Lords & Serfs Part 3 - Buy Boeing

How the extraction economy works, who it works for, and how it stays hidden in plain sight

Tad Theriot grew up shrimping in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. He put his children through college on a single boat. He did not inherit wealth or connections or access to the men who make decisions about the places where he lives and works. He had the Gulf, and he had the knowledge of it that comes from a lifetime on the water, and for a long time that was enough.

It is not enough anymore.

The waters where Tad shrimps are the same waters through which liquefied natural gas tankers now move, massive ships loaded with American energy bound for buyers in Berlin and Beijing. The shrimp catch in Cameron Parish is roughly half what it was before the plants arrived. The energy bills are rising, the federal government’s own projections link LNG exports directly to higher domestic energy prices, simple supply and demand, American households forced to compete with foreign buyers for access to American gas. A dredging incident by Venture Global, the company that operates the Calcasieu Pass export terminal, spilled hundreds of acres of mud into the bayou and killed roughly half of Tad’s oyster crop. The company offered some affected residents $20,000 on the condition that they could never sue or speak negatively about Venture Global again.

Tad did not take the offer.

He said he had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of oysters. He wanted hundreds of thousands of dollars. He will not get it.

Venture Global projected $6 billion in profits last year, more than doubling its earnings from the previous year. Its CEO attended a private meeting with Donald Trump in 2024, at which Trump reportedly asked assembled oil and gas executives to contribute $1 billion to his campaign, promising deregulation and policy support in return. Venture Global gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Two months after Trump took office, his administration approved a second Venture Global terminal in Cameron Parish. Seventeen new export terminals are either under construction or have been approved by the federal government. Six of them are in southwest Louisiana.

Tad Theriot’s coastline is being industrialized for the benefit of a company whose CEO bought access to the president, whose profits are sent to shareholders, whose costs are absorbed by the people who live where the plants are built. This is not a side effect of the energy economy. It is the energy economy, operating precisely as designed.

Cameron Parish voted more than 90 percent for Trump in 2024.

Cameron Parish is not a story about one company or one community or one bad decision. It is a story about a system that has been deliberately constructed to produce exactly this outcome, resources extracted, profits privatized, costs absorbed by the people closest to the extraction, and the political mechanisms that might intervene neutered before they can act.

The template repeats across industries with remarkable consistency.

In Lexington, Nebraska, four companies control roughly 90 percent of the American beef market. Tyson Foods announced in November 2025 that it was closing its plant there, 3,200 jobs, more than a quarter of the town’s population, gone. Beef prices at the time were at all-time highs. The plant, by the account of workers who had been there for decades, had always been profitable. Economists and trade lawyers who have studied the industry describe a documented pattern: dominant meatpackers use strategic plant closures to suppress the price they pay for cattle while keeping the price consumers pay for beef elevated. The gap between what the rancher receives and what the consumer pays has widened dramatically over fifty years of consolidation. In the 1970s, when the four largest meatpackers controlled only 22 percent of the market and genuine competition existed, small towns in rural America were actually growing. The reindustrialization of rural America that competition produced has been methodically reversed. Lexington will not easily recover. There are no comparable employers within reach. The building, workers were told, is not even for sale. Tyson will sit on it rather than allow a competitor to operate it. That is called market control.

In New Mexico, Blackstone Infrastructure, an arm of one of the largest private equity firms in the world, has applied to acquire PNM, the state’s largest public utility, in an $11.5 billion deal. Blackstone also controls QTS, the largest data center operator in the world, managing roughly $85 billion in data centers globally. OpenAI and Oracle are building a $165 billion data center campus in southern New Mexico as part of the National Stargate Initiative. The connection between Blackstone’s interest in acquiring New Mexico’s electrical grid and its position as the dominant player in the data center market is not subtle. Forty percent of PNM’s current customers live below the poverty line. Nearly 40,000 households are already behind on their utility bills. Former state regulators who have reviewed the application describe a structure designed to pass the costs of data center expansion onto ratepayers who cannot afford their current bills. More than 50 documents in the application have been designated confidential. The Public Regulation Commission that will decide the deal was converted from an elected body to a gubernatorial appointment two years ago. The people most affected by the decision have the least say in it. That is the design, not an accident.

