The OG Robber Barons Elitists and their Master Plan—The United States Constitution

Because the System Isn't Broken Series by Schmeeka Simpson

When I say OG, I mean Original Gangsters—the ones who laid the blueprint, not the ones who inherited it. And when I say Robber Baron, I’m not talking about Rockefeller or Carnegie or J.P. Morgan. I’m talking about the Founding Fathers. A Robber Baron is someone who builds wealth by exploiting land, labor, and law while writing rules to protect their dominance. Before Rockefeller, Carnegie, or J.P. Morgan, there were: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton. The legal architects of early America. They didn’t just use the system—they engineered it to protect their class forever.

Because long before corporate monopolies, oil empires, or Wall Street tycoons, there were men in powdered wigs who understood one thing better than anyone else: If you write the rules, you never lose the game. Their “revolutions” were not rebellions—they were reorganizations—reallocation of power and rebranding of control. The American Revolution was an upgrade to a system designed to protect the wealthy from accountability. Today, we call them visionaries. But let’s tell the truth: They were the OG Robber Barons of this nation. The story we are taught is patriotism. The story they lived in was profit.

The Founding Fathers were not moral philosophers. They were economic tacticians, and the historical record is clear:

The Founding Fathers were robbers of Indigenous land, thieves of African bodies, slave masters who built fortunes off unpaid labor, insider traders who speculated on land before treaties were signed, liars who preached liberty while practicing brutality, promise breakers who honored no treaty, no humanity, no equality. Let the record reflect:

• Indian Removal Policy groundwork (1790s–1810s) set the stage for later forced displacement. Doctrine of Discovery (U.S. v. Johnson, 1823)

• The Supreme Court ruled that Indigenous nations could not hold land in the same way Europeans could. Treaty violations: Over 500 treaties were signed and later broken or unilaterally altered by the U.S. government.

• Theft of African labor: Transatlantic Slave Trade (legal until 1808) was explicitly protected in Article I, Sec. 9 of the U.S. Constitution. Enslaved people were counted as 3/5 of a person under Article I, Sec. 2, boosting slave-state political power and still are under the guise of incarceration. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe were all major slaveholders.

• Insider trading: Founders speculated on western land before treaties were signed, Ohio Company land speculation (1780s), Yazoo Land Fraud (1795). They used insider government information to buy cheap and sell high.

• Liars & promise-breakers: The Treaty of New York (1790) with the Creek Nation was violated within a few years; the Treaty of Holston (1791) with the Cherokee was undermined by illegal white settlement that federal officials refused to prevent.

The Founders did not free themselves from tyranny—they replicated it with themselves at the top.

It was never the land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. It has always been the Land of the Thieves and the Home of the Slaves. America wasn’t built on democracy—it was built on commodities. Land as a commodity. Black and Native American lives are commodities. Women and children as commodities. Treaties as a commodity. Freedom as a commodity. The Founders were not escaping tyranny. They were escaping competition. They wanted a world where they didn’t have to answer to a king—because they intended to become kings themselves. The Constitution was, and is, basically a how-to guide on writing laws that serve your interests and on maintaining power while building wealth and enshrining class in perpetuity.

Step 1: Define the property broadly, then protect ownership at all costs.

Make sure it includes land, livestock, buildings, and people. Three-Fifths Compromise (1787), The Fugitive Slave Clause (Art. IV, Sec. 2) required enslaved people to be returned to owners. Slave Trade Protection until 1808 (Art. I, Sec. 9) Contract Clause (Art. I, Sec. 10) Prevented states from interfering with private contracts—including slave contracts. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) declared Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This ruling explicitly defined personhood to serve the elite. The 5th Amendment “Takings Clause” (1791), which protects property from government seizure—but doesn’t protect people from being treated as property—was reinforced by the Supreme Court in Fletcher v. Peck (1810) and Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819), which upheld property-first ideologies.

Step 2: Give yourself exclusive access to land. Acquire territory through “purchase,” war, treaties written in disappearing ink, and legal jargon the original owners couldn’t read.

Step 3: Build generational wealth through plantations, slave labor, debt schemes, land speculation, inheritance networks, political insider influence, and create a judiciary to defend wealth over humanity. Marbury v. Madison (1803) created judicial review and was soon used to protect corporations, contracts, and property rights far more aggressively than human rights.

Step 4: Write laws that make your wealth untouchable: Design contracts as sacred scripture so that property becomes holy, Corporations become people, and People become property. Hamilton’s Assumption Plan (1790) created a national debt market that enriched speculators who bought up war IOUs cheaply from veterans. Plantation elites monopolized cash crops with enslaved labor protected under the law. Because under a government that worships wealth. In God We Trust on the dollar bill is precisely where it belongs.

