🛡 Surviving Tomorrow

I want to tell you a story about one of my DNA-confirmed relatives on my mother’s side.

Her rather breathy name was Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen. She was born an Austrian duchess, grew up in castles, hung out with Mozart when they were seven, was married off at age fourteen, and when her hubby became Louis the XVI four years later, the eighteen-year-old became Queen of France and Frenchified her name to Marie Antoinette.

At first, the masses loved her. She was pretty and charming, and she knew how to make the public swoon. She spoke a few languages, played a few instruments, and was a capable politician. Talented lady.

Aunt Marie, though, was a profligate spender. She was a fashion addict, a real estate hound, and an inveterate gambler. She never met a costly war she didn’t love. Some of her custom-made hair poufs were three feet tall. In fact, I’m embarrassed to say she earned the nickname Madame Déficit after it was discovered that she had personally spent more than 7% of the nation’s budget.

Meanwhile, the slaving masses were starving to death. Bread was so scarce that it literally started a war called The Flour War in 1775. By then, the public had rightfully turned on Aunt Marie and the rest of the elites who passively extracted wealth from the working class while evading taxation to help pay to keep the country solvent. Even worse, Aunt Marie did her best to block all attempts at economic reform to tax the rich who had benefited most from civilization.

Does this story sound familiar?

Enter the meme queen bubble boy

“We recommend investors not weight Tesla shares in their portfolio in equal proportion to the S&P because Tesla shares are in our view and by virtually every conventional metric not only overvalued, but dramatically so.” — JP Morgan

Like Aunt Marie, Elon Reeve Musk is not a man of humble origins.

Raised in South Africa by a former model and a city councilor/property developer, Musk grew up in lavish luxury in one of the largest houses in Pretoria, enjoying yachts and ski trips and a first-class education at Wharton and Stanford. (But please note that their tax-evaded emerald mine profits probably weren’t apartheid-connected; though he likely introduced convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg, which is all sorts of creepy.)

Elon Musk is quite rightfully a social media darling, even though he didn’t actually start the company that made him famous. (He didn’t start Paypal or SolarCity either.) Up until about two years ago, pretty much everyone had a favorable view of the former-Paypal-turned-electric-car-and-rocket guy.

But just like Aunt Marie, things have taken a turn for the worst:

* The SEC sued him for lying about his publically-traded company.

* Musk has become a blatant market manipulator, whip-sawing the Bitcoin and Dogecoin markets to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

* As we’ve covered on Surviving Tomorrow before, Tesla is the most dangerous story stock in the world right now, and will likely lose its investors up to $1 trillion dollars in the next crash.

* In the meantime, Elon can see the writing on the wall and has begun cashing in his chips to the tune of $13 billion so far — but wisely, doing so loudly and publically so as not to spook investor-suckers.

People are starting to realize that, though Elon is certainly a very smart and interesting fellow, he definitely has a con-man streak.

Also, he’s cost the hard-working masses a metric ton of money.

Corporate socialism

Like the French kings and queens who lived large off the backs of the struggling masses, Elon Musk has built his twelve-figure fortune off the largesse of taxpayer subsidies.

Tesla has received more than a hundred handouts, grants, awards, and subsidies from the American people:

* We gave him a $465 million low-interest loan in 2010.

* We gave him a $440 million grant in 2014.

* We gave him a $2.6 billion contract in 2014.

* We gave him $1.3 billion in tax breaks and subsidies in 2014 that will allow him to avoid $300 million in payroll taxes through 2024.

* We gave him $497.5 million in direct grants and subsidies in 2015 (but the real number could be triple as much.)

* We gave him $517 million in free tax credits in 2015.

* We gave him $750 million toward an underperforming Buffalo plant in 2016.

* We gave him $15 million in Texas, and also shut down a public beach and changed the laws to give him legal protection against noise complaints.

* We gave him a $653 million contract in 2020.

* We gave him some of the $600 billion in payroll benefits during the 2020 pandemic while Musk tweeted against government aid for individuals.

* We saved SpaceX from bankruptcy in 2021 by giving him a $2.89 billion contract.

So… yay, free market?

This has to stop.

But jobs!

Oh please.

If you add up all the money we’ve given Musk, we could’ve given all of Tesla’s 70,000 employees a $144,000 loan to build their own startups. Think of all the lost opportunity cost of giving Musk over $10 billion. (We could’ve invested in Tesla stock and reaped a $120+ billion profit.) We could’ve built schools and hospitals. Imagine if we’d put that seed money in an endowment and educated thousands of kids through university instead.

So let’s just say what needs saying: Billionaires who oppose meaningful tax reform — especially Elon Musk — are traitors to the commons.

Musk goes Marie Antoinette

Normally when someone’s wealth balloons to $250,000,000,000 thanks to taxpayer subsidies and uneducated investors, they’re expected to pay a proportionate amount of taxation to help fund the society that made them rich and provided them with paying customers, a healthy and educated workforce, military and policing to keep the peace, and a judiciary to protect property rights.

But not Musk.

He thinks he’s paid his fair share, even though he’s not even close to paying back what we’ve already given him in handouts, let alone covering our lost opportunity costs or making a proportionate contribution to the commons.

After all, he reminds us, he might pay more in tax than anyone in American history. But who has profited more? And his premise itself is wrong: Thanks to a cadre of anti-commons accountants, there’s no precedent that suggests this will ever actually happen — after all, he paid zero federal taxes in 2018 and less than $70,000 in 2015 and 2017.

And yet TIME Magazine just named him Person of the Year.

Just what every oversized ego needs.

Thankfully, there’s at least one politician who’s willing to speak truth to power:

His (sexist) response?

Yes, you read that correctly.

Imagine this level of callousness toward the working masses who create 100% of all societal wealth through their labor and their spending.

Rather than being grateful that America let him into the land of opportunity in the first place, and paying what democracy decides is his fair share to pay, he’s doing exactly what Aunt Marie did — trolling the commons, mocking democracy, and opposing real and meaningful moves towards a fairer society for all.

Elites throughout history all sound the same.

The people need bread

The Federal minimum wage hasn’t gone up since 2009.

Think about how much houses, cars, and food cost thirteen years ago.

(If this isn’t the #1 reason to boycott multinational corporations and fire all of their rented politicians who’ve voted against helping millions of working poor people, I don’t know what is.)

Real wages and purchasing power stalled in 1971.

Shelter is unaffordable in every single state in the Union.

The rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer — they just don’t know it yet, because inflation robs silently.

And the reality is that democracy simply doesn’t want rockets. Sure, it’s fun to think about living on Mars, but in reality, we need to urgently invest society’s wealth in ending hunger and poverty, rescuing 1+ billion people from slums, and solving climate change so we don’t all die down here on earth.

When billionaires evade taxes and block economic reform, they not only impoverish the masses, but misallocate humanity’s funds to ends that aren’t aimed at widest-spread wellbeing.

Billionaires are like black holes that warp the proportions of civil society.

We need to change the system so that they simply cease to exist:

* We need a better pre-distribution of ownership. We should give tax breaks to companies where workers own 50+% of the stock, and put heavier taxes on those that don’t. If this was the case for Tesla, all 70,000 employees would be multi-millionaires.

* We need to make the minimum wage a true living wage and index it to real inflation. (FYI: I define a true living wage as the ability for a single-income family to affordably own a home within thirty minutes of their job.)

* We need a hard ceiling on unlimited wealth accumulation. Because billionaires no longer trigger income tax, dividends tax, or capital gains tax, they’ve left us with no other choice: We have to introduce a wealth tax.

Thankfully, Musk is inadvertently helping these efforts along.

Elon is the spark

“Her inordinate dissipations called into action the reforming hand of the nation; and her opposition to it, her inflexible perverseness, led herself to the guillotine. I have ever believed that, had there been no Queen, there would have been no revolution.” — Thomas Jefferson

At the end of the day, Elon Musk might be the best thing that’s ever happened to America.

Imagine what will happen if he keeps up this nonsense.

Imagine if and when he gets worse.

If he starts meddling in politics like the Koch Brothers…

If he starts a cryptocurrency…

If he becomes a trillionaire while tens of millions of working Americans go hungry and lose their homes…

The whole nation is going to hate him.

And nothing unites like a common enemy.

So keep it up, Elon.

Keep insulting members of Congress, fighting taxation, and protecting your “rights.”

It might be just the thing that ensures we get some real economic reform in this country.

Because “Don’t tax billionaires” is our generation’s “Let them eat cake.”

It’s time to guillotine billionaire wealth

We all know how the story ends for my Aunt Maria: The working poor chopped off her head and tossed it on a pile with all the other out-of-touch aristocrats.

She was the last dictator-queen of France.

That was more than two centuries ago now. Since then, we’ve seen the fall of most monarchies and aristocracies, but in their place, we’ve seen the rise of robber barons, multinational monopolies, and the predator billionaire class. Even still, the working masses struggle just to stay alive, despite the fact that they create 100% of the wealth in society through their work and their spending.

Thankfully, we don’t guillotine our elites anymore. I’d like to think that the working masses have matured over the centuries. We’ve done some self-improvement. We’ve educated ourselves. Become more understanding of the world, more compassionate to the plight of others.

I’d like to think that we’ve changed.

But clearly, the elites haven’t.

