Preamble: This is Part 2 of the MoneyScout series: "The Cost of Liberation."

The series examines the economic history of Black America - from Juneteenth to Greenwood to the modern carceral state - to reveal how the extraction class has consistently weaponized race to divide the working class and maintain control. The goal is not just to educate, but to organize because understanding the system is the first step toward building a better one.

Galveston, Texas. June 19, 1865.

"The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and property rights between former enslavers and enslaved people, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages."

When Union Major General Gordon Granger arrived to announce the end of the Civil War, he read General Order No. 3 aloud to the enslaved people of Texas. 

They might claim they want a free market, but they do not want a free people.

In a single breath, the state promised "rights of property," but immediately commanded the newly freed to stay on their former masters' land and sell their labor back to the exact same extraction class. Juneteenth announced emancipation, but without capital, emancipation was re-enslavement by contract. Here is the economic reality that day laid bare: legal freedom without economic leverage is just a longer leash.

1865: The Longer Leash

The sanitized history of the Emancipation Proclamation paints Abraham Lincoln as a moral savior. But history is driven by economics, not benevolence. In the 1860s, the South didn't have a Wall Street; its primary form of wealth was human capital. Emancipation was a calculated military strike designed to bankrupt the Confederate elite by legally removing their captive labor pool.

This weaponization of labor panic started long before the war even ended. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation faced furious protest not just from the South, but from Northern anti-war Democrats - known as "Copperheads" - and wealthy business interests in Congress. They deliberately stoked racial panic among the Northern white working class, terrorizing them with the manufactured lie that freeing enslaved people would flood Northern factories with "cheap labor" and destroy their livelihoods. It is the oldest trick in the rentier playbook: invent a cultural scapegoat so workers fight each other over crumbs instead of looking up at the bosses stealing the feast.

True liberation would have required a permanent redistribution of the South's capital. In January 1865, Union General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, confiscating the coastline from South Carolina to Florida and redistributing it in 40-acre plots to newly freed families. It was the promise of "40 acres and a mule" - the chance to own the very land they had been forced to cultivate.

But within months, Lincoln's successor, President Andrew Johnson, violently betrayed this promise. By the fall of 1865, Johnson rescinded the order and returned the land directly to pardoned white Confederates. To ensure the newly landless had no choice but to submit, the state repurposed the Freedmen’s Bureau - ostensibly created to protect the newly freed - into a contract enforcement agency. The Bureau actively forced freedpeople to sign exploitative labor contracts binding them to their former enslavers under the threat of vagrancy charges. The plantation didn't disappear - it just rebranded as sharecropping.

The Trapdoor: The 13th Amendment

Returning the land to the planters solved one problem for the extraction class, but it created another: they still needed an incredibly cheap, captive labor force to harvest it.

They found their solution in a constitutional trapdoor. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery - except as a punishment for a crime.

Almost immediately, Southern legislatures drafted the "Black Codes," explicitly designed to criminalize poverty and manufacture a new slave class. The Mississippi Vagrant Law of 1865 required Black people to carry written proof of employment and allowed authorities to arrest anyone who was unemployed, leasing them right back to white employers. 

These laws did not treat Black Americans as citizens; they functioned as punitive work visas. They made a person's very right to exist conditional upon their labor for the extraction class.

To enforce these codes, the state relied on local law enforcement agencies, many of which historically originated from runaway slave patrols. This wasn't incidental cruelty; it was a highly profitable economic model. By 1898, the state of Alabama derived a staggering 73% of its total state revenue directly from convict leasing.

That constitutional trapdoor never closed. Today, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, notoriously known as Angola, operates on an 18,000-acre tract that was once an antebellum slave plantation. Predominantly Black inmates are still forced to work those exact same fields, picking cotton for pennies an hour under the threat of solitary confinement. The extraction extends deep into modern corporate supply chains, where state inmates are leased through subcontractors to fast-food franchises and multinational corporations, legally bypassing minimum wage laws to pocket massive profits off stolen labor.

The 55 Minute Heist

The 19th-century economist Henry George noted a fundamental truth about human survival: wages are not a gift from capital; they are the direct product of the worker's own labor. You own your time, your energy, and the labor of your own hands. When the state and capital conspire to pay you less than your labor produces - or utilize legal loopholes to pay nothing at all - they are stealing your literal life.

For capital to continually expand, the system is intentionally designed so that a worker is paid less in wages than the actual value their labor produces. This is the core of Marxist economic theory regarding surplus value. There is a rich irony here: traditional libertarians will loudly argue that "taxation is theft," yet they completely fail to acknowledge that profit is stolen labor.

Consider a modern corporate example: based on annual revenue, an average Amazon worker generates roughly $218 an hour in physical value for the company, yet the median warehouse wage hovers around $18 an hour. The worker earns their entire daily wage in roughly five minutes. For the remaining 55 minutes of that hour, the remaining $200 is extracted directly by the rentier class.

To ensure the working class accepts this theft, the elite lock the tools of upward mobility behind massive paywalls. The 1960 California Master Plan established a tuition-free model for public colleges. But by 1970, Governor Ronald Reagan pushed to impose tuition fees explicitly to curb student protests, break labor discipline, and prevent the rise of what his advisors terrifiedly called an "educated proletariat".

