“Africa’s Last Raven starts off with a simple act of animal cruelty. The (initially) unnamed narrator discovers a raven which has had its wing broken by a pair of boys and a slingshot. The narrator shoos the boys away, and carries the bird to a park bench. The slow grace with which the narrator sits and soothes the bird implies a patience and degree of expertise that unfolds both in this simple opening scene, and across the rest of the book.

As the plot progresses, we learn that the narrator is a siphon; brought from Africa as an infant to be raised by older Americano parents, both doctors, both kind and loving, but both of Latin descent. Ethnically, linguistically, culturally, our narrator’s parents were distinct from the child they brought into their home, a child given up by a family who either would not, or could not raise them, in the midst of a conflict zone. And as the narrator nurses the raven, the process awakens a sense of parenthood the narrator did not know they had…”

As dour, drawn out, or plain un-fun as heavy literature can be, it is a genre that must explore weighty topics like mortality, morality and the meaning of life. Otherwise, who would want to read it? And why do we subject ourselves to this unbearable lightness of being? (Besides a high school reading requirement) Well, on some level I think we want to read about someone making terrible mistakes or bad life choices, so that we, the readers, learn to avoid those mistakes in our own lives. And as Tolstoy pointed out, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, so that leaves lots of room for highbrow literature to explore the misery of others, so you don’t have to live it yourself.

In the case of Africa’s Last Raven, the novel explores an experience that, if demographers are to be believed, almost certainly will happen over the next hundred years. As you may have read about, or noticed in your own life, a LOT of people are not having babies. Or if they do, they have one or two. This experience is vastly different from the experience of humanity over the last 250,000 years. Even in relatively stable populations of hunter gatherers, most women had at least three children, as the likelihood all would survive to adulthood was fairly low. And in pre-industrial, agricultural societies, that number jumped as high as eight (or more!). This meant most societies, over most of human history, had a total fertility rate (TFR) much higher than the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. But over the first quarter of the 21^st century, almost every continent with human beings on it saw their TFR drop below replacement rate. The only continent where the rate is currently above 2.1 is Africa, and even there, the TFR has dropped by 50% over the last thirty years or so.

The implications of this trend in demographics are difficult to overstate. At a bare minimum, every society on Earth will have to re-configure their political economies. As each decade passes, fewer and fewer working-age adults will have to support both a greater number of old people, AND whatever children they choose to have. It’s not hard to imagine my own children spending their entire adult lives working jobs that keep the elderly alive, while trying to find time to raise a child or two of their own. Imagining it is exhausting if you think through the implications, to say nothing of actually living it!

Indeed, my generation, the Millennials, are to some extent already living this reality. Many of us have elderly parents, and fewer children then they had. Whatever panic attacks may keep my fellow Millennials up at night, likely pale in comparison to the anxieties our children and grandchildren will experience. As fewer people have fewer children in countries like the United States, how will we continue to maintain anything, when all the working-age people are busy taking care of the elderly and the young? One obvious solution is immigration. And where might those immigrants come from in, say, 2050? There’s basically one option – Africa (and some parts of the Middle East).

As Africa is the only continent with an above-replacement fertility rate, one could easily see a future play out where the xenophobia of the 2010s-20s gets replaced with a pressing need to import people to keep the population stable. This will be true for Europe as well as the USA, but also South and East Asia as well as Latin America. Furthermore, it isn’t hard to imagine a contest between nations with stagnant or declining populations to import the most compatible Africans. After all, there are large swathes of the continent where English, French, Portugues and even Spanish are spoken. Might it become quite enticing for Africans with proficiency in one of these second languages to move their families to a country that speaks said language? Or perhaps in a darker turn of events, might richer countries offer lucrative amounts to import orphans or children living in extreme poverty to adoptive parents? Just as the late 19^th century saw a scramble for African colonies and natural resources, perhaps the later 21^st century will see a scramble for the continent’s children?

In this last act of colonialism, we will likely see richer nations to siphon off the best and brightest, or poorest and most desperate, from Africa and the Middle East. In the case of our fictional novel, the narrator grew up adopted by older parents who, however much they loved the child, weren’t the child’s biological parents. My understanding is that all adoptive children must grapple with this fact at some point in life, even if they never end up viewing it as a ‘bad’ thing. But layer this atop the deep-seated notion that they were imported for the value of their labor, or to keep afloat a demographically stagnant society that might otherwise have been uninterested in them, and you have a recipe for a generation so haunted by these notions, they live with crippling self-doubt, and might choose not have kids of their own?

You may be asking yourself at this point, “isn’t this supposed to be a series of posts about a BETTER future?!?” And it was supposed to be that. But the demographic declines we see around the world raise some fairly uncomfortable questions. Beyond the surface-level concerns about why the demographic collapse is happening, we might start asking deeper questions like “why is society?” or “Is the only purpose of civilization to produce another generation?” or “Does any of this human endeavor have a higher purpose?”

While I don’t claim to have any of those answers, I would say that the seed of an answer might be found in the premise of the fictional novel. The protagonist of Africa’s Last Raven DOES find a sense of fulfillment and purpose, and it begins in the park, picking up a wounded bird. While the raven begins the story in a role much like Poe’s famous raven - an ill-omen of impending doom and a reminder of past loss, the protagonist instead finds in the raven a kindred spirit. As they nurse the raven back to health, and eventually turn the bird loose, our protagonist comes to some profound conclusions about life and the human experience. And perhaps that is the lesson – that as dire and crushing as the demographic decline seemed to be, it didn’t turn out to be all exploitation and gloom. But I won’t spoil the ending, you’ll have to read it for yourself!

I know this installment was a bit more dour than previous entries on the best seller list. Indeed, the implications of what might happen as populations stagnate and decline, and what richer societies may do to keep themselves afloat at the expense of poorer ones, are unpleasant to say the least. But even as xenophobic and ugly as this current moment has become, the future does not have to be terrible. We still have some time to build a better one. As long as current events do not intervene, next time we will explore a better world through a genre near and dear to my heart – relentless, bloody horror!