Author’s note: Today is my 36th birthday! If you’re curious to see what I read and drink (or you’re in the mood to spoil the crankiest author on the Internet) here’s my book wishlist and my scotch wishlist. (Sad fact: Due to supply chain challenges, scotch is expected to triple in price later this year, so now is the time!)

Capitalism is evolving from corporations owning the means of production to also owning the products themselves.

We used to have the option to buy movies — now, in order to legally enjoy a movie forever, you have to pay Netflix a monthly fee for the rest of your life.

Document processors like Word and editing suites like Adobe used to be purchasable — now I will have to pay $4,800 over the next forty years to submit books to my publishers, and my wife will have to sacrifice more than $25,000 to a $313 billion company just so she can keep her job.

It’s all part of corporate America’s rapid shift to subscription serfdom.

And Toyota just dipped their claws in the pond.

The scam of the century

Toyota was founded in 1937.

Today it’s a $295 billion corporation.

They netted over $3.1 billion in the past year.

And they’re desperate to get their hands on that sweet recurring revenue.

They’re not the first automaker to milk their customers:

* BMW tried it with Apple CarPlay.

* Tesla tried it with Internet Connectivity.

* Mercedes tried it with EQS rear-wheel steering.

(Imagine having to pay for steering.)

Now, Toyota wants its customers to pay a monthly fee to start their own cars.

Since at least 2010, Toyotas have had the option to include remote start if you pay for the right key FOB.

Not anymore.

Now you have to get their Remote Connect subscription.

But here’s the really twisted thing: The key FOB uses radio waves to connect to the car — it doesn’t require Toyota’s Remote Connect servers at all.

The really scandalous thing? The fee will be charged to all vehicles built after November 12, 2018.

In other words, people are paying for a product that they once got for free, but if they don’t continue to pay for the product they’ve already paid for, they don’t get to use the product they’ve already paid for.

Imagine if you paid $50/year for a Medium subscription, and suddenly Medium emailed you and said, “Hey, we know you already paid to read Jared A. Brock’s articles this year, but if you want to keep reading Jared A. Brock’s articles, you’re going to have to pay another $80/year.”

How is this even legal?

Consumers didn’t ask for this

But corporations don’t care, because they don’t work for consumers.

They’re anti-human eternal entities whose legal reason for existing is to extract wealth from the commons and deliver it to elite shareholders.

Their poverty-making model is simple:

* The elite shareholder class impoverished the contributive masses via systemic inflation and purposeful wage stagnation.

* Second, they got us hooked on monthly payment plans for the things we wanted and needed but couldn’t afford to buy lump-sum anyway. (When was the last time you paid cash for a car or even a piece of furniture?)

* Now, corporate elites are working on a new scheme to steal our time, impoverish our lives, and ram us back into serfdom once and for all:The end of ownership.

I have argued for some time that streamers like Netflix and Prime are illegal monopolies — by keeping their products exclusively rent-by-the-month and never making them available to purchase anywhere else, they are systemically excluding people from participating in culture. There are tens of millions of people who can’t get approved for credit cards or can’t afford a $100+ annual fee for life just to watch a movie every once in a while.

But the real danger happens once any human necessity is commodified as an investment — it’s eventually sold to the highest bidder, which is always an extractive, tax-evading, anti-human, multinational investment corporation.

A mattress might sell for $600 today, but when it can make an investor $99/month on a 36-month lease, that mattress is suddenly “worth” $3,600.

Now imagine what it’s going to do to house prices.

Don’t forget the game plan for subscription serfdom:

We do all the productive work.We do all the purchasing that keeps the economy going.They get all the profits.They own all the products.

A societal structure in which the vast majority own nothing and have to toil for rich elites just to survive already has a name: It’s called feudalism.

And remember: The end of ownership for the masses is just the beginning of ownership for the elites. They ultimately want to own the same thing that their feudal ancestors owned:

They want to own us.

Calls to action

First: Publicly refuse to do business with any product-selling company that switches to a recurring revenue model and won’t let you purchase their products at a reasonable cost. Refuse to give your hard-earned money to any business that won’t outright sell you the things you want and need.

I hope word spreads and no one on earth buys a Toyota ever again, that the company goes bankrupt and sends a message that terrifies every corporation on earth: Don’t participate in subscription serfdom or we serfs will end your business.

So please join me in boycotting Toyota.

Second: To avoid wasting years of your life paying to rent cheaper-quality versions in the future, acquire buy-it-for-life-quality possessions now.

Third: Get into politics (or bankroll candidates and new parties to do so) and pass a law called the Right to Own Act.

Fourth: Start counter-companies that sell one-time services and fully-owned, buy-it-for-life products.

We need to make some radical changes to the direction of society, my friends.

Otherwise, pretty soon, we won’t be allowed to own cars at all, never mind key FOBs.

Coca-Cola is bad AF.

Not only are they a giant sugar monopoly that has devoured over 400 of their competitors, but they’re partly responsible for hundreds of millions of cases of diabetes around the globe in their 135-year history.

When I visited North Korea, I only saw two Western brands — BMW, and Coca-Cola.

Last week, the Senate passed a bill called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

Unanimously.

(That’s a gigantic deal in America.)

For those unaware of the situation, Ch!na has been genociding a people group in a western province called Xinjiang. While several million Uyghurs have already been sent to concentration camps or placed under Orwellian surveillance, we have no idea how bad things could ultimately get. Looking back fifty years from now, it may very well be our generation’s Rwanda or even a Holocaust-level ethnocide.

Despite Republicans and Democrats all agreeing to ban imported products from the region, Coca-cola, Nike, and Apple decided to lobby against the bill.

…

…

…

We need to have a conversation about corporations.

Implausible deniability

The reason that Coke, Apple, Nike, and others oppose the bill is that they all source products from the area. They say the protections are “too broad” and might slow or halt their ability to turn a profit off the backs of cheap overseas labor. (Okay, they didn’t say that last bit out loud, but we all know that’s exactly why they make shoes in Asia and not Connecticut.)

Nike, of course, denies that they use Uyghur slave labor, but this is a rotten company that’s been saying this for four decades while regularly getting busted for using sweatshops, child labor, inhumane conditions, extremely underpaid workers, environmental poisoning, abusing women, and other human rights abuses. (TLDR: Don’t buy Nike products, ever.)

If Nike isn’t involved in any abusive behaviors, it really makes you wonder why “A factory in eastern Ch!na that manufactures shoes for U.S. company Nike is equipped with watchtowers, barbed-wire fences, and police guard boxes.”

And this is just one company at the tip of the iceberg.

Abuse for everyone

“We have found no evidence of any forced labour on Apple production lines and we plan to continue monitoring.” — Apple PR (Spoiler alert: There is evidence.)

At least 82 companies have been implicated in using Uyghur slave labor, including Apple, Google, BMW, GM, Mercedes, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony, Microsoft, Adidas, Abercrombie & Fitch, Calvin Klein, Lacoste, HP, Land Rover, Nintendo, Oculus, Victoria’s Secret, and Volkswagen.

After being busted for using Uyghur labor, Nike posted a statement on their website swearing they no longer rent slaves, but a follow-up investigation by the Washington Post showed it simply wasn’t true.

This is problem #1 for multinational corporations:

They cannot be trusted.

Every corporation’s sole legal reason for existing is to extract wealth from the planet, workers, and consumers, in order to return profits to private shareholders. How could we possibly trust their word when they say they’re doing no harm?

Worse still, even the “best” and most “ethical” multinationals have supply chains that are so complex that they often don’t even know they have abusive practices in their supply chain… and their incentive is to keep it that way.

Just look how easy it is to look the other way and profit from the abuse of human beings:

Vile, right?

Do you know who doesn’t have any slave-related sourcing worries?

The local organic farmer’s market where I buy my vegetables. I can literally see the field behind the cash register.

When businesses are local, you don’t need to trust them — you can just verify with your own eyes.

Guilty until proven innocent

People are innocent until proven guilty.

But if your legal fiduciary reason for existing is to create private profits for private shareholders, then the public has the right to declare corporations guilty until proven innocent.

We don’t want to trust corporations.

We want to verify them.

How? Make them monitor every step of the production process with real-time video feeds, from soil to sale counter.

Too expensive or unwieldy? Then maybe it’s time to shut it down and let local producers create products without widespread abuse.

No company should be able to turn a cent of profit until they fulfill humanity’s fiduciary obligation:

To do no harm.

Better safe than suffering

It doesn’t matter that three-trillion-dollar companies like Apple think the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is “too broad” for their liking.

Their private profits don’t matter more than human lives.

Ch!na is a nation rife with human rights abuses and Xinjiang province is specifically known for its widespread exploitation of our precious brothers and sisters.

If temporarily black-balling an entire foreign province is what it takes to wake up American corporations (and the CCP) to the fact that we’re done with slavery, so be it.

Plus, it’s better to be safe than allow suffering. (No one needs Nikes anyway.)

Imagine if your son or daughter or brother or sister or spouse was trapped in that region. Would you say, “Well hey, we can’t possibly risk corporate shareholders losing a dime per shoe by moving production to a verified facility in, say, France or Kentucky. Better keep things humming in Xinjiang and hope for the best.”

No.

You’d want your government to make a strong statement that American citizens refuse to enjoy products made in any place where the slightest possibility of slavery exists.