Step 5: Create a court system that protects wealth first, humanity second. Make the judiciary the bodyguard of property, make the Constitution the armor of the elite. By the late 19th century, the Court used the 14th Amendment—originally meant to protect formerly enslaved people—to protect corporations far more frequently.

And finally:

Step 6: Guarantee only your class can govern: The Electoral College was designed to dilute popular vote power and protect slave states. Only landowners can vote, only wealthy white men can serve, and only elites can interpret the law they wrote for themselves. The Constitution intentionally slows democratic action through bicameralism, veto power, and lifetime judicial appointments. At the same time, the U.S. Senate structure gives small states equal power with massive states, so there is genuinely no majority rule.

This isn’t a conspiracy. This is American history. They built a system that preserves minority rule, resists redistribution, frustrates reform, elevates courts over communities, and protects the wealthy from democracy’s reach. And for 237 years, that system has worked exactly as intended.

The Constitution is not broken. It is functioning with terrifying accuracy. The Constitution started this country off with the bar of democracy and equality in hell and has left us fighting to ascend from its circles for centuries, with the aftermath of nationwide and global trauma that is visible in every corner of not only this country but every country it touches. Racial wealth gap? Inherited from slavery, maintained by policy such as the Homestead Act exclusions (1862), the FHA redlining (1934), and the GI Bill racial discrimination (1944).

Overpowered police state? Descendant of slave patrols and Indian Removal militias, Slave Patrol Laws (1700s–1800s) are the basis for modern policing. Black Codes (1865–1866) criminalized Black existence after emancipation. War on Drugs (1971–now) disproportionately targeted Black communities.

Eviction court, predatory landlords? Built on the sanctity of property over humanity. Landlord-tenant law descended from English feudal property structures retained in U.S. common law. Modern eviction policies reflect property priority baked into the Constitution.

Voting barriers and minority rule? Built into the bones of the Electoral College and Senate: Poll taxes (legal until 1966), Grandfather clauses, Jim Crow literacy tests, Shelby County v. Holder (2013) gutted the Voting Rights Act’s protections.

Generational poverty in Black and Indigenous communities? Engineered outcomes of policies that never included us. Indian Removal Act (1830), Trail of Tears (1838). The Dawes Act (1887) carved up tribal lands for white settlement.

America isn’t failing.

It’s succeeding at the exact thing it was built to do: to protect the wealthy and the powerful from accountability, and to do so on the backs of the othered. Please understand that I do not believe the Constitution is a moral document. The Constitution governs my material life, but it does not govern my humanity, and it holds no inherent claim on my soul, dignity, or humanity. I have no faith in a document that purports to define whether I deserve to be treated as living, breathing, being worthy of rights or respect. I believe we need a new document. One that doesn’t start us off in the depths of demonic musings of liars, rapists, and thieves. We The People, deserve a constitution that acknowledges the humanity of all from its onset, so we can dream and achieve higher heights of equity and collaboration across false demographic boundaries instead of constantly fighting not to be dragged back to hell.

And we have that opportunity unwittingly before us now, thanks to the current political climate. The same Constitution that locked us out also holds one dangerous key:

Article V, the mechanism for a constitutional convention. Right now, states across the country are submitting applications that could trigger a complete rewrite of the Constitution for the first time since 1787. Dozens of states have passed active Article V applications, many backed by: Convention of States, Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force, U.S. Term Limits.

This is not hypothetical—it is happening now, in real legislative chambers. This is not a drill.

Article V Convention is risky, unpredictable, unprecedented, and absolutely transformational. Yes, it could open the door to dismantling voting rights, weakening civil rights, expanding presidential power, and entrenching minority rule. But—and this is important—if democratic, multiracial and gendered coalitions are present it could also open the door to rewriting the social contract, embedding gender equality, guaranteeing reproductive freedom, building a fundamental right to vote, redefining policing, protecting Indigenous sovereignty, creating a multiracial, inclusive democracy for the first time, shifting the center of power from elites to people.

This is the danger and the possibility.

Because when the descendants of the excluded get a pen in their hand, the Constitution stops being a weapon and becomes a promise.

And so I say: the system isn’t broken.

But it’s calling our bluff.

America is asking us if we’re ready to write a new story—or keep living inside the master plan of the OG Robber Barons. The question is, do we want to keep living inside their design? Or do we write a new one?

All Power to All People.