Built to Rise | Vincent Cordova for U.S. President 2028

Let me start with a question nobody in Washington asks out loud:

What is a human life worth inside the systems we live under right now?

Not what it’s worth in a eulogy. Not what it’s worth in a campaign ad. What it’s worth on paper, in the actual machinery: in the billing code, the rent ledger, the insurance denial, the quarterly earnings call.

Answer that honestly and you’ll see the problem. Under the systems we have today, a human life is mostly worth what can be taken from it. Your labor gets taken at a discount. Your time gets taken by a second job. Your health is a revenue stream until it becomes a liability. Then it gets denied. Your data is harvested while you sleep. Your housing is someone else’s yield. Your debt is someone else’s asset.

Labor

Your labor gets taken at a discount.

Time

Your time gets taken by a second job.

Health

Your health is a revenue stream until it becomes a liability. Then it gets denied.

Data

Your data is harvested while you sleep.

Housing

Your housing is someone else's yield.

Debt

Your debt is someone else's asset.

That isn’t an economy built around life. It’s an economy built around extraction. And we’ve lived inside it so long that most of us have stopped feeling what it costs.

This post is about feeling it again. It’s also about what we build once we do.

Part I

We Have Been Taught to Feel Less

There is a kind of numbness that sets in when you’ve been squeezed long enough.

You stop expecting the rent to stay the same. You stop expecting a doctor’s visit to be affordable. You stop expecting your kids to do better than you did. You start calling exhaustion “the grind” and calling survival “success.” When a neighbor loses their house or their health or their job, you feel bad for a minute, and then you go back to holding on to your own piece, because that’s all you think you can afford to do.

That numbness is not an accident. It’s a design feature.

A system that takes from people has to keep them from feeling the full weight of what’s being taken. If we felt it fully, we would stop it. So the system teaches us to feel less. It teaches us that struggle is normal, that hardship is personal failure, and that someone always has to be on the bottom. It teaches us to look down at the person below us instead of up at the structure pressing on both of us.

I’ve called this the Ladder of Neglect. Everyone is taught to fear the rung beneath them. The worker fears the unemployed. The unemployed fear the unhoused. The unhoused fear the incarcerated. And while everyone is busy looking down, almost nobody looks up at who built the ladder, who profits from every rung, and who never has to climb it at all.

Look up

Who built the ladder · who profits from every rung · who never has to climb it

The worker

fears ↓

The unemployed

fears ↓

The unhoused

fears ↓

The incarcerated

So when I say we have to feel more than what life is today, I mean it literally. We have to recover the feeling that a human life is sacred. That a child’s potential is not a line item. That an elder’s dignity is not negotiable. That a worker’s body is not a consumable. We have to feel the loss of every person the system was designed to keep down, because that feeling is where the will to change everything comes from.

Part II

The Numbers Behind the Numbness

Feelings matter. But so does the record. Here is what the extraction economy looks like right now, in 2026.

Wealth

32.5%

of all household net worth · wealthiest 1%

2.3%

of all household net worth · bottom 50%

According to the Federal Reserve’s own Distributional Financial Accounts, released September 18, 2026, the wealthiest 1% of American households held 32.5% of all household net worth in the second quarter of this year. That’s a record in the Fed’s quarterly series. The bottom 50% of households, half the country, held 2.3%.

Read that again. Half of America, roughly 66 million households, holds a sliver of the nation’s wealth. That is not the result of half the country being lazy. Those are the people who stock the shelves, drive the trucks, clean the hospitals, harvest the food, and raise the next generation. The wealth they produce flows up and out, by design.

Housing

RENT ↗

1 in 2

12M

renters cost-burdened · severely burdened households

Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that half of all renters in this country are cost-burdened. They spend 30% or more of their income on housing and utilities. Around 12 million renter households are severely burdened, paying more than half their income just to keep a roof overhead. When half your paycheck goes to rent, you aren’t living. You’re paying for permission to exist.

Health

Past due

41%

100M+

of American adults · people with health care debt

KFF’s research has found that about 41% of American adults carry some form of health care debt, more than 100 million people. In the richest nation in human history, getting sick is one of the fastest ways to go broke.

None of these are separate problems. They are the same problem showing up in different rooms of the same house. In every one of them, a human need (shelter, health, security, a fair return on work) has been converted into a point of leverage. Someone owns the leverage and pulls on it.