In Arizona, food bank usage is up 42 percent. Nationally, SNAP enrollment has fallen below 40 million for the first time since 2020, not because hunger has declined but because the administration has made the program harder to access and is now cutting $187 billion from it through the One Big Beautiful Bill, the same legislation that adds $4.5 trillion to the deficit and delivers trillions in tax cuts to the top of the income distribution. The Kraft Heinz CFO described the reduction in SNAP transactions on an earnings call as down in line with expectations, if not even a little more than expected. A corporation modeling the hunger of its customer base as a revenue line item, calmly, in front of investors. The court had planned this too, not in a single meeting but across decades of coordinated policy work by the network the Grove built. The wealth tax that might have funded those benefits was never passed. The antitrust enforcement that might have broken up the meatpacking oligopoly was abandoned. The campaign finance reform that might have limited the donor class was blocked. Each of these was a decision made by people whose interests were served by the outcome.

This template is not new. In the early 20th century, the United Fruit Company operated across Central America with such total control of land, infrastructure, and government that the states it dominated became known by a term coined specifically to describe them: banana republics. When Guatemala’s democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz attempted to redistribute unused United Fruit land to landless peasants in 1954, at the company’s own declared tax value, the company lobbied Washington and the CIA, led by a director whose brother had previously been United Fruit’s lawyer, orchestrated a coup. The land reform was reversed, and the peasants got nothing. Guatemala entered decades of civil war that killed an estimated 200,000 people, the majority of them indigenous Mayan civilians. The people now arriving at America’s southern border are in many cases the descendants of the people whose governments were overthrown so that a Boston corporation could maximize its returns. The extraction economy has a long memory. The communities it extracts from have longer ones.

The point was never simply bananas. It was the right of private capital to rewrite democracy wherever democracy interfered with extraction.

The template is consistent across every industry, every community, every zip code, and across more than a century of American economic history: extract maximum value, privatize the profits, socialize the costs, and ensure that the people absorbing those costs have as little political power as possible to change the arrangement.

It does not require coordination in a smoke-filled room or a redwood forest, though as Part Two of this series documented, that coordination has also happened. It requires only that everyone at the top follow their incentives, that the regulatory mechanisms designed to constrain those incentives be systematically weakened, and that the political system remain responsive to the people with the resources to access it rather than the people with the most at stake in its decisions.

That is the extraction economy. It operates in plain sight, in quarterly earnings calls and regulatory filings and congressional testimony, in the language of market efficiency and fiscal responsibility and program integrity. The language is the cover. The extraction is the point.

The system does not require its architects to be personally corrupt in order to function. It requires only aligned incentives, weakened constraints, and a political system responsive to money rather than people. But it helps to understand that the people at the top are not merely following abstract incentives. They are personally profiting from specific decisions in real time, in amounts that would have seemed fictional a generation ago.

In the first quarter of 2026, financial disclosures filed with the Office of Government Ethics showed that Donald Trump had made between $211 million and $687 million in securities transactions involving companies including Nvidia, Palantir, Apple, Meta, Tesla, Boeing, and Qualcomm. The executives of every one of those companies accompanied the president on his trip to Beijing that same week to meet with Xi Jinping. Trump described it as an honor to have them aboard, singling out Jensen Huang of Nvidia, a company in which Trump’s filings show 15 transactions in the first quarter alone, as “the Great Jensen Huang.” He told Truth Social that he would be asking President Xi to open up China so that “these brilliant people can work their magic.”

