🛡 Surviving Tomorrow

Blame Warren Buffett.

He’s the one who popularized the new tax evasion scheme by which thousands of billionaires are now scamming the public out of hundreds of billions in lost taxation to pay for the civilizations they so happily exploit for profit.

It’s really simple.

I’m going to teach you exactly how you, too, can evade taxes like a billionaire.

Got a pen and paper ready?

Let’s go.

Step One

Find a boring industry. (IE. book retailing, taxi cabs, or holiday rentals.)

Start a corporation that’s a basic middle man broker with zero inventory, but has a super slick app and website. (IE. Amazon, Uber, and Airbnb.)

Take on as much investor money as humanly possible.

Burn that investor cash like a Nazi book rally.

No really, spend that money as fast as you possibly can— specifically, on eviscerating your competition with underpricing, and making your “not employees” into wage slaves. It doesn’t matter that you aren’t making a real profit. That might come later — but only after you’ve put hundreds of thousands of people out of jobs. Get to work.

When you do start to turn a small profit, take on more investor money, and borrow vast amounts of cheap cash from the banks, and use all three money sources to absolutely shatter your competition. Sit back and watch your stock price rise as investors silently realize your company is a scam and get in on the action.

Get your PR machine to convince Millennial addicts on Robinhood that your company’s stock price (but certainly not real profits) can grow infinitely larger forever. (Think: Tesla, which hasn’t made an annual profit in 17 years.)

Once you’ve gained an iron grip monopoly on your industry, start lobby-bribing Congress for tax breaks, labor concessions, anti-competition legislation that favors your business, etc.

Oh, also, buy media assets so you can further undermine democracy.

Step two: Wait, nevermind, you don’t need step one

Don’t bother building another “disruptor” in the Vampire Economy.

You can just buy stock in one of the already-existing money-losing zombie predator corporations.

And never sell it.

Just borrow hyper-cheap debt to fund your lifestyle, backed by your stocks, like all the billionaires do.

That way, you never have any income to tax.

Think about it: If you’re borrowing lifestyle cash at 5%, but your stocks are going up by 10%, you’d be crazy to claim income and pay income tax. So long as debt stays cheap and stock prices rise, you can borrow an unlimited amount of money to upgrade your lifestyle, buy more stock, wash, rinse, repeat. Let the good times roll!

In fact, you should probably buy all that stock on margin.

Gotta boost your alpha, bro.

$1000 leveraged up and re-invested perpetually in Tesla/Uber/Bitcoin/etc ten years ago is now worth $1234567890, remember?

This is Buffet’s fault

Considering how much money death-profiting Warren Buffett has extracted from society, he hasn’t come anywhere close to contributing his fair share to the world.

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. And he’s evading tax on 95% of his wealth.

Sure, Buffett admits that the tax system needs fixing. But pushing words out of your mouth-hole 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.

ProPublica:

“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 hostage 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.

If we keep on our current trajectory, they’ll own the whole world within our lifetime.

Now it’s Elon Musk’s turn to scam the masses

Elon clearly knows the billionaire tax evasion scheme:

He currently has at least 88 million shares pledged as collateral on personal debts.

Elon also knows $TSLA has become an outrageously and dangerously overpriced story stock.

As the great Concoda puts it:

“I see all-time highs, I take profits.”

Elon knows the end (of the corporatist business cycle) is nigh, and this is a great chance to pay off his personal debts with overpriced stocks.

Elon also knows that we know about the billionaire tax evasion scam:

See what he did there?

Elon’s about to reap $30+ billion in hard cash thanks to his sucker-speculators, and come out looking like the “good guy” for actually paying his taxes — you know, the thing that everyone is supposed to do to keep civilization afloat. What a nice guy.

Elon’s tax bill on all this free money will be a maximum $4 billion — significantly less than you and I pay by percentage. But I’m sure his accountants are working on another tax evasion strategy.

So now billionaires get to play it both ways.

In conclusion

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.

Billionaires added more than $5.5 trillion to their net worth during the pandemic — that’s enough to build a $75,000 health/education/house trust fund for every single child in America (all 72 million of them) and still leave billionaires $100 billion richer.

But obviously, corporate-controlled Congress won’t do a thing about tax evasion, because most of them are inside traders anyway.

There’s only one thing to do:

Get the whole nation to evade taxes like a billionaire.

Thousands of meme-stonkers, crypto-speculators, and Robinhood addicts are already doing it:

* Buy vast amounts of stock on leverage.

* Borrow hyper-cheap debt to fund your lavish lifestyle and buy more stock.

* Pray to God the house of cards doesn’t fall apart like it’s done every other time in history.

Yes, if everyone acts like a billionaire the market bubble will hyper-inflate, tax-funded services will disappear, and the nation will collapse. But that’s what’s already happening anyway. Might as well get in on the action.

Welcome to the new global economy.

It’s every man for himself, now.

Backpacking through Central America changed my life.

It exposed me to poverty and made me loathe corporatism.

It exposed me to environmental destruction and made me love nature.

One of my life’s greatest collection of memories comes from my months of volunteering at eco-villages in Costa Rica.

The rich coast.

* Swimming in hot rivers, warmed by volcanic heat

* Discovering glow-in-the-dark mushrooms

* Listening to howler monkeys in the hills

* Cooking organic food in an open-air kitchen without insects due to mindful planting

* Watching red-hot lava flow down a volcano at night

The land was so verdant that even the fence posts blossomed with flowers.

Costa Rica is one of the most sustainable nations on earth. It’s a place filled with beautiful and warm people. It’s chocked full of stunning views and breathtaking scenery.

And now, thanks to the recent invention of a new type of corporation, it will all be owned by a hedge fund.

Natural Asset Companies

It’s technically a new type of publicly tradeable security.

Like a stock (or NFT), but for nature.

Trees Inc.Rivers Inc.Mountains Inc.Water Springs Inc.Rainforest Inc.Oceans Inc.

In September, the New York Stock Exchange (of course) announced the new security, as a “nature-based solution to unlock the value of natural resources.”

That definitely sounds pretty based.

An NAC is basically a real estate agent for Mother Nature. It picks a piece of nature, assigns a price tag, wrangles the rights out of the commons, and sells slices of that lake/ocean/volcano/mountain/etc to institutional shareholders, specifically, the multinational corporations who fund the NAC in the first place.