People are worth any amount of sacrifice.

Corporations on notice

Friends:

Please stop buying slave-made goods, and please stop voting for corporate-captured parties and their corporate-captured politicians. Buy local, buy verified, start new parties, support new candidates.

This is our country.

This is our world.

Corporations: you are temporary guests that play by our rules and live and die by our will.

Enough is enough.

We’re done with slavery.

And if your company is not, then we’re done with you.

There’s the old saying, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his own soul?”

That’s the biggest problem with corporations.

They aren’t humans.

And they certainly don’t care about our souls.

*This article was written on a seven-year-old Macbook Air that was purposefully purchased used so as not to create first-order demand for slave-made products. The author also does not own a cell phone of any kind and does not buy Nike products. He does own a used Volkswagen, but does not own products from any of the other brands listed, including using DuckDuckGo instead of Google.

Last week, I published an article entitled A Stock Market Crash Is Coming and Everyone Knows It. Rather than acknowledging that this market bubble is a giant scam and everyone is still trying to find ways to profit from it, my horribly greedy little readers all just asked the same question:

“So where should we invest our money, then?”

Obviously, not all my readers are horribly greedy little people.

Just 98% of you. ;)

We can’t help ourselves, can we? We’re so enculturated into this commodified, consumerist, individualist anti-culture that we can’t even fathom simply not playing the extraction game.

Yes, self-preservation is in our nature, but for most investors, the motive isn’t to protect truly-earned wealth — it’s to make an easy killing, even if it means a hard living for someone else.

Passive investors aside, I do sympathize with the hundreds of millions of people who are going to suffer in the next three years. Either the market will crash and wipe out half the market, or the Feds will continue to print so much new cash to avoid a crash that your savings will be worth half their current value.

Probably both.

When the bubble does burst — and it always bursts — tens of millions will lose homes. Tens of millions will lose jobs. Millions will go bankrupt. Thousands will commit suicide. Millions will never recover.

So where should we ethically and morally invest our money now, simply to protect it from the coming crash?

First, let’s start with what won’t work for people who are committed to longest-term widest-spread wellbeing for Earth and its inhabitants:

Gold

The gold standard was once useful, but as we enter the digital-first age, gold will play a smaller and smaller role in international finance until it’s as arcane an investment as seashells and beaver pelts. Plus, it costs money to store and protect gold, it isn’t easily tradeable, it doesn’t have a lot of real-world usefulness, the government can confiscate it at any time, it’s no longer a true hedge against inflation, and it’s not a productive asset.

But none of this matters to ethical people.

They avoid investing in shiny metal because gold is disastrous for the earth, it’s horrible for people, and it’s a pyramid scheme that only makes you rich if you can sell it to someone for more than you paid for it.

So gold is out.

Bonds

Bonds are garbage and basically pay negative yields versus real inflation.

But that doesn’t matter to ethical people.

They avoid bonds (and all other forms of debt) because they don’t want to play any part in the system of interest/usury that all major religions have unanimously been telling to ban for thousands of years.

They understand that interest wrecks lifelong havoc on societies because of the magic money multiplier effect, and they can’t make themselves complicit with a system that’s mathematically designed to enrich the rich and bankrupt the poor.

So bonds are out.

Commodities

Commodities prices have been soaring lately, but there are serious volatility issues, and as recently bankrupted British natural gas companies can attest, looming trade wars and supply chain challenges make this an extremely risky investment category.

But that doesn’t matter to ethical people.

They understand that human necessities like water and food and energy and heat shouldn’t be commodified in the first place. If the price of rice doubles because investors bid up the price, thousands of children literally starve to death. Commodities need to be de-commodified, because lives hang in the balance, and the market doesn’t care who lives and dies, so long as shareholders reap an ever-rising profit.

So commodities are out.

Real Estate

Residential real estate in most cities is probably 40–60% overpriced right now.

But that doesn’t matter to ethical people.

As with commodities, they understand that human shelter shouldn’t be commodified. Despite the nearly overwhelming temptation to hoard houses, become a land-lorder, and hop on predator apps like Airbnb, ethical people see that we’re at the start of a global shelter crisis that will only worsen if they decide to steal homeownership from others.

So real estate is out.

Pyramid schemes

The cryptocurrency and NFT markets have been on a $3 trillion tear these past two years, but they may have topped out, and you certainly need a huge stomach to handle the volatility.

But that doesn’t matter to ethical people.

They understand that Bitcoin is a Ponzi scheme, that all coins are $#itcoins, and that most NFTs are blatant fraud. They can’t in good conscience invest in an “asset” class that relies solely on eventually selling their digital files to someone for more than they paid, knowing that when the market crashes, those people are going to lose trillions of dollars.

So pyramid schemes are out.

Stocks

Most stocks are probably at least 200% overpriced right now.

But that doesn’t matter to ethical people.

Almost every publically-traded company is deeply problematic and is doing something that seriously hurts the planet or the poor. I want to be able to look my son in the eyes and say that I did no harm.

And on a macro level, ethical people are willing to be adults and admit the truth that every investor knows deep down in their bowels… that there’s no such thing as “putting your money to work for you.” You’re just using your capital (or credit) advantage to put someone else to work for you, flaying a profit off the back of someone else’s time, talent, energy, and effort.

This, of course, breaks the Golden Rule. Ethical people don’t want to be parasites on a living host. They want to actively contribute, not passively extract.

So stocks are out.

A quick recap

So far, we’ve established that a moral or ethical person can’t likely invest in:

* Gold

* Bonds

* Real estate

* Pyramid schemes

* Stocks

Out, out, out, out, out.

But they still need to protect their money from institutional theft.

So unless I’m missing something, that basically leaves us with just three major investment options:

1. Pay down debts

I can hear the howls already:

“But debt is good if your interest rate is less than inflation!”

Look, I understand that millions of people are taking advantage of their corrupt government’s decision to devalue their currency by slow-paying their mortgage, but if growing wealthy by cratering the spending power of the poor is your idea of honoring mankind, Surviving Tomorrow probably just isn’t the right fit for you.

Ethical people understand that there are things that are more important than getting the absolute top return on investment — and the faster we pay off our debts, the sooner we are free. Freedom allows you to sleep better at night. To never worry about a rate hike, or job loss, or any accident or surprise that could make you lose your house.

The first good investment most people can make is to pay off their credit cards —saving 18.95% interest is the same thing as earning a 25+% ROI. Once you’ve killed your highest-bearing interest debts, work your way down until you don’t owe anyone anything except a debt of love.

2. Invest in your homestead

It’s time to stop thinking of our houses as boxes to sell to others, leaving us rich and the buyer with a lifetime of debt.

Instead, think of a house as a home, a citadel, and a homestead.

The goal here is economic self-sufficiency. Invest in insulation and water-saving technologies. Invest in solar. Invest in a micro-wind turbine if you live on a hill. Invest in micro-hydro if you have a creek or brook. Invest in geothermal. Build a rentable unit in your attic, basement, garden, garage, or backyard as a way to add housing stock to your city. Put in a garden or greenhouse or polytunnel. If you can work from home, ditch the city and buy a reasonably affordable yield-producing piece of land where you can have a rural farm, intentional community, and/or a sustainable timber forest.

Take your time. Start small — with high-ROI projects — and re-invest in your homestead until it pays for itself.

3. Invest in yourself

There are three ways you can attack this investment:

The first is to upgrade your education, get trained in a new skillset, find yourself a mentor, and start a sole proprietorship.

The second option is to invest in your community — IE, start a family business, co-operative, community-owned company, not-for-profit, for-benefit, or partnership with one or more competent entrepreneurs with complementary skillsets.

Together, build a truly great company that has zero debt, great cash flows, and large reserves so you can expand during a crash.

Do you know what we desperately need right now?

* Local, sustainable, organic food producers.

* Local, sustainable, organic hemp clothing manufacturers.

* Geothermal, mini-wind turbine, and micro-hydro installers.

* House renovators to transform aging units into ultra-efficient eco-homes.

* Builders of owner-occupier-only houses, neighborhoods, and cities. (We need to build 750+ million houses in the next 28 years or three billion people will be living in slums in our lifetime.)

* Experienced political operatives to fundraise and start new, pro-democracy, pro-sustainability, anti-corporate political parties.

Thirdly, investors can seek and acquire an already-established profit-producing small business that can survive a crash in the next 3–5 years. With so many Boomers retiring every single day, there are literally millions of opportunities to take over car mechanics, barbershops, restaurants, bakeries, greenhouses, and more. Many of them will even be willing to hold part of the loan.

The reality is that we need a generation to build companies that give instead of take, that contribute instead of extract, that cement communal stability instead of undermining its foundations.

Sadly, instead of living in a contribution economy, we now live in an extraction economy, where the wealthiest in society are those who contribute the very least — bankers, land-lorders, insurance brokers, corporate insiders, middle-man monopolists like Airbnb and Amazon and Uber, crypto speculators, Millennial grifters on Robinhood, and the elite shareholders who wield their capital advantage to siphon wealth away from the real builders of civilization. This is what happens when you let rent-seekers take over the global economy.

To turn things around, we must patently reject the powerful temptation to make any investment that profits from extraction.

In conclusion

Will the person who avoids unethical investments and only participates in commons-honoring investments end up wealthier in the end?

