🛡 Surviving Tomorrow

“I’ve spent more time with President Xi Jinping of China than any world leader. He firmly believes that China, before the year 2035, is going to own America because autocracies can make quick decisions.” — US President Joe Biden

My great-grandpa grew up in China and we had Chinese boarders growing up — both, weirdly, were named Lin Ding. The second one taught us his family recipes, helped my mom build a Chinese garden, and he took me to visit the fish tanks at the university where he was studying to be an ichthyologist. Ever since I was a boy, China has always been on my radar.

And 71 percent of Americans are worried about a hot war between the United States and China in the next five years, so we seriously need to talk about it.

For those of you who are keeping score like I am, it’s clear that China is absolutely crushing America:

* They’re investing heavily in solar, wind, hydro, biomass, and biofuels, creating five times as many eco-jobs versus the US.

* They’re crushing us on EVs, with plans for all their cars to be electric by 2035.

* They’re thrashing us on quantum security and have already stolen sensitive information about millions of US federal employees and contractors.

* They have 23,550 miles of high-speed rail.

* They produce 67% of the world’s solar panels (versus America’s 1%.)

* They have half as much debt as America (and 22X less external debt.)

* They’re slaying us at GDP growth.

* They exported over 500 million Covid vaccine doses versus America’s 110 million.

* They have a quarter the murder rate, eight times less burglary, 18X less gun crime, and three times less opiate usage.

* They have one-sixth the obesity rate.

* They have more university students than the EU and the US combined.

* They have a $283.6 billion trade surplus with the States.

* They’ve forced their money-grubbing private education institutions to go not-for-profit.

* They’re cracking down on monopolies while America’s have metastasized like cancer.

* They’re cracking down on social media algorithms and protecting children from digital addiction.

At some point it makes you wonder:

Maybe China deserves to win.

Obviously, China does NOT deserve to win

This is the same Han-centric nation that’s ethnically cleansing and genociding the Uyghur nation.

And oppressing the nation of Taiwan.

And the nation of Hong Kong.

And the nation of Tibet.

And colonizing dozens of African countries.

And debt-trapping the world via their Belt and Road Initiative.

And exporting their surveillance technology to dozens of other dictatorships.

So… they’re basically like America, but with 4.37X more citizens.

But we can still learn from China

It takes a lot of humility to admit that other nations are succeeding where we’re failing or falling behind.

When I visited North Korea, my guide/guard told me that North Korea was the best country in the world in every single category, even though he’d never left his slave state.

I told him that it’s okay for each nation to be the best at something. I told him that Canada has the best waterfalls (Niagara) and mountains (Rockies), but America has the coolest canyon (Grand) and Italian food is far better than Hungarian.

Here are a few of the many things America needs to learn from China:

1. China has an extremely long-term mindset

It’s important to put things in perspective:

America is 245 years old. China is 3,221.

Is there anyone who thinks the United States will still be united in 2,976 years? (I think it’ll be twelve countries within a century.)

America works on a two-year time scale — election, mid-terms, election, mid-terms. It’s awful, and stupid. China works on a millennia time scale. Within twenty years, China will be a two-billion person nation with the biggest economy in world history. And they’re just on Chapter Four of their story.

2. China invests heavily in success

They invest in their Olympic athletes. They invest in infrastructure. They’re investing $1.2 trillion in sixty other countries.

They understand that national success requires national investment.

3. China cares about unity

Culture = gathered and rootedIndividualism = uprooted and scattered

While America is a hyper-individualist anti-culture that’s fracturing everywhere, China is a more communal place, with a higher value on family, community, and nationhood.

Tomorrow’s superpower

Obviously, China isn’t beating America in every category. We still have the most white supremacists, gun-toting preppers, Kardashians, student debt, vampire corporations, and TikTok narcissists.

And we shouldn’t try to join China’s race to the bottom on cheap goods, human rights and freedoms, invasive surveillance, Hollywood censorship, authoritarian governance, dystopian panopticoins, kidnapping Chinese nationals who escape overseas, sentencing Canadians to death, and their horrendous social credit system.

China has its eyes set on becoming the dominant culture globally, but that would leave us with a world that is significantly less free, more surveilled, less creative, and less human.

Sure, they’re winning, but I really hope they don’t win win.

Because might isn’t right.

Never was, never will be.

What America does have going for it is some semblance of goodwill. While America has friends, China only has clients. Unfortunately, the corporations that own the Fed and Congress have leveraged the stars and stripes to run their extraction scams all over the world, building serious resentment and distrust even among our allies.

America needs to clean-slate itself and have a national discussion about what universal bedrock values we want to live by and promote in the world in the centuries ahead. Right now, the only “values” that America is exporting are vapid consumerism and predatory corporatism. No wonder half the world hates America and China is laughing.

But US President Joe Biden put it well:

“America is unique. From all nations in the world, we’re the only nation organized based on an idea — None of you get your rights from your government; you get your rights merely because you’re a child of God. The government is there to protect those God-given rights. No other government has been based on that notion. No one can defeat us except us.”

Sadly, American elites are hell-bent on doing just that.

Remember, friends: Democracy isn’t the natural state of human affairs.

Dictatorship is.

Will nationalism beat individualism? Will fake democracy best bona fide autocracy? Will creative culture beat conformist culture?Will centralization beat disintegration? Will coercive “unity” best coercive disunity?

Will China and America learn to get along like the Brock family and the Dings, enjoying years of mutual benefit, cultural exchange, and moral growth on both sides, or will they go to war and destroy the world?

These are the questions of our age.

It’s been a tough two years for most people on this planet:

Stress.

Anxiety.

Real need.

Loneliness.

Depression.

Mental and emotional breakdown.

While the average person is ready for life to get back to normal, there’s a zero percent chance that we’ll ever go back to how things were before the pandemic.

But it’s not going to happen.

In fact, it’s going to be the opposite. Society is going to get more lonely as we emerge from endless curfews, lockdowns, Orwellian surveillance systems, and restrictive locational controls.

Why?

Because the past two years have proven wildly profitable for the predator corporations that rule America.

The Great Lone-ification

Culture comes from the Latin cultus — to cultivate. Cultures form where people come together and are rooted.

Individualism comes from the Latin dividere — to divide. In contrast to cultures that are together and rooted, individualists are uprooted and scattered.

Individualism is an anti-culture.

Over the next generation, we’re going to see the mass-evaporation of cultures on a scale we haven’t seen since perhaps the Roman Empire.