Part III

Extraction Never Dies. It Changes Containers.

If you want to understand why this keeps happening no matter who wins the election, you have to look at history, because extraction has a pattern. It doesn’t end. It re-engineers itself. Every time the public outlaws one form, it reappears inside a new legal container.

Before 1865
Slavery
The original American extraction system: total ownership of human labor, enforced by law.
1865 →
Convict leasing
When the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, it left an exception: “except as a punishment for crime.” Southern states walked straight through that door. They passed Black Codes criminalizing unemployment, “vagrancy,” and loitering, then leased the convicted out to plantations, mines, and railroads. Convict leasing recreated forced labor under a new name.
1867 →
Debt peonage
When Congress outlawed debt peonage in 1867, the practice survived for generations through sharecropping and the company store. Families “owed” more at the end of every harvest than they started with, and the debt itself became the chain.
Mill towns
Company scrip
In the mining and mill towns, workers were paid in company scrip, money only good at the company store, at the company's prices, in the company's housing. Your wage came back to the boss before it ever reached your family.
1930s
Red lines
In the 1930s, federal mapping of neighborhoods by “risk” drew red lines around Black and immigrant communities. That locked millions out of the single biggest wealth-building tool of the 20th century, home ownership. The effects still show up in the wealth gap today.
Now
The same pattern runs on new infrastructure
- Wage suppression dressed up as “flexibility” and “independent contracting”
- Private prisons and detention paid per bed, which makes human confinement a profit center
- Medical billing where denial of care is a business strategy
- Corporate landlords and private equity buying up homes and turning shelter into a yield product
- Algorithmic surveillance that harvests your behavior, prices you by your desperation, and sells your attention back to the highest bidder

Different container.

Same contents.

A small group positioned to take, and a large group conditioned to give.

This is why reform keeps failing. We keep outlawing the container and leaving the machine intact. If we want different results, we can’t just ban the newest form of extraction. We have to rebuild the foundation so extraction has nowhere to re-form.

Part IV

No System Requires an Underclass. We Chose One.

Here is the lie at the center of all of it: “Somebody has to be on the bottom.”

We’ve been told that poverty is natural. That an underclass is the price of prosperity. That if everyone rose, the economy would collapse, because someone has to do the hard work cheaply.

That’s not economics. That’s a business model being passed off as a law of nature.

An underclass is not an accident of the market. It’s a necessary input for an extraction economy. If you want to pay people less than their work is worth, you need people desperate enough to accept it. If you want to charge whatever you like for housing, medicine, and food, you need people with no alternative. If you want a pool of cheap labor that can’t fight back, you need people scared of falling even further.

Desperation is the fuel.
Remove the desperation and the extraction machine stalls.

That’s why I say our systems are conditioned for an underclass. They don’t just tolerate one. They depend on one. Every time a policy keeps wages low, keeps medicine expensive, keeps housing scarce, or keeps people one paycheck from disaster, it is maintaining the supply of desperation that the system runs on.

And it means the opposite is also true. If we design systems that don’t need desperation, we don’t need an underclass. Not as charity or a handout. As engineering.

Part V

What It Means to Build a System Around Life

So what does a system built for people to rise actually look like?

It starts with a different first principle. Today, the first question every system asks is: How much can be taken? We replace it with: What does this person need to rise, and how do we make sure nothing stands between them and it?

From that principle come concrete design rules. These aren’t slogans. They are tests. Every law, every program, every institution we build should have to pass them.

