Escaping the Era of Extraction

How the American political and economic system dehumanizes the people, and how the people can fight back.

“And Daddy, Won’t You Take Me Back to Muhlenberg County”

In 1977, Muhlenberg County, Kentucky produced more coal than any place on Earth. At peak production, there were 3,765 miners in the County, accounting for more than 12% of the County’s total population of 30,000. The coal jobs did not just benefit the miners; they supported a small business ecosystem. Trucking, machine shops, clothiers, restaurants, insurance agencies, community banks, and car dealerships. By all accounts, the mines, though dangerous, provided the people of Muhlenberg County a decent living, comfort, a paycheck, and a good life.

But as the 1970s and ‘80s progressed, the coal jobs slowly went away. The local economy suffered as a result and never bounced back. Despite the fact that the miners produced immense wealth and shareholder value for the companies and executives that hired them, those same companies and executives abandoned the people of Muhlenberg County by the mid-1990s, leaving them to fend for themselves with no new jobs and shuttered storefronts. As John Prine wrote, “They dug for the coal ‘til the land was forsaken, and wrote it all down as the progress of man.”

I am a product of Muhlenberg County. My great-grandfather started our family car dealership—Lester Motors—in 1952 before my grandfather took over in the late-’60s.

There was a time when it was easy to sell Fords, Lincolns, Chevys, and Chryslers to folks in and around the County. They had the money, they had the need, and we had the cars. There was a great pride in carrying on my great-grandfather’s legacy. He built Lester Motors from nothing in a town that no one, including many Kentuckians, had heard of. And he, along with my grandfather and father after him, knew that carrying on his legacy meant earning the respect and admiration not only of their employees, but of the broader community.

When the coal jobs went away, so too did Lester Motors’ source of revenue. Unemployed miners and their families became cash-strapped; they weren’t spending as much on cars or service because they simply couldn’t afford it. By the recession in the early-2000s, the writing was on the wall. After 50 years of business, we, like most other small businesses in the County before and after us, shut down.

In thinking about our current historical moment, a phrase keeps popping up in my head: “Things aren’t what they used to be.” This feeling is endemic to our life as a nation at this stage in our history, and though the feeling lurks beneath the surface of our everyday lives, it exposes itself periodically in ways big and small. I call this feeling and the time that we live in the “Era of Extraction.”

The Era of Extraction

Have you noticed how crappy everything seems nowadays? I remember as a kid we had a refrigerator. We bought it in 1997. Just a simple, white refrigerator with an ice machine in the freezer door. We used it in our kitchen at first before relocating it to the garage when we moved to St. Louis. That thing lasted until about two years ago. It never needed new parts, it kept our beer and ice cream cold. And it worked just fine for 25 years before my parents relocated their other fridge to the garage. Now, you buy a new fridge and it conks out as soon as the warranty expires. Explain to me how that works?

Another example. A year ago, the left headlight went out on my 2017 Jeep Grand Cherokee. I figured it would be a simple fix, so I got on YouTube to learn how to replace it myself. Sure enough, I needed special tools to take off the bumper and find my way into the headlight compartment. So, I decided to take it to Dobbs. It cost me $800 to replace that one headlight. I am not blaming Dobbs and I’m certainly not blaming the mechanics. It’s Jeeps fault. How is it that cars are so complicated today that it costs $800 to change one lightbulb?

Okay, one last one. My wife and I were talking about my need for a new pair of sunglasses right before our honeymoon. I mentioned how much I loved my old Ray-Bans and how I’d like to buy a new pair. My phone was in my pocket. I had not searched the internet for sunglasses, nor had I typed “Ray-Bans” into Google. Lo and behold, once I pulled my phone out and began scrolling aimlessly through the internet, every banner ad was for Ray-Bans. I simply mentioned, out loud and to my wife, my interest in buying a new pair. How did Google know to target ads to me?

All of these examples are minor. However, they are quintessential examples of how “things aren’t what they used to be” and how this Era of Extraction seeks to transform us from human beings into resources from which to extract value for others.

