Dear John,

In a system built on theft, exclusion, and exploitation, racism is profitable.

In 2017 alone, mass incarceration cost $182 billion — turning a massive profit for big banks and for-profit prison operators, and trapping mostly low-income Black and Latinx people in a cycle of economic and political disenfranchisement.

Called the Oppression Economy, this vicious cycle has been running since the first colonizers settled in America to this very moment: Elite institutions are motivated to keep suppressing the economic vitality of people of color. That economic oppression in turn hinders their political power, and that political oppression kneecaps their ability to change the system.

In our latest video, Solana Rice and Jeremie Greer, Co-Founders of Liberation in a Generation, break down how this cycle of oppression keeps turning in our system of mass incarceration.

From big banks making millions from credit lines to for-profit prison operators, to prison gerrymandering in which incarcerated people are counted as residents of the largely white, rural towns that house prisons rather than their hometowns, to felony disenfranchisement upon release — the Oppression Economy is a never-ending cycle that has been churning for centuries.

So how do we break the cycle?

Let’s start with supporting candidates and pressuring elected officials at every level of government who will support bold policies that dismantle the Oppression Economy and build a Liberation Economy — and remove those that don’t.

To end the Oppression Economy, our government must end the criminalization of people of color, end their political suppression, and curb runaway corporate power.

To build a Liberation Economy, our government must guarantee that all people of color have access to basic economic rights like guaranteed income and employment, universal health care, guaranteed housing, a free college education, and generational wealth.
    
This Liberation Economy is within our power to create. Our government does not belong to the corporations and the plutocrats that control them. 

It belongs to us, and it is within our power to take it back.

It’s time to break the cycle.

Thanks for watching,
Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action

P.S. Big thanks to my friends Solana and Jeremie at Liberation in a Generation for collaborating on this project. Join the fight to interrupt the vicious cycle of economic oppression and build a Liberation Economy where Black, Indigenous, and people of color not only survive, but thrive.