When tuition wasn't enough, they legislated new traps. The 1998 Higher Education Act amendments created the FAFSA drug ban, stripping federal financial aid from students with drug convictions. Because the War on Drugs was disproportionately waged in low-income and minority neighborhoods, this ban functioned as a highly effective tool of educational disenfranchisement. Today, a working-class student with a minor marijuana charge is permanently locked out of higher education and pushed into low-wage precarity. At the same time, Wall Street executives legally make billions off the same plant. The result is a labor pool where one worker is permanently barred from upward mobility while another profits from their exclusion.

The American Mirage: Modern Captive Labor

When capital cannot utilize the domestic prison system to extract cheap labor, it pivots to other vulnerable populations. The state makes a massive show of criminalizing undocumented workers through systems like the I-9 mandate, yet it rarely prosecutes the corporate employers who break the law to hire them. Instead, ICE raids the workers, throwing them into detention centers to create a captive labor market. In the landmark federal case Nwauzor v. GEO Group, Inc., a historic $23 million wage theft judgment was upheld against private prison giants who forced detained immigrants to scrub floors and maintain facilities under the threat of solitary confinement for exactly $1 a day.

The same legal architecture that allows private prisons to exploit labor also enables nonprofits to exploit disabled workers under a separate legal carveout. Thanks to Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, organizations like Goodwill are legally permitted to pay disabled individuals well below the federal minimum wage, masking blatant exploitation as "job training" paying some workers as low as .18 an hour, for context it’s common for prisoners to earn .08 an hour for laundry services, .13 an hour for obedience dog training, and .21 cents an hour for professional welding services - the same welding that makes all of our states road signs. American labor, when class consciousness takes root, can make professional welding jobs earn $32 an hour, and .21 cents an hour when we let the bourgeois get their way. 

And just like former slaves we’re forced into share cropping and segregated by Jim Crow laws from the free market, prisoners are forced into a close loop economy but held in the most extortionist value as they beg for their families and friends to add money to their “books” just soq they can pay 10x as much for a hamburger or soda - much less any form of leisure such as a tv. When you are in chains, you are a slave, whether that’s in 1865 or 2026.

The immigrant laborer and the disabled worker are today’s structural sharecroppers - working alongside the native-born working class while the elite profits from our division. Capital uses borders and manufactured myths of scarcity to convince us that our neighbors are stealing our jobs, when in reality, the extraction class is intentionally cultivating an unprotected underclass to drive down wages for the entire working class.

Mutual Aid and Targeted Assassinations

When the state refuses to provide the tools for liberation, the working class must build them. Historically, the greatest threats to the extraction class have come from cross-racial coalitions that provided resources outside the capitalist framework.

In the late 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that civil rights meant nothing without economic rights. His Poor People’s Campaign demanded a radical $30 billion anti-poverty program, full employment, and a guaranteed annual income. In April 1968, he traveled to Memphis to support Black sanitation workers striking for union recognition and a living wage. He was assassinated right as his focus shifted to organizing a multiracial occupation of Washington to threaten the extraction machine.

A year later in Chicago, Fred Hampton organized the original Rainbow Coalition, successfully uniting the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and the Young Patriots - a group of poor, working-class Appalachian whites. They bypassed the capitalist state by building parallel logistical supply lines. They opened community medical clinics, organized mutual aid, and launched the Free Breakfast for Children Program. At a 1969 U.S. Senate hearing, the national School Lunch Program administrator admitted that Hampton's breakfast program fed more poor schoolchildren than the entire State of California.

This material success terrified the ruling class. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover explicitly labeled the breakfast program "the greatest threat to internal security," launching a vicious COINTELPRO campaign to destroy it. Agents sent forged letters to stores to cut off food donations, spread rumors that the food was poisoned, and launched armed raids on sites while children were eating.

When economic and psychological sabotage failed, the state turned to direct violence. In December 1969, after being drugged by an FBI informant, the 21-year-old Hampton was assassinated in his bed during a coordinated police raid.

The pattern is undeniable; the assassination of Fred Hampton and MLK to the sudden death of leaders who threaten the war profiteering apparatus of the military-industrial complex - the ruling class has consistently deployed lethal force against anyone capable of dismantling the extraction economy. First, they sabotage the food, then they eliminate the coalition builders.

The Unfinished Business of Juneteenth

We are taught in sanitized history books that Abraham Lincoln freed the enslaved people. But at the end of the day, Black people freed Black people. They escaped, they sabotaged the plantation economy from within, and they fought for their own liberation.

When Black Americans finally seized the tools of production, they built staggering prosperity. As we explored in our previous investigation of Black Wall Street, the Greenwood District of Tulsa was a bulletproof proof-of-concept for working-class financial sovereignty.

This exposes a fundamental economic truth: private capital does not invest to build communities; it invests solely to extract and expand its own wealth. Private capital sees wealth merely as a vehicle to grow more wealth. But when everyday people seize the tools of production and pool their labor into the commons, it is the public that prospers. The commons builds resilient, self-sustaining systems capable of competing directly against private interests and the status quo. When the working class unites, they create a better life for everyone involved.