Almost certainly not.

But moral people don’t have any other choice. Their spirits and souls compel them to do what is right, regardless of what the unthinking (or uncaring) masses do.

It takes a person of deep character to look at their investments honestly and holistically, and do what is best not for themselves but for the world.

In the end, if everyone acted this way — if we invested in ourselves and each other in the right ways — we might all end up with a little less stuff, but we’ll have become more.

And the whole world would be richer for it.

It is unlikely that the American stock market will crash in 2022.

Consumer spending is ramping back up, inflation is soaring, credit’s cheap and easy, and politicians are so desperate to keep this hot potato from dropping on their watch that they’ll go to nearly any length to avoid a crash.

That said, there’s no excuse not to be vigilant and extremely wary in these economically absurd times.

We can only be certain about one thing: Uncertainty.

With that in mind, let’s look at ten of the most likely surprises that could crash the stock market despite all attempts to keep the house of cards rising ever higher.

1. No more free money

The Biden administration has signaled its intention to stop printing as many stimulus trillions this year as they did last year. This is a good thing for the economy, but passive market extractors don’t like it one bit.

If the Dems fully shut down the printing press, it could trigger a market crash. But they won’t. They’ll slow it down for a bit, watch the markets totter, then fire it back up again and say, “Well hey, we tried.”

Can you blame them? Wouldn’t you print free money if you owned the money printer and could use it to get yourself re-elected?

2. Snowpocalypse

All that is necessary to extinguish the human race is for winter to blow a little colder, a little longer.

No, I’m not talking about a Day After Tomorrow situation.

More of a Texas energy fiasco, which left 4.5 million without power and water, cost tens of billions, left thousands with crippling debt, and saw more than 200 people (including a baby) freeze to death.

Anti-human corporations rarely let a good crisis go to waste, and several energy companies made billions off the two-week emergency, with some companies jacking prices 180X. (I’m of the opinion that corporatists should go to prison for putting profit over people, but “the free market is always right,” remember?)

Don’t pretend this can’t and won’t happen again.

In fact, natural gas prices in Europe have already spiked 10+X this winter and the heavy snow hasn’t even arrived yet.

It’s the same for New England.

With all the accidental and purposeful supply chain shortages — and, let’s be honest, corporations price-testing consumers who’ve been saving for the past year — if we have a particularly cold or long winter, it could be economically disastrous for millions of people.

The problems are many and obvious: Most houses are poorly insulated and bleed heat; they don’t have woodstoves; they don’t have grid-independent backup generators; they don’t provide occupants with a way to survive without reliance on faraway fossil fuel corporations. That’s the whole point.

If winter hits hard and long and the cost of heating spikes 100+X for the duration, millions of people will be forced into bankruptcy, which will almost certainly crash the stock market.

3. Rising interest rates

The Feds are desperate to slow down this “transitory” inflation. (Don’t tell your Congressperson, but words actually have meanings. Transitory means brief, momentary, fleeting. If this yearlong inflation is just a passing cloud, then why are they so worked up about trying to fix it?)

If politicians cared about the masses — which they do not — all they’d need to do is aggressively tax corporate profits and billionaire wealth, but such things are unthinkable in hyper-individualist America.

That understood, their go-to mechanism is raising interest rates. But as Data-Driven Investor points out, a 1% interest rate hike could scythe 30–40% off the stock market. I don’t expect them to do so, but if house, stock, and food prices jump another 30% in the year ahead, it’s crazy to think that they’d rather crash the markets than tax the billionaires who benefit from all these outrageous price increases in the first place.

4. COVID-22

Sometimes I forget that we’re still in the middle of a global pandemic and a quarter of the American population refuses to understand that vaccines aren’t the hill to die on.

But with any luck, Omicron will burn through the global population with minimal carnage and give us enough immunity to get back to normal-ish life.

That said, another mutation could create a significantly more deadly variant that could make the Bubonic plague look like the man flu.

(The big philosophical question I keep asking myself is: If COVID-19 had a 90+% infection rate and a 90+% kill rate, would there be any anti-vaxxers left or would they drop the charade and get serious about their health?)

If a hyper-deadly coronavirus emerges this year, we’d likely see a stock market crash.

5. Petty politicians

There’s obviously a huge amount of anti-vax hysteria on the far right, but there’s also an outrageous amount of hysteria on the far left as well.

All the social isolation has gone to our heads, with social media turning our brains to mush, causing a mental health crisis that could take a whole generation to flush from our collective system.

Human beings are generally control freaks who love to tell others what to do, and in the year ahead, we may see totalitarian-leaning “progressives” try to lock down their populations once again.

If they do so, expect riots in the streets as people reach a breaking point… followed by a market crash.

6. Ch!na and/or Russia

There’s no telling what could happen to the markets if Putin does, indeed, decide to invade Ukraine this year.

Same if Ch!na makes a play for the Taiwan Strait.

Or if the US-Ch!na world continues to bifurcate and makes the rest of the world choose sides, essentially creating a two-economy Earth.

7. Real estate

The Ch!nese housing bubble could implode at any moment.

Same for Canada.

And the United Kingdom.

And much of the developed and developing world.

Shelter prices have risen to lethal heights on the backs of lifetime debt for the masses, Airbnb’s colonization of former family homes, and the hyper-financed institutional land-lorders who are turning the contributive working class into lifetime subscription serfs.

But if one domestic real estate market falls, it could set off a chain reaction that could take down the stock market as well.

8. Crypto

Bitcoin and his/her/brrr buddies are now a $3 trillion Ponzi scheme, and if something (or someone) spooks the markets bad enough, it could cause a sell-off that crashes the real market.

(Think: The Fed announcing crypto is now illegal and anyone caught holding $BTC faces a $250,000 fine or five years in prison.)

You never know, but I don’t think this is going to happen quite yet — but once the Feds release their own dystopian surveillance currency, expect the digital dollar war to begin in earnest.

9. Extreme weather events

Dang it, climate change, why can’t you just be fake?

2021 saw record fires out west and record flooding out east, plus hellish heat domes over Canada and Russia, and we can only expect such events to get worse in the year ahead.

The question is: How much can the markets handle?

As in, how much can speculators afford to gamble that the meme stock known as Tesla will tick a few points higher while they rack up credit card debt to pay for 24/7 air conditioning, more expensive food, and flood and/or fire insurance?

If next summer’s fires reach LA, or a bad drought scorches Midwest crops, or rains pummel Manhattan and flood the subway system, or the Texas oil refineries get wiped out by a hurricane, it could set off a chain reaction that crashes the market.

Or Yellowstone could finally just put America out of its misery.

10. A major cyberattack

Cyber attacks happen literally thousands of times every single day, but if an army of foreign hackers managed to hijack one of America’s three power grids and keep it down for a week or more, there’s a good chance we’d see a major market plunge.

(Though, honestly hackers, the world would be a far better place if war criminal Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook went down forever. Just saying.)

In conclusion

There’s good news, dear reader: The stock market isn’t everything.

In fact, I sometimes wish we could get rid of grow-forever corporations and move forward solely with local/regional companies and partnerships and co-ops and for-benefits.

Sure, multinational corporatism has proven wildly profitable for the hyper-elites (and brutally punishing on the working class and the environment), but there comes a point when you realize that capitalism has reached an inflection point and doesn’t deliver the widest-spread wellbeing it promised.

At some point, stability for the masses must take precedence over one more digital zero on the net worths of the spoiled few. The idea that an economy can grow forever inside a finite ecological system is not only dangerous and stupid but scientifically impossible.

An added bonus? A tanking stock market gets rid of price inflation.

In reality, the stock market won’t even really be “crashing” — it’ll just be resetting to temporary sanity… before blasting off to the moon again, leaving tens of millions of hard-working Americans burned and suffering in its wake.

The modern global economy simply isn’t designed to promote human flourishing. It exists to extract wealth from people and the planet, enslave the working class, and steal our time.

This year, our work as common serfs is to build the world in which we want to live — a world free of unsustainable, anti-democratic, monopolistic, tax-evading multinational corporations.

In other words, a world where stock market crashes simply don’t matter to us, and don’t affect us, because we no longer need them.

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." —Ludwig von Mises

The stock market is going to crash in the next three years and wipe out half the market.

Either that or the Feds will continue to print so much new cash to avoid a crash that your savings will be worth half their current value.

For tens of millions of zero-asset Americans, and those with the means and discipline to save for the future, these punishing scenarios amount to six of one, half-dozen of the other.

But the grifters who’ve profited wildly from the debt-fueled rise in real estate, stock, and crypto prices don’t care.

Because they’re all in on the scam.

Pretty much everyone agrees

You know the market is a fraud when share prices double or triple despite profits getting crushed by a global pandemic.

A crash is coming, it’s just a matter of when and how large.

* The Economist’s Intelligence Unit thinks a bubble burst is highly probable.

* Jon Wolfenbarger, of the Mises Institute, thinks this crash will be worse than 2008, dropping at least 60%.

* Michael Burry (of The Big Short fame) thinks we’re in a massive bubble and the looming crash will be the worst in history.

* Approximately 50% of Wall Street strategists think the S&P 500 will end the year below current levels. (Bank of America thinks -10%, Morgan Stanley thinks -20%.)