Because there’s a new mono-empire in town: Corporatism.

It owns the Fed.It owns Congress.It dominates labor.It controls much of the economy.It will soon own all the houses.And eventually, it will own everything and everyone.

Because a corporation’s legal fiduciary reason for existing is to deliver profits to passive extractor-shareholders, it will do whatever is necessary to stay alive. If individualism proves more profitable than communalism, hundreds of trillions of dollars will be invested to ensure that individualism prevails.

After all, divide and conquer is a great business model.

A state of ever-emergency

We’re stuck with Covid+ forever.

The Omicron variant already has thirty mutations.

There will be more.

We’ll do our best to create vaccines against them.

Some will work.

People will die.

Welcome to nature.

Corporations and their governments will use each new surprise — be it a disease, extreme weather event, supply chain shortage, mean tweet, terrorist attack, war, or rumor of war — to pump people with anxiety, make them afraid of each other, and make them terrified to venture outside the house.

If we keep on our current trajectory, here’s what America’s individualist-corporatist “culture” will look like in fifty years.

No more restaurants

Eating together is an act as old as humanity itself, but culture-making restaurants were already in trouble before Covid.

* Chains like Starbucks were offshoring their profits and using the proceeds to crush local coffee shops.

* Extractor land-lorders were draining wealth from restaurateurs via hefty commercial rents.

* Social anxiety rates were on the rise.

* Vampire companies like Uber were creating delivery apps so people could eat at home.

For the next few decades, restaurant monopolies will continue to destroy the little guys, millions will go out of business as real estate costs soar to unimaginable heights, and dark kitchens will proliferate around the world.

Soon, the only options will be app-ordered McDonald’s cooked up by robots, or bleary-eyed delivery drivers dropping ghost kitchen meals at the doorstep of your overpriced condo rental.

No more shopping

I spent my teenage life at the mall.

My kids and grandkids will buy everything they want and need online and have it shipped by overworked couriers and uninterested bots.

Or they’ll just print it at home with a 3D printer.

No more movie theatres

This goes without saying.

Cinemas were dying well before Covid, as binge-worthy content proliferated on Youtube and TikTok.

Plus, land-lorders will continue to drain film exhibitors of wealth via ever-rising rents; this is set against fewer and fewer people gathering in the flesh to enjoy a cinematic experience. It’s only a matter of time before even WallStreetBets shorts AMC.

And then there are the streamers. The CEO of Netflix says that their biggest competitor is sleep. That’s funny until you realize how sad that is.

The best thing that can happen to the streamers is for everyone to have an individual Netflix account, stay home, and never stop watching.

And people are doing just that.

No more sex

Or rather, no more meaningful sex.

Instead, a whole generation of children is being raised with porn in their pockets and getting wildly addicted, setting their arousal templates to pixels on a screen instead of real people.

Gen Zers are already having less sex than previous generations. Just wait until VR porn really takes off — and then see what happens when sex robots get good and go mainstream.

Real human bodies (and souls) just won’t be able to compete.

No more outdoor play

Fifty years from now, the world will be too hot to spend time with others outside.

Or it will be too cold — climate change means greater fluctuations after all.

Or there will be too much acid rain.

Or too much air pollution to breathe safely.

Or too much crime, thanks to poverty and a collapse in spending on policing and crime prevention.

Instead, people will just stay home and play in the metaverse, Ready Player One-style.

Alone.

Don’t get me wrong: restaurants, shopping, cinemas, and other places of culture will still exist for elites with the money to pay, but it’ll be far too expensive for the serf masses.

We’ve engineered our society for loneliness

Just take a look at all the biggest companies in the world.

Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Tencent, and the banks that finance them all have a vested interest in keeping us apart from each other.

They all profit from loneliness.

That’s why you don’t hear big tech companies complaining about draconian lockdown measures. They’d rather sell surveillance tech to governments to keep people at home and spending time and money online.

In the future, you’ll be “connected” constantly, and “socializing” digitally, but you’ll be lonelier than you’ve ever been. Because you’ll never be about to fool your glorious, physical, homo sapien body.

Your body knows that human happiness requires human togetherness.

We were made for each other.

And soon, practicing togetherness will be an act of resistance against the individualist-corporatist anti-culture.

Want to be a revolutionary?

Bring people together.

Turn off your phone.Grab some friends.Cook in the park. Play soccer.Watch the moon rise.Light a campfire on the beach.Skinny dip.Sing and saunter under the stars.Grab your family and go off-grid for a week.

You won’t miss a thing back in the “real” world.

It’s quickly disappearing anyway.

The Internet has radicalized people against their own long-term wellbeing.

* It’s true for depressed girls who derive their self-image from Instagram.

* It’s true for guys who seek out porn instead of real partners.

* It’s true for boys who play video games instead of becoming useful.

* It’s true for otherwise healthy people who become anti-vaxxers.

* It’s true for everyday citizens who suddenly become rabid partisans.

And it’s especially true for the tens of millions of people who, thanks to Facebook’s predatory algorithms, now believe climate change is a hoax.

Every family seems to have one (or six) of them now.

They don’t believe in manmade climate change (and usually have a Koch Brothers-funded study to back it up.) Worst of all, they often vociferously deny that there is any possibility that humans could destroy the planet.

Here’s how to break through to people like this.

Don’t try this online

Last week, someone on Twitter accused me of trying to incite murder.

Seriously.

I responded with composure and rationality, but that didn’t stop him from roaring back with a second litany of lies.

So I tried to take it offline:

Why take of offline?

Because I know for a fact that 99% of the population would never treat others the way they do online. This Twitter dude wouldn’t tell me to my face over dinner that I’m trying to drum up mass murder. And if he did, we would discuss until we’d reached some sort of understanding.

No one wins online.

Get them high

Kidding.

Get them drunk.

Kidding again.

But you get my point. Get them in the right mood first. Have a nice meal together, go for a long walk where you talk about the kids and pets, then cozy up in front of the fire with a tea and some cookies.

You need to get them in a safe space before you take them well outside their comfort zone.

Tell them your goal isn’t to convince them of anything

And mean it, too.

Be very upfront about your goal:

Look, I know you have extremely strong opinions about climate change and how it’s a total hoax, but because we’re [family/friends/colleagues/inmates/etc] I would really love it if you’d give me five minutes to share my perspective. I don’t need you to accept any of it, I just need you to suspend disbelief and humor me so that I can at least feel heard.

Almost everyone I know will grant you this request.