The 1921 massacre was not an isolated race riot; it was the violent enforcement arm of the extraction class physically annihilating the alternative, thriving commons that put the people first.

Juneteenth was never the end of slavery - it was the day the terms of servitude were rewritten into contract law, debt-traps, and prison codes. Until those loopholes are permanently closed, June 19, 1865, remains unfinished business.

Dismantling this extractionist society requires us to transcend manufactured divisions and recognize our shared economic reality. We must demand that lawmakers pass the federal Abolition Amendment to remove the penal exception from the 13th Amendment permanently. We must pass the Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act to end subminimum wages for disabled workers. We must reframe poverty and homelessness not as individual moral failures, but as deliberate systemic failures of design.

True freedom requires an uncompromising economic floor, and we must build it ourselves. 

Collectively as a people, we must incentivize labor for the commons instead of allowing private interests to keep us shackled to the systems extortion and break free from our chains with the tools of success. The working class must come together to save the working class, because the cavalry is not coming from Washington.

MoneyScout is an OAL MEDIA production. The mission of MoneyScout is to investigate and educate about the financial issues the working class faces, both historical and modern-day, and then to propose solutions, for we are the only Americans left who believe in a better tomorrow. It is through class solidarity and working-class consciousness that we can overcome this extractionist, rent-seeking society.

[Greenwood District - Tulsa, Oklahoma 1921.]

Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1906.

A Black man couldn't get a loan from a white bank in Tulsa. So, O.W. Gurley, a Black entrepreneur, bought 40 acres of land and began selling plots to other Black families. 

By 1921, the Greenwood District held 600 Black-owned businesses, two theaters, two airports, and a dollar that circulated for nearly a year before leaving the neighborhood.

It was a beautiful display of a circular economy. It demonstrated the power of money velocity when a community pools its resources and helps one another without outside extractors. But the wealthy elite cannot tolerate the existence of an alternative that doesn’t put them on top.

The Spark

May 30th, 1921.

A 19-year-old Black shoe shiner, Dick Rowland, took a break. He traveled to the third floor of the Drexel Building, the location of the closest segregated bathroom he could use. What was a daily routine would soon become 300 dead, more than 35 square blocks destroyed, and 800 hospitalizations - all because he would be accused of sexually assaulting the 17-year-old white elevator operator, Sarah Page.

But how does a simple rumor about a Black man become the trigger to destroy the equivalent of half a billion dollars in community wealth? That’s not incidental; it’s the extraction class recognizing an opportunity.

Rowland was arrested immediately following the incident and denied any time for an investigation, while rumors quickly spread that he was to be lynched. Several hundred white men showed up outside the courthouse, thirsty for his blood. In solidarity, 50 to 60 armed Black men arrived from Greenwood with rifles and shotguns to help defend Rowland, while the sheriff and deputies begged the crowd for time to investigate.

Reports conflict on the exact timeline, but a 2001 Commission found that as the Black men were about to leave, a white man attempted to disarm a Black World War I veteran. In the chaos, a shot was fired, and all hell broke loose.

[Picture of the aftermath of Greenwood after the “riots”]

“War is the destruction of capitals.” - Henry George, Progress and Poverty.

The physical devastation of Greenwood was absolute. Over 35 city blocks went up in flames, 300 people died, and 800 were injured. During the attack, privately owned WWI planes dropped TNT from above, marking one of the first aircraft bombings of a civilian population in U.S. history. When the Tulsa Fire Department attempted to respond to the blazes, they were held at gunpoint by the white mob and forced to abandon the neighborhood - an eerie precursor to the 1985 MOVE bombing in West Philadelphia, where the state explicitly ordered firefighters to "let the fire burn."

(Note: If you are interested in a play-by-play of the historical battle, check out this great video breakdown by Extra History, but this essay focuses on economics.)

Why did the white establishment and local government tolerate and actively fuel the mob?

In Progress and Poverty, the economist Henry George wrote: "War is the destruction of Capital." The assault on Greenwood was not just a riot; it was a deliberate act of class warfare disguised as a race war.

Ironically, segregation had forced hyper-local commerce upon Greenwood, creating a closed-loop circular economy that retained capital. Because there were no outside corporate landlords extracting rent, the wealth created by Black labor stayed horizontal. Greenwood proved that the working class does not need elite capital to thrive. To the extraction class, this horizontal wealth creation was an unfortunate threat to their vertical wealth extraction.

Furthermore, Oklahoma was considered a significant economic and social opportunity by leaders such as Gurley and the politician Edward P. McCabe, leading to the establishment of over 50 all-Black towns and settlements across the state, among the highest in any state or territory. Greenwood wasn't just an isolated success; it was the crown jewel of a growing movement. The wealthy elite realized that if Greenwood's model of financial sovereignty were allowed to spread to those 50 other communities, it would completely destabilize their extraction economy.