The Trump Organization says the trades are executed through fully discretionary accounts managed by third party financial institutions, and that neither the president nor his family plays any role in selecting or directing specific investments. That is the standard defense. It does not explain why the president’s portfolio is so heavily concentrated in the companies whose CEOs he personally escorts to foreign trade summits to negotiate market access agreements that would directly affect their stock prices.

Paolo Zampolli, a US special envoy who accompanied Vice President JD Vance to Hungary, put the arrangement more plainly than any financial disclosure document could. Speaking to the Financial Times, he said: “Whenever people see me, they want something. They want access to the president. I tell them: Buy Boeing. If you want to make the president happy, buy Boeing. It’s the simplest thing in the world.”

A presidential envoy. On the record. In one of the most respected financial newspapers in the world. Describing access to the American head of state as a commodity available for purchase through stock acquisition. Neither a leak nor an allegation. That is a confession.

The Trump family has increased its wealth by an estimated $4 billion since the president returned to office, according to journalists tracking the administration’s financial dealings. The vehicles for that enrichment are varied and not always transparent. World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company, receives money that is by the nature of cryptocurrency difficult to trace. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, received $2 billion from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for his private equity firm, while simultaneously negotiating in the Gulf on behalf of the United States government, as a volunteer, without elected office or Senate confirmation. Don Jr. and Eric Trump are investors in a drone company that has received major contracts from the US Defense Department. When Hunter Biden was tangentially connected to foreign business interests while his father was in office, it consumed years of congressional investigation. The amounts involved were a fraction of what is documented here. Thus far, investigations have not materialized.

No-bid contracts have been awarded for White House renovation projects at costs that bear little relationship to initial estimates. A reflecting pool project described by the president as costing $1.2 million is running at approximately $13 million. A ballroom initially projected at $200 million in private funding has accumulated a price tag of $1 billion in requested taxpayer security funding with limited transparency about where the money is going. Three acres of prime Miami real estate were transferred to the Trump organization for what has been reported as $10, for a presidential library the president has indicated he would prefer to operate as a hotel.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson, who has spent her career studying American political corruption, described this recently as the most corrupt administration in American history. She noted that the independent inspectors who exist specifically to enforce the emoluments clause, the constitutional provision designed to prevent presidents from profiting from their office, have simply stopped enforcing it.

The emoluments clause is still in the Constitution. The enforcement mechanism has been turned off.

This is what the extraction economy looks like at its apex, not the slow systemic extraction of a Cameron Parish or a Lexington Nebraska, where the mechanism is impersonal and the profits flow to shareholders through quarterly earnings reports, but the direct, personal, real-time conversion of public power into private wealth. The lord is not merely overseeing the extraction, the lord is the extraction.

A system this extractive requires a story. Not a true story necessarily, but a consistent one, repeated loudly enough and often enough that the people absorbing the costs of the extraction spend their energy arguing about the story rather than examining the extraction itself.

The story the current administration tells is fraud. Waste, fraud, and abuse, the catchphrase that launched a thousand press releases and gave Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency its public justification. The government is being robbed, the story goes, by people who don’t deserve what they’re receiving. Find them, cut them off, and restore integrity to the system.

It is a very old technique. You accuse your opponent of what you yourself are doing. The accusation creates confusion. People hear both sides claiming the other is corrupt and conclude that everyone is corrupt or no one is, and either conclusion serves the people actually doing the extracting because it suppresses the outrage that clarity would produce.

In Maine, Vice President JD Vance traveled to make the case for Medicaid fraud, specifically, the suggestion that the state’s Somali population was gaming the system at taxpayer expense. Federal reviewers had examined Maine’s Medicaid program and found that approximately 0.1 percent of total program spending involved incorrect payments, significantly below the national average, and almost entirely the result of paperwork errors rather than deliberate fraud. That is the actual number. It is not the number being discussed in the political coverage of JD Vance’s Maine visit.