(If they won’t, they’re probably an extremely unsafe person and you need to take a big step back anyway, and let them know why.)

Stop calling it global warming

Global-scale climate change is just too confusing for small minds.

They’ll say stupid stuff like, “the weather is always changing” and “we’ve had hot and cold periods before.”

And they’re right.

But they’re also practicing some classic third-grade misdirection and they probably don’t know it.

To gut them of this juvenile tactic, avoid the phrases “climate change” and “global warming.”

Instead, keep it grade-school simple: Call it air pollution. That’s it. Air pollution. People can deny climate change and global warming, but no sane person can say that pollution isn’t real.

Once you’ve gained that foothold, then it’s simply a matter of scale.

Explain how global warming actually works

To help people understand how “air pollution” works, tell them this story or do the experiment in real-time:

* Imagine you have an empty fish tank or a glass cactus terrarium that’s airtight and full of oxygen.

* Now imagine you have a heat lamp shining into the glass box. Sure, some of the heat will escape through the glass, but overall, the box and its contents are going to get hotter, right? Of course.

* Now, instead of oxygen (O), imagine pumping nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4), carbon dioxide (CO2), and chlorofluorocarbons (aka CFCs) into the box. If you do this, the glass tank will get hotter, even though the heat lamp’s temperature hasn’t changed, because these particular gases trap the heat and keep it from escaping. This is called the greenhouse effect. (If you have access to a sauna, take them in and dump a load of water on the rocks to create steam. That’s the greenhouse effect.)

* Now understand that planet Earth is literally a greenhouse. When we pump too many heat-trapping gases into our greenhouse air, we get all sorts of really neat benefits (like longer growing seasons, the ability to grow food at higher latitudes, fewer winter deaths, fewer heating costs, etc) and some truly heinous side effects (scorching temperatures, more weeds and invasive insects, torrential rainfall, more hurricanes, ocean acidification, desertification, rising cooling costs, rising sea levels, increased food costs due to irrigation needs, etc.) So you can see this comes down to a cost-benefit analysis, right? Cool.

* So my question to you is: Do you think it’s in any way possible that humans could potentially pump so much air pollution into our global greenhouse that the negative side effects could maybe outweigh the positives?

Then sit back and listen. Your goal here is simply to open their mind to the possibility that global warming could, theoretically, be possible.

If your climate change deniers are like the ones in my family, this is where they’ll tell you that it’s pretty prideful to think that humans are so powerful that they could possibly mess up Mother Nature.

This is where you acknowledge their opinion, and then step back in to offer your perspective.

Help them realize how tiny planet Earth is

I’ve been to forty countries, driven across North America five times for work, and I literally took a trip around the world for my first book, and can tell you firsthand that the world is incredibly tiny. (Back in the nineties, a commercial plane circled the whole thing in just 31 hours.)

People who insist that humans can’t hurt the earth simply haven’t done the math:

* The earth is only 123 billion acres, with less than 37 billion acres of it above water.

* 33% of that land is desert and about 24% is mountainous.

* Only 10.6% is considered arable.

* There are currently 7.91 billion people alive.

Ask your climate change denier friend/uncle if they think it’s theoretically possible that you could potentially wreck their half an acre of land.

I know I could.

I could burn it, oil it, salt it, pollute it, poison it. I could wreck it for at least a century, if not a millennia. Now add the machines of industry, the beautiful and brutal efficiency of transnational corporate capitalism, and tell me our collective consumer lifestyle couldn’t possibly do the same. It’s an impossible thing to deny without a huge dose of delusion.

Again, your goal isn’t to convince them of anything, just to open the door to the possibility that so many humans on so little a planet could theoretically do so much damage.

Then show them the current scale of human impact

Once you’ve established that the world is comparatively small and that humans could potentially pollute the air and ruin the land, have a short discussion about the current state of human impact on nature.

Be sure to mention:

* Residential built-up (cities, towns, villages, hamlets, neighborhoods, etc)

* Crop and pasturelands

* Grazing

* Oil & gas production

* Mining & quarrying

* Power generation

* Roads

* Railways

* Powerlines

* Electrical infrastructure

* Logging

* Reservoirs

This is the part where you whip out your phone or laptop and pull up Earth Engine and actually show them a map of our current impact on earth.

Now get them to imagine what this map might look like if we grow to 10+ billion people and continue to grow our levels of air pollution and land pollution. Ask them how they think this could impact the world in fifty years.

(Pro-tip: If they say “technology will save us,” then point out the flaw in their argument — using such a phrase admits there’s a pollution problem. If there wasn’t a real problem, we wouldn’t need tech to save us. Which it won’t.)

Understand their point of view

At this point, thank them for listening to your perspective. Let them know you really appreciate that you feel like you’ve been heard, and acknowledge it must’ve been hard for them to sit through.

For nearly all of human economic history, commerce roughly functioned in the same way:

* Workers created value in the form of goods and services.

* Their products were sold to purchasers.

* The profits went to wealthy people who had systemic advantages over impoverished workers.

But until exactly fifty years ago, things steadily improved for folks without much wealth.

We went from slavery to serfdom to grueling industrial employment to believing the American Dream was actually attainable for all.

Then, strange things started happening in 1971…

Worker compensation flatlined:

Affordability peaked:

Inflation skyrocketed:

National debt soared:

And the number of billionaires metastasized from a literal handful — the Rockefellers, Mellons, Gettys, Hugheses, and DuPonts — to more than 2,755 billionaires worldwide today.

(In case you’re wondering the heck what happened in 1971, America went off the gold standard, but that’s not the point of this article.)

Taking control of the money supply and systematically robbing the working class via inflation was Phase One on the journey toward stuffing the middle class back into serfdom.

It gets far worse from here.

Phase two

For almost all of human history, people made one-time payments and then took possession of goods and services.

Not anymore.

Have you noticed that everyone is pushing you into a monthly payment?

* Your land-lorder or mortgage lender

* Your insurance company

* Your heating provider

* Your electricity board

* Your water company

* Your municipality for land taxes

* Your phone provider

* Your car salesman

* Your student loan gangster

* Your credit card company

* Your grocery delivery service

* Your razor maker

* And the fifty million apps you haven’t used in two years but are too lazy to cancel

Some of them make sense — if I use a variable amount of electricity over the course of a year, my energy people deserve to get paid in full in a timely manner.