This price decline is, on the surface, a bit surprising considering the reality in the Persian Gulf. A constricted supply SHOULD push prices up if there are no alternative products and demand remains inelastic. All of these factors are certainly just as true today as they were in early April when the last tankers from the Gulf reached their destinations in California. So why haven’t we seen the supply shock? Where’s the price spike?

Setting aside for the moment the fact that oil futures are up almost double what they were in February, the lack of calamity bears scrutiny. Especially because a lack of immediate calamity does not mean there’s NO calamity looming on the horizon. So, what happened?

For starters, the contingency plans have, so far, worked. Around the world, strategic reserves and commercial reserves stepped in to moderate what would have been a catastrophic price spike. In total, governments have authorized the release of some 400 million barrels from strategic reserves. On top of this, commercial inventories of crude were likely also about 400 million barrels, leaving the global system with roughly 800 million barrels of slack in the system. Since the start of the closure of the strait, roughly 1.7 billion barrels haven’t reached global markets (100 days x 17 million barrels per day). The actual number is actually a bit lower as Saudi Arabia was able to divert about 3 million bpd from the Persian Gulf to export facilities on the Red Sea, and the world continues to produce oil and gas in the interim.

Still, this should leave a gap of some 900 million barrels off the world market, which seems it should have produced a greater supply shock and driven up prices. Fortunately for the industrial world, many more prudent nations in South Asia and East Africa implemented rationing systems quite quickly after the closure of the strait. Unfortunately, a robust estimate of oil consumption savings is not easy to come by, but on presumes that between cutting consumption and increasing imports from outside the gulf, the gap between production and consumption should have narrowed by about 450 billion, meaning the gap between production and consumption may be as narrow as 4 million bpd since the closure of the strait. That’s bad but may be as little as 5% global production.

All this seems great. Between reserves, conservation and some creative exporting by the Saudis, the worst has been avoided. And if we were looking at a peace deal and a rapid opening of the straits sometime soon, that might have been true. But the hot war appears to be heating back up, and even if it weren’t, the gap between Iranian and American demands for peace are still too wide to be bridged at this point. So, the Strait will stay closed, and the gap between supply and demand will continue to widen. Perhaps most important, a significant gap has opened up between oil futures and spot prices. In many places, refineries are paying some $30 per barrel above the future price. This gap points to a continual constriction of supplies.

But commercial reserves are basically gone at this point, and strategic reserve releases can only take us so far. Given the transport times, should the Strait re-open tomorrow, prices have nowhere to go but up for at least the next six to eight weeks. And that’s the best-case scenario. If the strait remains closed, industry leaders from Saudi Aramco to the Carlyle Group estimate physical shortages will be a reality by the beginning of July. . Real shortages will likely mean caps on how much one can buy at any given gas station. Enjoy those $3.69 gallons, because by July 4^th,, even people in the US may have to declare their independence from filling up their tanks.

“The Pacifists’ Dagger starts out with a piercing insight; even in a room with only two people, the intentions of others can render the place crowded. The couple tangled in the sheets are not who they’ve told each other they are, nor have they been fully honest with others that know them. This opening scene is not for the prude, as it heats up faster than the boilers of the steamer the main character finds themselves on by chapter two. This tale of fast-paced espionage and double crosses takes us from Cascadia across the Pacific, to the boom towns of Novaya Siberia, to the heart of the Ural Caliphate, and a revelation which threatens the tenuous Peace of Baikal.

Perhaps the novel shines the brightest when asking the question “what is the price of peace” because, as the title suggests, even those who abhor violence, can’t always avoid it. Thus, it is fitting our main character, slight of stature and lacking the typical, square-jawed swagger of most espionage protagonists, excels at the lost art of Kung Fu. Through discipline and leverage, they must redirect the strikes and blows of adversary and ally alike, using the other’s strength against them. And always with an eye towards recovering the stolen plans. But we don’t want to reveal too much, too soon…”

The spy genre, much like true crime, lends itself to travelogue and allows the author to explore the world beyond the USA. And for any perspective author of speculative fiction who wants to look at the wider world, here’s your chance to swing for the fences! What’s that? You’re not interested in another story about the agent of the free world fighting the forces of tyranny? You’re in luck, because a better world will almost certainly feature styles of political economy from all over and break the democracy-vs-authoritarian mold. Agents of theocracy, merchants, anarchists, guilds and, yes, petty tyrants can populate your story, providing ethical and moral foils, as well as possibilities for double crosses, red herrings, head fakes and pursuit of MacGuffins of all sorts of shapes and sizes.

But what twist of character can we add to this genre to spice it up and ask some provocative questions? As the excerpt alludes to, the main character of this particular novel is transgender. They blend into the background of any location, passing themselves off as masculine in one context, feminine in another. And as mentioned in the review, our protagonist is not the kind of spy who bashes their rivals over the head. As one of the few remaining kung fu masters left in the world, our spy is a perfect avatar for the anarchist confederation of Cascadia. The possibilities are endless…

Themes of a Better World

The obvious one here is the visibility of trans people. Make a marginalized person a hero, and you automatically have room for exploring some really touchy themes. Then throw that protagonist into a space they may not traditionally occupy – super-secret spy person, and you’ve got the chance to really upset the ‘traditional gender roles’ crowd. Never mind that cross-dressing, disguises and characters that don’t fall into the traditional gender roles have been staples of the espionage genre going back centuries. Granted, in the past those characters would probably have had a supporting role, but now’s the time to thrust a character like this into the spotlight.

It would behoove us to acknowledge that a better world isn’t a perfect one. Powerful interests will spy on each other, gain whatever advantage they can, and fight from the shadows. We’re talking about people, not angels. But with this in mind, one could explore the complex topic of what, exactly, might power look like in the 22nd century. And what does that tell us about today?

