for private insurers. It negotiates prices, it pays claims, and it has done so for sixty years. We know how to do this because we already do it.
Healthcare doesn’t work like a normal market.
You can’t comparison shop during a cardiac event. You don’t choose when to have a stroke. Every wealthy country that looked honestly at these conditions reached the same conclusion: healthcare cannot be organized around market competition.
The American system has grown around a different goal. The administrative apparatus — prior authorizations, claim denials, billing complexity — exists to protect revenue, not deliver care. The clinical judgment of a trained physician is overruled by a clerk or algorithm with no medical expertise and every financial incentive to deny.
Fifteen States Against Citizens United
This article was originally published on Red, Blue & Real, the author’s Substack publication. The version below includes sources and further reading.
Two Doors for Money Into Politics
Money in politics is a classically American conflict. In 2010, business interests gained an entirely new level of legal power. The change was not simply more money. It was a different kind of money, operating under different rules, in quantities that made the previous system look small by comparison.
Two federal court rulings that year dismantled major parts of a century of campaign finance law. One allowed corporations to spend directly on elections. The other created the super PAC system — unlimited independent spending, unlimited contributions, no effective ceiling.
The results reshaped American politics. Outside groups spent roughly $4.5 billion in the 2024 election cycle.5 Super PACs alone raised more than $5 billion.5 Dark money — political spending that does not disclose its original source — reached record levels approaching $1.9 billion.8
Fifteen states have now developed a legal theory intended to close the corporate spending door. The super PAC door is another matter entirely.
Weakening Unions: The Double-Breasted Trick
American workers once held a claim on the full value of their labor — wages, pensions, healthcare, job security. A legal structure called the double-breasted employer was built to take that claim apart from both sides simultaneously. One company, two arms, one owner — and the wage floor suppressed no matter which side wins the contract. This piece documents how the mechanism works, who built it, and why it now operates in an environment designed to make accountability impossible.
It is All One Pot of Money
Americans tend to think about the economy in sectors. The defense industry. The oil industry. The banking sector. The tech giants. This is a useful shorthand for what these industries produce — weapons systems, energy, credit, software — but it describes function, not ownership. The question this piece examines is a different one: at the level where the money actually accumulates, do these sectors exist as separate things at all?
The answer the ownership record suggests is largely no. The same concentrated pools of capital sit at the top of the shareholder lists across industries that are supposed to be distinct, supposed to compete, supposed to be governed by separate regulatory frameworks built around their differences. This piece assembles that picture — not sector by sector, but all at once — and asks whether economic activity at that scale is better described as productive or extractive.
The Veto Queen Story Is Missing Its First Three Chapters
Arizona voters will hear that Katie Hobbs vetoed 401 bills. That number is real. The context behind it — the audit that cost taxpayers at least $8.6 million, the structural reasons Arizona was targeted, and the wealth extraction agenda those vetoes blocked — is the part the attack ads leave out.
Maybe the Two-Party System Is a Root of Wealth Extraction
The U.S. two-party system may do more than organize elections. Its donor structure, electoral rules, and polarization dynamics may also help sustain policies that concentrate wealth.
The Overton Window: Satire Gets Deleted and Extremism Doesn’t
The Overton Window: Satire Gets Deleted and Extremism Doesn’t
I once reposted a meme showing a hospital patient in an ICE mask with the caption “ICE agents still hospitalized after being shot with cell phone.” It was funny.
Facebook deleted it, and I’ve discovered this is common. Reports from civil liberties and digital rights groups show this is a real pattern: content critical of ICE routinely disappears from major platforms.