But now, pretty much every industry is trying to ram you into a monthly plan, whether you need or even want one: socks, tights, kid’s toys, underwear, make-up, toothbrushes, meat-by-mail, veg boxes, snack boxes, pre-packaged meals, candy clubs, hot sauces, seafood, cheeses, olive oils, wine clubs, coffee blends, yoga outfits, candles, flowers, paper, art crates, Bitcoin, even outrageously wasteful things like monthly potted plants.

And it makes sense.

Why sell someone something once when you can keep their credit card on file and sell it to them twelve times a year forever?

There’s actually a name for this type of business structure: A recurring revenue model. Corporations love recurring revenue. It helps them forecast revenues, plan their spending accordingly, and most importantly, it seems to mega-boost stock prices for shareholders. It’s not that we should ban all RRM businesses, it’s just that we need to ensure we don’t allow corporations to forever get rid of the option to own at reasonable prices.

(Full disclosure: I run one RRM business — my Substack newsletter+podcast — though I’ve set it up so you can own a copy of every single article and episode I publish for free. And if you’d like to own a physical copy of any of my books or articles for life, please visit jaredbrock.com.)

Daily consumables like food and media aside, recurring revenue models aren’t actually the best thing for consumers. It would be far better if our money retained its value long-term, and we could just save up and purchase buy-it-for-life-quality goods instead of having to re-rent inferior-quality items repeatedly until the day we die broke.

The poverty-making model

First, 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.

Phase three

As kids, most of us used to buy movies.

Physical VHS tapes, usually from Walmart. (Please don’t go to Walmart.)

We all owned the entire Disney collection, remember?

Then Blockbuster came along and we mostly rented, but we always bought DVDs and Blu-rays of the films we knew we were going to watch again and again and again — The Godfather, Fight Club, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings.

Now, if you want to watch a Netflix-produced movie or TV show, you have to pay a monthly fee. Unlike Band of Brothers or The Sopranos back in the day, there is no other legal way for you to repeatedly enjoy the content that Netflix produces unless you continue to pay for the rest of your life.

We already know that people don’t rent because they’re broke — they’re broke because they rent. Now, the shareholder class wants to extend this injustice to every facet of your life.

Do you see what’s happening here?

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

You will own nothing and be happy, remember?

This infuriates me.

The perfect example is Microsoft’s Word. I’m a full-time book author, and publishers bafflingly still require me to submit manuscripts in Word. But Microsoft — a $2.5 trillion company — forces me to pay $9.99 per month forever for the crappiest word processor ever created.

(Interestingly, their website still uses the word “buy” on their rent button, so clearly they don’t have anyone on staff with an English degree.)

The same goes for my wife’s Adobe editing suite — she’ll have to spend more than $30,000 on it over the rest of her career. How absurd is this?

First they came for my movies

Within our lifetime, everything will become “a service,” whether we like it or not. We’ll be forced to rent what we need — impoverishing us in the long run — and it will almost certainly be pitched to us as a way to “save the environment,” because the rental companies will posture like they’re circular economy good guys.

Think:

* Appliances like fridges, toasters, and washing machines (all eventually equipped with Black Mirror-style voice ID and biometric video surveillance)

* Furniture, including mattresses

* Laptops, phones, gaming chairs

* Literally every physical item you own

And do you know what?

We won’t be able to afford to own anything anyway.

Because 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.

* It’s already happening with houses, which are well on their way to $10 million.

* Cars will be completely out of reach within a decade or two.

* Furniture-as-a-service startups are already a thing. (Imagine paying $128/month just to sleep in a bed. Made of foam!)

* The hyper-elitist World Economic Forum thinks you won’t even own your underwear within nine years.

Think about it another way: What does a mattress cost at IKEA, maybe six or eight hundred bucks? But what is a mattress’s market value to an investor if it rents for $99/month on a 36-month lease?

Can you afford a $3500 mattress?

A pair of shoes from Target might be fifty bucks today, but in the hands of a $9 trillion-dollar shark like Blackrock, it could cost you $500 not to be bare-foot.

Now add another twenty years of inflation, wage stagnation, work gigification, and robotic automation.

Friends, I’m looking at the future and I’m seeing a world where it’s mathematically impossible for the masses NOT to be enslaved.

You already don’t have the option to buy Netflix movies. Soon, you won’t have the choice or ability to purchase homes, cars, clothes, or anything else.

Can you believe how insane our economy is?

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 alread…

This opening statement will immediately lose me about a quarter of the reading public, but someone has to say it:

Boomers are to blame for at least half the world’s current troubles.

* They plunged us into generational wars in the Middle East.

* They ditched the gold standard and skyrocketed inflation.

* They caused the Great Recession.

* They caused the current housing crisis and asset bubble.

* They approved and racked up $29 trillion in federal debt.

* They set the time bomb that is Social Security.

* They killed two-thirds of all wildlife on earth.

* They caused the climate change that’s ravaging our planet.

And they’ve been turning a profit from it the whole time.

Don’t believe me?

Just Google any Fortune 500 and take a look at its board of directors, C-suite officers, and major shareholders.

While I won’t go quite so far as one author who argues compellingly that they are a generation of sociopaths who betrayed America, did you know that Boomers are statistically low on empathy? (Just wait ‘til the comments on this article roll in.) Blame the lead, asbestos, and hairspray if you must — but at least acknowledge the reality that:

a.) life is hard for everyone, and b.) on average, no one has had it easier.

Never has a generation extracted so much from a planet and the next generation. Their behaviors and policies are unlike any generation before or after them. They live by the code of “me first and damn the consequences.” Since they took control of Congress in the eighties, they’ve refused to invest in research and development, education, healthcare, crime prevention, or even basic maintenance to the nation’s crumbling infrastructure.

A writer for CNBC says Millennials will inherit $68 trillion from Boomers in the next eight years, but evidently, the not-so-sharp reporter forgot that there’s a whole other generation between Boomers and Millennials.

Also, quick newsflash: Boomers aren’t leaving a cent to their Gen X kids. They’re in amazing shape thanks to medical advances, so they’re golfing and cruising far longer, and when they do eventually slow down, they’ll burn whatever’s left of their runway on wildly-overpriced old folks' homes and end-of-life care, eventually relying on their kids to cover the shortfall.

The Me Generation took a free trip at the planet’s expense and is hellbent on taking the rest of it with them.

And you’re paying for it.

Here are the four big mechanisms by which they’re forcing future generations to bankroll their ride into the sunset:

1. Education

Not that you even needed a post-secondary education (only 12% went), but when Boomers went off to university, it literally cost pennies.