The Era of Extraction, however, is more than crappy products and technology companies using our data to sell us things. It is an ideology embraced by the political and economic class designed to make themselves richer and more powerful and the rest of us poorer, complacent, and beholden to them. It is an Era the motto of which is, “Greed is good,” and espoused by the biggest leaches in our politics and economy; it is exemplified by high credit card interest rates, hidden fees on concert tickets, airlines toying with “standing seats” and dynamic pricing, social media companies tracking our every click, Hollywood studios shoving artless drivel down our throats, grocery stores experimenting with surge pricing, rising insurance premiums, denied claims, healthcare bankruptcies, and cost cutting and layoffs resulting in an increase in executive compensation.

This Era of Extraction was born of the marriage between bad government—by which I mean poorly regulated campaign finance and a policy apparatus run by special interest groups—and big business. Their relationship began quietly in the 1950s as the American political class embraced the Military Industrial Complex. It grew in Ivy League law and business schools in the 1970s in response to the Great Society and the expansion of equal justice and civil rights. Their relationship became public throughout the 1980s and into the 2000s with Reaganomics and Third Way neoliberalism. And now, as we fester in the Trump Era, bad government and big business grossly flaunt their marriage at our expense.

In the Era of Extraction, the people are viewed as resources, not people with intrinsic value, dignity, and worth. We are considered “human capital,” resources like oil and gas to be extracted for the prosperity and advancement of the establishment class. The political establishment wants our votes; the economic elite want our money and labor. Both view the people as nameless numbers on a spreadsheet, not humans with the freedom of expression, speech, and upward mobility.

These selfish and uncaring perpetrators of globalization, deregulation, monopolization, and the gig economy care little, if anything, about our needs. They simply care about their bottom line. And they use their deep pockets to influence career politicians to use the power of the state to direct a policy regime that benefits their class of freeloaders through the dismantling of America’s strong labor tradition, trade agreements that ship jobs overseas and artificially suppress wages, and cuts to our hard-earned Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid to finance their multi-trillion dollar tax cuts. Not only that, but bad government has allowed big business to buy 25% of our housing supply, use bloodsucking third parties to drive up the cost of healthcare and prescription drugs, defund and privatize essential services like public schools and air traffic control, and extract our personal data without our consent.

The advent of Artificial Intelligence will bring about further and immediate concerns over job displacement, wage security, and growing income and wealth inequality. After the passage of NAFTA in the 1990s, mega-corporations and freeloading corporate interests threatened workers with plant closures if they unionized or participated in strikes for better pay and benefits. We can expect these same threats to occur within the next 5 years with the rise of AI.

In my field, for instance, 47% of legal jobs can be replaced by AI. Many of the tasks that AI could automate are performed by legal assistants, paralegals, and new associate attorneys. But mid-level attorneys may be at risk too, especially those who do not have the skill to adapt quickly to technological changes. Jobs in other sectors are equally threatened by AI.

The establishment class celebrates advancements in AI as necessary and exciting technological innovation; they tell us that to compete with China we must have an equally strong adoption of AI in all sectors of our economy and even within our government.

That is a lie.

The establishment cheers AI because it rewards the already wealthy industrialists, tech oligarchs, and vulture capitalists who have bought and sold politicians like Thoroughbreds at auction. While we wait nervously for its implementation in our workplaces, we can expect that this class of financiers and private equity bros will threaten the financial well-being and job security of most American workers—both blue-collar and white-collar—just like the manufacturers did to their workers in the late-1990s and early-2000s after NAFTA and China’s entry into the WTO. These economic elite will make us work as long as they can with stagnant wages and fewer benefits because they know that we know that AI is coming to threaten our way of life while maximizing their corporate profits.

And this is the crux of the Era of Extraction. The powerful seek to maintain and accumulate more power and wealth for themselves while we, the average American, remain unprotected by a government that would rather serve the interests of big business than our own. To the elite few, we are not human; we are resources. And their political backers, those career politicians who support them, will implement policies that have their backs while we sit fighting each other over who gets to use what bathroom.