Did I mention that NACs were invented by a company backed by the Inter-American Development Bank, Aberdare Ventures, the New York Stock Exchange itself, and — wait for it — the oil-funded Rockefeller Foundation?

Take a guess what country’s natural assets they’re going to sell off first:

My beloved Costa Rica.

Everything has its price

“NACs will attempt to assign value to services — such as carbon retention, freshwater generation, pest control, groundwater storage and erosion prevention — intrinsically provided by natural resources.” 1

So once they’ve assigned a price to every atom in the atmosphere, then what?

“Proceeds from an NAC initial public offering (IPO) will be used to manage the specific natural asset and potentially acquire additional natural assets or return value to the owners.” 2

Potentially?

Please.

They’ll maximize profits and acquire additional natural resources.

The elites won’t stop until they wring a profit from every living inch of planet earth.

The great battle of our age

“This new nature-based solution provides another tool for governments to work with the private sector to promote sustainability, while providing financial returns.” 3

Just two quick thoughts on this gem:

* Whenever you hear “governments” and “private sector” in the same sentence, it’s the same thing as saying “corporations are colluding with corrupt politicians again.”

* In the battle of sustainability versus profit, the former has never won against the latter. There’s simply no track record that suggests we can trust corporations to do what’s right for people and our planet.

Call this what it is: robbery

“According to initial calculations, NACs will unlock $4 quadrillion [that’s four million billion dollars] in assets as a new feeding ground for Wall Street investors to buy the rights to clean water and clean air and trout streams and bass-laden lakes and gorgeous picturesque waterfalls and lagoons, an entire forest, or maybe eventually extend into the oceans. Who knows the range of possibilities once nature is transacted on Wall Street.” 4

A democracy would never allow NACs to exist.

Two-thirds of Americans think we should do more on climate change.90% support planting a trillion trees.84% support carbon capture tax credits.73% support taxing corporate emissions.

Saving the environment would be an easy lay-up for a democracy.

But, of course, there isn’t a single democratic nation on planet earth.

We’ve got a handful of dictatorships, and a whole bunch of corporatocracies.

In the same way that African dictators have looted their nations to fill their personal bank accounts in London and Geneva, corporate-captures politicians are now allowing their backers to ransack the nations they’ve sworn to serve.

Let’s cut the crap

If corporations were serious about protecting the environment and promoting sustainability, they wouldn’t take a giant gun and sticker a price tag on every piece of nature.

They’d donate a share of their corporate profits for a not-for-profit whose sole reason for existing was to protect the ecosystem.

But that’s not why corporations exist.

Corporations are anti-human extraction machines whose sole legal purpose for existing is to extract profits from anyone and anything for the private benefit of its shareholders.

The for-profit corporation is the fiduciary enemy of humanity and nature, and perhaps none more so than a Natural Asset Company.

Maybe the best way to protect nature is just to get rid of the institutions that do it the most harm?

How to actually protect nature

Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I still happen to think that some things are priceless. (That includes much of nature, and humans, too.) We don’t need to rely on private capital to “protect” nature.

Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure something as temporary as a homo sapien doesn’t have the right or ability to “own” something as permanent as a mountain.

The ecosystem will definitely allow us to use and abuse it, but there will come a point where we muck up the chemistry so badly that it destroys us. It’s not personal, it’s just science. At the end of the day, nature is sovereign over mankind.

Maybe we need to delete the word ownership from our vocabulary and certainly from our legal contracts and sales agreements and land deeds. Instead, let’s use the word stewardship — and introduce a raft of legislation that defines stewardship as “leaving something better than you found it.”

Steward it or lose it.

At the very least, it’s time that we give at least some pieces of nature legal self-sovereignty, including:

* The ocean

* The polar ice caps

* All the rivers and lakes

* Every inch of mountain above 14,000 feet

There’s already a river in New Zealand that has the same legal rights as a human being.

Same for Mount Taranaki and a national park.

India granted human rights to the Ganges and Yahuna rivers.

Please don’t roll your eyes and write this off as a silly idea.

After all, the democracy-destroying Citizens United ruling made corporations people in the eyes of the law. If a fully lifeless corporation can be a “human,” then surely nature itself — that vital, living, breathing being that sustains every moment of our sorry little lives — can be equally so.

Everything’s just a legal fiction anyway.

They call it the Amazonian Chernobyl.

In 1964, the multinational corporation Texaco — one of the planet-destroying giants spawned from John D. Rockefeller’s colossal illegal monopoly — began drilling in Ecuador.

For nearly thirty years, Texaco turned tens of billions in profits while illegally dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste, destroying habitats, livelihoods, and lives — all to save roughly $3 per barrel in proper waste treatment costs.

When Chevron was eventually busted by the Ecuadorians, the company spent a microscopic $40 million on “cleaning” the area and negotiated an agreement with corrupt officials, saying the clean-up was “complete,” even though a domestic science team deemed the areas wildly unsafe.

In 2003, American attorney Steven Donziger visited the South American nation and described it as “an apocalyptic disaster.”

Children walked barefoot along oil-covered roads.

Jungle lakes were covered in oil.

Local tribes suffered from stomach cancer, respiratory illnesses, miscarriages, and birth defects.

Donzinger helped 30,000 indigenous Ecuadorians file a $28 billion lawsuit for making them sick and poisoning the Amazon with eighteen billion gallons of toxic water.

After an eight-year court battle, the locals won a groundbreaking $9.5 billion to help offset some of their losses, roughly three weeks of Chevron’s revenue. It was the first time in history that an indigenous group had successfully beaten a multinational corporation.

Chevron refused to pay the fine.

Instead, they decided to destroy Steven Donzinger’s life.

American “Justice”

There is no depth to which some people will go to make money.

Especially multinational corporations — after all, they’re anti-human alien fictions that live forever, have more rights than humans, and legally exist for the sole purpose of extracting wealth from the commons to deliver to elite shareholders.

According to a leaked internal Chevron memo, “Our L-T [long-term] strategy is to demonize Donziger.”

So far, with a legal team of hundreds, they’ve:

* Sued him for $60 billion (the most against any individual in American legal history)

* Got him disbarred as a lawyer

* Frozen his bank accounts

* Crushed him with millions in fines

* Not allowed him a jury

* Got a court to force him to wear a 24-hour ankle monitor for the past two years

* Imposed a lien on his home

* Destroyed his ability to earn a living

* Placed him under house arrest for the past 800 days (not only has the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights ruled it illegal, and twenty-nine Nobel laureates called “judicial harassment,” but it’s four times longer than the maximum sentence allowed for this charge)

And as of last week, Steven Donzinger is now in prison.