* Investor John Hussman (who predicted the dot-com bubble burst) thinks the market will crash 66%.

* Jeremy Grantham thinks we’re in a bubble the size of 2008 or 1929.

* The European Securities and Markets Authority thinks we’re in a bubble.

* Mega-criminal Warren Buffett thinks a crash is coming and has over $140 billion ready to deploy.

* The top 15 non-financial companies (including Apple, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta/Facebook) think a crash is coming and have stockpiled more than $1 trillion to go shopping when it does.

Here are five reasons why we’re in this bubble, and why it’s going to burst:

1. Insane new investors

Kids these days.

Boomers robbed them of their future, so instead of even bothering with futile attempts to build real, productive, contributive businesses in the face of government-controlling tax-evading multinational monopolies, they decided to passively play the markets instead.

Enter commission-free predator apps like Robinhood. In the past two years, millions of young people have jumped onto these platforms and are treating the stock market like the casino it is.

Unlike traditional value investors who pore over thousands of pages of documents in order to make sound decisions about stock purchases, young people essentially trade the news, or even mere tweets. Just look at who’s run Tesla up to a trillion dollars, even though it’s not worth 1/20th that much:

But you’ll never convince a bitboy or a Tesla maniac that meme-stonking isn’t a risky house of cards that’s bound to collapse.

After all, everyone’s an expert during a hysterics-fueled bull run.

Joe Kennedy, the infamous father of President JFK, managed to dodge the 1929 crash after having an epiphany while getting his shoes shined on Wall Street, saying:

“When even shoeshine boys are giving you stock tips, it’s time to sell.”

But rents and food prices are going up, and when this bubble does pop, all these young people won’t have jobs or free Internet money.

2. Borrow-to-invest

Why hasn’t the world learned our lesson by now?

If you let millions of people borrow money to buy the same stock…The stock price will go up…Which allows stockholders to borrow more money…So they can buy more stock…And create massive market bubbles that eventually burst and destroy millions of lives.

Easy credit is what caused the Great Depression, people.

I’ll say what no corporate-captured political party will ever tell you:

It should be illegal to invest on margin.

Especially for crypto. Thanks to DeFi, perhaps no market is as hyper-leveraged as the $3 trillion crypto market, which may have less than 10% real wealth behind it. But when people need to withdraw to pay real bills — or when the US starts heavily regulating the space — trillions will get wiped out.

3. Wild valuations

The price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio is considered the benchmark number for comparing one company’s stock price to another. The ratio is based on the current stock price divided by the trailing 12-month earnings per share. If a stock price is $10/share, and the P/E ratio is 10, it means that company is earning $1 per share. If you buy a $10 share with a P/E of 20, it’ll roughly take you 20 years to break even.

* Warren Buffett likes to buy stocks with a P/E of around 12.

* The S&P 500’s long-term median P/E ratio is around 15.

* The S&P 500’s current P/E ratio is around 29 — nearly double its century-long average — despite the pandemic. (#Bubble)

* Apple’s P/E is typically around 30.

* Amazon’s P/E hovers around 60.

Tesla’s P/E ratio is currently over 330.

That’s $1 worth of earnings for every $330 invested.

Would you really buy a business with an ROI of 0.3%? Would you acquire a company that would take over three centuries to break even?

4. Inflation

When governments print trillions of dollars out of thin air and loan it to investors to pump into asset bubbles, the price of everything rises.

[Learn how to calculate your personal inflation rate here.]

When prices rise rapidly, people starve, freeze, go bankrupt, or take to the streets demanding change. That’s how Hitler came to power in Germany.

When inflation soars due to price rises due to money printing, governments have two choices:

A. Raise interest rates and likely trigger panic and a crash that lobs 50+% off the market in the next five years.

B. Print more money out of thin air to keep the bubble inflating, but in doing so, robbing the poor of 50+% of their purchasing power in the next five years.

So far, corporate-controlled governments have chosen option B, but are now signaling that they desperately need to raise rates to slow down inflation.

However, there’s no way their banker bosses will let them raise rates nearly as much as is needed to save the currency from depreciating.

But if they keep robbing the poor via inflation, there will soon be mobs in the streets. Which also tends to crash markets…

5. Everything else

There are a ton of other factors that could lead to a huge market crash:

* A worsening USA-Ch!na relationship

* A terrorist attack

* New Covid variants (and over-responses from increasingly authoritarian governments)

* A major cyber-attack

* Social unrest and protests

* Supply chain disruptions

* Extreme weather events

* Contested elections and capitol battles on a scale we haven’t seen since 1812

Typically, one of these factors will set off a chain reaction that takes down the whole market.

Remember: The dot-com bubble shaved 49% off of people’s investments, and the S&P 500 dropped 57% in 2008 and millions lost their jobs and homes. The next crash will almost certainly be far worse, by many trillions.

But the average house, stock, and crypto investor already knows all this… and they still don’t care.

Hot potato

The game is simple.

The birthday boy or girl starts with a beanbag or a balloon or a ball or — if you want a visit from child protection services — an actual piping hot potato.

Mom or dad hits play on the music and the kids toss the scalding object around the circle, hoping not to be holding the tuber when the music stops.

The music stops. Rory the fat kid gingerly holds the burning potato. All the other kids scream with delight as he’s eliminated. This repeats until one kid is left and gets a grab-bag of sugar for his or her efforts.

Adult speculators are the same way.

They all know that houses, stocks, and crypto are overpriced. They know we’re in a hysteria-driven bubble. They’re holding on as long as they can, trying to squeeze as much unearned wealth out of society as possible. But unlike 2008, they think they’ll be smart enough to sell right before the crash this time.

But they won’t (and mathematically can’t.)

Only one kid will be left with the spoils.

And it won’t be you.

Just like hot potato, the vast majority will get burned and end up with nothing in the end.

Happy New Year, my friends.

I like to think we do a decent job of forecasting the future over here at Surviving Tomorrow headquarters.

Only time will tell.

This article is written in declaratives, but of course, it’s simply speculative.

Circle back in a year and see how our predictions fared!

Let’s start with the good news first:

1. We don’t all die in a global nuclear war

Nukes are for Boomers.

Thank heavens for mutually-assured destruction on a planetary scale. There are more than 15,000+ nuclear warheads on planet Earth, but clear through the end of 2022, the nine nuclear nations will continue their good work of keeping planet-destroying weapons out of the hands of rogue actors… for now.

This is where we cut to a banger of a quote from Albert Einstein that only a small percentage of the population will understand:

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Luckily, WWIII won’t happen in 2022.

2. The stock market doesn’t crash

That’s 2023’s job.

We’ll see moderate growth in the stock price of vampire corporations and the corrupted real estate market — though certainly not in real, productive, contributive growth.

While the Great Quit and the booming union negotiations will provide some temporary relief for union members, overall there will be no meaningful rise in workers’ real wages when you factor in crushing inflation.

3. Bitcoin hits seventeen billion trillion dollars

Just kidding.

The crypto crackdown will continue as:

a.) Central banks see the real threat it now poses to their corrupt money monopoly.

b.) They get serious about launching their dystopian surveillance coins.

Also, bafflingly, Tether will continue to keep its fraud alive (and likely won’t get indicted as a $60+ billion crime until after the greater market crashes.)

4. The metaverse is a flop*

*For now.

Adults just don’t want to “live” in virtual reality, or have the virtual world invade their lives via augmented reality.

From a historical perspective, the pornography industry typically innovates first. (Think: pop-ups, pop-downs, pop-unders, secure payments, age verification.) And even porn hasn’t seen widespread VR uptake. Plus Google glasses were a huge bust and Oculus isn’t winning over the 35-plussers (basically, people with real lives.)

Accordingly, Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc will have to keep doing what it’s been doing for years to create markets for its life-threatening products:

Target children.

5. Inflation doesn’t go away

Yay money printing, overpopulation, and resource depletion.

Real inflation including assets has already exceeded 10% for the past two years in a row, and it will continue through 2022.

If you need it, buy it now, because it will be more expensive tomorrow.

Also: “Transitory” enters the lexicon as a joke word. (Think: “My girlfriend and I didn’t break up, our relationship is just transitory.”)

Surviving Tomorrow encourages all readers to ignore the fake government numbers and calculate their own personalized inflation numbers.

6. Supply chain challenges continue to plague humanity

And some of them will be straight-up manufactured by Ch!na as they test their ability to constrict supply flows in order to extract wealth from the West.

They’re pure geniuses, folks — practicing monopoly-capitalism abroad to enforce fake communism at home.

The tiniest of silver linings?

There’s a microscopic opportunity for localism to make a reemergence if ya’ll would stop shopping at Walmart.

7. Republicans win the mid-terms

Not by the usual landslide, but enough to freak the deluded Dems.

(The GOP is also going to take the Presidency in 2024, whether they win or not.)

8. More predator corporations move to the Subscription Serfdom Model

Toyota recently began retroactively charging customers $8/month to start their own cars, and we’ll see more companies dip their claws into the not-for-sale model in 2022.

Under subscription serfdom, it’s only a matter of time before you won’t be able to afford a house, car, or mattress.

9. Airbnb continues to ruin families and communities

Thanks to its unsustainable grow-forever business model, Airbnb hosts will continue to outbid working families for residential homes, which will make sale prices rise, rentals disappear, and the few remaining rentals skyrocket in price.