But a day is coming when we will wake up and realize that the American Dream was nothing but a pipedream. The hopes of equal opportunity, the dreams of a better future, and the fantasies of a nice house, good schools, and a sound retirement will be out of reach for the rapidly shrinking American middle-class because career politicians allowed their vampiric, freeloading corporate sponsors to suck us dry. We will be left scratching our heads, wondering what the hell happened and how things got so bad. We will become like Muhlenberg County, the place of my childhood, a once comfortable community of bustling storefronts now shuttered by a vulturous economic and political elite that has plucked every ounce of value from our land and our people and left us in economic uncertainty.

A Return to Normal

Let me clarity something for those who wish to misconstrue my words. I am not against wealth or rich people. I myself would very much like to have more money than I currently do. I, like most Americans, dream of a nice big house in the suburbs, sending my kids to private school, membership at a private golf club, and annual beach vacations.

None of what is written above is meant to denigrate or demean those who made their fortune on their own terms through hard work and innovation. Rather, my discussion on the Era of Extraction is simply to showcase the systemic realities confronting ordinary Americans as we embark on similar dreams of the good life.

When housing, childcare, and healthcare account for nearly 70% of our monthly income, it is hard to pursue the American Dream because all of our other essential spending—car payments and repairs, insurance, groceries, credit cards, entertainment—make up the remainder of our take home pay each month. That’s to say nothing of planning for retirement or saving for our kids’ education. It is a struggle just to live a middle-class suburban lifestyle today in ways that it was not just 20 or 30 years ago, and those in power do not care to assuage our concerns or relieve our burdens or anxieties.

But there is a hopeful alternative to the Era of Extraction and the feeling that “things aren’t what they used to be.” And that is a return to traditional American values and economics with a People First Agenda. The People First Agenda aims to return America to normal, to a time of shared prosperity, equal opportunity, and upward mobility through four essential components:

1. Economic freedom

2. Individual liberty

3. Good government

4. Visionary leadership

This post is a first in a series of posts that will reflect on the Era of Extraction and how certain policies contained within the People First Agenda can help provide answers to advancing a policy regime centered around the average American, not the powerful few. But before all of that, let me give a brief explanation of what I mean by each of these four components to the People First Agenda.

Economic Freedom

The idea of upward mobility and economic progress is fundamental to our American experiment, and each of us has the right to make our own way in life. That does not mean that we must each be small business owners; that is neither practical nor advisable. What this basic concept of traditional American economics does mean, however, is that the American people should not be hampered in their pursuit of a better life.

It is a basic fact that most modern Americans rely on someone else to pay them their living. This dynamic creates a power imbalance between those who work and those who sign the paychecks. It does not matter whether you are a welder, electrician, or pipefitter, or a mortgage lender, insurance adjuster, or healthcare worker, there is an innate imbalance between you and the company you work for. This imbalance creates an unspoken anxiety when you ask for a raise or request more time off. It may also cause unnecessary anxiety for the small business owner who hired you. But that anxiety should not exist in the first place.

There is power in numbers. When people band together to assert better economic outcomes for themselves and their families, they can correct the power imbalance innate to the employer-employee relationship. Unions are important for this reason. But so are industry collectives, non-union workers who work with industry leaders to curtail inequitable outcomes, especially with the rise of AI.

Other avenues for economic freedom that will be discussed in future posts include national paid leave, a living wage adjusted for inflation, affordable housing, workplace protections against the use of AI in employment decisions, Payroll Tax and Self-Employment Tax relief, the expansion of early-childhood education and access to childcare, affordable healthcare, lower credit card interest rates and a bank on junk fees, access to generational wealth, and stronger anti-monopoly laws.

All of these policies would create a floor upon which the average American could reclaim their independence, reassert their economic freedom, and become upwardly mobile again.

Individual Liberty

America’s founding documents recognize the natural rights that we share by virtue of our humanity. The Founding Fathers understood the importance of protecting our natural liberties from interference by the state. The Declaration of Independence reaffirms our inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Bill of Rights protects our fundamental rights to speech, association, religion, and press, and prevents the government from unreasonable searches and seizures, guarantees the right to a criminal jury trial, and provides for a right to privacy.