Do not go gentle into that good night

I hope you’re furious.

Raging.

Shaking.

Weeping.

You should be.

This is the first time a multinational corporation has prosecuted an individual.

A good man.

This is what happens when corporations take control of your Congress.

When a nation allows the unlimited accumulation of wealth and power.

When your inequality is worse than the Roman Empire.

We need to help Steven

I encourage you to stuff your fury into the furnace of action:

* Watch Steven’s goodbye message sent just hours before going to prison.

* Follow Steven on Twitter and Instagram, and share his story on social media (be sure to tag the President and Justice Department)

* Watch the documentary Crude on Youtube.

* Sign the petition demanding the President and AG release him immediately.

* Read up on intimidation lawsuits

* If you or someone you know works at Chevron, whistleblow

* Ask the New York Times why they won’t cover the story

This will continue to happen until we fix this forever

First, here's how not to fix this absurd injustice:

* Don’t bother calling your corporate-sponsored Congressman.

* Don’t bother getting pepper-sprayed by corporate-directed cops at a rally.

* Don’t bother hacking or stalking the board of directors and end up in the cell beside Steven.

There’s only one weapon that can bring monster corporations to heel:

Money.

We need folks like WallStreetBets, meme-stonkers, and especially activist shareholders to buy enough stock to seize control of the company (just like what’s currently happening at Exxon), run an internal investigation to oust every single person involved in persecuting Donzinger, make restitution to Donzinger, then publish the internal documents and press for the imprisonment of the cruel and inhumane individuals who continue to put profit before people.

Clearly, Chevron has ruined Donzinger’s life to make a statement — that if you mess with our ability to make profits, human lives be damned, we will ruin yours.

It’s time we put multinational corporations on notice.

This earth belongs to we the people — legal fictions live and die by our will.

And while we wait for the courts to send all these criminals to jail, let’s all stop buying Chevron products.

Spread the word.

The elites hate you.

It’s not personal.

They just do.

Elites hated your ancestors, too.

Whether your ancestors were African slaves in the New World (especially in Brazil), or serfs under the British aristocracy, or peasants under the Russian Tsars, or slaves under the Chinese dynasties, elites have extracted time and wealth from your family since before recorded history.

Until essentially the end of World War I, elites owned everything.

Take, for instance, the East India Company. A staff of 35 people controlled the fate of more than 100 million Indians from a five-window office in London.

Lack of ownership for the masses — that was the problem.

Whenever elites own everything, everyone else is shackled to horrible jobs just to survive, while the elites live in obscene luxury with no thought to the misery and suffering of the masses.

Sound familiar?

In the wake of the global pandemic, today’s elites are taking back the planet they believe rightfully belongs to them, and putting the rest of us back where they believe we belong:

In economic chains.

The Great Reset

In January 2021, the hyper-elitist World Economic Forum — hosted by Prince Charles and sponsored by glowing anti-democratic monopolists including Blackrock and JPMorgan — held its 50th annual meeting from the Alpine slopes of Davos, Switzerland.

The theme was The Great Reset, a proposal to rebuild the economy “sustainably” in the wake of COVID-19.

Right.

Even billionaire-obsessed Forbes Magazine had to admit their agenda was “another example of wealthy, powerful elites salving their consciences with faux efforts to help the masses, and in the process make themselves even wealthier and more powerful.”

In the WEF video 8 Predictions For The World In 2030, the very first prediction is:

“You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”

As the WEF explained on its website:

[By 2030] all products will have become services. “I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes.” Shopping is a distant memory in the city of 2030, whose inhabitants have cracked clean energy and borrow what they need on demand. It sounds utopian, until she mentions that her every move is tracked and outside the city live swathes of discontents, the ultimate depiction of a society split in two.

Notice the implicit threat towards the end?

Play ball or suffer.

And if the elites have their way, you won’t own your own underwear in nine years or less.

Slavery by another name

This, of course, begs the question:

If we won’t own anything… who will?

The answer is obvious: The elites will.

And they’ll rent it back to us for top dollar.

Whatever “the market” can bear.

But obviously, what the market can bear and what the people can bear are two different things entirely.

Interestingly, a societal structure in which the vast majority own nothing and have to work for elites just to stay alive already has a name:

It’s called feudalism.

Our serf ancestors worked to enrich a lord. Now we work to enrich land-lords and bankers. 

Feudalism 2.0

Have you noticed that the economy is rapidly shape-shifting?

During the pandemic, billionaires added more than $5.5 trillion to their net worth.

If you chart the trajectory and do the math, you’ll discover elites will control the entire global economy within our lifetime.

Sadly, the goal of today’s elites is the same as their ancestors:

To enslave the world in order to extract the maximum amount of time and wealth from every living being.

Ownership matters

Without ownership, America’s 115,656,681 renters are at the whims of cruel land-lorders and Airbnb takeovers.

Without ownership, all of Tesla’s 70,000 employees miss out on their $14 million stake in the company they created, while Elon Musk makes $36 billion in a single day.

Without ownership, millions of Walmart employees struggle to feed their families, while the billionaire Walton family enjoys corporate socialism on an unprecedented scale.

Without ownership, people pay ever-increasing gas prices to get to work, the bottom billion go to bed hungry because of the slightest increase in grain prices, women and children prostitute their bodies to make ends meet, and a million people globally move into slums every single day.

Without ownership, we don’t get to own stuff. Not our houses, cars, clothes, music, movies, furniture, appliances, or books. Everything becomes pay-per-use. And if you can’t pay, you don’t get to use it. No matter what it is.

Without ownership, every single one of us lives and dies by the market:

* When the price of energy spikes 180X during a Texas blizzard, you can either freeze to death or take on a lifetime of debt.

* When the price of housing rises to $10 million in our lifetime, you can live on the streets or work three underpaid jobs just to keep a rotting roof over your head.

* When your child develops a life-threatening condition and private health insurance denies part or all of your claim, you can let your kid die or declare bankruptcy along with hundreds of thousands of other American families every single year.

* When the market price of water moves beyond what you can afford (due to systemic inequalities beyond your control) the CEO of Nestlé thinks you don’t deserve to drink water.

Without ownership, people don’t have stakes in the game. They aren’t invested. They become rogue actors, prone to dissent and violence and chaos.