The Rise Test: Seven Standards for Life-Centered Systems

1
No essential need may be priced at desperation.
Housing, health care, food, water, energy, and basic connectivity are the floor of a human life. No one may profit by withholding them, rationing them, or charging what the market will bear from people who have no choice. Where an essential service exists, its price is tied to the cost of providing it, not to how badly someone needs it.
2
No one may profit from another person's failure.
If a business model earns more when people get sicker, stay poorer, go to prison, fall behind on payments, or lose their home, that business model is extraction, and it's prohibited. This covers per-bed detention contracts, profit-driven claim denials, predatory late fees, and any arrangement where someone's harm is someone else's revenue.
3
Ownership flows to those who build.
The people who create value share in the value they create. Workers who build a company gain a stake in it. Communities that host infrastructure share in its returns. Public resources pay a dividend to the public that owns them. Wealth should pool where the work happens, not drain away to people who never set foot there.
4
Mission-lock beats shareholder pressure.
Institutions that provide essential services must be structurally protected from being bought, stripped, and flipped. The public benefit corporation with no outside shareholders, mission-locked to serve employees and the public, is a model I've built myself with Cordova Courier. We can scale it into housing, health care, and utilities. When there are no outside shareholders demanding extraction, there's no pressure to extract.
5
Every person's data, attention, and behavior belongs to them.
Your inner life is not raw material. No company or government may harvest, sell, or weaponize your personal data, your behavior, or your attention without your informed, revocable consent, and nobody may use it to price you by your vulnerability.
6
Education builds Thinkers, Builders, and Owners.
We stop training people only to be employees of someone else's dream. Every child learns to think critically, build with their hands and minds, and understand ownership: how wealth is made, held, and passed on. A generation that understands the machine can't be extracted from as easily.
7
No loophole survives.
History proves extraction escapes through exceptions. So every protection is written to close the door behind it: no “except as” clauses, no shell-company workarounds, no relabeling the same practice under a new name. If it functions as extraction, it’s treated as extraction, whatever it’s called.

Part VI

Rising Is Not a Zero-Sum Game

Some people will hear all this and get afraid. If everyone rises, what happens to me?

I want to answer that directly, because fear is the tool extraction has always used to keep us divided.

When the floor rises, everyone standing on it rises. When nobody can be paid poverty wages, your wage isn’t undercut by someone more desperate. When health care isn’t a profit center, your premiums aren’t subsidizing someone’s stock buyback. When homes are homes and not yield products, your kids can afford to live in the town they grew up in. When no one can profit from another person’s failure, your failure, the illness or layoff or bad year that can hit anyone, stops being a catastrophe.

When the floor rises, everyone standing on it rises.

When nobody can be paid poverty wages, your wage isn't undercut by someone more desperate.
When health care isn't a profit center, your premiums aren't subsidizing someone's stock buyback.
When homes are homes and not yield products, your kids can afford to live in the town they grew up in.

The extraction economy wants you to believe that dignity is scarce and you have to fight your neighbor for it. But dignity isn’t scarce. It was rationed. The rationing is a choice, and we can make a different one.

Dignity is scarce.

It was rationed.

A society where everyone can rise isn’t weaker. It’s stronger. It’s more creative, because people who aren’t drowning have room to invent. It’s healthier, because people who aren’t scared see a doctor before it’s too late. It’s more secure, because people with a stake in the country defend it. And it’s more free, because a person who isn’t desperate can’t be controlled through their desperation.

Part VII

The Beagles: What a System Does to Those Who Can’t Fight Back

If you want to see the logic of extraction with nothing hiding it, look at how this country treats beagles.

Beagles are the most common dog used in animal testing. They aren’t chosen for any scientific reason. They’re chosen because they are small, gentle, trusting, and forgiving, so they’re easier to handle even during painful procedures. Sit with that. They’re selected for their goodness. The very qualities that make a beagle a beloved family dog are what make it a “convenient” test subject. Around 40,000 dogs are in American laboratories right now.

Small

Gentle

Trusting

Forgiving

That is the extraction model in its purest form. Find the ones least able to resist, and build the business on them. It’s the same logic that has always picked out an underclass: those who can’t fight back, can’t vote with their wallets, and can’t make headlines on their own.

Ridglan Farms: When the Law Protects the Facility

For nearly 60 years, Ridglan Farms in Blue Mounds, Wisconsin bred beagles for research. Activists and investigators raised abuse concerns for years, including allegations of surgeries performed without anesthesia. Ridglan has always denied mistreating its dogs.

Here is how the system responded:

January 2025
A Dane County judge found probable cause that Ridglan Farms had committed animal cruelty crimes. A special prosecutor was appointed and declined to file charges.
Settlement
Instead, Ridglan got a settlement. It could avoid criminal prosecution by giving up its state breeding license by July 1, 2026.
April 2026
When activists came back to the facility in April 2026, law enforcement defended it with rubber bullets and tear gas.
July 2026
Prosecutors filed charges against 47 people for an earlier “open rescue” in which activists took 23 beagles.

Read the scoreboard

criminal charges for a facility where a judge found probable cause of cruelty

people charged for removing 23 dogs

Read the scoreboard. A facility where a judge found probable cause of cruelty faced no criminal charges. Forty-seven people who removed 23 dogs did.