Is power simply physical courage? Wealth? Conviction? Zealotry? Naked, brute force? If we’re looking to explore a better world, one presumes brute force wouldn’t be the final arbiter, but while might doesn’t make right, it often makes things the way they are. On one side, we have a money-grubbing merchant republic, squaring off against the pacifist anarchist confederation which may not be as pacifist as they claim. BUT WAIT! HERE COME THE AGENTS OF A RESURGENT THEOCRACY TO STEAL THE SECRET PLANS! There are so many places one could go with this, and the exploration of the theme of how power gets wielded, by whom, and to what ends, offers endless narrative possibilities.

And how can alternate political economies emerge and thrive from under the heel of late-stage capitalism, without some source of independent power? And how can the people building this different path forward do so without some way to, if nothing else, protect themselves? Maybe the battlefield is deadlocked. Neither side can win in the shadows of the drones, but maybe they can win in the shadows. And what is the price of power?

Take our protector of the anarchist confederation; they can track down the stolen plans, through the brothels of the Nikolaievsk-on-Amur waterfront, across the arid steppes at the feet of the Altai Mountains, but what do they do when confronted with the fact that the plans weren’t stolen at all, but being sold to the highest bidder? For an anarchist from a communal town that eschews monied commerce, what happens when they discover the head of the confederation is more than willing to engage in the vices of gold and silver? Furthermore, what does our protagonist do when they come to realize the sale is meant to ensure the flow of weapons to the confederation, to prepare it for the very real possibility of invasion from over the Rockies by the Athabascan Union? Does one abandon their pacifism the first time they see a fist swinging at their nose?

For that matter, what would you do?

The problem appears to be that people are looking at the looming crisis and assuming that it will have some easy or quick resolution. As a result, oil is not priced as if it’s about to go into physical supplied shortage, but instead priced at an inconvenient level. This reaction is not entirely irrational. The United States has been bombing the Middle East in one capacity or another for the last 30 years. And decisions by the current regime that seemed to be set in stone one week often get reversed the next. For example, does anyone actually know what you, as an individual, paid in tariffs this year?

And all this uncertainty while it may play well in the New York real estate market of the 1980s does not play well when it comes to energy, economics and geopolitical conflict. So I think it’s worth looking at what the US says it demands to end the current conflict what Iran says it demands in the current conflict and the more than Hormuz Strait-size distance between the two.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a snazzy graphic with the issues lined up side-by-side, so you’ll have to read the Al-Jazeera article for the details. Right off the bat, we can see a pair of problems, the status of nuclear fuel, and the status of the Strait itself. The US says we will not tolerate Iran enriching uranium, and they have said that they will not tolerate not having uranium to enrich. We say we want the straits to go completely open as they were on February 28. Iran says it will now charge a toll every time a ship passes through the Strait. While we could perhaps come to agreements on other topics involving this conflict, these two are fundamentally reconcilable. What one side wants the other side will not allow.

So it looks like we are going to hit tank bottom here in the United States around July 4th. Oh, the irony. We will get to inadvertently declare our independence from a lot of fossil fuels. And this actually gets back to the point of the previous article the impact of high gas prices on disposable income, and what that implies for economic activity here in the US. While I was of course, being facetious and saying that high oil prices are good, actually, if we really are looking at the kind of supply shock that’s about to hit this country then we really do need higher oil prices and we need them now. If we are about to go without 2 million barrels (490k mbd from the Persian Gulf and another 1.7 mbd a day that will go to the highest bidder on the global market) then our economy needs to price that in and people need to start adapting now.

And that will be a discussion for next week. How can we adapt to an economy where oil and natural gas are, for the foreseeable future, at least twice as much as they were a year ago?

But enough about the broader economy, let’s talk about how the fuel situation in the country looks set to go from bad to worse. Last week, we only calculated the cost to customers if prices remained similar to what they are now, for the next six months. As noted last week, we don’t know how much longer the Hormuz closure will go on, but fuel prices certainly aren’t going down anytime soon. Even if the Strait reopens tomorrow, it will take six months to get back to 80% prior production according to Goldman Sachs. This suggests at least 2-4 million barrels a day won’t be coming back online anytime this year. Those facilities took years and billions of dollars to build, and that will take as much as two years to rebuild and re-open. Iran has vowed to keep the strait closed until the US ceases military operations against them and lifts its own blockade of the strait. And even if hostilities ended tomorrow, it would take six months to clear the mines Iran laid in the strait to control ship traffic.

So, six months looks like a reasonable timeline. But there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. In this case, the catch is a supertanker-sized one, and that is that the loss of some 20 million barrels a day of exported crude oil (to say nothing of the lost liquid natural gas and fertilizer exports). This loss comes out of a total global crude production of roughly 104 million barrels a day. This math is simple enough; we’ve lost just under 20% of all oil available to the global economy. And in a world where oil is both an inelastic good, and a largely fungible one, prices have only one direction to go – up.

But here’s the worse part of an already bad story – the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74 (which lasted roughly 6 months) caused a decade of stagflation and economic disruptions from a loss of about 7% of global production. While the situations aren’t exactly one-to-one, the impact of the current closure going on 6 months would be about three times worse in terms of lost oil consumption. And in a world where energy consumption and GDP are basically tied at the hip, what this implies about economic contraction is not pretty.