And why not?

They didn’t sign up to play real-life monopoly.

Why not smash the board and shatter the pieces?

The end game

You’re probably wondering…

What’s the point of Feudalism 2.0?

Is it really worth the hassle of re-taking total ownership of the global economy and forcing the masses back into serfdom?

It’s not like it’ll win you friends, make you happy, or let you live forever.

So why bother?

Because elites are sad, broken, and delusional. They think that adding extra zeroes on their net worth will somehow give them peace of mind, contentment, true friendship, love, respect, and life purpose.

And because owning the world can’t and won’t satisfy, once the masses are crushed, elites will continue their bloody game of thrones until the day they die.

In a winner-take-all world, only one person can win.

It’s time to go to war with the elites

There are three things we can do to resist the great reset.

And remember, we have less than nine years.

1. Vote with your time and money

The polls can’t and won’t save you from the corporations that control Congress.

We have to bankrupt them.

The only way to do that is to stop giving them your money. No more shopping, no more banking, no more enriching predator corporations.

Go local and independent.

(You can also join the national strike that’s currently underway, refusing to contribute your time and talent to enriching multinational extractors.)

2. Amass owned assets, help others do the same, and never sell

I’m talking productive businesses, houses, land, building supplies, water sources, power generation, renewable lumber, animals, seeds. Real wealth.

While you’re at it, download every movie and song that you ever hope to watch/listen to more than twice.

Otherwise, you’ll be forced to rent these things for top dollar, and in doing so, further enrich the most corrupt institutions and people on earth.

3. Get offline and build real relationships with real people

We need more friends.

We need to build resilient micro-societies.

And entirely new anti-corporate, pro-commons sovereignties.

And offline communities of people who really care for each other and know each other.

When Feudalism 2.0 takes over the economy, we serfs are going to need each other.

Every Sunday morning for several years, my friends and I used to gather at Locke Street Bakery on Locke Street in Hamilton.

The bagels were amazing.

Literally handmade.

Boiled and fire-baked right before our eyes.

Slathered with homemade cream cheese, smoked salmon, the works.

Served by women in their forties and fifties who we knew by name.

LSB was a blue-collar institution in a run-down neighborhood, and for decades it faithfully served its equally faithful clientele.

LSB was so good, in fact, that it started attracting other local businesses.

A funky hair salon opened across the street.

A butcher shop did the same.

A bookshop.

A florist.

And then, one day — once all the signs suggested this neighborhood was about to pop — Starbucks moved into the neighborhood.

It was all downhill from there.

Corporations can’t create culture.

Corporations aren’t real.

They’re just legal fictions; anti-human institutions that live forever, have more rights than people, and exist solely to extract wealth from employees, suppliers, consumers, and taxpayers.

Corporations can’t and don’t create culture because culture is natural, organic, biological, creative.

It’s why people use Airbnb/steal real family homes instead of staying at hotels. Marriott can’t fake home.

It’s why all the top restaurants in the world aren’t chains. Real human chefs surprise and delight patrons with new and living flavors. McDonald’s and Starbucks, on the other hand, are continually “innovating,” but it all tastes roughly the same because the bottom line goal isn’t creative expression, it’s profit.

If you’ve ever been to a corporate “community event” or witnessed a corporate-created “grassroots campaign,” you know exactly what I mean. Everything’s a bit sanitized and clean and proper and nice and… off.

That’s because corporations aren’t relational — they’re transactional.

They can’t give freely and creatively.

Their legal fiduciary reason for existence is to take.

And human beings can smell it from a mile away.

The Corporate Colonization Cycle

Because corporations can’t create culture, they have to play succubus to a living host, hoovering resources out of fledgling local ecosystems.

To put it another way, corporations have to find real culture creators who are building meaningful neighborhoods, and then slip in their stores to get in on the action before the culture-creators get pushed out and move elsewhere.

Unlike one-of-a-kind local businesses that keep 100% of their profits spinning in their neighborhood and attract outside money, multinationals do the opposite: They siphon money from local communities to faraway elite shareholders, and make everywhere so similar and boring that it drives people away from once-thriving pockets of real culture.

In the case of Starbucks and hundreds of other multinational monster brands, they literally have teams of people who research up-and-coming areas to determine the best place to install their wealth-extracting hoses.

The corporate colonization cycle happens all over the world:

* Ernest Hemingway shops at a bookstore, and suddenly Shakespeare and Co. is a lifeless global brand.

* Mennonites create St. Jacob’s Farmer’s Market, then Walmart builds just feet across the county line to benefit from all the visitors.

* A trunkmaker named Louis Vuitton crafted high-quality bags, now a hyper-capitalist billionaire leverages the name to buy out seventy competitor brands.

* Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre chatted philosophy at a run-down restaurant, now Café de Flores is overrun by celebrities and narcissistic Instagramers.

* Two centuries ago, Vincent Van Gogh used a certain sketchbook made of moleskin, and in 1997 an Italian papermaker created an overpriced knock-off version that’s now owned by a Belgian glass repair company.

The corporate colonization cycle is simple and heartbreaking:

People create culture → Corporations kill culture.

After Starbucks moved to Locke Street, everything changed.

House prices tripled, driving out the working poor.

Antique shops bloomed like mold on week-old bread.

Airbnbs popped up like brain tumors.

The streets got cleaner, safer, more sanitized.

Surveillance cameras showed up in shop windows.

Pretty soon, crowds of aging female shoppers arrived, all looking to be part of this exciting new “neighborhood.”

Little did the tourists know as they ordered their flat whites at Starbucks, but Locke Street had already died.

All the real culture-creators had moved to James Street and Ottawa Street and Cannon Street.

And, after serving as the neighborhood’s beating heart and soul for decades, Locke Street Bakery closed.

It got bought out by a capitalist couple who moved the bakery to a lifeless warehouse in the suburbs and tried to make LSB a brand to sell in stores.

All those sweet bagel-serving women were fired. (I miss you, Sue.)

When the capitalists eventually realized that no one was interested in frozen bagels, they turned the former storefront into a lifeless vegan cafe staffed with why-are-you-even-talking-to-me Millennials.

Ironically, they called the restaurant Democracy.

Congrats to Dylan Mobley, winner of a book and $100 free Cardano! Stay tuned for more giveaways in the future.

Also: One of my books is free on Amazon this week!