We won’t see the widespread smashing of windows and torching of Airbnbs quite yet, but it will eventually be the thing to do, like it was with Jehovah’s Witness buildings in the seventies.

Over on CNN+, their soon-to-be #1 host, Scott Galloway — despite his genuine care for the next generation — will remain publicly silent about one of his favorite companies. But late at night, while cuddling his adorable dog, he’ll quietly start to realize what we already know:

That Airbnb is a global threat to affordable homeownership and rentership.

10. No more lockdowns

Multinational corporations made a multi-trillion-dollar killing during the lockdowns, but even their rented politicians and privatized media corporations won’t be able to muster up enough fear to keep everyone indoors for another year.

We’re already seeing revolt in Australia and within Boris Johnson’s UK Conservative party, and if any government is stupid enough to try to place its citizens on house arrest over an infectious-but-mild variant, there will be revolts in the street.

Sadly, even without lockdowns…

11. Loneliness and depression increase

Because we’re engineering our society for loneliness.

After all, it’s far more profitable to divide and conquer your customers so they all stay home and spend online. No one makes money from a walk in the wild.

Between the loss of restaurants, cinemas, shopping, outdoor play, mass gatherings, and human-to-human sex, we’re seeing a long-term decline in face-to-face human interaction.

Soon, being together will be a radical act.

12. Social media continues to destroy society

Congress will do nothing meaningful to stop Facebook.

War criminal Mark Zuckerberg will make some basic tweaks to his algorithm in the wake of Frances Haugen’s important disclosures, knowing full-well his must-make-more-profits algorithm stands at odds with civil discourse and democracy.

Expect social media to continue to divide society as the machine generates more extremists on both sides of the political aisle.

13. Ch!na continues to dominate America

America and Ch!na are already at war, but one side doesn’t know it yet.

Though they’ll have to spend a lot of 2022 shoring up their crumbling foundations (IE massive debt and a real estate bubble that’s ready to explode), expect Ch!nese global domination to keep more or less on schedule, with additional port purchases, debt traps, surveillance rollouts, and economic colonization of developing countries.

Maybe they deserve to run the world…

14. The climate crisis continues to worsen

Manhattan won’t be underwater by the end of 2022, but we’ll continue to:

* Spew heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

* Poison our rivers.

* Fill the oceans with microplastics.

* Frack the foundations of our landmasses and ocean beds.

* Deforest tens of millions of acres (roughly the size of Panama.)

* Rape the soil another half-inch, leaving us with just a few dozen more natural harvests before we have to move to synthetic food production.

The world’s largest polluters will, of course, continue to play their massive game of misdirection by shaming the middle class into not eating meat, using plastic straws, heating with woodstoves, driving fast, or taking baths.

But at least three more people will wise up to their con.

15. Debt increases

And not just Federal debt, which is a given.

We’re talking about personal consumer debt.

In 2022, people will burn through their Covid savings runway and get back to tapping their credit cards as they return to semi-normal commercial life.

After the Republicans win the mid-terms there will be no more free handouts, which will force many people back to work, which will cue corporations to push back against unions and resist real wage increases.

16. Global democracy remains in decline for the sixteenth consecutive year

Freedom House will release its annual report and it will contain more of the same — increasing authoritarianism across the planet.

Yet, sheeplike citizens will keep voting for corporate-captured mainstream parties instead of defunding the corporations who bankroll the sociopathic politicians that execute the will of private interests.

Weep for us, Athens, for we held your dream in the palm of our hand and smothered it to death.

17. The rich get richer

While elites won’t add another $5.5 trillion to their net worth in the year ahead, they will likely add $2+ trillion as the markets continue to ride a wave of inflation, rising consumer prices, and the last of 2021’s printed money.

America will go yet another year without a democratic wealth tax, with groveling billionaire sycophants continuing to scream that anything less than unlimited wealth accumulation is socialism.

18. The poor get poorer

Last year, the British National Health Service (NHS) got a 1% pay raise.

But real inflation was 10+%, so they actually got a 9% pay cut.

In 2022, food, transportation, and especially housing prices will rise, and while many people will receive the tiniest of pay raises, they will be significantly poorer in real relative wealth.

Several million people will also fall out of the job market due to automation, monopolization, and financialization — made economically inefficient — never to return to the workforce for the rest of their lives. As a knock-on effect of permanent poverty, American drug addiction will continue to claim more lives than 2021, as will suicide.

19. Governments desperately try to stave off a crash

After temporarily slowing down the money printer in a weak attempt to slow down inflation, the markets will react poorly (read: numbers go down) and corporations will push their rented politicians to do something.

Yet, the big banks see the writing on the wall, and push a counter-narrative to their rented politicians. The result will be a mishmash of conflicting economic maneuvers, crazy risk-taking, and fiscal decisions that will baffle seasoned economists, Wall Street, and Main Street alike.

If the market sees a full quarter or more of losses, expect the Fed to re-start up the money printer late in 2022, rather than doing the right thing and letting the whole house of cards burn to the ground in a reset to sanity.

20. Housing becomes increasingly unaffordable for renters

“Nobody gets seconds until everyone’s had firsts” apparently doesn’t apply to shelter.

Thanks to Airbnb, second house-owners, land-lorders, and institutional investors, the rental market will continue to evaporate, forcing working renters to surrender a far greater portion of their hard-earned wealth to passive extractors.

And that’s for the “lucky” renters who can find any places to rent in their area.

For the bottom of society, it simply means hundreds of thousands more people will end up on the streets while former family homes sit empty for much of the year. Wealthy people will continue to leave homeless-filled cities like Los Angeles, pretending “not to understand” exactly why there are more people on the streets now than at any point since the Great Depression.

21. Homeownership becomes increasingly unaffordable without massive debt

House prices won’t rise as quickly as they did during the Covid flight to the suburbs, but the same purchasers who are outbidding renters will continue to dominate middle-class working folks.

Out of desperation, millions of young-ish families will try to pole-vault the massive chasm into homeownership, loading themselves with multi-six-figure debt, effectively wage-enslaving themselves for forty years to a bank that simply printed digital credit into their bank accounts.

22. Most people find a way to carry on

Because every human being is a miracle.

I met a woman when I was in Transnistria — the dystopian half-nation between Moldova and Ukraine that’s controlled by the Russians — who showed me the scar on her chest where her husband tried to stab her in the heart before burning their house down and abandoning her and their two children. She still had the fortitude to smile.

I’ve been to North Korea, where I witnessed malnourished children drawing water by hand from mud wells. I didn’t see a single piece of wildlife in five days — no birds, nor rabbits, nor squirrels, nor rodents — because they’ve all been eaten. Yet our Korean brothers and sisters soldier on.

I’ve visited the largest garbage dump in Africa, where thousands of men, women, and children spend their entire lives digging through the trash for anything of value. Do they know how precious and strong they are?

It’s awe-inspiring how resilient human beings can be.

It’s also scary when you realize that predator corporations know it, too.

They know how much more life can still be pressed out of the middle class.

On a personal note…

* Baby Concord will take his first steps, and his first spoken phrase will be either “corporate corruption” or “sic semper tyrannis.”

* Surviving Tomorrow, which grew to 15,000 followers in this its first year, will grow to 50,000+ followers as its wonderful and intelligent readers consistently and purposefully clap, share, and strongly insist that all their friends and family join the conversation and follow along.

In conclusion

Trajectory is everything, my dear friends.

Insanity, as you know, is doing the same things and expecting different results.

As long as we keep buying products from the same corporations, incinerating our time on the same extremist-creating social media sites, and voting for the same corporate-captured political parties, we’ll keep going where we’re already headed:

Democratic destruction, ecological collapse, and economic irrelevance.

Thanks for reading Surviving Tomorrow.

All my love,

Jared A. Brock

“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Queen Elizabeth II thinks she owns over 2,195,866,240 acres of land plus half of the UK’s foreshore and most of its seabed.

Think about that for a second.

In the twenty-first century — with all our human rights, technological advances, scientific breakthroughs, and philosophical machinations — there is an elite British family that still plays dress-up and thinks they own a significant percentage of all the dry and damp land on planet Earth.

And 62% of their nation believes them.

Talk about mass insanity.

Imagine the amount of media control one would need to muster in order to maintain such a collective delusion.

Or…

After all their centuries under serfdom, maybe the British masses just understand history better than we do in the New World.

Maybe they understand that humans aren’t naturally free.

Normally, we’re just slaves.

Democracy under siege

Democracy has been in decline for fifteen straight years.

Anti-human corporatism and ideological fundamentalism continue to tear down the human rights and freedoms so hard-won by the sacrifice of tens of millions of lives in World War II.

The elites should be ashamed of themselves.

(So should their mothers.)

Instead of seeking widest-spread wellbeing for our global family and our host planet, private interests grapple for unchecked power in order to advance their anti-commons agendas.

But of course, using the word “democracy” to describe varying degrees of oligarchy and corporatocracy doesn’t do the word justice. America, nor ancient Athens, nor the United Kingdom, nor any other nation on earth, has ever been a democracy, not for one minute. The elites would never allow a real democracy to last for long.

But maybe we don’t need to worry about the inevitable disappearance of democracy. Maybe it’s our fate.