Just as global capitalist empires use brutal sanctions and military interventions to crush socialist experiments before their models can catch on, the local bourgeois (the same elites we have been talking about this whole time) had to physically annihilate Greenwood to prevent its circular economy from becoming contagious.

The Erasure & The Beneficiaries

When the white working class burned down the homes and ruined the jobs of the Black working class, who actually profited? The white elite, of course.

The most damning economic fact of the massacre isn't the fire; it is the paperwork. Not a single rioter was arrested. Insurance companies financially shielded the white rioters by overwhelmingly refusing to pay out claims to the Black business owners, citing "riot clauses" to protect elite capital. To permanently remove any tools of capital, they orchestrated a land grab. The city moved on two fronts simultaneously: rezoning the burned land to displace survivors, and passing a ‘Fire Limits’ ordinance requiring fire-proof construction materials - a classist mandate designed to price them out of rebuilding.

[Tulsa Massacre - A line of White Police officers stand in formation watching as people crawl out of burning smoke]

It is no coincidence that the Ku Klux Klan heavily populated the local government and elite business syndicates drafting these rezoning laws. The Klan functioned not just as a mob in the streets, but as the violent enforcement arm of the extraction class, using white supremacy to execute a corporate land grab. The Klan needed little more than a rumor - and Tulsa’s white press knew it, printing that Sarah Page’s dress was ‘tattered and ruffled’ the same day as the alleged incident, an insinuation of assault calibrated to stay just outside legal defamation.

The elites functioned like colonizers, utilizing the violence to extract the land and replace one marginalized group (the Black working-class) with another (the white working-class) - a tried-and-true strategy they have used for centuries in places like Puerto Rico, where they slaughtered the indigenous people, the Taíno, and replaced them with enslaved Black people. Generational wealth was lost in an instant. The white rioters did not get richer - they just destroyed their neighbors. At the end of the day, the working class lost, and the wealthy elite won.

Where We Sit Today

Today, out of those 50 all-Black towns, only 13 still stand - hollowed out not by bombs, but by decades of credit denial and systemic starvation. Black neighborhoods still lose wealth faster, still have higher arrest rates, and possess less generational wealth than white neighborhoods. This isn't due to inherent inferiority, but because the same extraction mechanisms remain in place: predatory lending, redlining, corporate landlords, and a financial system that penalizes community-owned capital. And when that doesn’t work, the ruling class deploys the direct violence of capitalism, doing everything in its power to keep power out of the hands of the people.

The tools to reclaim our sovereignty, as Greenwood did, still exist and can be built locally. North Dakota - the only state in the U.S. to do this - operates a public bank that historically saved the state from the 2008 housing crisis and the 2020 pandemic. It can offer farmers rates as low as 1%, all because the community puts its tax reserves into a public bank rather than private banks controlled by elites.

Money velocity, collective ownership, and hyper-local commerce are still viable today through mutual aid networks, community land trusts, and credit unions. Greenwood wasn't just a historical tragedy; it was a proof-of-concept that still makes the ruling class nervous today. It proved that working-class financial sovereignty is possible. The fight for that economic liberation didn't end in Tulsa, and it didn't start there either - it is a battle Black America has been fighting for centuries, a battle Black America has been fighting for centuries, from the plantations of the antebellum South to the redlined districts of the 20th century. 

MoneyScout is an OAL MEDIA production. The mission of MoneyScout is to investigate and educate about the financial issues the working class faces, both historical and modern-day, and then to propose solutions, for we are the only Americans left who believe in a better tomorrow. It is through class solidarity and working-class consciousness that we can only overcome this extractionist, rent-seeking society.

It is the duty of the working class to possess strategic knowledge and understand the economy, for not understanding it is a failure for those who wish to own it, a system designed by the ultra wealthy to force the working class into complacency.

Thank you for reading!

You can support OAL Media at https://www.patreon.com/OALMedia

I received this question on my previous article linked to Reddit, erm, actually it went a little more like

Reddit Commenter: “Do communists/retards understand that loans have to be paid back? How does one pay back a loan against unrealized gains without realizing the gains?”

First off, I’m not a communist. I’m more of a market socialist, but someone assuming communists are retards is not someone I have high faith in understanding political nuance. That said, the core of the question is actually a great springboard.

The following is my reply to that commenter:

My sweet summer child. You still think the wealthy elites play by the same rules as you and I?

You see, SBLOC loans are designed by the wealthy, for the wealthy. And something you may have yet to discover is that the elite long ago developed class consciousness - and in doing so, they figured out exactly how to rig the rules to their advantage.

SBLOCs do not work like the mortgages you and I get (as we discussed in my previous article). If we want to access $100k, we have to take out a home equity line of credit and put our house up as collateral. The wealthy use a dedicated brokerage account.

For those out of the loop, a brokerage account is simply an investment account that lets you buy and sell assets, such as stock market shares. There’s more to them than that, but we will keep it simple for now.

Let me break down BUY-BORROW-DIE in more detail - specifically how the SBLOC loophole answers this exact question.