Now, thanks to education inflation, students “need” a six-figure master’s degree just to serve coffee for minimum wage.

And those degrees will literally cost them a decade or more of debt servitude to pay off. The total US student debt is now at a staggering $1.75 trillion, and it’s still climbing like an American Gladiator being shot with tennis balls.

Did I mention that the federal student debt program somehow loses the government over $100 billion per year? Take a guess which taxpayers will be footing the bill…

2. Work

When Boomers left college (or high school, or even grade school), they went straight to work at union jobs that enjoyed steady wage increases for the entire duration of their careers.

Now, armed with several degrees and desperate to pay off their student loans, young people are reluctantly going to work for corporate socialists, money-losing zombie disruptors, multinational tax evaders, or predatory gig companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure they never have employee rights, all to enrich the shareholders of multinational predator corporations who continue to undermine worker rights and political democracy.

3. Housing

In the Carey Grant comedy Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, the protagonist goes exorbitantly over-budget and ends up building a house that cost a then-unheard-of 2.5 times his annual salary.

That’s Boomerdom in a nutshell.

When Boomers bought their first houses, they only cost about two or three times their annual single-earner average income. Now that Boomers can’t find ways to contribute to the productive economy, they’ve turned to real estate as a sure-fire way to extract wealth from productive young people, hoovering up Airbnbs, rental properties, and condos, enjoying skyrocketing property “values” thanks to purposefully-restricted supply.

Now, as they get ready to make their exit, they expect “the kids” to pay absurd prices for crumbling housing stock, leaving the oldies cash-rich and the rest noosed for life.

Meanwhile, young people are battling bloated consumer prices and crushing rent in all fifty states, forcing them to save more and for far longer, before eventually purchasing an outrageously overpriced house — fourteen times higher than what Boomers paid — by taking on a lifetime of bank debt.

4. Taxes

Social Security is the biggest pyramid scheme (and ticking time bomb) in human history.

Before Boomers, 32% of federal tax dollars were spent on investments. Today, forty percent of government spending gets incinerated by social insurance, retirement, health benefits, Medicare, and Medicaid. By 2030, entitlements will devour 61% of public funding, crippling the nation for generations to come.

Boomer-controlled Congress forces contributing workers to pay for it mostly through payroll taxes, yet the fund is conveniently expected to run dry in 2034 when the median Boomer is dead.

Guess who’s going to enjoy massive, lifelong increases in taxation to fund the shortfall for Gen X, yet almost certainly end up with nothing left when it’s time for them to retire at age 88?

You.

And even if you know how to evade taxes like a billionaire, they’re already taxing you an extra 10+% another way: Through that wealth-robbing silent tax called inflation.

You are their exit plan

If you are under the age of forty, you are being systematically compelled to bankroll people over the age of sixty in more ways than you can imagine:

* You are expected to work for low wages at their companies.

* You are expected to hand over a huge portion of those over-taxed wages to rent their income properties.

* You are expected to turn a profit for the companies in their stock portfolio.

* You are expected to buy their overpriced houses when they decide to sell.

* You are expected to finance that massive purchase by paying them interest for much of your adult life.

* You are expected to shoulder the national debt they’re so happily expanding by billions every day.

* You are expected to fork over a huge portion of your income as taxation to support their favored programs (including neverending wars and subsidizing their largest corporations.)

* You are expected to use a currency that they’re constantly devaluing.

* You are expected to pay into the pyramid schemes to fund their retirements.

No wonder Millennials are four times poorer than Boomers at their age.

In all fairness…

Some of the nicest people I know are Boomers. And some of Surviving Tomorrow’s most committed readers are folks aged 60+ who are working hard to right the wrongs of their peers.

And, sadly, there are millions of Boomers who’ve had genuinely horrible lives and have struggled to survive every single day of their existence. They know what it’s like to be a Millennial, Gen Zer, or Gen Alpha(-er?)

Life under Boomer corporatism is a hard struggle. I’ve witnessed it with my own grandparents and wife’s grandparents. Old age care and the government literally bankrupted the four most beloved elders in my life.

So I know it’s not all Boomers that are to blame for exploiting the next generation. Society should have changed its systems to treat them far better, and it definitely needs to learn from the past and not repeat those same mistakes again on a 100+ million-person scale.

Instead, what are Boomers leaving behind?

The biggest national debt in human history, an unaddressed climate disaster, a Social Security insolvency crisis, …

Have you been following the situation in Ethiopia?

Of course you haven’t.

No one has the time or mental fortitude to endure the unending amount of conflict that happens between human beings on planet earth.

The only reason I keep up with Ethiopia is that’s where my wife grew up.

Briefly: Colonialists left Africa in a terrible state, in which various tribes were smashed together into single nations, while others sought to grab new territory in the wake of colonial retrenchment.

Ethiopia is one of those latter places (but also was kinda-sorta colonized by Italy, which is why it still has such great pasta. It’s complicated.)

Home to five official languages and eighty different ethnic groups, Ethiopia is a powder keg for conflict with a growing population and depleting resources. One people group has already managed to splinter off: Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia came at the high price of 250,000 people dead.

Now, essentially two tribes in Ethiopia — Tigray in the north, Oromo in the south — are trying to destroy each other. The Tigrayans are an ancient Spartan-style warrior tribe, and they’re so desperate for self-rule that they’ve started killing Ethiopian citizens. Things have gotten so bad that the Prime Minister of Ethiopia has ordered all military to protect the capital from falling, and is sending in Turkish combat drones. In twenty years, we might look back on the conflict and call it the next Rwanda.

It makes you wonder:

Maybe Ethiopia would be better off as two, ten, or even eighty smaller nations.

It’s the same all over the world:

* Spain’s arcane monarchy oppresses several distinct cultures including Andalusia, Aragon, Asturias, Basque Country, Castile, Catalonia, Galicia, León, Navarre, Valencia, and Aran Valley.

* Anglophone Canada just celebrated its 150th anniversary a few years ago, but it rules over a French-speaking nation that’s 400 years old.

* A certain 1.45 billion-person Eastern nation that cannot be named rules over at least four other countries with brutal authoritarian force.

* Want peace in the Middle East? Try a nine-state solution.

* The United Kingdom is a laughable misnomer. The Welsh hate the English. The Scottish hate the English. The Cornish hate the English. Half the Northern Irish just call themselves Irish. The United Kingdom contains at least five countries, and all are essentially colonies of the City of London Corporation. [Update: English people, stop saying this isn’t true. I live in Wales and it’s front-and-center every single day.]