Last week, someone offered to pay me $500 to write a short Medium article about their new NFT startup.

That’s a lot of money for someone with a brand new baby at home.

The company “sends” its “community” on a different digital “travel experience” each month.

One month everyone will digitally attend Coachella or Burning Man, another time they’ll go to the Superbowl or the NBA Finals.

It’s a really cool idea, until you think about it for like four seconds.

I wrote back:

“Dear [so and so]. Sorry to say I can’t support your project. It’s anti-human. If you’ve read much of Surviving Tomorrow, you know that I’m deeply pro-human. Biological. Offline. Together. [Your company] separates people. It keeps them from going on real adventures to real places to spend real offline time with real people. My post-college volunteering trip through Central America changed my life and made me friends for life. [Your company] is the opposite of what human beings need. I hope you’ll seriously re-think this business.”

It was the easiest $500 I’ve never made.

New name, same game

Facebook is changing its name to Meta Platforms Inc.

It’s stupid, I know.

But then again, so is wasting 2.39 years of waking life on Facebook, so can the average user really judge them?

As most of my long-time readers know, I’m not a fan of the highly-addictive, extremist-breeding, time-devouring, money-gobbling, democracy-smashing, depression-inducing, hatred-boosting sludgefest that is Facebook.

Now, in an attempt to distance Facebook from its endless crimes and scandals, kid billionaire/Sith lord Mark Zuckerberg has decided that burning 76,450,684 years of human life each year in two dimensions is no longer enough.

No, in his profit-focused mind, it’s time for Facebook’s 1.908 billion daily active users to enter the Metaverse — in other words, he wants to further separate us from each other, but this time, in virtual reality.

In order to create “connection.”

In order words, the lie that built Facebook is about to go exponential.

The trillion-dollar vision

Facebook is built on an extremely simple and profound promise:

That if we will all spend more time alone staring at a screen, freely hand over our identities, and let an algorithm change our beliefs and behaviors, Facebook will deliver connection.

And guess what?

Facebook delivered.

Extremely well:

* Old classmates who’d lost touch (for a reason) suddenly knew what each other were up to.

* Grandparents got to see their faraway grandbabies.

* Former colleagues got to argue about who stole the election from whom.

* During lockdown, everyone got to see how bored everyone else was.

* Oh, and millions of couples had affairs, with 20% of divorce cases now involving Facebook.

So yes, we connected.

But there’s a fundamental problem with Facebook’s unique selling proposition:

There’s a massive difference between connection and communion.

Facebook promises connection and hopes we won’t realize that connection isn’t actually what we want, need, or crave.

In the same way that Americans conflate autonomy with freedom, Mark Zuckerberg conflates connection with communion.

Humans don’t “connect.”

We aren’t USB keys.We aren’t wifi signals.We aren’t prongs that plug into outlets.

Machines connect.

Humans commune.

Communion

I don’t know anyone who’s logged off of Facebook feeling euphoric, content, or fulfilled.

Statistically speaking, most users log off either more depressed or more enraged.

Facebook is like McDonald’s — it’s temporarily satisfying because of the saccharine sugar hit, but it ultimately leaves you hungry within hours, craving another hit.

Communion, on the other hand, is different.

When people meet face to face, magic happens.

We smell each other. Hear each other without compression. We breathe in each other’s pheromones. Our breathing syncs. Our heart rates rise.Our faces flush.We really communicate.We can sense nuance, subtlety, jest.We subconsciously see each other’s pupils dilate.We touch each other, hold each other, feel each other.We know and are known.

And not one advertiser, including Russian trolls and conspiracy theorists, can pay to plant 36 thoughts in our heads.

More of the same

“The metaverse is the next frontier… From now on, we’re going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook-first.” — Mark Zuckerberg

The metaverse is wildly overrated.

It’s basically highly-addictive social media in virtual or augmented reality.

That’s right — either we’ll spend our hours inside Facebook’s digital world, or Facebook will invade our physical world.

Either way, its algorithms will continue to get to know us better than our family, bombarding us with ads whether we’re aware of them or not, manipulating our behavior for the betterment not of ourselves and our communities, but for the bottom-line profits of elite shareholders on the hunt for more and more Zuckerbucks.

You thought Facebook wars on comment walls were bad?

Now people will be able to see and scream at each other in digital town halls.

Sorry, MarkyZ.

We are homo sapiens, not homo digitalis.

We are proudly biological, offline, and physical.

We were made to be together, in the flesh.

We were not made to sit sedentarily and stare at a small square of light all day.

And we definitely weren’t designed to strap a screen to our face and “live” inside an ad-filled world created by a sociopath.

Let’s never forget that Facebook (and VR/AR/the metaverse) was created not to improve human life and achieve widest-spread wellbeing.

It was and will always be about shareholder profits.

Leaked documents have proved conclusively that Mark Zuckerberg does not care about the widest-spread wellbeing of our global family.

Like all of us, Mark cares above all for himself.

As trust in Facebook Inc. continues to sink lower and lower, the Chief Exploitation Officer thinks he can rebrand as Meta Platforms Inc. and double down on a thesis that never worked in the first place.

Facebook is built on the false promise that spending more time alone on screens will somehow deliver the human communion we want, need, and crave.

It hasn’t, won’t, can’t, and never will.

November 2020

The president’s lawyer creates a six-step plan for Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election, called the Eastman Memo.

November 7, 2020

Joseph R. Biden is elected President of the United States.

Pence and enough Republicans decide against executing the Eastman coup d’etat.

Donald Trump’s team begins working to ensure it won’t happen again.

Jan 2021 — Oct 2022

With two-thirds of Republicans still believing the election was stolen, Donald Trump systematically purges the Republican party of anyone who didn’t back him in his coup attempt or publicly state that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

He also purges the ten Republican members of Congress who voted for his impeachment.

November 8, 2022

Republicans retake key governorships and the House because Democrats don’t bother to show up at the mid-term polls as always.

Republican state legislatures immediately start changing election laws:

* Further gerrymandering districts

* Making it harder for Democrat-likely voters to vote

* Allowing Republican-held chambers to certify the election results instead of independent bodies

January 7, 2023

Donald Trump’s Facebook ban expires. Zuckerberg does the “right” thing (for shareholders) and re-instates the former POTUS, who immediately announces he’ll run for President in 2024.

Winter-Spring 2024

Donald Trump hosts huge, maskless rallies across the country while the Democrats still do most of theirs online.