1. While Alive: The Infinite Money Glitch

Because an SBLOC is a revolving line of credit (unlike a mortgage or a car loan), the bank does not require the billionaire to make monthly principal payments to pay down the balance. They only charge interest. And even then, the billionaire rarely pays that interest out of pocket. Instead, they "Capitalize the Interest."

If a billionaire borrows $10 million at 5% interest against a $100 million portfolio, they owe $500,000 in interest that year. Instead of writing a check, they let the bank add that $500,000 to their total loan balance. Now they owe $10.5 million.

The Math: Why does the bank allow this? Because while the debt grew by $500,000, the stock market (averaging 8-10% annual gains) increased the billionaire's underlying portfolio by $8 million. The collateral is growing much faster than the debt. The bank is perfectly happy to let the loan roll over indefinitely because their risk is effectively zero.

And if they do want to make a payment to keep the loan balance down, they use another tool: Tax-Shielded Cash Flow.

They don't sell stock to pay the bank (which would trigger capital gains). Instead, they use cash flow from assets that the government heavily subsidizes - like the rent from real estate that is artificially shielded by the phantom "depreciation" deduction.

You’re always told there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. Unless, of course, you avoid taxes until you die. Which is exactly what they do.

2. At Death: The Ultimate Tax-Free Payoff

Here is what you really don’t understand: The loan is rarely fully paid off while the billionaire is alive. The entire point of the strategy is to defer the final balloon payment until the moment they die.

This is how the loan settles:

1. Death: The billionaire dies owing the bank $20 million, secured against a stock portfolio that has grown to $150 million.

2. The Step-Up in Basis: The heirs inherit the portfolio. The IRS "steps up" the cost basis of those stocks to their current market value of $150 million. All of the original growth is permanently erased from the tax ledger. 

3. The Payoff: The heirs instantly sell $20 million worth of the newly inherited stock. Because their "purchase price" on paper is today's market value, there is zero taxable capital gain on that sale.

The Result: The heirs hand the $20 million in tax-free cash to the bank. The loan is paid in full. The bank is made whole, the heirs pocket the remaining $130 million, and the IRS gets absolutely nothing.

Millions were extracted from the market, with not a dime going back to fund the SNAP or affordable housing programs that the actual workers, who created the value of those companies in the first place, need to survive.

Speaking of SNAP, did you know mega-corporations like Walmart intentionally underpay their workers so they qualify for food stamps? It's literally built into corporate training. They pay starvation wages, rely on the government (your tax dollars) to subsidize their payroll with SNAP benefits, and then funnel those massive profit margins back to their billionaire executives to pad their Buy-Borrow-Die portfolios.

The wealthy have always had class consciousness. It’s time we start unpacking what they actually do, so we can realize their wealth isn’t some bootstraps feat of amazement or one brilliant patented idea. They've been rigging the system from the start.

If you want to learn just how far this rabbit hole goes, follow my Substack and subscribe to the Patreon. I actually work in finance, and I'm not trying to sell you some dumb course or tell you to "never sell your Bitcoin" while secretly planning to cash out. Just look at Michael Saylor, former CEO of MicroStrategy, who openly admitted that while he told you never to sell your Bitcoin, he never said his company wouldn't sell its Bitcoin if they had to.

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It is the duty of the working class to possess strategic knowledge and understand the economy. Not understanding it is exactly what the ultra-wealthy rely on to force the working class into complacency.

We are the Only Americans Left. The cavalry is not coming, and it is up to us to fight for our home.

1. Economist David Ricardo’s law of rent suggests that, so long as housing is scarce, any wage increase will simply be a rent increase, and therefore, landlords will take any wage increase. What economic policies (appropriate to your political office) will you pass to increase the housing supply?

2. Arizona’s minimum wage is already indexed to CPI, which means wages chase inflation rather than beat it — wage policy alone cannot restore purchasing power. Beyond raising the wage floor, what economic levers appropriate to your office will you use to lower the cost of living for working Arizonans?

3. The wealth gap in America isn’t just about income - it’s structural. The ultra wealthy shelter and grow their assets through mechanisms such as Securities-Based Lines of Credit, Irrevocable Trusts, and the Buy, Borrow, Die strategy, which allows wealth to pass between generations largely untaxed. Even aggressive income or capital gains taxes leave these structures intact. Meanwhile, most working people have no ownership stake in the enterprises that profit from their labor.

What policies will you support to help working people build actual ownership and wealth - whether through worker cooperatives, Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs), profit-sharing mandates, public banking, or preferential contracting with worker-owned enterprises? And how will you address the structural tax and estate mechanisms that allow dynastic wealth to compound outside the reach of conventional redistribution?

— putting this at the end so people can get right into the questions.

PREAMBLE: For too long, political conversations about affordability have relied on surface-level fixes - temporary subsidies, nominal wage bumps, and vague promises to "cut red tape." But working-class Arizonans are facing a structural crisis, not a temporary one. Wages are merely chasing inflation, the constrained housing market extracts every hard-earned wage gain, and our current frameworks protect dynastic wealth while taxing labor.

We are not looking for platitudes, and we do not need you to diagnose the problem - we all know the rent is too high. This section is designed to identify candidates who understand the actual mechanics of economic exploitation and have the political courage to dismantle them. We want to know your concrete mechanisms for shifting power, capital, and true ownership back to the working people who build this state.