* There are more than five thousand Indigenous nations across the globe, totaling nearly half a billion people.

The gig is up

Young people are waking up to an obvious fact that many older folks (especially those who murdered people who carried a different team flag) simply cannot fathom:

Nations are legal fictions.

Just bits of paper and a bunch of people who agree to play by the paper’s rules.

Yes, there are some benefits to nationalism.

There are also heavy costs.

People are rightly starting to question the value of nation-states as they are currently arranged.

What is the purpose of a nation?

To preserve a unique culture?To express a political ideology?To propagate a religion?To organize an economy?

At the end of the day, I believe every nation is just an experiment in what it means to live well.

And currently, almost every nation on earth is on a downward trajectory, if not failing miserably.

The end of big countries

Large nations are unwieldy.

The bureaucracy it takes to run a 300+ million person nation proves economically inefficient in the extreme.

Democracy crumbles because it’s hard to get real representation at scale.

And there are so many disparate opinions that disagreements become intractable.

When working together inevitably fails, one party dominates through coercion, violence, or worse.

In a nuclear age where going to war will destroy everyone and everything, there’s no longer a need to have a vast population to defend your borders.

We just don’t need big countries anymore.

An introduction to Tinyism

“Tinyism is a political philosophy that believes current empires and nations should be fractured, shattered, and dissolved into thousands of independent micro-states and city-states. This action would vastly improve democracy and enhance economies — recent statistics indicate small nations are usually the happiest, wealthiest, and most peaceful.” — Hank Pellissier

Here’s my prediction:

Within one hundred years, there will be at least one hundred new nations on planet earth.

But there could be plenty more.

After all, there are 650 major ethnic groups, about 9,800 cultural-ethno-linguistic groups, and up to 24,000 unimax groups.

(Plus there are 108,000 publicly-listed corporations, all of which will be chomping for a private domain in the years ahead… though not one should get it.)

Why shouldn’t ethnic groups have the right to self-sovereignty, especially for the hundreds who’ve had their sovereignty stolen? Isn’t it inherently racist for one ethnicity to impose its will on another ethnic group?

After a major disruptive event — a colossal economic depression, a cyberwar or solar flare that knocks out the grid for a year or more, or a supervolcano that causes years of winter — we could see the emergence of tens of thousands of new sovereignties.

And that would be a very good thing.

In praise of tiny

When you have a smaller population, you can have a smaller bureaucracy.

When you have a smaller population, you can have more representation and democracy.

When you have a smaller population, you can avoid getting pushed around by groups that don’t share your values.

When you have a smaller population, you can better preserve unique cultures, races, religions, economic systems, histories, societal structures, and experiments in what it means to live well.

When you have a smaller population, you can have fewer rules, fewer laws, and more freedom.

And if you don’t like your tiny country, you now have far more other options to choose from.

“But what about national defense?!”

It’s a legitimate fear, but it’s worth noting that small nations are some of the safest nations on earth.

And luckily, returns to violence are drastically decreasing in the digital economy. There’s just less stuff to steal and fewer resources to exploit.

Quite paradoxically, being more “vulnerable” makes you learn to get along. New sovereignties will do well to form an alliance with hundreds of other city-states. Like NATO, attacking one would be like attacking all. Plus, new sovereignties will move swiftly to ink trade deals with hundreds of other nations to further increase the cost of war and the value of peace.

Pretty soon, everyone will get along because there’s no other choice.

The return of the city-state

The world is urbanizing and power is accruing to cities. Already in America, we’re seeing mayors defy state and national mandates in order to protect and defend their citizens (or just rebel for political reasons, depending on your point of view.)

There’s no reason to think that many cities won’t eventually just become laws unto themselves.

I’m excited for this to happen. After all, some of the most beautiful places on earth started out as tiny little cities, and their historic urban cores are still beautiful all these centuries later:

* Paris was 25 acres.

* Athens was 35 acres.

* Lille was 60 acres.

* Vatican City is 109 acres.

* Oxford was 115 acres.

* Old Jerusalem is 225 acres.

* The City of London is 330 acres.

* Monaco is 499 acres.

* Rome was 608 acres.

* The walls of Avila, one of the most gorgeous sights on earth, surround just 77 acres.

What will become of America?

Nearly half of all Americans want to secede from the union in one direction or another.

And that’s perfectly within their rights as human beings.

Others protest loudly that the union must be preserved at all costs. But they never seem to answer the all-important question:

What are we actually trying to preserve?

Our lack of shared values? The sham of democracy? McDonald’s and apple pie and baseball?

Think long and hard…

Today I’m joined by Doomberg, one of the hottest newsletters on Substack.

In this episode, we discuss:

* Why gas prices are soaring

* The cryptocurrency pyramid bubble

* Why you should care more about mining

* Dystopian governmental surveillance currencies

* Outrageous insider trading in Washington

* Why you should stock three months of groceries ASAP

* The future of sustainable energy

* Why British people could freeze to death this winter thanks to Russia

Listen above or watch on Youtube, check out all of Doomberg’s great insights, and please share it with anyone who might find it insightful. (And if you like this email, please hit the heart button so Substack shares it with more people!)

Dear friends,

We have a very special treat today. I’m joined by bestselling author and acclaimed idler Tom Hodgkinson.

Things get pretty heavy here on Surviving Tomorrow, so Tom is an enjoyable antidote to all the troubles and challenges we’re navigating in this corporate-controlled world.

In this episode, we talk about idleness, lazy parenting, living in the country, ancient philosophy, the metaverse, politics, and how to design a life that you actually love.

Listen above or watch the video below, and be sure to check out all of Tom’s books, articles, and courses on The Idler.

Enjoy the episode, and please share it with someone who will enjoy a listen.

I grew up terrified of water shortages.

Every summer, the newspapers and radio blared the dire warnings:

We’re in a crisis.

We’re running out of water.

Our aquifer is nearly dry.

Take shorter showers.

Wash your dishes by hand.

Only drink what you need.

Watering your lawn is absolutely forbidden.

I never once took a shower that wasn’t rushed.

Baths were exclusively for special occasions.

(My dad, in an attempt to save money, did nothing to assuage my fears.)

But it turns out the whole water-shaming gambit was a scam.

While 100,000 tax-paying citizens scrimped and saved on water, Nestlé was stealing 976 million liters from our city’s aquifer each year.

When their contract came up for renewal, I put in a bid of $4.00 per million liters, a whopping 7.8% more than the $3.71 per million liters Nestlé was paying to drain our town dry, but our corrupt government turned me down.

