Gusher Up, Trickle Down, Leads Me to a Sinking Feeling
AUG 02, 2026
Extractive capitalism is the economic model for the United States.
We’ve been living through a brutal experiment of how much work and wealth can be extracted from the working- and middle classes and funneled upward before the former are exhausted. The same brutal experiment is being inflicted on Mother Earth: how much lithium, gold, fossil fuels, strategic metals and minerals, even drinking water can be commodified and extracted before the earth itself is exhausted.
It’s a gusher up, trickle down system where almost all the profit is absorbed by corporations and the oligarchs. It’s a system we’re told that’s inevitable—the best possible system, the most efficient, market-driven, a reflection of the “genius” of men like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. And it is indeed a reflection of those men—and their boundless greed.
It’s truly amazing how much wealth is being extracted from workers. The tax code targets wages more than capital gains. Inflation (gas, groceries, and other essentials) cuts into largely fixed incomes. Health care costs continue to rise and are the leading cause of personal bankruptcies. Higher education often leads to onerous student debt that cannot be discharged through personal bankruptcy. Workers are bombarded with ads to bet money on sports using apps on their phones. Lottery tickets are everywhere, selling the dream of a financial windfall at very long odds. Expensive prescription drugs are sold as a solution to excessive weight and even to addiction to other drugs such as opioids.
The term “debt slavery” describes the status of many Americans; they own so little, not their houses (assuming they can afford one), not their cars and trucks, in some cases not even their furniture.
Productive capitalism is possible. So too is a “share the wealth” system centered on communal health rather than the greed of billionaires. But we are fed constant BS that “lifestyles of the rich and famous” are what we should all aspire toward.
How long a top-heavy system of extractive capitalism can last before it collapses under the weight of its own greed and waste is an experiment we’re currently conducting. What will come after the collapse is unknown.
To me, it seems the idea of a social contract is dead. America’s oligarchs and corporations are driven by profit margins, and workers’ jobs are being ruthlessly curtailed or eliminated in the process. AI is being pushed largely to make salaried employees redundant. Who needs people when machines can perform the same function, even if the machines are limited and only as reliable as their (faulty) programming?
Corporations say they exist to maximize shareholder value. Billionaires say they deserve all the money they can extract because they are the “makers” and creators (the rest of us, of course, are takers and drones). They owe us (the little people) nothing, so they say, and if we complain, we are told to work harder toward the American dream, even if it takes three jobs, none of which may provide health care benefits.
Small wonder that the American people want a different system; small wonder we are so heavily propagandized against anything that smacks of “communism” or even democratic socialism.
It’s laughable that Trump and Company sell communism (!) as a leading threat to America when it’s so obviously extractive capitalism that threatens to bury us. Meanwhile, extractive capitalism is protected (and accelerated) by unbridled U.S. militarism as the Pentagon’s budget soars to $1.5 trillion (or higher) in FY2027.
A militant extractive system is very good for a few at the expense of a great many. I suppose this is why my dad warned me that “the rich get richer and the poor poorer” and that tough times were ahead that might rival his experience of surviving the Great Depression in the 1930s.
I don’t know if it’s too late to change course. Whether we’ve already hit the iceberg and are just fighting over the lifeboats as the ship of state goes down remains to be seen. America, I like to think, still has the potential to rally. What is so deeply frustrating is that we’re being led by rogues and villains who seek to keep us in steerage even as they dance in the ballroom.
And when the ship finally slips beneath the waves, they won’t be onboard, dressed in their best while waiting for their demise. They will be long gone, motoring away on their luxury yachts.
Bracing Views 
1. “Extractive capitalism is the economic model for the United States… We’ve been living through a brutal experiment of how much work and wealth can be extracted from the working- and middle classes and funneled upward before the former are exhausted… It’s a gusher up, trickle down system where almost all the profit is absorbed by corporations and the oligarchs… It’s truly amazing how much wealth is being extracted from workers.”
A RAND Corp. study (https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-2.html) put the figure at $79 trillion transferred from the bottom 90% to the upper 10% over the period 1975-2023.
2. “The tax code targets wages more than capital gains.”
It’s a kick in the gut that repeated “tax reform” measures pitched as making the tax code more equitable, fairer, easier on the (shrinking) middle class instead has actually amounted to legalized thievery, the functioning of government “to promote the general welfare” be damned.
3. “Health care costs continue to rise and are the leading cause of personal bankruptcies.”
It’s beyond sobering that this country spends twice as much as comparable OECD countries on health care while consistently ranking at the bottom in key health status measures, while still not covering everyone, and with wildly variable coverage for those who do have it. This despite having “the best health care in the world.”
4. “The same brutal experiment is being inflicted on Mother Earth: how much lithium, gold, fossil fuels, strategic metals and minerals, even drinking water can be commodified and extracted before the earth itself is exhausted.”
Pentagon war plans in light of global warming aren’t concerned with strategies to ameliorate the political, economic, and social upheavals resulting from impending population migrations due to droughts, floods, crop failures, reduction in potable water and such, but instead are geared to securing supplies of energy, strategic metals, minerals, ores and such for this country, to hell with everyone else.
5. “How long a top-heavy system of extractive capitalism can last before it collapses under the weight of its own greed and waste is an experiment we’re currently conducting. What will come after the collapse is unknown.”
In “America, the Farewell Tour,” published in 2018, Chris Hedges opined that the United States had about twenty years left before collapsing. Eight years hence and the timetable for that prediction seems precisely on track.
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Capitalism is unsustainable since eternal growth is impossible. Climate change shows we are living on borrowed time. Capitalism is fundamentally borrowing from the future to make a profit. In the case of climate change it has taken without limit from the prehistoric past of fossil vegetation. We are seeing the result of this burning of a candle at both ends.
But it delivers the goods and that is why people like it and are willing to work.
If you look at technology, which has accelerated capitalism, it has produced in case after case the best, nay, even the perfect thing for the work to be done. Modern cars are a marvel, so are modern vacuum cleaners, so are modern tools, so are smartphones and on and on and on. The things we buy are in so many cases the best they can be, reliable, efficient, fast, lightweight, attractive to the eye.
A problem looms. Why are people employed? It is because nothing better has been available. AI changes that. As a worker, it knows all it needs to know, doesn’t forget, learns instantly, never tires, works around the clock without complaint, doesn’t ask for a raise, needs no benefits such as insurance of vacation time, and so much more.
A Model T is obsolete. It can’t do the job like a modern car. A book is soon to come out about AI and people. It is titled “Obsolete”
Capitalism has made the modern life we know bringing incredible efficiency for any job to be done as it directs wealth to investors, not workers, but has needed workers to progress. Now we will see what happens when it is applied to the human being as worker. Robots give a clue.
PS – I saw my first data center the other day while going to the airport. It is a monster the size of an Amazon warehouse in this case liquid cooled with huge pipes on one side of the building. A giveaway is the lack of a parking lot.
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Two quotes come to mind (when feeling lazy, I simply quote others). Loggins and Messina: “What does it avail a man to gain his fortune and lose his soul?”. And from Karl Marx: “Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction”. Marx argued that capitalism creates severe wealth gaps, the replacement of human labor with machines (hello AI) and cyclical wealth-sucking market crashes that eventually break the whole system (or ship) apart. On this point, Karl gets no argument from me.
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