The senator from Florida who has been most vocal about government program fraud is Rick Scott. The hospital company Scott led before entering politics paid what was at the time a record settlement with the federal government, $1.7 billion, over Medicare and Medicaid fraud allegations. Fraud serious enough to produce a $1.7 billion settlement. Scott kept his fortune. He ran for Senate, won, and now advocates for cutting the programs his company defrauded.

The president himself has granted pardons or clemency to more than 70 people who are either allies or donors to his campaign and political action committees and who have been convicted, not accused, convicted, of fraud. The administration that campaigns on fraud is the administration that pardons it, provided the fraudster’s check cleared.

This is the cover. It is not subtle once you see it. But it is effective because it exploits something real, there is always some fraud in any large program, public or private, and the existence of that fraud can be amplified into the suggestion that the program itself is fraudulent, that the people it serves are the problem, that the solution is to cut the program rather than enforce it. The Somali immigrants in Maine become the story. The $1.7 billion settlement becomes a footnote. The $4 billion in presidential wealth accumulation becomes a disclosure buried in a government ethics filing that most people will never read.

The extraction economy does not only extract money. It extracts clarity. It takes the observable fact of a system that is transferring wealth systematically upward and replaces it with a story about the people at the bottom taking more than their share. The serf is told that the problem is other serfs. The lord counts the money.

History records what happens when extraction reaches this pitch.

The Gilded Age barons, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, built fortunes that make today’s billionaire class look modest. They owned the courts, the senators, the press. They were, to the people living under them, as permanent and immovable as the landscape itself. Then Ida Tarbell spent years documenting Standard Oil’s practices, chapter by chapter, in a magazine that ordinary Americans could read. She did not editorialize excessively. She described what was happening, in enough detail that it could not be dismissed, to enough people that it could not be ignored. Theodore Roosevelt did not break up Standard Oil because he was a radical. He broke it up because Tarbell had made the alternative, doing nothing, politically untenable.

Viktor Orbán built a similar extraction system in Hungary. His cronies enriched themselves through no-bid contracts and regulatory favors while the Hungarian economy deteriorated beneath them. He built palaces. His people built palaces. The videos of those palaces, circulating on social media after his government fell to a popular movement in April of this year, infuriated ordinary Hungarians in ways that years of abstract arguments about democratic backsliding had not. Corruption became visible. Visible corruption became intolerable. Intolerable corruption became the end of the government.

The reflecting pool is bright blue. The ballroom costs a billion dollars. The Miami real estate went for ten dollars. These are not abstractions. They are visible and they are being seen.

Heather Cox Richardson, who has studied corruption’s role in toppling governments across American history, noted recently that corruption is one of the things that reliably brings down even strong regimes. Not because people suddenly develop a principled objection to concentrated power, they may have had that objection for years. But because at a certain point the gap between the story the regime tells about itself and the reality visible to anyone paying attention becomes too wide to sustain. The story collapses. And when the story collapses, the extraction it was covering becomes visible all at once, to everyone, in a way that is very difficult to walk back.

We may be approaching that point. The extraction economy described in this piece, the LNG exports, the meatpacking consolidation, the private equity utility acquisitions, the SNAP cuts, the presidential trading and the no-bid contracts and the pardoned fraudsters, is not a secret. It is documented in quarterly earnings calls and regulatory filings and congressional testimony and Office of Government Ethics disclosures, and Financial Times interviews with presidential envoys who explain that access to the president is available for the price of a Boeing stock purchase.

It is visible, but are enough people looking?

In the parts of this series that follow, we will look at what looking has produced, at the communities and movements that have named what is being done to them, organized around that naming, and begun building something the extraction economy cannot easily reach. They have understood, as the Swiss cantons understood and as Ida Tarbell understood and as the Guatemalan communities that survived the United Fruit era understood, that the extraction ends when the people it extracts from decide, collectively, specifically, and with enough organization to make the decision stick, that it ends.

The arithmetic has not changed.

The lord counts his money, and the rest of us need to start counting each other.