Please be specific. Cite the exact levers, policies, and structural reforms you will champion if endorsed.

____

Recently, independent media commentator Chris Valenti, highlighted a fascinating trend: the high-profile pundits who helped build the modern MAGA movement are publicly and vocally jumping ship.

CHECK OUT CHRIS’S NEW VIDEO

The Breakdown: A Coalition Splintering

In his latest breakdown, Chris pieces together a striking montage of right-wing media heavyweights who are openly expressing their disillusionment with the current administration's trajectory. The consensus among these former allies? The movement has been fundamentally co-opted, the promised policies are regressive, and the vows to "drain the swamp" have evaporated into blatant cronyism.

Here are the key takeaways from Valenti's analysis:

• Megyn Kelly & Shawn Ryan's Stark Realization: Valenti points out a revealing exchange where Kelly and Ryan discuss the shrinking, exclusionary definition of what constitutes "Core MAGA" today. They argue that the movement has been whittled down to a sycophantic echo chamber that demands absolute compliance. Instead of a broad political coalition, it has become heavily reliant on "yes-men" who refuse to challenge the top of the ticket. Maga has become whatever Israel wants it to be - it is neo-conservative war hawkish and is a dying movement.

• Matt Walsh on the "America 250" Fiasco: Even staunch conservatives like Matt Walsh are calling out the administration's vanity projects. Walsh expressed outrage over the planning of the nation's 250th-anniversary celebration. He heavily criticized the event for devolving from a massive, unifying national milestone into a mundane 90-minute political rally centered entirely around Trump himself.

• Andrew Schulz & Charlamagne tha God on the "Slush Fund": On the economic front, Schulz and Charlamagne dissected the proposed $1.776 billion "weaponization fund". Far from helping the working class or fixing the economy, they correctly identify this as a massive slush fund designed to reward political loyalists and potentially pay off those who commit crimes in the president's name. Valenti echoes this, noting that working-class supporters will likely never see a dime of that money.

• Tucker Carlson's Bizarre Escalation: Perhaps the most shocking pivot comes from Tucker Carlson, who Valenti highlights quoting the Bible to question if Trump's behavior mirrors the prophesied Antichrist. When former prime-time champions are using apocalyptic scripture to describe the leader they helped install, it is a clear indicator that the ideological foundation is cracking. Meanwhile Hasan Piker can endorse candidates and they actually win their races - we’re going to end up in a future that’s a Democratic Socialist running up against some New America Party with Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk.

• The War on Dissent: Valenti emphasizes that from the top down, internal dissent is no longer tolerated. Figures like Representative Thomas Massie, who tried to hold the line on unchecked government spending and push for transparency, are actively targeted by the administration's top brass. This includes the highly unusual and legally questionable deployment of military officials, like the Secretary of War, for domestic political campaigning against members of their own party.

The OAL Media Take: What This Means for the Proletariat

At OAL Media, we don't just react to political theater; we look at these shifts through the lens of labor and economics. While the conservative elite fight over influence, purity tests, and billion-dollar slush funds, the actual material conditions of everyday workers are completely ignored.

This dynamic is exactly what we unpack in our MoneyScout financial education series. The people at the top are playing a high-stakes game of musical chairs, arguing over foreign policy lobbies and grifting opportunities, while the working proletariat is left trying to figure out how to navigate crushing inflation, exorbitant housing costs, and eroding labor rights. The frustration expressed by these right-wing pundits isn't just about political strategy, it's a symptom of a fundamentally broken, top-down economic model that prioritizes cronyism over ground-up stability. They aim to hoard all of the tools and make sure you don’t know how to get out of a pit trap that they dug for you while you blame yourself for not checking for holes instead of paying attention to the people who made the pit in the first place.

As a worker cooperative, our mission at OAL is to cut through this partisan noise and deliver real value. When politicians abandon economic principles to fund their inner circle, the working class foots the bill. That’s why proletariat financial teachings and workplace organizing are more crucial now than ever. We don't just need new political figureheads; we need new structures that empower workers, rather than waiting for a handful of media elites to suddenly realize the ship they built is sinking.

The Wrap-Up

Chris Valenti’s video serves as a perfect example of what happens when you run on a platform full of backstabbing snakes - they don’t actually care for you they will grift and follow you for as long as it profits them. The ideological bubble is bursting, the loyalists are scattering, and the fallout is going to completely reshape the independent media landscape.

Be sure to watch Chris’s full, unfiltered breakdown in the embedded video above.

Want to stay ahead of the curve? If you want to understand how these massive political shifts directly impact your wallet, your community, and your workplace, make sure you are subscribed to the OAL Media Substack. 

Keep an eye out for our upcoming Monthly Deep Dives, and tune into MoneyScout for the financial education the elite don't want you to have.

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The following work is an OAL Media Broadcast Doc for Chris Valenti, a self described Douchebag Leftist Italian New Yorker who majored in history and minor in Political Science, and acts as a megaphone for the people.