In recent years we have seen a whitling away of our individual liberties by powerful forces beyond our control. Since the advent of social media, Big Tech has used their platforms to censor and control speech and content. Even though we may not like the speech or content that people use on the internet, that does not mean that we should grant Big Tech the right to censor what we say. Doing so leads to a slippery slope of self-regulated speech and the suppression of ideas.

While simultaneously censoring what we say on their platforms, social media companies use algorithms dictate what we see. These algorithms are, perhaps, the single most destructive force to our democracy today because they keep us from acquiring different perspectives and preclude us from thinking freely for ourselves. By reinforcing our biases, the algorithms cater to our worst instincts.

But it’s not just Big Tech that controls what we see and say. The government seeks the same control and more. The Dobbs decision gutted the constitutional right of women to have autonomy over their own bodies and undermined all of our individual privacy rights—including mine as a man. Just as startling is our own acquiescence to the national security state which seeks to collect our data (oftentimes through Big Tech companies like Palantir) to spy on us. I want to keep Americans safe, but we must not be willing to say, “I have nothing to hide,” because as soon as we do that, we open the door to government overreach.

Recommitting ourselves to individual liberty starts with targeting Big Tech’s use of our personal data by passing laws requiring our consent for the use and sale of that data, and by offering us the opportunity to have all of our data wiped clean from Big Tech’s databases. It continues through protecting abortion rights for women, strengthening civil rights laws for the historically disenfranchised, and ensuring safety within our communities with common sense gun reform. If we do all of these things to protect the individual liberties of all Americans, especially those who are unlike ourselves, then we can more fully be a free and open society, the kind that our Founding Fathers envisioned with those solemn words contained in the Declaration of Independence.

Good Government

Since the 1980s, politicians have lamented the growth of government. Ronald Reagan once quipped that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Bill Clinton likewise declared, "The era of big government is over.” Bush 41 and 43 and Barack Obama had similar sentiments. And with the rise of DOGE in the second Trump Administration, concerns over waste, fraud, and abuse in government are at an all-time high.

But government is involved in our lives whether we realize it or not. When functioning properly, the government ensures that we have safe food to eat, clean water to drink, and fresh air to breathe. At its best, government implements regulations to protect workers from unsafe workplaces, provides funding for scientific research and development for disease prevention, and punishes grifters and fraudsters from preying on everyday Americans.

We cannot hide from the fact that there is bloat in the federal government. That bloat, however, comes not from government programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, but from the revolving door of corporate lobbyists who leverage their clients’ limitless funds to sway public policy in their favor.

Many members of Congress leave office to work as lobbyists. Many aides and staffers at regulatory agencies get offers from the private sector to work in-house for substantially more money due to their insider knowledge of agency protocols.

This revolving door creates a whole host of problems. For one, members of Congress are more apt to welcome former members now serving as lobbyists into their offices because of their interpersonal relationship with them. Second, the lure of high-six figure salaries means that government workers are more willing to leave their mediocre pay to join the private sector. Such incentives allow corporate special interests to hire insiders who know workarounds to their industry-specific regulations. The combined effect of this revolving door is weakened and corrupt government, one incapable and unwilling to uphold the safety and security of ordinary Americans.

The waste, fraud, and abuse that we all know is happening exists not because people making less than poverty wages are on Medicaid. Rather, it stems from the well-connected few spending $4.5 billion to leverage their connections and power to promote a policy agenda that benefits them, not us.

The People First Agenda advocates for laws that curb the excesses of bad government and promote clean, good government. That starts with outlawing government workers, members of Congress, and their staff from joining lobbying firms for at least 5 years after their service. Good government also includes pushing for a constitutional amendment to end the corporate financing of elections, implementing public funding of elections, banning Congressional insider stock trading, and, somewhat paradoxically, increasing congressional salaries for members and their staff.