Nestlé now legally takes 1.3 billion liters per year just from my town, and water-shaming the public continues.

There’s a stretch of highway in Port Talbot, Wales, that makes me furious.

The speed limit drops from 70MPH to 50MPH.

It’s enforced with dozens of cameras that calculate your average speed and automatically mails an outrageous fine to your house if you go over.

Because of the drop in speed, traffic backs up for miles. It takes at least twenty minutes to slog through, every time.

Which gives you enough time to read the mass-shaming roadside signs:

Pollution kills.

Slow down, save lives.

Speeding causes cancer.

Poor air quality kills, reduce your speed.

But being stuck in traffic also gives you time to look around at the city you’re supposedly helping to save from horrible respiratory diseases.

It’s covered in smokestacks.

There’s no other way to say it: Port Talbot is a Shittsburg, a refinery town that enriches a few corporate shareholders and causes thousands of deaths each year due to heart disease, lung cancer, and asthma.

In fact, it’s the most polluted place in the United Kingdom.

But, rather than fining, regulating, or shutting down the corporations that are spewing the vast majority of the poisons that are literally murdering people, Britain pollution-shames its drivers and fines tens of thousands of middle-class drivers each year for not “doing their part.”

My astute readers will know exactly where I’m going with this

The sociopaths who run the government think it’s time that the masses no longer deserve to eat meat.

And there’s an easy way to keep the bottom half from eating meat while enriching the anti-social elites who run the cartel:

Just tax it out of our budget range.

Beef prices are already up 50% since last year.

Most people already can’t afford filet mignon — if ground beef goes to $40/pound, almost everyone I know will save tacos for their birthday. Pretty soon, beef will be the next caviar or champagne.

And in the meantime, they’ll weaponize our honor-shame culture to shame us into avoiding meat.

Yes, we absolutely need to lower greenhouse gas emissions. But after centuries of poisoning us for profit, corporations now want us to make lifestyle changes so they can continue to turn a profit from emitting greenhouse gases.

But we know what they also know:

Meat isn’t the problem

In America, agriculture makes up just 10% of greenhouse gas emissions:

Globally, the picture seems a bit worse at first…

But that’s only until you read the fine print:

So, animals are responsible for somewhere in the ballpark of 19.2% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Even without any offsets, it’s still less than a quarter of the total.

In other words: The overwhelming majority of GHGs are caused by transport, industry, and power/heat production.

(And animals aren’t farting nitrous oxide, CFCs, and all the other lethal poisons that we should be really worried about.)

Just take a look at the leading emitter of each greenhouse gas:

Notice what’s not on the leading source for any single greenhouse gas?

Animals.

They simply aren’t the main problem. (And even for the one GHG that cows emit the second most, there are tons of companies working on methane capture — I’ve seen two projects in action myself.)

But instead of going after the corporations that are literally murdering hundreds of thousands of people each year, what do corporate-controlled governments do?

Meat-shame us like it’s our fault.

George Monbiot rightly calls this micro-consumerist bollocks:

“Tiny issues such as plastic straws and coffee cups, rather than the huge structural forces driving us towards catastrophe. We are obsessed with plastic bags. We believe we’re doing the world a favour by buying tote bags instead, though, on one estimate, the environmental impact of producing an organic cotton tote bag is equivalent to that of 20,000 plastic ones.”

If only we’d stop watering our lawns… driving so fast… and eating hamburgers?

* Transport: Could easily go all-electric.

* Industry: Could easily go all-electric.

* Power/heat production: Could easily go geothermal and hydro and tidal.

But these are three of the strongest lobby-bribing groups in the world.

Heck, Chevron would rather send people to prison than pay fines they legally owe for poisoning tens of thousands of people.

Obviously, they’ll keep polluting until the moment we put them out of business.

Corporations could transition to 100% renewables within a year if they chose to re-allocate, but they’d rather do the thing we tell children not to do:

Bully the weak.

I call bull$#!t

Literal bull$#t is what keeps our soil alive.

For thousands of years, hundreds of millions of ruminants sustainably roamed the plains of North America and Europe and Asia, fertilizing the soil and supplying homo sapiens with unlimited amounts of life-giving protein and fat.

If the market for ruminants is systematically destroyed, it’s not like the government is going to let all the Angus and Plains Bison and Longhorns just go wild and re-populate the plains.

Once ruminant populations are decimated, they’ll become sideshows in zoos, museums, and circuses.

In other words, the #1 creator of natural soil on planet earth will simply cease to exist…

…leaving us more reliant on AgTech companies to produce synthetic soils and fertilizers to keep our desperate dirt producing food for a 10+ billion person world.

Getting rid of meat animals is quite literally anti-human, anti-nature, and anti-future.

We need way more bull$#!t, not less.

There are good reasons to go vegetarian or vegan, to be sure.

It’s “more humane”

Some people argue that it’s cruel to slaughter animals to eat. I agree — in fact, after helping an organic farmer friend kill a bunch of Christmas turkeys for his clients, I went vegetarian for a whole year.

But do you know what’s even worse than quickly and instantly killing turkeys in an abattoir? When a coyote or fox or wolf or rat shreds one to pieces in the wild.

Humans are undeniably cruel to each other, but we’re nicer to animals than anything they encounter in nature.

Just Google “cheetah attacks antelope” or “crocodile devours wildebeest.”

Can we do better than the current monopoly model? Absolutely. Slaughterhouses are horrible. We need to return to the ancient ways of natural, sustainable meat harvesting.

It’s “healthier”

Healthwise, there are certainly benefits to going veg/vegan versus the Standard American Diet (SAD.)

But that’s also true for keto, paleo, and carnivore diets. Pretty much anything beats corporate-created sugar-filled American “food.”

And the longest-lived people in the world still eat meat, so that rules out the longevity argument.

It’s “cleaner”

To be clear, modern mass-scale beef farming is horrible for the environment.

Eating two feedlot burgers per week for a year creates as much greenhouse gas as heating a house for three months. Plus all the chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and deforestation are having disastrous consequences for the environment. Modern monopoly beef is bad.

Consumers have demanded cheap meat, and farmers have gone to d…

Everybody loves billionaire Warren Buffett.

Heck, even I love Warren Buffett.

* All that cute aww-shucks Midwest yokelism.

* All those adorable grandfatherly folksy words of wisdom.

* All those video clips of him slurping Coke, chomping McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches, and spooning Dairy Queen sundaes like a six-year-old.