OAL has been creating these broadcast docs most everyday for Chris and we are now gradually beginning to branch out to more public audiences.

https://youtu.be/Nk_LccPet1M

^^ Link to Chris Video that day, he uses a few links from us but he has his own style.

If you are interested, please subscribe, support us on Patreon, or email me at Gavin@oalmedia.network

Vibe Check:  Remember, comrade, it is the designs of the capitalist scum to make us feel the weight of oppression so hard that we feel the call for drugs and paraphernalia that we may let ourselves indulge in these addictions. We are brought down to such a level that we may never rise again against them. You cannot have a working-class movement if they are all doped up; you cannot have conscious conversations about philosophy and the need for change and revolution if they are zonked out of their mind.

You’re doing a really hard thing, being sober, and having to choose to live and fight every single day still, and I am proud of you.

 Host: Chris Valenti

Current Stats: 151k subs on YT, 998 members on Discord (culling the herd).

Note, normally these are highlighted and color coded, but I haven’t figured that part out yet. I’m new to Substack.

Community Art

Art by “Kat”

Join the Discord here to submit Art in the #art channel

Warmups

• Robot at community fair malfunctions - kicks kid 

• I need this to be the future of all Campaign Ads

  • These political ads are getting really specific

• South Park Writers promise more Trump Takedowns in Next Season

• OpenAI Announces Construction Of New Data Center On top of Small sick child - YouTube 

• Scott Besset, saying the U.S. just stole $1B from Iranian Cryptowallets without them knowing, made the Crypto market crash 6.7%

• Crypto is treated as untouchable money by the government. It’s one of its biggest selling factors, and with this admission, it just makes crypto no different than literally any other financial asset.

Top Stories

• Polls show Bibi needs to stop negotiating with the U.S., despite their being in desperate need of U.S. assistance to continue their genocides

• California city votes to permanently ban Data Centers (Data Center favorability has dropped significantly in the last few months)

• Albania protests push back on Jared Kushner’s Israeli resort building (burning his house down, protests met with water cannons it’s fucking wild)

War Updates

WarmUps: US sanctions Iran’s largest digital asset exchange Nobitex and 3 others

The Iran War

• Iran and the US trade strikes in the Persian Gulf, further testing the ceasefire - AP News

  • Iran targets Kuwait and Bahrain as US conducts new strikes in latest test of peace talks - CNN - Supporting Article

• Israel strikes just south of Beirut ahead of second day of critical ceasefire talks - AP News

• House passes resolution to end hostilities with Iran - NPR

• Trump tells CNBC: 'I don't care' if Iran negotiations are over

Israel’s Elections

• Official Letter on how Israel aims to restructure the U.S. Military 

• Poll shows Bibi risks losing his election because he’s not hard enough on Lebanon

  • The poll can be found 3/4 of the way down the section labeled “Election Rivals Target North.”

• Context: The Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the next election would be held in 2026; the next election was scheduled to be held no later than 27 October 2026.[24]

  • After the October 7 attacks and the ensuing Gaza war, some have called for the resignation of Netanyahu,[25][26] with polls suggesting that more than 75% of Israelis believe he should step down.

• Around 70% of voters surveyed in northern Israel disapprove of how the war in Lebanon is being handled. The core grievance is that northern residents want the war pursued until Hezbollah is completely dismantled. Still, they feel Netanyahu is buckling to U.S. pressure (specifically from Donald Trump) to accept a ceasefire. 

Ukraine War

• Ukrainian drones hit St. Petersburg oil terminal ahead of ‘Russian Davos’ - AP News

  • Ukraine targets St. Petersburg as ‘Putin’s Davos’ gets underway - CNN - Supporting Article

U.S. Politics and Domestic Affairs

MAGA insanity 

Jake Lang burns pride flags on top of a U-Haul at Newark ICE facility

Jake Lang is also a Jan 6’er

Louisiana bill will make sleeping on the streets a misdemeanor statewide

• Trump taps housing regulator Pulte to be acting director of national intelligence

  • Here's him on Jan 6

• Ted Lieu lies about Trump constantly falling asleep in meetings

• New Jersey sues Delaney Hall operators for access after allegations of inhumane conditions - CNN

• Pete Hegseth removes all women and some Black service members from the Navy promotion list

• The Supreme Court Is Showing Its Boundless Contempt for Black Voters

• Donny wants to keep the UFC arena on the white house lawn

  • Sean Strickland says he's flying to DC to protest the UFC White House Fight

THE WORKING CLASS 

• Rockstar employees form union amid ongoing legal claims

  • This Simple Tool for Unrigging the Economy Is Spreading ... - YouTube

• James Talarico may be on track to turn Texas Blue

• California city votes to permanently ban data centers

  • Americans Have Grown Dramatically Anti-Data Center in just a few months

  • What Data Centers Don't Want You to See

The Albanians are Pissed at Kushner/Trump

• Albanians are protesting 

• Thousands protest in Albania against coastal resort linked to Jared Kushner

• Albanians protest plan for Kushner-linked luxury resort - YouTube

Just the News

• Police locked in negotiations with man in Bakersfield holding hostages - AP News 

  • Two hostages released amid hours-long standoff with man barricaded inside California office building - CNN - Supporting Article 

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Yeah, but the bank that writes the loans for him to use to avoid ever paying taxes doesn’t care.