One base gets fired up and ready for war.

March 5, 2024

Super Tuesday.

Donald Trump already has his Republican party nomination on lock and is cruising to an easy victory. All other candidates are simply angling for a seat at his table.

Summer 2024

Democrats once again block real contenders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and put forward another corporate-captured middling candidate at their “Democratic” National Convention. It does not matter who they put forward because that person will not win.

Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination.

Fall 2024

The Dems run a Dem-standard campaign, filling their little bellies with stress, but hoping and believing (but not praying) the polls giving them a slight edge will actually prove true on election night.

November 5, 2024

Election Day.

Donald Trump loses the election by the narrowest of margins.

November 6, 2024

Donald Trump announces he won the election and calls his state attorneys general to throw out Democrat votes, find a few extra Republican votes, and pick sympathetic fake electors to certify the election in his favor.

Facebook does “the right thing” and re-bans Trump, swearing this time it’s for good.

December 16, 2024

The electors gather in their respective state capitals to vote for President and Vice President.

Several states have voted Democrat, but their Republican-held legislatures send bogus electors who swing the election to Trump.

January 6, 2025

The electoral votes are formally counted before a joint session of Congress.

The President of the Senate, Kamala Harris, faces the same choice faced by Mike Pence: Whether or not to throw out phony election results.

And she does.

Because they are.

January 7, 2025

Hundreds of thousands of Republicans flood into Washington with more anger and weaponry than last time.

Protests, demonstrations, and Antifa-versus-the-Tea-Party battles break out in major cities across the nation.

The economy spasms and the stock market freaks.

January 19, 2025

Joe Biden faces enormous pressure to call in the National Guard to quell the coup before he is no longer in charge of the military.

January 20, 2025

Inauguration Day.

Two presumptive presidents show up to be sworn in as the 47th President of a United States that hasn’t been so divided since the Civil War.

A call to action

This is what happens when you let a republic turn into a corporatist oligarchy instead of a real democracy.

It doesn’t matter who wins if you have a democracy because there are zero politicians.

Instead, both parties practice non-stop gerrymandering, partisan politics, insider trading, and dark money campaign finance — all for the benefit of private corporate interests, not widest-spread wellbeing.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it until the day I die:

Democracy is too precious a thing to entrust to politicians.

And there’s only one way out of this mess:

Stop voting for corporate-captured Democrats and Republicans and start voting with your dollars.

We’ve got twelve fiscal quarters to bankrupt the corporate powers who (s)elect the people who lead the United States of America.

Spread the word.

Tesla just hit a trillion-dollar market cap.

Trillion with a capital T.

$1,000,000,000,000.00

Things are so crazy right now that Elon Musk’s net worth grew by $36 billion in a single day.

If the company was a cooperative, each of Tesla’s 70,000+ employees would be sitting on a $14 million fortune.

But, of course, Tesla isn’t a co-op — and it isn’t worth a trillion dollars.

It isn’t worth a tenth that much.

What is $TSLA actually worth?

To Tesla’s credit — and unlike its past four years — the company actually made a small profit in 2020… derived almost exclusively from Bitcoin and corporate socialism.

The thing is, a measly $3.4 billion in not-selling-real-products profits doesn’t remotely justify a trilly market cap.

We need some context:

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?

Cue the irrational fanboys:

“But Tesla’s future potential is huge!”

Sure.*

*But not compared to its current price.

To fall in line with the S&P’s historical averages and provide a reasonable rate of real return, Tesla would need to 22X its earnings to nearly $75 billion, nearly four times Amazon’s profits last year.

To provide a 10% annual return at a trillion-dollar market cap, Tesla would need to 29X its current profits.

Versus last year’s profit margins, that’s well over $3 trillion in annual revenue.

That’s nearly 6X more revenue than the largest revenue-earning company on earth.

It’s just not going to happen.

Double bubble trouble

Objectively, Tesla is wildly overpriced even compared to the overall market bubble.

But it’s a double bubble: the overall market bubble + the Musk fanboy story stock bubble.

Tesla may very well be 11Xs better than the average S&P company right now, but that just means Tesla’s price bubble is that much more inflated once you scrub out all the irrational exuberance.

Let’s run a back-of-the-napkin comparative analysis:

* If Tesla traded at the same P/E as Amazon — arguably one of the strongest companies on earth — Tesla’s market cap drops to $178 billion.

* If Tesla traded at the same P/E as Volkswagen Group — which includes Audi, Bugatti, Bentley, Lamborghini, Ducati, and Porsche — Tesla’s market cap drops to $25 billion.

* If you compare Tesla to Apple, which is fair comparison and a far more rational P/E, Tesla’s market cap drops to $90 billion.

Now pop the overall asset bubble, and Tesla’s true market cap is realistically somewhere less than $50 billion… about a 20th of what it’s trading for right now.

Gamblers in a dangerous time

As a sound investment, $TSLA is one of the worst stock picks in the world.

As a fun gamble, it’s one of the best.

And, just like Bitcoin, small investors are going to lose hundreds of billions of dollars when the price bubble pops.

Because let’s face it: Tesla is a meme stock.

Just look who’s buying shares:

And they’re probably buying most of it on margin.

Either way, Tesla stock is clearly being pumped by unsophisticated investors who haven’t done their due diligence regarding the company’s actual long-term worth.

Nor do they care.

The end result?

Tens of thousands of Tesla speculators will lose their life savings.

In conclusion

In no rational world is Tesla worth $1,000,000,000,000.

But, of course, we don’t live in a rational world anymore.

Because the productive economy is completely dead, the only way to make big money without doing any real work is to play the extraction game, getting in on Ponzi schemes like real estate, the stock market, and cryptocurrency, desperately hoping you can sell at the top before the whole house of cards falls apart.

And it will fall apart.

When it does, there will be riots and protests, there will be suicides, and millions of people will lose their jobs and homes and suffer untold hardship.

As usual, the elites will pick through the wreckage and scoop up cheap assets at firesale prices.

We saw it in 2008, and we will see it again, but on a bigger scale.

The rich will do what they want, and the poor will suffer what they must.

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Superpowers aren’t impressive.

Italy, Greece, Ethiopia, Egypt, Britain, Spain, Portugal; they’ve all ruled the world for a time before sliding back to just regular-ol’-nation status.

Now it’s America’s turn.

The United States is going to collapse.

This isn’t a fear-mongering statement.