Now it is true that we use energy more efficiently fifty years after the last serious oil shock. The energy production profile is quite different too, with natural gas and renewables making up much larger shares of the pie. The problem though, is that transportation fuels are essentially ALL still petroleum driven. Yes, we have hybrid and electric cars, but those make up a tiny portion of global use. For the US, the electric grid shouldn’t fail, but moving goods and people around the country will become much more expensive, and this alone will drive up prices throughout the economy. While the US is an exporter of refined oil, we are NOT, as the current regime likes to claim, energy independent. This claim can be shown to be a lie with an examination of the below information from the Energy Information Agency. In 2025, the US imported some 6.1 million barrels per day., of which 490,000 per day came from the Persian Gulf. That’s right, the current price spike comes from losing just 8% of our total imports. But wait, there’s more, and it’s worse, because of that 6.1 million barrels per day we import, 3.9 million comes from Canada and is effectively locked in, as the pipelines run south out of Alberta to the US. But the rest, the other 1.7 million barrels a day that don’t come from the Persian Gulf or Canada? That oil comes from around the world, and in a world where the oil prices is set to go up, those producers will sell to the highest bidder, and that highest bidder won’t necessarily be the US. Again, oil prices have only one direction to go, and that’s up.

But more concerning than the price shock is the likelihood of physical shortages – a true supply shock.

Combined with the logistics of moving millions of barrels of oil by sea, commercial and strategic reserves allowed oil companies and countries to cushion the lack of supply for the last ten weeks. This cushion will ease the supply shock for another two months or so, depending on where you are. Experts now expect that cushion to run out here in the US by July 4^th. At that point, what happens?

For one, there won’t be enough oil to go around. Duh. For another, in many places, oil won’t be available at anything but the most exorbitant prices. It might top a thousand dollars a barrel in countries that rely entirely upon Persian Gulf imports. And what will happen to the global economy when the supply crunch hits? As mentioned earlier, energy use and economic activity move almost in lockstep – burn more exajoules, produce more goods and services. GDP goes up. Line goes up. So, what are we looking at globally?

In 2024, the global economy used about 576 exajoules of energy, from all sources, but for our purposes, 200 eJs came from oil and 145 eJs came from natural gas. Without 20% of both energy sources, the global economy has lost 69 eJs of energy thanks to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. That’s about 12% of all energy production globally, and while the relationship isn’t exactly one-to-one, A contraction of the global economy will begin when the supply shock starts, which again, is happening now in East Africa and South Asia, and rippling towards East Asia, Europe and the Americas, and whenever the strait re-opens. IF the supply shock continues for more than a few months, a 12% contraction in global economic activity will follow. For comparison, economists put global declines of GDP for the 2008-09 Great Recession and the COVID-19 Recession in the 3.5-5% contractions in economic activity as measured by per capital GDP.

Since this is a US-based blog, let’s remember that in the US, the Great Recession resulted in a 4.1% contraction of the economy and a 10% unemployment rate. And since North America will likely be the last industrial region to experience the supply shock, starting in early July, let’s use the third and fourth quarters of 2026 as a measure of the duration of the supply shock. If the supply shock lasts two quarters (six months), we will be looking at a global economic crisis two to three times worse than COVID or the Great Financial Crisis by the end of the year.

Since March 1^st of this year, the United States has engaged in an illegal, offensive war against a nation that hadn’t attacked us. I’ll leave it up to you to decide why, as the excuses given by the regime have been all over the place.

Wars impose many costs, most importantly are the human costs, and we shouldn’t lose track of the nearly 5,000 lives that have probably been lost so far, to say nothing of the injuries, both physical and psychological. So far, US casualties have (officially) been light, but the real number is likely higher than official numbers.

While no infrastructure damage has been done to the US so far, one obvious cost has been at the fuel pump. And so far, we haven’t even suffered that much of a price hike so far. That will change as the last of Persian Gulf oil reached US refineries about two weeks ago, and releases from reserves, both public and private, are still being released. So far, so good. We’ve been insulated from the repercussions of our stupid actions.

This state of affairs will not continue. For one, physical shortages are already the reality in much of Asia and Africa as a result of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. And with much cheerleading by supporters of the regime, many tankers are now headed for US ports to buy US oil and distillates (like gas, diesel and aviation fuel). This will not make US citizens rich. It will make a few US oil companies a whole lot of money. It will also drive up gas and diesel costs for Americans at the pump.

With that in mind, I decided to run the dreaded numbers, to estimate the cost so far, to the US economy. In short, if we subtract the prewar price (as of the last week of February), from the average monthly price per gallon, then multiply that cost difference by day in the month, then add it all up, we can estimate a total number of dollars spent by US drivers on higher fuel costs.

The Iran war cost US drivers $ 31.3 billion dollars in extra fuel costs in just over two months. If (and this is a huge IF) prices stay close to the May averages of $ 4.45 per gallon of gas and $ 5.64 for diesel, then over the next six months higher fuel prices will cost US drivers another $ 130.5 billion. This back-of-the-envelope number doesn’t include the costs of other distillates like aviation fuels, marine fuels and bunker (home heating) fuel. Nor does it reflect the cascading rise in prices which will result from more expensive transportation costs and plastic stocks.

Perhaps most crucially, this impact does not include the multiplier effects of what that $ 161.8 billion COULD have been spent on. Every dollar pumped into the tank means a dollar not spent on birthday parties, clothes, rent, vacation, and so on…

Detractors would say this added cost, while real, is minuscule compared to total wages paid to Americans. According to the Social Security Administration, in 2024 Americans reported $ 11.7 trillion in aggregate wages. When we take the top 20% out of this figure (and they take home 52% of total household income, we get a $ 5.6 trillion for the bottom 80% of US households. f you’d like to read more about why this income distribution is a big freaking problem, may I suggest Inequality by Design, sold online and in real life at a bookstore near you…

Assuming transportation costs are even across quintiles, that means the bottom 80% of households will pay about $129 billion MORE for fuel over the next six months. That’s about 4.36 % of income spent on fuel instead of other things. With that in mind, I will leave you with a question, dear reader; what will you spend less on this year?

“True crime novels sometimes have kernels of truth in them. Unfortunately for readers, the only truth at the heart of 40 Miles to Mont Royal is that genre is tired and uninteresting. Perhaps it’s the slavish devotion to relaying just the facts, perhaps it’s the turgid prose, perhaps the unlikely alliance of main characters strains credulity. But by the end, you’ll wish the Quebecois border guards threw the protagonists and antagonist into the St. Lawrence.