Buy, borrow, die. Putting loans on unrealized gains is so fucking stupid. (Like the fact it’s allowed is stupid, I mean financial strategies it’s brilliant, but very very corrupt).

Thing is, so long as your return on investment is greater than your interest charges, you can use the cash you borrowed to buy more stocks. They aren’t getting regular market loans like you and me when we need a loan for a car or something; they're often getting loans down to 5-6% for hundreds of thousands of dollars. As a matter of fact, the rates actually are at 6.5% with smaller balance loans at upwards of 10% - meaning they want you to borrow more and be even more wealthy just to get lower interest. For context, the average credit card interest rate is 20%.

Back in 2010 and early 2020, rates were cut and they were getting loans for 1-2%. Even at a credit union, a credit card lowest I’ve ever seen is 8% and that’s on a loyal customer with excellent credit and financing. This would be why there is so much pressure to get a loyalist in the Federal Reserve to artificially slash interest rates. Artificially cheap money doesn't crash the market, it supercharges it for the wealthy while driving up inflation for everyone else. It allows the elites to borrow at practically zero percent and use that ultra-cheap debt to buy up real estate, swallow smaller competition, and consolidate individual assets.

You have to work and sweat and scrape by to earn what, $60,000 a year? A billionaire calls his personal banker to take out an SBLOC (Securities-Backed Line of Credit) and, in 15 minutes, has cash for more than you will earn in 10 years from a loan he’s just taken out.

Note: Most lenders for SBLOCs require a minimum portfolio of $143k-$250k, with an initial line of credit starting at $100k.

[Source: Amerisbank]

And if you can keep taking out loans against your portfolio until you die, the underlying stock accounts holding that wealth completely bypass the estate process, so long as you've named beneficiaries. Then the step-up cost basis kicks in and says that whatever those stocks are currently valued at is now assumed to be the price the beneficiaries "bought" (inherited) them at.

So if your grandpa bought a stock for $1 and it went up to $100, and he sold it, he would be taxed on the $99 difference.

Note: when a stock is purchased it is considered “unrealized” meaning its value is subject to change based on market valuation. When a stock is sold, it is considered “realized” and becomes a taxable event, counting the realized gains (or realized losses) towards your income. Yes, the same kind of income that you get taxed on when you file your W-2.

But if he doesn’t sell and you inherit it, step-up cost basis kicks in. If it grows from $100 to $150 and you decide to sell, you’re only taxed on $50 of realized gains, not what the stock was when it was first bought for $1.

Buy, borrow, die, step-up cost basis, and being allowed to borrow on unrealized gains is the problem. It’s just a few of the big loopholes that allow the wealthy to avoid paying taxes.

You want to know the real fucked part?

The Probate (the legal court process of distributing assets) process as I mentioned earlier gets skipped because they have designated beneficiaries. Normally when someone dies, the probate process kicks in, collects the assets, taxes them (if more than $15 million in assets, $30 million for married couples, thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill passed in 2025), and then disperses the remaining assets to the beneficiaries. 

But this is a lengthy process that everyday working-class people have to deal with before they even see a dime of inheritance, all because the tools to writing a trust and will and deed, and the knowledge about these systems, are kept out of the hands of the working class.

To form a will and a simple trust often costs thousands of dollars. Nowadays you can probably get it done for about $500, but you still have to file the paperwork yourself and hope you set it up correctly, something that most families, who can’t even cover a sudden $500 expense, do not put as a priority.

Note: Assigning beneficiaries is normally free to do on your assets including your checking account, investments, and property. For the love of god, go assign beneficiaries. The state will likely assume your wife and then next of kin, but it’s a lengthy process

If a billionaire dies, the IRS still counts assets with named beneficiaries. To avoid the 40% Estate Tax, billionaires don't just use simple trusts; they use highly complex Irrevocable Trusts (with names like GRATs, SLATs, and Dynasty Trusts). These specialized legal structures effectively freeze the value of their assets and move them completely out of their legal ownership before they die, starving the IRS of estate tax revenue. 

So the simple trust doesn’t get done. Marriages fight, divorces split assets, kids leave the nest, and no one wants grandma's house when she dies. So it gets sold and split off to the middle generation who has been so squeezed that there’s a good chance their only hope of retirement is what their parents leave them, like some form of stump to rest at in the end of the giving tree.

But even that stump is being uprooted.

There is a massive, quiet theft happening right now where privatized nursing homes and Medicaid estate recovery swoop in at the end of life, squeezing residents for every dime until every ounce of middle-class wealth has been exsanguinated back to the bloodthirsty elites.

The wealthy elite do not care about destroying the dam that floods the valley of the working class, for they sit on the top of the mountain of money and will never get wet. And when the flood passes, they will buy up all the land and rent it back to us, further extracting more and more wealth. Welcome to the Gilded Age 2.0.

(But more on exactly how the healthcare and nursing home industry aids in that wealth extraction in my next post).