Visionary Leadership

The politics of our day center around nostalgia. Politicians of all stripes look longingly to a fictional past as a guidepost for our present. Such nostalgia stymies our political imagination and the art of the possible.

We are a quarter of the way through the 21st Century, and yet, neither Republicans nor Democrats have a positive vision for America’s future. Our policies are stuck in the past. But that’s what happens when the average age of Congress is 59 and when career politicians sit comfortably in their seats with little to no competition.

While I do not think that we should long for the past, we should take lessons from it. Each successful period of American history occurred because the people had a telos, something to strive for. In the Founding Era, it was the establishment of the first and only democratic country in the world. In the 1850s and 1860s, it was the abolition of slavery and the reconstruction of our frayed fabric. In the late-1800s and early-1900s, it was the building of the railroads, the modernization of industry, and the curbing of excessive wealth and entitlement through anti-trust and worker safety measures. During the Great Depression, it was building better infrastructure, government programs to ease the burdens of poverty, and protecting our most vulnerable in old age. And in the 1960s, it was putting a man on the moon and the promotion of civil rights. All of these eras had a uniting purpose and clear goal for the American people to get behind.

But right now, we are too focused on petty partisan bickering to formulate a cohesive vision and collective purpose for America in the 21st Century.

For America to be great, America must invest in her people again. That investment includes unique public policy choices like allowing parents to place a portion of their annual child tax credit into interest-bearing accounts until their children reach adulthood; free community college and technical school; expanding public schools to include early-childhood development programs and free childcare; combatting the rise of AI in our places of work and our schools; protecting our environment from ruin so that we, our children, and our grandchildren can live in a cleaner, safer world; reforming our agriculture away from monoculture and promoting small family farms to make America healthy again; using the power and resources of the government to fund research and development to cure cancer and other terminal diseases; increasing the housing supply and modernizing our infrastructure through high-speed rail and safe air travel; cracking down on monopolistic tactics to create competition in the free market and help small businesses access greater public resources; implementing a public option for healthcare and for property and casualty insurance; raising the minimum wage, reigniting our strong labor traditions, and incentivizing collective action over personal gain; and keeping us out of unnecessary and expensive foreign wars while at the same time using our global reach and influence to promote economic growth and stability in distressed regions.

For this vision for the 21st Century to become a reality, we, the average American, must be willing to believe in ourselves once again. For too long, we have placed all of our hopes on self-interested politicians. But real change comes from us, not them.

We must be willing to put aside our biases, our differences, and our own self-interests to invest in America again; we must work together, labor together, mourn together, and grow together, to see each other as friends, not enemies, so that we can enjoy our American Dream as one, indivisible people.

More to Come

I believe in America, her promises, her hopes, her dreams. I believe in her people, the ones who make her move, who make her sing, who make her strong. It is our grit, our toughness, and our determination to overcome any obstacle that drives us, propels us to do great things, to seek higher heights, and to treasure each quiet moment. When we work together, build together, and dream together, we Americans can do anything.

But right now, our American Dream is fading fast. We are angry, frustrated, and just dead tired—tired of losing, tired of scraping by, tired of buying into a system that rewards the freeloading establishment at our expense, tired of this Era of Extraction, and tired of lamenting that “things aren’t what they used to be.” And that’s exactly where the establishment wants us: divided, confused, and willing to give up and give in.

It does not have to be that way.

If we want to escape this Era of Extraction and return to normal, we must first put aside our differences and open our eyes to the realities of the present. And presently, regardless of whether you are a Republican, Democrat, or Independent, our politics, government, and economy are not working for us. Once we recognize that reality, then we must be open to fresh perspectives, new ideas, and the setting aside of our own personal motives for the greater good of all people sharing in our American Dream.

Over the course of the next few weeks and months, I will be posting about the various policies that, unfortunately, those very same politicians that I have been skeptical about should implement on our behalf. As a Populist blog, The People’s Path is concerned about a policy apparatus that works for all people, not just the entitled few; the broad American middle- and working-class, those individuals outside of power, both economic and political.

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