The beagles did get out, but not because the law protected them. They got out because of years of public pressure, protest, and a rescue organization negotiating to buy and accept them. More than 2,100 beagles left Ridglan by August 2026, and the facility closed for good. That was a real victory. It was won by the public, around the law rather than through it.

And Ridglan was not the biggest. The country’s largest beagle breeder, Marshall BioResources in New York, is reported to be eight times larger. It is still operating.

2,100+

beagles left Ridglan by August 2026

~60 years

Ridglan bred beagles for research

8×

larger: Marshall BioResources, still operating

Envigo: The “Record Fine” That Proves the Point

~450

beagles in acute distress

~4,000

beagles surrendered

$35M+

largest animal welfare penalty ever

Before Ridglan there was Envigo in Cumberland, Virginia. In 2022, federal investigators found nearly 450 beagles in acute distress, and about 4,000 beagles were surrendered and adopted out. In 2024 the company pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate the Animal Welfare Act and the Clean Water Act. It agreed to pay more than $35 million, the largest penalty ever in an animal welfare case.

That was justice for one facility. But understand what it took. USDA inspectors had documented dozens of violations before anything happened. It took an undercover investigation, a federal search warrant, and national outrage. The system itself kept running: the same kind of breeding, the same kind of testing, the same flow of federal money to labs that buy these dogs.

Where the Government Is Complicit

Here is the hard truth. The federal government is the largest funder of animal testing in the world. The suffering in these facilities isn’t some fringe practice hiding from Washington. Much of it is paid for by Washington.

The law that’s supposed to protect these animals, the Animal Welfare Act of 1966, was written with the door left open:

Exception
The Act explicitly does not regulate the design or performance of research itself. It sets standards for cages, food, and paperwork, not for what's done to the animal inside the experiment.
Exception
USDA's own reporting system includes a pain category for experiments where animals feel pain with no relief at all, allowed whenever a researcher justifies it on paper.
Exception
The Act excludes purpose-bred rats, mice, and birds, the overwhelming majority of animals used in labs, so they get no federal protection at all.

Sound familiar? It’s the Thirteenth Amendment’s “except as a punishment for crime” all over again. A protection with an exception built in, and the exception is where the suffering lives.

Credit Where It’s Due, and Why It Isn’t Enough

I’ll be honest about the progress, because honesty is how we earn trust. In the last eighteen months, federal agencies have moved:

FDA

released a roadmap in April 2025 to phase out animal testing requirements for drugs, starting with monoclonal antibodies, and reports meeting its first-year goals.

NIH

closed its in-house beagle lab in May 2025 and stopped issuing funding opportunities that require animal-only research.

Navy · Congress · VA

The Navy banned funding for experiments on dogs and cats. Congress ordered the Pentagon to stop painful experiments on dogs and cats. The VA was directed to end testing on cats, dogs, and primates.

EPA

recommitted in January 2026 to ending all tests on mammals by 2035.

These are real steps, and they came from people across the political spectrum, Republicans and Democrats alike. That alone shows this is not a partisan issue. It’s a moral one.

But look at what most of them are: roadmaps, pledges, announcements, and agency policies. A roadmap is not a law. A pledge can be reversed by the next administration with one memo. An agency’s priorities change when its leadership does. Meanwhile, the Animal Welfare Act still contains every exception it had in 1966, the breeders are still breeding, and federal grants still pay for experiments on dogs.

Progress that isn’t written into law is progress on loan.
And everything we’ve learned about extraction says that whatever is left on loan eventually gets taken back.

Part VIII

Confronting the Laws That Have Harmed So Many for So Long

The beagles teach us something that goes far beyond animal testing. Every story in this post follows the same pattern:

The harm isn’t happening in spite of the law. It’s happening through it.

Convict leasing didn’t break the Thirteenth Amendment. It used the exception written into it. Redlining wasn’t a rogue bank; it was federal mapping policy. Private detention isn’t illegal; it’s contracted. Medical debt isn’t fraud; it’s billing. Ridglan didn’t hide from the system; the system negotiated with it while charging the people who carried out dogs.

That’s why I keep saying we can’t just fight the newest abuse. We have to confront the laws themselves: the exceptions, the carve-outs, the “except as” clauses, and the funding streams that keep extraction legal and profitable.