After all, we’ve been here before.

Planet freedom?

The first civilizations in Sumer, Egypt, and the Indus Valley were ruled by priest-kings and rife with slavery and subjugation.

The Roman world started as a monarchy, then became a republic ruled by wildly-corrupt aristocratic senators and consuls, before falling to the tyrannical Caesars.

Africa was ruled by pharaohs and tribal chieftains, the eastern dynasties have been ruled by hyper-violent warlords from 2070 BC to this very day, and France and Britain have been dominated by outrageously abusive monarchs for most of their histories.

Some people will argue this wasn’t the case during our hunter-gatherer days, but it’s quite clear that humans have always had a tendency to lord our might, strength, and advantages over others. If you don’t believe tyranny can’t exist in a society as small as two, you’ve obviously never seen two children play in a sandbox, or known a woman with an abusive spouse.

All of human history is a story of dictators, tyrants, warlords, priests, popes, kings, queens, emperors, caesars, czars, tsars, autocrats, führers, duces, chairmen, rajas, khans, sultans, shahs, pharaohs, witch doctors, chiefs, bullies, and abusers, all practicing their own form of authoritarianism or totalitarianism.

We just got lucky.

There is nothing new under the sun

Freedom, of course, is a sliding scale. When choice and control erode, there comes a point where people are pushed over the Rubicon from free to not free. We’re currently crossing over.

Last night on our star-saunter, my wife and I passed a delivery driver who works for an Amazon affiliate. He was deep in the bowels of his van, desperately searching in the 9PM dark for a package to deliver to one of the dozens of Airbnbs that pock our neighborhood like skin cancer. It was late, and freezing cold, and we felt sick to our stomachs.

Because we know this man.

He’s mentally challenged and physically handicapped, earns minimum wage in a costly area plagued with land-lorders and Airbnbs and no other jobs available, his car is constantly in the shop for repairs, and he works like a dog from sunup to nearly midnight and will continue to do so until Amazon automates his job and he dies homeless.

How is this man not a slave by another name?

He will never be free.

It’s the same for tens of millions of Americans that have been permanently left behind.

It’s the same for the two billion people who will move into slums in our lifetime.

Mean reversion

Mean reversion: A theory that suggests that prices eventually revert to the long-run average level of the entire dataset.

What if we aren’t currently witnessing a loss of freedom?

What if this is just a reversion to the mean?

We’ve had 6,500 years of documented subjugation and oppression for the masses, blended with a few centuries of moderate freedom for a tiny subset of the Western population.

And now we’re reverting back to the long-term average.

Think about all the macroeconomic factors that are currently coalescing to strip your freedom, rob your wealth, and destroy your future:

* Average house prices skyrocketing to $10 million.

* The end of ownership, leading to subscription serfdom.

* Job automation leading to economic irrelevance for billions.

* Democracy in irreversible decline.

* Global surveillance, restricted movement, social credit systems, and digital surveillance currencies on the rise.

* The cost of living soaring as real inflation devours purchasing power.

* Runaway environmental destruction, species collapse, and soil extinction.

* Corporatization taking over governments and their judiciaries.

Clearly, freedom and democracy’s best days are in the past.

And if we can’t protect it, maybe we don’t deserve it.

Rule Britannia

Maybe that Brit biologist Darwin was right.

Maybe this is a dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest, winner-take-all, losers-can-go-die-quietly world in which most of us were born to be subjects, servants, serfs, and slaves.

After all, fewer than a fifth of all people on planet Earth live in a nation that is considered fully free, and this is the best it’s ever been.

Sadly, that freedom is diminishing everywhere and I honestly don’t see how things will ever turn around without a widespread revival.

The United Kingdom, for its part, never gave up on aristocratic rule. Sure, it temporarily put on the sheen of democracy, but a quick leaf through the House of Commons and the House of Lords reveals a tight-knit club of kissing cousins who all went to Eton and Oxford and call each other by made-up titles like Duke, Earl, Viscount, Baron, Knight, and Lord.

It’s adorable, but frightening. After all…

* Less than 1% of Brits own half the country’s landmass.

* The 600 aristocratic families and landed gentry still own a third.

* Just six families own all of central London.

* The monarchy believes it owns the British Parliament itself.

Meanwhile, tens of millions of hard-laboring contributors work themselves to the bone to pay heavy taxes and astronomical rents just to keep the extractive elites afloat.

And, despite the fact that the monarchy is little more than a 7,936-property land-lording operation made wealthy through ten centuries of bloodshed, war, slavery, and genocide, British taxpayers are still forced to support the lecherous institution to the tune of $109 million per year.

At least the British public knows they’re getting screwed: According to a new poll released last week, just 5% of voters said British politicians were in office for the welfare of their country.

And do you know what?

Those 5% are wrong.

It’s every man for himself now.

(And if you don’t like it, then it’s time for you to make a radical change.)

“ATH! ATH! ATH! ATH!” — Every bitcoiner in the world right now

Bitcoin’s having a good week — if you consider a several trillion dollars in future losses for the middle class a good thing.

All-time highs certainly make the Bitcoin cult high, alright.

Right now, Twitter is a-flutter with bitboys in rapturous ecstasy, declaring total economic victory — as if the ballooning price of a Ponzi scheme somehow confers legitimacy — spouting fake words and phrases like “supercycle,” “hypercycle,” “parabolic,” and “the exponential age.”

It’s all hogwash.

While I’m just as happy as the next guy to see the $USD, $CAD, and £GBP crash and burn and die forever, just because $BTC is experiencing a pump doesn’t mean it won’t end terribly for thousands of young speculators.

Bitcoin will almost certainly never be the global reserve currency, and there are some intriguing historic precedents worth considering before an entire generation gambles away their life savings on a bunch of digital files.

Let’s go visit ancient Greece and Rome.

Thucydides trap

The year is 432 BC.

The entitled and decadent city-state of Athens is on the rise.

The violent and brutal city-state of Sparta is in decline.

The Athenian military general Thucydides sizes up the situation and realizes something inevitable is about to occur:

War.

And a bloody war at that.

For more than a generation, the two city-states went at it with all the cruelty and brutality they could muster. Huge amounts of the countryside were destroyed, entire cities leveled, whole cultures made extinct, with tens of thousands killed by sword and spear and starvation and plague and fire.

When it was all over thirty years later, Thucydides penned his official history of the bloodbath, entitled The History of the Peloponnesian War, and concluded:

“It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.”

Pyrrhic victory

The year is 279 BC.

Pyrrhus, king of Epirus and one of the greatest generals of his era, refuses to accept Roman rule in his part of Greece.

At the battles of Heraclea in 280 BC and the battle of Asculum in 279 BC, Pyrrhus and his army defeated the Romans… but suffered irreplaceable casualties in doing so.

As Plutarch reports in the Life of Pyrrhus:

The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that “If we are victorious in one more battle with the Romans, we shall be utterly ruined.” This was because he lost a great part of the forces he had brought to Italy, and almost all his particular friends and most of his principal commanders. He could not call up more men from home and his allies in Italy were becoming indifferent. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.

So, too, was the case with Athens and Sparta 150 years earlier.

In the end, Sparta won — nominally — but when their three-decade war was over, both nations lay in ruin; economies shattered, a generation of young boys dead, their cities undefended, leaving all of Greece vulnerable to invasion from the east.

Decentralization vs centralization

This will be the economic battle of our time.

Bitcoin and its mob are the rising Athens — decadent and demanding; brilliant, yet entitled.

Government fiat is the bitter, savage, violent, and ancient Sparta; the ugly, backward, and corrupted status quo.

Perhaps the greatest and most baffling cognitive dissonance amount bitcoiners right now is how, on one hand, they hate “fedcoins” and insist the whole Federal Reserve system is a corrupt institution run by lying criminals (which it is), and yet when it comes to the matter of whether or not the Fed will eventually try to kill Bitcoin and launch its own digital surveillance currency, they’re the first group to defend the Fed and say it will never happen because people at the Fed have promised they won’t shut Bitcoin down.

Do they have a split personality?

Just go on Twitter. Bitboys absolutely rail against the Fed, but also insist that the Fed’s going to do the “right thing,” stick to their word, and roll over for Bitcoin.

Even Tim Denning (who, to be clear, is not an outrageous bitcoiner) has drunk the Kool-aid, saying:

Does anyone really believe this policy decision will hold forever?

That the nation with the biggest military in human history is simply going to give up its ability to control and manipulate the global economy just because some genius coder created an accountable and unmanipulatable digital currency?

Zero chance.

There’s simply too much wealth to be extracted by controlling money.

War between Athens and Sparta is inevitable.

Here’s what’s likely going to happen

* America will continue to let Bitcoin chug along until it becomes an actual and major threat to the real American economy. Which it most certainly will do. As more nations pull an El Salvador and ditch the US Dollar, as more people start evading taxes because it’s so easy to do with Bitcoin, and as tens of millions ditch the USD because it’s so inflationary, there will come a mathematical breaking point when it’s in the best interests of the American state to launch its counter-attack.

* America will launch a digital surveillance currency. Just another fiat currency, but this time, it’s a fully traceable, trackable, deletable, weaponizable panopticoin.