The novel starts off reasonably enough. It has to, if the author wants that coveted ‘true events’ label slapped on the cover. We meet our first two protagonists on the factory floor of a ball-bearing co-op in Indiana. The gruff old man on the night shift, handing off the lathe to the flirty, flouncy dame from day shift couldn’t be more different. After the monthly meeting, the co-op’s books turn out to be cooked. The pension accounts have been drained. For reasons the author elucidates in excruciating detail, this pair are the only two who suspect the true puppeteer behind it all. At this point, plot device B, a hardboiled detective for hire with a heart of gold, shows up to point them all in the right direction – the Wild North!”

Even in a better future, the critics are brutal! But the impulse is a bit understandable; a century from now, the next cycle of dissolution and rebirth is already swirling about in the undercurrents of the collective unconscious. And our columnist seems to sense it. They’re grasping back in time to the heyday of Embezzlement Noir, when the truth won out over lies and the scoundrels running out the back door with the bags of cash got punished. The displacement of murder-oriented true crime with financial deception-true crime reflects underlying anxieties. In the 2010s and 2020s, everyone feared the storm breaking across the country would involve a lot of homicide. And with the redemption of the republic and the triumph of ‘the people’ over ‘the money changers’, one can understand why the genres shifted and Embezzlement Noir dominated bookshelves in the second half of the century. One can also understand how a columnist for the New New York Times would pine for a simpler time, or what they easily recognized anyway. Some things really never change, do they?

Themes of a Better World

One of my favorite pet ideological projects is pushing the idea of workers co-ops and worker ownership into the discourse. For a speculative fiction author who wants a grounded, work-a-day setting, what better place the start than a factory floor, and what better way to weave in the threads of a better world than a worker owned co-op. Yes, sole proprietorships would still exist in a better, more economically equitable America. So could top-down companies owned by a single family with its hierarchy and authoritarian leadership style. But for the majority of the population, the mode of economic production could the worker owned cooperative.

In our book, Inequality by Design, Dr. Mattson and I devote an entire chapter to the concept of worker ownership. We go over the boring corporate governance, the obvious benefits of profit sharing and worker control for the employees, as well as the fact that worker ownership is wholly compatible with a free market economy. This is a point we plan to elaborate on in a future post, but it would be helpful in building that better future if Americans would differentiate between the institution of capitalism, and the observable phenomenon of supply and demand. But more on that at a later date.

Not to spoil the chapter of the book, but worker owned co-ops exist, right now, in real America. Thus, the notion that a whole economy build on co-ops and worker ownership is just pie-in-the-sky socialism in line with Charles Fourier and his oceans of lemonade is immediately belied by the fact that even in the hostile, hyper-capitalist environment of today, worker co-ops are, in fact, viable. Now just imagine if we built an economy around them instead of a few thousand tech bros trying to suck the remaining wealth out of our exhausted people?

This isn’t to say that the America of a better future wouldn’t have problems. After all, people are going to do crime, if for no other reason than believing they’re the cleverest crime-doer and can’t possibly get caught for it! But another theme of a better world which could receive exploration in speculative fiction would be the foundational ideas of crime and justice. Or punishment, if you prefer Russian literature. These are issues people have wrestled with as long as writing has been a thing, and probably for a long time before that.

What would a justice system look like when crimes against people and communities (remember the plot revolves around theft of the cooperative’s retirement funds), received more attention than crimes against private property rights? What might rehabilitation look like? Have you ever considered the notion of restorative justice in the true crime genre? For that matter, what does policing look like in a society that isn’t constantly surveilled in the name of ‘safety’? And of course, one could explore that core theme of crime fiction – are there some people truly beyond redemption?

A factory floor may seem a mundane place to kick off a work of speculative fiction, but the everyday setting can be one of the best places to explore broad, sweeping themes. What does a community owe its members? What does society owe the individual? Is the master embezzler an evil genius, or a sympathetic villain who felt slighted one too many times at the monthly meetings? Throw in a love triangle or some sexual tension for good measure, and you could weave a pretty compelling story. When we come back, we will take a look at that twin of true crime – the international spy thriller. And yes, we will encounter international people of mystery, menacing henchmen, exotic locales, and maybe even a 22^nd century Bond girl!

First up, the lightest of genres: the romance. This genre can, like a walk hand-in-hand on that first ‘real’ date, brighten your whole week, month, even year. After all, who DOESN’T want to feel loved? So, it’s fitting that one of the genres with broadest appeal would top our hypothetical 2126 New New York Times best seller list. Here’s the opening paragraphs of their review:

“One of the staples of the romance genre is the story of the second chance. In this case, Hallmark of a Plow Man, our protagonist, Danny, is a big city boy who’s just gotten done working three years on his rotation of national service. Though he grew up in Detroit, he learned how to farm, haul in the crops, and generally love the land. While out with his family during a block party, he runs into Val, his high school crush. Visions of a farm full of kids and luscious apple trees on Michigan’s Gold Coast dance through his head, only to be interrupted by the appearance of a strapping, swarthy man at Val’s side. Hi-jinks ensue as our plow man enlists the aid of Diana, another high school friend who he spent years hanging out with and commiserating over the immaturity of their classmates. And as their continual break-up plots fail one-by-one, our boy slowly realizes that maybe, just maybe, the high school buddy is the lady he’s looking for.

I won’t spoil the ending, but I’d imagine anyone reading this can guess how the story ends. It’s a callback to the late 20^th century, second golden age of film, part When Harry Met Sally, part The Wedding Singer, cross-pollinated with a Hallmark pulp-serial from the Recovery. At a breezy 300 pages, it’s a read for a long train ride or a lazy week at the beach! There’s a reason Hallmark of a Plow Man has sat at the top of the best seller list for five months now, so let’s break down just how the author builds an endearing love quadrilateral, while doing justice to each main character….”