Confronting the law means:

1
Reading the exceptions first. Every protection gets judged by what it leaves out. If the exception is where the harm lives, the protection is a decoy.
2
Turning pledges into statutes. Any reform that matters gets written into law with deadlines, enforcement, and penalties, so it can't be undone by the next administration's memo.
3
Following the money. If federal dollars fund the harm, the fastest way to end the harm is to end the dollars and redirect them to what replaces it.
4
Holding the institution accountable, not just the individual. When a facility, company, or agency causes harm, consequences have to reach the structure, its license, its contracts, its leadership, not just the lowest-ranking person in the room.
5
Protecting the people who expose the harm. Whistleblowers, investigators, and inspectors should never face more legal risk than the people they expose.

What Cordova 2028 Will Do for the Animals

Applied to animal testing, that principle becomes a concrete commitment:

Codify the phase-out.

Write the FDA, NIH, EPA, and Defense Department commitments into federal statute with fixed deadlines, so no future administration can quietly reverse them.

End federal funding for experiments on dogs and cats,

on a firm timeline, and redirect that money into human-relevant research methods: human cell and tissue models, organ-on-a-chip systems, and computational modeling.

Close the Animal Welfare Act's loopholes.

Bring every warm-blooded animal used in research under its protection, and end the category of pain without relief.

Ban repeat violators from the supply chain.

Any breeder with documented federal welfare violations loses the right to sell to any federally funded lab.

Guarantee a life after the lab.

Every dog and cat that survives research gets the right to be released for adoption instead of being destroyed.

Full transparency.

Every federally funded experiment on animals, the species used, and the pain category get published in a public, searchable database. Taxpayers have a right to know what they're paying for.

This isn’t a detour from the rest of this platform. It’s the same fight. A country that will breed the gentlest dogs specifically because they won’t resist, and fund their suffering with public money, is a country that has learned to see the vulnerable as raw material. We can’t build a nation where every person is free to rise while keeping an economy that profits from whoever can’t fight back. The way we treat the most defenseless tells us exactly what our systems value.

Change what the systems value, and you change everything downstream.

Part IX

From Feeling to Building

So here’s where we are.

We have an economy where half the country holds a sliver of the wealth, half of renters are drowning in housing costs, and more than 100 million people carry debt from getting sick. We have a 160-year history of extraction escaping every reform by changing its name. We have laws that left the door open for gentle dogs to be bred for pain on the public’s dime. And we have a culture that has taught us to feel less, to accept less, and to expect less.

I’m asking you to refuse all of it.

Feel the full weight of what has been taken: from you, from your parents, from your neighbors, from people you’ll never meet who are being ground down right now by the same machine. Let that feeling sharpen into resolve. Not resentment. Resolve.

Then let’s build. Let’s build institutions that can’t be bought and stripped. Let’s build laws with no loopholes left open. Let’s build an economy where the first question is always what does this person need to rise? and where the answer is never someone else has to fall.

That’s what Cordova 2028 is about. It’s not about managing extraction more politely or making the ladder a little less steep. It’s about taking the ladder down and building something where every person has solid ground to stand on and room to rise as high as they’re willing to reach.

We were never meant to live as a resource for someone else’s wealth. We were meant to live. Fully. With dignity, security, and the freedom to become everything we’re capable of.

It’s time our systems were built to match.

I am a piece of the collective essence of this world that never gives up and needs every other piece to be whole.

Vinnie Cordova
Cordova 2028: Moving Forward Together
cordova2028.com | info@cordova2028.com

Sources

Read: They Feel What We Feel →← All Blog Posts

We Have Been Taught to Feel Less

The Numbers Behind the Numbness

Extraction Never Dies. It Changes Containers.

No System Requires an Underclass. We Chose One.

What It Means to Build a System Around Life

The Rise Test: Seven Standards for Life-Centered Systems

Rising Is Not a Zero-Sum Game

The Beagles: What a System Does to Those Who Can’t Fight Back

Ridglan Farms: When the Law Protects the Facility

Envigo: The “Record Fine” That Proves the Point

Where the Government Is Complicit

Credit Where It’s Due, and Why It Isn’t Enough

Confronting the Laws That Have Harmed So Many for So Long

What Cordova 2028 Will Do for the Animals

From Feeling to Building

Sources

Community Comments