Just your everyday pulled-himself-up-by-his-bootstraps country boy (whose dad happened to be a stockbroker-turned-four-term libertarian Republican Congressman at a time when insider trading was legal for legislators and who got his buddies to bankroll his son’s investment business.)

* Living humbly in his “modest” itty-bitty tiny little 6,570 square foot mansion.

* Jet-setting around on his multi-million-dollar private plane which he named “The Indefensible” (isn’t that clever?)

* Amassing a personal fortune of more than $100,000,000,000.

With polls regularly saying he’s one of the most trusted men in America.

Because he’s a “good billionaire,” remember?

…

…

Why do we fall for such cockamamie PR campaigns?

Death Inc.

For more than fifty years, Warren Buffett has grown rich from his stakes in:

* Chevron, a company that has destroyed habitat and lives for more than a century and just last week became the first corporation to send a man to prison.

* Coca-Cola, a brutal monopoly that has subsumed more than 400 competitor brands, stolen water rights from millions, lobbied against ending Xinjiang forced labor, and is contributing greatly to the global diabetes crisis.

* Wells-Fargo, possibly the most rotten bank in American history, which is embroiled in unending criminal activities including racketeering, creating millions of fake accounts without customer consent, and practicing straight-up organizational racism.

* Visa, Mastercard, and Amex, predatory companies that have debt-trapped hundreds of millions of people and are leading contributors to the unsustainable economy that is bankrupting families and destroying society.

* Apple, a company that knowingly used child labor for years (and probably still does), engages in massive amounts of illegal anti-competitive activity, and has offshored more than $250 billion, withholding taxation from the communities they profit from.

* Johnson & Johnson, nicknamed a “kingpin” company for selling billions of dollars worth of opioids.

* Moody’s Corporation, one of the crooked ratings agencies that gave AAA ratings to highly-toxic CDOs, setting off the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and causing the bankruptcy and eviction of millions of families.

* Suncor, the sixth-largest polluter in Canada, known for polluting the Athabasca River, falsifying records, and poisoning children.

You get the point.

The list goes on and on and on.

Literally hundreds of subsidiaries and thousands of crimes.

We used to have a term for people who made their money by destroying the planet, abusing women and minorities, and benefiting from thousands of global-scale crimes against humanity:

Inmates.

And then there are his taxes — or lack thereof

Considering how much wealth Warren Buffett has extracted from society, he doesn’t come anywhere close to contributing his fair share to the nation.

Over a five year period, Buffett grew his wealth by $24.3 billion but paid just 0.10% tax on it:

Even by “standard” tax accounting ($23.7M / $125M income), he’s paying just 18.9% income tax… far less than the average working family.

Sure, Buffett admits that the tax system needs fixing.

But pushing words out of your mouth isn’t nearly enough to create actual equality in society — not when billionaires and their corporations control the very Congress that’s supposed to tax and regulate them.

Warren Buffett has, in fact, popularized a new tax evasion model by which most billionaires now avoid paying the costs of civilization:

“Buffett has famously held onto his stock in the company he founded, Berkshire Hathaway. That has allowed Buffett to largely avoid transforming his wealth into income. Berkshire does not pay a dividend, [which has enabled him to avoid] hundreds of millions in taxes each year.

Many Silicon Valley and infotech companies have emulated Buffett’s model, eschewing stock dividends… companies like Microsoft and Oracle offered shareholders rocketing growth and profits but did not pay dividends. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Tesla do not pay dividends.”

The end result?

More than half of all American billionaire wealth is now permanently held as unrealized gains — totally untaxable by the public, yet billionaires can borrow cheaply against their wealth to fund their absurdly lavish lifestyles and weaponize their wealth to amass ever more power and control of the global economy.

Whether billionaire sycophants like it or not, we clearly need a billionaire wealth tax because elites no longer trigger income tax, dividends tax, and capital gains tax.

But he’s giving all his money to charity!

No, friends, he’s not.

True charity directly helps the poorest people in society.

Philanthrocapitalism isn’t charity.

It’s an expression of power that leads to a transfer of power to the elites.

Philanthrocapitalism is a means by which billionaire elites evade taxation, retain their family wealth perpetually, and control the fates of millions of others by shaping public policy. (Buffett’s business partner, in fact, is currently building a dystopian college dorm that doesn’t have windows.)

The vast majority of Buffett’s wealth will end up in the hands of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is the same institution that’s lobbying hard for Orwellian digital surveillance Covid passports (paper ones will do, Bill), gives billions in grants to private companies, wants us all to eat lab-grown synthetic meat, and plans to geoengineer the planet by blotting out the stars.

Let’s face it, billionaire charity is just another rich-person swindle — a desperate attempt to salve the masses and keep them from demanding a real social safety net. We don’t need their peanuts in charity; we need them to pay their taxes.

And remember: for every “decent” philanthropic billionaire, there are ten Saudi dictators, libertarian surveillance-loving anarcho-capitalists like Peter Thiel, and oil magnates like Charles Koch, whose foundations rammed through Citizens United — the horrendous democracy-destroying Supreme Court ruling that make corporations human beings in the eyes of the law.

So much for “charity.”

We need a new global economic system

“Mr. Buffett is actually the most dangerous kind of billionaire we have. The worst billionaires are the Good Billionaires. The sort who make it seem like the problem is the distortion of the system when, in fact, the problem is the system. The [current] system is a set of social arrangements that make it possible for anyone to gain and guard and keep so much wealth, even as millions of others lack for food, work, housing, health, connectivity, education, dignity…” — Anand Giridharadas, The New York Times

Every honest person knows there’s no such thing as “putting your money to work for you.” You’re just weaponizing your capital to put others to work for you.

This raises an interesting question:

What, exactly, has Warren Buffett contributed to society that warrants his $100+ billion net worth?

The answer: Rich people gave him their money, he used it to purchase extraction machines (called corporations), and then used the profits to buy more extraction machines.

That’s it.

By comparison, the average worker in one of the companies Buffett controls (you know, the active contributors who create 100% of the value of the stock) making $20 per hour, would have to work full-time for 2.5 million years to actually earn the wealth Buffett possesses.

(Conversely, if Berkshire Hathaway was equally owned by its 360,000 employees, every single one would be a millionaire.)

Clearly, our system isn’t working for achieving any sense of fairness, care for the planet, dignity for the productive contributor workers, or widest-spread wellbeing.

And that’s the real goal, isn’t it?

Forget th…