There you have it, speculative fiction meets romance. What’s not to love? And how could such a story tell a story worth reading, while also exploring themes of a better world? As Shakespeare wrote, let me count the ways…

1 - The Ag Mission and National Service – Hopefully, an America that successfully rebuilds itself in the wake of this late-capitalist horror show, embraces a form of national service that doesn’t revolve around bombing countries full of brown people. It’s not too difficult, really, to imagine that in the face of climate destabilization, the current oil shock, and the end of grinding economic inequality, we might need to round up the youngers and set them to work. The most famous past examples of such a project include the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Project Administration and later, VISTA, AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps. In this version of the future, America collectively realizes two things: young people, especially young men, need physical challenges in those years between high school and their brains finally developing a pre-frontal cortex. So, instead of wasting your early twenties at frat parties or screwing up a job right out of high school, what if America’s young men spent that time working the land? Or the sea. I’m sure fisheries will need management and reestablishment.

And what about the ladies? An America rebuilding a functional economy and a national sense of purpose that revolves around something other than collective violence and ruthless exploitation, will surely need her daughters to go through three years’ service as well. Don’t worry, in the optimist future, there’s plenty of work to go around, from the farms to hospitals to the intricate work of stitching together a renewable energy grid. In this case of our characters, the big city boy has returned from the farm to find his high school crush three years into salvaging and repairing electric systems from the wreckage of the suburbs for installation in the homes and businesses of revitalized Detroit.

2 - Re-contextualizing Localism - The city boy finds out he likes rural America better. Instead of holding up the ‘big city’ as the apex of American culture, maybe an intrepid author of speculative could re-invent the countryside as a place of change and vitality. Each successive round of young people swashing through every three years constantly invigorates and renews the human landscape like the cycle of the seasons. Instead of the popular image of the countryside as a place of stultifying conformity and small-town isolation, perhaps we see a countryside full of colorful characters from across the nation thrown together and told to get something done for the greater good. But again, instead of charging machine gun nests or rounding up the natives, these young people must learn to work together to keep the harvests coming in, or holding the encroaching desert at bay, or managing wetlands to prevent further loss of coastline to the rising Greenland Floodwaters.

3 – The return of Sailing Ships – Whether it’s the collapse of oil production or the need to move goods without the energy-intense production of steel-hulled ships, the early 22^nd century could be a second age of sail. I know, sailing ships aren’t sexy, until they involve pirates, but a rebirth of the tall ships could make for a strong back story for the swarthy rival to our protagonist’s attempts to woo his high school love. The seas offer the opportunity for adventure and exploration of the wider world, and this promise excites our female protagonist more than settling on a farm. And thanks to the preservation of germ theory, a second age of sail can involve less scurvy than the 18th century. Everyone wins!

And this is just a sample of the ways the romance could thrive in a speculative future setting. We don’t have to shove the themes of cultural renewal, national service and de-industrialization too far forward. Instead, we can explore the themes through our main characters, their backgrounds, and their choices going forward. Next week, we will move on to another crowd-pleasing genre: the crime thriller!

So, over the next few weeks, we will take a genre and play it out in a future America that doesn’t look like the Walking Dead, Blade Runner, or Star Trek. To be clear, while this future United States will be one which has gone through largely positive reconstruction, that doesn’t mean it will be all sunshine, roses and puppy dogs. As discussed last week, positive reconstruction could come about through good, bad and ugly scenarios, and those possible paths will certainly lurk in the background. As a framing device, we will open the New New York Times to the best seller list in the Sunday paper, scan the titles, and check out what our great-great grandchildren might read at the beach this summer.

Atop the list this week we see Hallmark of a Plow Man, a naughty rom-com about a boy from the big city coming home from working the farms of the corn belt to sweep his high school sweetheart off her feet. That is, if the strapping sailor from Argentina doesn’t charm her first! Next, we have 40 Miles to Mont Royal, a true-crime novel about an unlikely trio chasing down the thief who absconded with the savings of an entire co-op. Will they catch the suspect before they reach the Quebec border? Rounding out the top three we have The Pacifists’ Dagger, a tale of espionage and double crosses which takes us from Cascadia across the Pacific to the boom towns of Novaya Siberia, to the heart of the Ural Caliphate, and a revelation which threatens the tenuous Peace of Baikal. At number four sits Playground of Silence, a hefty novel about aging, immigration and the place the African Diaspora occupies in our collective culture. The novel asks what responsibilities we have to the children stolen in what some refer to as the last act of colonialism. Set during the height of the Third Great Awakening, The Greenest Apostle explores the theological conflicts of the 2070s and asks fundamental questions about church, state and the divine. Number six on the list is Blood of the Palmetto, a gruesome story about a young protagonist, a kindly neighbor, and a bloody past which threatens to boil over and tear apart the fragile peace of a small town on the Carolina coast.

To be clear, our hypothetical best-sellers appear on the same mock list but draw on themes from different paths forward. Yes, they all exist in the same world, but the themes will explore in each certainly draw more heavily on differing threads, good, bad and ugly. For instance, the lighter fare like the rom com and the true crime novels draw more on themes from a ‘good’ path forward. The spy-thriller and the religious novel play out against a past that seems more in line with the ‘bad’ path forward. Finally, the horror novel and the literary tome certainly suggest an ‘ugly’ path to positive reconstruction. In the end, the human tapestry depicts all our experiences, and all our experiences differ. Even if a majority of people in any given society might be better (or worse) off than they were ten years ago, the experiences of individuals always color our view of the broader sweep of history.

With that in mind, next week we will play with the possibilities presented by our most light-hearted genre, the rom-com. Join us as Hallmark of a Plow Man illustrates a future of positive reconstruction through the raging hormones of a love triangle of twenty-somethings!