Just a fact.

Everyone knows it.

Whether in five years or fifty, the days of America-as-global-superpower are numbered.

In the same way that Rome pulled back its troops from Alexandria in Egypt and the Scottish borders in Britain, the American military-industrial complex will continue the work started in Afghanistan and eventually withdraw its 800 global military bases in order to make a last-ditch effort to enslave its own people in a soft-totalitarian panopticon surveillance state.

And then it will collapse.

Diehard nationalists insist it could never happen, but the signs of American collapse are obvious:

1. Wealth inequality

American income inequality is growing, too.

Higher than the Roman Empire’s, in fact.

The stats on wealth inequality are crazy. Please read them all.

Nevermind the Gilded Age of corporate tyrants like Vanderbilt and Carnegie and Rockefeller — today’s billionaires control more wealth and political power than the monopolists of the past could ever have dreamed.

And while extreme right-wingers are quick to shout “Communism! Socialism!” they fail to realize we’re not advocating central ownership or central control of the economy. That’s what billionaires are working on.

2. Debt

The numbers are staggering:

* America has nearly $29 trillion in federal debt.

* Total consumer debt sits at $14.9 trillion.

* Half a million American families are systemically forced into bankruptcy every year.

Don’t listen to those nutty Modern Monetary Theory boosters who think we can pile up debt forever and it will never destroy our society.

The bell will toll, and it will toll for us.

Don’t get me wrong, the MMTers are technically right — we can print money forever. But every unbacked printed dollar erodes trust and purchasing power.

When society is built on a literal lie, it’s only a matter of time before it falls.

3. Economic Instability

Because of how hyper-elites have structured the economy, we’re stuck with permanent economic instability — insane asset bubbles, followed by massive crashes that hurt those who a.) didn’t benefit in the good times, and b.) suffer most in the bad times.

While it’s never occurred to the corporations who control our countries, people want to live in economically stable places.

Because America refuses to deliver on true, long-term economic stability for the majority, it’s no wonder we’re currently seeing a national strike, and why many of us with the power to do so have already moved overseas.

4. Homeownership in Crisis

Rentership, too.

I’ve been sounding the alarm on this one for a while — people have no idea the tidal wave that’s about to shatter the American middle class once and for all.

House prices are going to $10 million in our lifetime, and if we don’t ban for-profit residential real estate investment and overthrow the corrupt zoning boards that keep young families from building homes they can afford, we will see a houselessness crisis never witnessed before in human history.

5. Crony Corporate Politics

Democracy, of course, has never existed in America, but the corporate oligarchy now owns Congress lock, stock, and barrel.

There’s honestly no point in voting unless it’s with your money.

6. Environmental Instability

When I was younger, my wife and I visited Tikal in Guatemala, the New York City of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization.

They destroyed their environment, and then it destroyed them.

It’s really simple: Nations that don’t protect people, wildlife, soil, water, and air eventually go extinct.

It’s not personal, it’s science.

As commenter Nikos Papakonstantinou put it:

You can’t eat, drink, or breathe money.

It takes 1,000 years for nature to grow 3cm of topsoil, and America has managed to burn through several feet in the past century.

Now, America only has sixty harvests left.

(An excellent book on the topic is Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilization.)

7. The Vampire Economy

Let’s face it, the American productive economy is dead.

Most of the major brands are zombie companies that burn cash and have never been profitable a day in their short-lived corporate lives.

Rather than producing products and services of real value, corporate America is just a giant game of extractivism, a dung pile of rent-seeking skimmers who blood-suck time and wealth from the productive poor while contributing nothing of real value:

* Landlords

* Bankers

* Stock investors

* Crypto speculators who would rather treat Bitcoin as a Ponzi scheme instead of freedom money to stave off abhorrent central bank surveillance currencies.

When a nation stops creating real value and starts eating itself like a snake, its days are mathematically numbered.

8. Mass Hysteria

Looking at you, anti-vaxxers.

And Q-Anoners.

And cancel culturists.

And people who vote for Republicans and Democrats.

America is now filled with conspiracy theorists and people who draw the line and refuse to dialogue with people outside of their own box. This signals a total breakdown in personal understanding, civic goodwill, institutional trust, and national unity.

9. Screen Addiction

The invention of the smartphone will surely go down in history as one of the most destructive pieces of technology ever invented.

Homo sapiens are in no way adapted for the super-stimulus of digital outputs.

Between social media, streaming, porn, gaming, and shopping addictions, we’re breaking our necks, frying our eyes, and shattering any sense of offline meaning or belonging.

Just wait until Gen Z and Gen Alpha are in charge.

10. Individualism

America is a culture (from the Latin cultus, where we derive the word “cult”) built on the myth of rugged individualism, of “one for me, and all for me.”

It’s a dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the-fittest, winner-take-all, loser-dies-in-poverty cult where the rich prey on the poor and the masses suffer so the elites can live a little better a little longer.

America is a piece of glass that has been shattered into 331 million shards, each stabbing the next in a frantic fight for survival.

Only a hard fire can forge the pieces back together.

There are those who believe a Canadian living in Europe shouldn’t have the right to comment on America at all, but of course, those people are usually nationalists who fail to see we live in a hyper-connected world where everyone’s choices affect everyone else. The failure to understand this is yet another symptom of hyper-individualism.

America is a fractured, atomized nation, with each member so hell-bent on self-actualization, obsessed with concocting a singularly unique identity, and blinded by the idea that autonomy and freedom are the same thing.

Because the nation cannot fathom it shares one common freedom, it simply cannot surrender any amount of selfhood to the collective, despite the fact that human togetherness is the #1 thing correlated to human happiness.

The end isn’t the end

All empires fall. It’s a non-negotiable. It’s just a matter of when, how, and how hard.

Collapse doesn’t mean disappearance.

And it doesn’t necessarily mean a total dystopian hellscape like the Book of Eli.

But it does mean a loss of global superpower status and all the unfair advantages that came along with it, like currency supremacy and cheap goods. It means a country seriously diminished, greatly impoverished, wracked with crime and disease and exploitation, and subject to the whims of foreign corporatists hell-bent on extraction.

You know, like much of the rest of the world.

Normally, my articles outline a challenge facing soci…

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I grew up in a pretty little granola town in Ontario, Canada.

For many years, the good folk of our town fought against those corporate invaders from Bentonville, Arkansas, in hopes of protecting our local businesses, consumers, the environment, and democracy.