* America will make Bitcoin illegal.Would you buy, hold, spend, or accept Bitcoin if getting caught in possession of it came with a ten-year jail sentence or a $250,000 fine? Most people wouldn’t. And most vendors certainly wouldn’t accept Bitcoin for transactions, which will essentially end the long-term domestic market for Bitcoin.

* America and Bitcoiners will go to war.The likes of Michael Saylor and Robert Breedlove will move to Bitcoin-friendly nations and invest accordingly, and many location-independent folks will follow, but all will face sanctions and seizures of domestic assets. America will then enlist its allies to join in a federation that bans Bitcoin — after all, each of these nations will also be suffering from cratered tax revenues thanks to Bitcoin — making geoarbitrage increasingly difficult even for highly-mobile Bitcoiners.

* America will eventually win.But only in the same way that Sparta beat Athens. Bitcoin will still exist, of course, though likely only as a currency in marginal nations like El Salvador. America, too, will still exist, but the battle for monetary supremacy will have taken its Pyrrhic toll on the economy, leaving America and the rest of Western civilization vulnerable to economic subjugation from the east.

* China sweeps in like the Romans and Persians.When weakened decentralized powers break down, all it takes is one somewhat-strong centralized power to sweep in. In the case of the city-states of Athens and Sparta (and Thebes and Corinth and hundreds of others), it was Alexander who put all of Greece under his rule and reign.

The Chinese Dream, as laid out in Xi Jinping’s book, is simple: To make China the center of the economic universe. A single, united Han bloodline, rich in resources and mighty in power and strength, essentially ruling the rest of the world via client nations, vassal states, and good old-fashioned colonialism.

* They already own the biggest pork producer in America.

* They already own the biggest dairy producer in Canada.

* They already own most of the toll highways in Africa.

* They’re debt-trapping half the globe with their Belt and Road Initiative.

* They even own the ancient Athenian port that Sparta attacked 2,400 years ago.

Why not also go for control of the global reserve currency?

The economic war between $BTC and the $USD is a Thucydidean trap that will end in a Pyrrhic victory for America.

But the economic war that follows could be the end of Western civilization as we know it.

“Conservative: A statesman who is enamored with existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with other evils.” — Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary

I rail against liberals plenty, so today I’m going to set my sights on the other side of the aisle and say what most people already know deep down:

Most conservatives today are fake conservatives.

* They don’t care about fair business.

* They don’t care about balanced budgets.

* They don’t care about shared freedom.

* They aren’t actually pro-life.

* They don’t care about family values.

* They don’t care about the future.

Just so long as the red team wins and they get to shrink government until it magically ushers in a corporate-controlled libertarian paradise.

Which, of course, isn’t conservatism at all.

Calm yourselves, lefties

You’re the kind, warm-hearted, open-to-newness people, remember?

No need to get hopped up because someone’s having a civil discussion about a chunk of the political spectrum that you loathe to the core of your fair trade organic vegan knickers.

It’s important to start by pointing out what conservatism is not:

* It’s not the Republican party.

* It’s not the Tea Party or the Capitol Hill rioters.

* It’s not Fox News, OAN, Breitbart, etc.

* It’s not future president Donald Trump.

So don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

In other words, don’t act exactly like the people you hate.

The Core Principles of Conservatism

Conservatism, like all ideologies, is full of flaws. But perhaps no set of political values has been re-interpreted and lived out as poorly as by today’s Republicans:

* Individual FreedomIronically, today’s conservatives conflate the word “freedom” with the word “autonomy.” The ancient Greeks and Romans defined freedom as the ability to do right in any circumstance, whereas Americans today simply think freedom means “do whatever I want, others be damned.”

* Limited GovernmentWhich is ironic, because Republicans are in favor of a massive military and are the ones that got Citizen’s United passed, which allows for unlimited campaign finance.

* OrderWhich is ironic, because they’re also chaotic and anti-institutional, and can’t seem to find a way to reconcile this dichotomy within their ranks.

* Fiscal ResponsibilityIt’s quite sad that for many people, fiscal responsibility is more important than the responsibility we have to take care of each other. It’s also ironic, because there’s never been a fiscally-responsible Republican president. (After all, they’re the party of massive corporate socialism.)

* Free MarketsWhich is ironic, because rules-free markets are just black markets that always end in monopoly.

* The Rule of LawWhich is ironic, because the judicial branch is not supposed to rule the roost — yet Republicans have stacked the bench and passed horrible pro-corporate decisions like Citizen’s United, sending anti-corporatists to prison, gerrymandering districts, and using it to rig elections.

* Human DignityWhich is ironic, because they’re against sensible gun laws, raising wages, elevating workers’ rights, ending wars, or providing healthcare to all.

* VarietyWhich is ironic, because they’re one of the most homogenous (and racist) voting blocs in history.

As you can see, there probably isn’t a Trumper, Tea Partier, Fox News commentator, or QAnon believer who actually believes and lives out these flawed conservative values.

The Republican Party

… is a total disaster.

It’s filled with gun-toting preppers.It’s filled with rabid anti-vaxxers.It’s filled with delusional QAnoners.It’s jam-packed with racists.

Most Republicans aren’t even pro-life — they’re just anti-abortion, but more than happy to carry a weapon, keep the nukes, send thousands of young people off to fight endless wars, and let tens of thousands die each year due to lack of medical coverage.

Most Republicans aren’t in favor of small government — if they were, they’d start with the military.

And let’s not pretend for a moment that most Republicans believe (or even understand) the rules-free-market or fiscal responsibility. No, the Republican party is bought-and-paid-for with corporate dollars, and contains an unfathomable number of monopoly defenders, corporate socialists, and billionaire sycophants.

Modern conservatism is, above all, just political corporatism.

That said: The Republican Party also contains millions of kind-hearted, hard-working, fair-minded, pro-science, utterly-sensible people who hate what their party has become, but rightly see the swamplike corruption on the other side and continue to vote for the devil they know.

If only there was another option…

Introducing Commons Conservatism

I know a number of people who aren’t extreme right or extreme left. There’s no political party for them, but they all tend to believe in a common set of progressive conservative-ish ideals:

* Good GovernanceWe don’t need big government or small government, we need good government — filled with capable public servants who are transparent, accountable, and absolutely terrified of those they represent.

* Fiscal ResponsibilityThis means delivering services to customer-citizens in an effective and accountable manner. If we get taxed, we want to see an itemized receipt.

* Fair-Rules Market Commons conservatives are equally opposed to the tyranny of the centralized state (ie socialism/communism) and the corporatized state (ie multinational monopolies.) This is achieved not by eliminating regulation, or by authoritarianism, but by enacting democratically-decided fair rules for how the economy will run.

* Family Values Yes, family matters. But not in the nuclear one-dad-one-mom-two-and-a-half-kids-white-picket-fence kind of way. No, we’re talking about the family unit we had for thousands and thousands of years; the one that included support for children, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Commons conservatives look at where our economy is heading and realize that a full-family structure is essentially inevitable when childcare, education, and eldercare costs become impossible for the middle class to pay. At the same time, they also believe in structuring society so that one-income families can thrive — which is more important than ever, now that single parenthood is at an all-time high.

* Proportional FreedomThey don’t conflate it with idiotic libertarian autonomy. Commons conservatives understand that we all share one freedom, and that the only sensible path forward is pluralism — that “people of different beliefs, backgrounds, and lifestyles can coexist in the same society and participate equally in the political process” — so long as no one party is able to tell everyone else what to do.

* Genuinely Pro-lifeCommons conservatives still believe that abortion is murder, but they're willing to invest heavily in unwanted pregnancy prevention and step up to adopt babies from women willing to carry their infants to full-term. They’re also 360-degree pro-life: In favor of sensible gun laws, against war, anti-nuke, anti-drone, anti-robot soldiers, anti-chemical weapon, and in favor of ending any corporate practice that harms nature and sickens people.

* Sensible Land StewardshipIt’s hard to believe, but the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act all came to life under Nixon. Without clean land, air, and water, we literally have no future. Millions of commons conservatives — especially farmers, ranchers, hunters, and fishermen — fundamentally understand that sustainability is an economic, social, and scientific imperative. Nature doesn’t negotiate with terrorists.

* Safety and SecurityWe don’t need to be “tough on crime”… we need to build a society where crime is unnecessary. This means investing heavily in crime prevention, systemic poverty elimination, and restorative justice.

Commons conservatives believe we are only as safe as our most dangerous neighborhood, only as wise as our least-educated classroom, and only as rich as our poorest neighbor.

Fake conservatism is dead

American Republicans and British Conservatives live under the delusion that their brand of fake conservatism is the future.

They’re out of their mind.

The majority of the younger generations, specifically Gen Z and Gen Alpha, cannot fathom voting for the rabid corporatists and mentally-deranged hyper-right-wingers who currently control right-leaning parties.

If commons conservatives don’t rise up and lead their half of the spectrum back to reasonable ground, extremists within the party will almost certainly seize total control and do whatever they need to do (legally or otherwise) to take over America and turn it into a fascist dictatorship.

And isn’t that the ultimate betrayal of conservative values?

It’s time for commons conservatives to do the right thing and break up with the Republican party. America is well-overdue to become a multi-party nation anyway.

And when commons conservatives grow a backbone and do the right thing, they might discover they have some friends across the aisle.

After all, most modern “liberals” are fake liberals, too.