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The Road Not Taken

by Robert Frost

Last week, we searched for silver in the clouds, and hopefully you feel like we came away with something positive. That may be hard to do, considering nearly a 5th of the world’s supply of oil is bottled up in the Persian Gulf/ Given the reliance of modern agriculture on petroleum inputs, that puts a significant number of calories at risk by this fall. This will mean higher food prices in rich countries, and the specter of starvation in poorer ones. To say that the coming fall might become a literal one for regimes around the world is not an understatement. I cannot speak for what may happen in other countries, but I will hazard a guess for what this could mean here in the United States.

If ever there were a moment for a revolution to actually happen here, fall of 2026 would seem primed for it. As this is springtime in Oklahoma, we have favorable conditions for supercells, and some may turn tornadic. Consider this series of posts a revolution watch issued for the 50 United States. All the conditions are primed for it: prices are going up, unemployment is going up, the blatant corruption of the political and economic elites is on more full display than at any point in my lifetime, and the country is engaged in a disastrous war in the Middle East. Belaboring the meteorological metaphor, we do have a cap in place. The US has been pleasantly isolated from the negative results of our generally bad foreign policy since the end of the Vietnam War, and our mass media has consistently peddled a triplet of lies that are now, thankfully, being exposed. In no particular order, those lies are that 1 - America is an exceptionally free country that people around the world envy, 2 - that opposition to the status quo is equivalent to support for terrorism, antisemitism or plain unpatriotic, and 3 - that no matter how bad your local economy is, the country as a whole is getting richer and that rising tide lifts all boats. If any reader wants a particularly close look at that latter point, may i kindly suggest reading Inequality By Design, available online or wherever books are sold.

To conclude the severe weather metaphor, when the cap of warm air erodes and finally breaks, the suppression of thunderstorm formation goes away. Storms can form and spiral into 50,000-foot-tall monsters in less than an hour. So too, we might be surprised at the speed at which revolutionary change might come to the USA.

And this raises the obvious question; in what form will that revolutionary energy find release?

At this point, I need to make clear that the scenarios I’m about to lay out are explicitly ones where the existing political-economic order does not successfully fend off the revolution, AND that the long-term impacts of the revolution are largely positive. Of course, there are scenarios where the revolution gets started, but the authorities snuff it out as happened in France during the Flour War in 1775. Similarly, the powers that be could co-opt the revolution and maintain their privileged positions much the way the planter elite did in the American South after the end of Reconstruction. And then there are scenarios where the revolutionary energy leads to violent civil war that finally end the republic, as happened in Rome after the Punic Wars. And then there’s the classic Animal Farm scenario, where the revolution succeeds in replacing one group of pigs with another.

No, the general framework for the following scenarios follows a course in which the revolutionaries win, AND change the system for the better. I’ll let you pick which revolutionary moment from world history you, dear reader, best fits that description. Now that we’ve established THAT the revolution succeeds, we have to ask HOW the revolution succeeds. There are three principal ways a revolution succeeds, and they could be described as good, bad and ugly.

In the GOOD scenario, the revolutionaries manage to gain positions of power and influence through largely traditional means, which we might label as the legal takeover. In the case of the US, that probably means winning a lot of seats in Congress and, in all likelihood, the Presidency. But a true revolution requires a thorough restructuring of the political economy of a country first and foremost, so this path would also require a lost of winning at the state and local level as well for the revolutionary coalition. So much winning. Because this would almost certainly require the movement to take over one or both political parties AND those winners then remain immune to the pervasive bribery of Washington, I would submit that a better way to achieve revolutionary change through legalistic means in the US might be an Article Five Constitutional Convention. This process could re-write whole sections of our nation’s founding document, and if it could be pulled off, might break the cycle of bribery and corruption which hamstrings our system’s ability to achieve any meaningful results for average people. This is, unsurprisingly, the preferable scenario, and bears a close resemblance to the positive reconstruction scenario laid out on this blog last year.

The BAD scenario would require the US thread a needle that very few countries have managed, for reasons that should become clear pretty quickly. In this scenario, the US experiences a complete collapse of the economy, which, and this part is crucial, impoverishes the capital class. How might people with more money than Mansa Musa end up impoverished? Well, right now most of the value of the US stock markets is tied up in AI data center construction and speculation, and we are currently engaged in a ruinous war which will make the cost of everything that goes into those data centers more expensive. On top of that, the Epstein War looks set to crush the petrodollar, and arraignment which allowed our society to finance massive Federal budget deficits which in turn allow the capitalist class to bail themselves out every time they wreck the economy, as in 2008. So far so good, right?

Unfortunately, this scenario also requires the immiseration of the general population as well, because when the rich suffer, one can safely bet they will make sure the rest of us suffer as well. Again, look at 2008 if you don’t believe me. However, our collective reaction to the bankrupting of the country is something each of us DO have some small amount of control over, A positive outcome from this scenario absolutely requires that Americans don’t take the bait of division and instead focus their energies on building a better world from the bankruptcy. And building a better world which explicitly excludes the corporate overlords who for two long have grown fat off the rest of our labor.

And therein lies a second, core pillar of the bad scenario; such a degree of economic chaos certainly invites those who do still have access to some capital, or muscle, or likely both, to buy up whatever assets remain, much like the oligarchs did in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This will require Americans to act with solidarity, responding to the bankruptcy of the largest companies in America by seizing what assets remain and using them to build a new economic order on their own. This scenario requires a degree of class solidarity and long-term, delayed gratification from Americans I’ve never seen us display.