My childhood mind is imprinted with images of signs and protestors all telling Walmart to shove off.

Walmart, of course, eventually shoved its way into town by lobby-bribing our city councilors and provincial legislators.

After all, this is the same company that rammed a superstore into the shadow of a millennia-old Mexican pyramid.

My city’s Walmart was installed at the northern edge of town, set way back off the road, behind the Woodlawn Cemetery.

Twenty years later, when Walmart opened a second store in a prime location right beside the mall, no one made a sound.

The corporate colonizers had taken control.

99 problems

Walmart is horrible for society.

Or, as the kids say, it’s problematic.

And not problematic in the sense of offending a delicate teenager’s feelings.

We’re talking actual, major, global, systemic problems:

1. Walmart savages local economies

Walmart is so big that it runs a trade deficit with China, and that deficit is so big that over a five-year period, it drained an estimated 200,000 American jobs.

2. Walmart treats its employees like garbage

Honestly, the Walton family probably treats their dogs better.

(This is the same company, after all, that tried to turn a profit off its deceased employees by buying dead peasants insurance.)

But even the living ones are suffering:

* 70% of Walmart employees leave in the first year.

* The company has engaged in all sorts of illegal union-busting actions.

* They have more employees on food stamps than almost any company in history.

3. Walmart costs communities a boatload of tax dollars

Obviously, Walmart lobby-bribe politicians for all the tax breaks and shady benefits they can extract, just like every other major corporation, but Walmart’s incessant cost-cutting also means they shunt their security costs to local police forces, who have to respond to an absurd amount of calls.

In just four counties, police departments logged over 16,800 calls to Walmart locations in just one year.

In other words, taxpayers are not only funding Walmart employees’ breakfasts, lunches, and suppers, but we’re also paying the company’s security bill.

4. Walmart destroys local competition

Nevermind quality, service, humanity, or net planetary benefit, in the world of winner-take-all corporatism, whoever has the deepest pockets survives.

Much like John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and Jeff Bezos’s Amazon, the Walton family’s Walmart practices predatory under-pricing to drive local businesses to bankruptcy.

In fact, it will often open two stores if it knows it can kill competition quicker, eventually abandoning one of the locations once they’re in control, thereafter making shoppers drive further for the things they want and need. (They’ve abandoned more than 25 million square feet of stores so far, some of which have been torn down at the taxpayer’s expense.)

5. Walmart enriches authoritarian regimes

We all know it.

The biggest big box store in America is one of the least American things in America.

Walmart estimates that over 70% of its suppliers are based in China.

Now, it’s starting to pivot to Modi’s India for cheap products made by exploited laborers with few environmental protections.

Walmart’s overseas law-arbitrage has led to hundreds of deaths, child slavery, the abuse of women, disability discrimination, and thousands of other human rights abuses.

Oh, and they also have at least $76 billion stashed away in 15 tax havens, doing everything in their power to avoid paying any of the costs of civilization while extracting as much profit as possible.

People over profits

Not to get too philosophical, but now that you’re aware of all these facts, consciously continuing to shop at Walmart is an immoral act.

That’s what happened to me.

I learned the truth.

After that, I couldn’t in good conscience continue to enrich them.

Walmart is, like all multinational corporations, a predator alien species that should not be kept alive any longer.

I say we kill it.

Because Walmart is deeply anti-human… and entirely stoppable.

The fix is frightfully simple

Just stop shopping at Walmart.

It’s really that straightforward.

Over a decade ago, I watched Walmart: The High Cost of Low Prices and I decided to actually do something about it.

People spent more than half a trillion at Walmart last year, but the corrupt company didn’t get one dollar from me.

After all, I know how the game actually works:

Everyone (except minorities, prisoners, and whoever else Mitch McConnell doesn’t like) gets one vote every four years, to participate in the charade of democracy while corporations (they’re people, remember?) funnel billions in dark money to (s)elect the false dichotomy Repub-Dem candidates of their choosing.

Meantime, those of us who are actually awake don’t bother wasting any time at a ballot box and invest vote 20,000–50,000+ times per year with a voting currency that actually matters and makes a difference: With our dollars.

When Walmart’s the only option

I’m not saying it’s easy to stop shopping at Walmart if you’re legitimately poor.

Not cheap… poor.

After all, Walmart perfected the race-to-the-bottom, and desperate people in dire straights can barely afford to shop anywhere else.

But that’s the point, isn’t it?

The entire point of multinational corporations is to shatter local resilience and self-reliance, disconnecting people from land and place and generational skillsets, creating a system of utter corporate dependence.

From that perspective, almost no sacrifice is too great in order to re-gain communal sovereignty.

For all those of us who are a shade above destitute, we must start paying the price for those who genuinely can’t.

As commenter Russ Linton put it:

“We need to starve these megastore beasts as much as possible. Deprive them of profit, of workers, and reclaim our lives.”

It’s the only way we’ll all ever be able to become free.

Go local. Seriously, just make the choice and do it.

For the past ten years, I’ve been putting my money where my mouth is.

The first step was to become a horrible corporate citizen and just radically scale back my consumption. In addition to simply not shopping — I don’t own a phone and in the past three years I’ve only purchased five pairs of socks and one pair of jeans — my localization efforts include:

* Only going to local restaurants 99% of the time. (There’s only one chain restaurant in my town, so this one is admittedly easy.) My favorite is a Mexican place run by my friend Laura.

* Getting my grass-fed beef and lamb from Robert and his parents, who own a farm beside my wife’s office.

* Walking to a local farm shop to buy organic vegetables and sourdough bread from Laluna and the other hippie-types who dig them from the ground.

* Collecting organic milk from my doorstep every Monday morning from Gerwin. (Yes, we have a milkman; it’s extremely affordable and amazing.)

* Popping in to see Katherine and her amazing team at our local corner shop for organic eggs.

* Seeing Marie at the Tuesday market for honey and jam and apple juice.

(Full disclosure: I still haven’t kicked my Amazon habit, but I mostly buy my books used from third-party sellers located within a few hundred-mile radius.)

But as you can see, much of our shopping is human-scale and relational.

It’s not as “easy” as popping over for a giant shop at a Walmart, but it’s easier on the economy, the planet, and my community.

It’s also easier on the future.

Plus, it’s fun.

Money and time well-spent.

And it allows me to vote for the kind of world I actually want to live in.

You know… one without…