Finally, the UGLY scenario is quite straightforward; a revolutionary movement seizes power, likely through political violence. In this scenario, there’s about a thousand ways things could go wrong. The country spins apart as regions refuse to obey the dictator of the week in DC. The dictator proves quite capable and ruthlessly suppresses any competing movements. The empire strikes back and plunges the country into civil war. Either which way things go, the likely outcome is that the winners of all this are the most ruthless. As a result, we would lose what was left of our civil liberties, along with the justice system and any remaining checks on government power to coerce consent. Could such a scenario produce a long-term improvement in American’s material conditions? Maybe, but the historical record doesn’t offer much encouragement on that front. It would require America to produce a second George Washington, someone who can both win a military conflict, hold the fledgling country together in the chaotic aftermath of said conflict, and be willing to give up power. Yes, Washington being a slave owner and Indian fighter were both morally reprehensible, but it isn’t difficult to imagine what the US would look like if he’d let the constitutional convention crown him king.

While these three general paths may look wildly different, the means by which the American people build a better world for ourselves, the titular positive ‘ends’ in this case, they all have something in common. One, they are just three of many paths diverging in a woods, and we cannot know which one is ‘right’ to take. Second, if we end up taking a path to a better world, it won’t involve world-ending destruction which only a tiny percent of the population will survive, nor do they end up with fusion power and faster than light travel. And they don’t involve the continuation of our current, dystopian hellscape. In fact, each scenario only requires that we face a similar situation many, many groups faced over the millennia, and we decide to build something better in the aftermath of the storm. Next time, we will take a stroll through early 22nd century America, one which survived the tribulations of the early 21st century and emerged better off in the long run…

Right off the bat, I can practically hear someone screaming through the screen, “if you’re so bored with modern art, why don’t YOU write a better story?!?” More on that later, because it is a fair criticism. But for now, I do want to talk about the real-world problem this vision creates. First and foremost, it constricts the breadth of what we believe could be possible. And this lack of imagination cascades over into the realm decision making and the political economy. In a way, what passes for pollical-economic discourse has devolved into some version of “imagine a color you’ve never seen before.” If the only futures we can imagine involve a jaded loner scrambling through the ruins of the old world, or a handful of billionaire oligarchs crushing everyone under their boot, how can we advocate for any alternative?

That’s not to say there aren’t people out there, building a better world one small improvement at a time. The Syrian Kurds, for instance, have constructed a quite appealing system of governance that relies on devolved decision-making, aggressive gender equality, and a decentralized economy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the US and Israel currently provide substantial material support to a Syrian government that is trying to crush the Kurds. For an example closer to the US, one could look at the Zapatista communities which fought and won major concessions from the Mexican government during their ten-year civil war. Unfortunately, many of those hard-won reforms got wiped out in the decades of the mid-20^th century, but fortunately for us, the writing and inspiration survived. If you’re curious, look up the concept of dual power some time. And that’s just a few of the many examples one could choose from, as starting points for talking about how a society might organize itself in the wake of the Epstein War.

And let us make no mistake about it, this war looks set to completely remake the dynamics of the world economy and the political systems attached to it. Even if the war ended tomorrow, and shipments began flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, it would take four three to six weeks, depending on destination, for those petroleum products to reach their markets. That delay between when a tanker loads up, and when it finally reaches the buyer’s port for offloading, is the ONLY reason the supply shocks and price impacts haven’t been worse so far. But that state of affairs won’t remain.

Depending on where you are in the world right now, the price of oil, and everything made from it, is about to go through the roof. Thanks to the good people (snark) at JP-Morgan, we have this handy graphic of where and when the supply shocks from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz will arrive at your door. In East Asia, or at least the parts not buying oil directly from Iran, those supply shocks are hitting now. For Europe, you’ve got about a week. For anyone reading this in the Americas, we’ve got about two weeks. Once again, even if the war ends tomorrow and pumping and exporting resumes immediately, everyone will spend the next four to six weeks getting by on 20% less petroleum globally.

But an end to hostilities doesn’t appear in the cards. Iran views this conflict as existential, and for good reason. So, they seem bound and determined to make the US and Israel, and any gulf country supporting them, pay a high price. Look forward to higher fuel prices for the foreseeable future. And food. That’s right This disruption hits not only liquid petroleum and its distillates, but it will also hit the fertilizer market too. Short version of a long story - most fertilizers use natural gas as a direct input. As a result, we may be looking at a 20-30% shortfall in needed fertilizer, just as the spring planting season is starting up. I’m sure that won’t be a problem. At least, not a problem for farmers that can afford to pay more for fertilizer. And not a problem for customers who can afford to pay more for food.

Thanks to the mistakes of a senile elite, the whole world stares down the double-barreled shotgun of higher food and fuel prices. Last time this happened in 2010-2011, we got the Arab Spring, where millions marched in the streets, overthrew established regimes, and generally took to reimaging their societies. Of course, a lot of work went into fueling conflicts or propping up regimes on the part of the great powers, but that’s what makes this crisis different. The Arab Spring took place in the context of an otherwise stable global order. Today, the global orders looks anything BUT stable. The people of the great powers will get squeezed by this crisis too. In 2010-2011, higher oil prices and crop failures led to higher prices in the Middle East and North Africa, but the rest of the world (for the most part) didn’t get their applecart overturned.

For all the approaching danger, before us also lies an opportunity. With the old assumptions up in the air, and the old power structures falling apart, we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: the chance to sneak in through the side window and push the elites out, locking the front door behind them. Peacefully, of course. Yes, risks abound, but there are a few ways that could work out for the better, which we will discuss next time…

Last time I posted, I’d teased that this week we would talk about the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s as an analogue to what the United States is currently experiencing. In our book, Inequality by Design, Dr Mattson and I draw on history to discuss parallels the current situation in the United States has in common with past regimes which put their respective societies through staggering levels of income and wealth inequality. The one obvious parallel we did NOT bring up in the book was the Soviet Union.

We had three principal reasons for largely skipping a discussion of the Soviet collapse. First, for all its shortcomings, the Soviet Union wasn’t actually a terribly unequal society. Everyone, even the elites, were equally poor. Before you get on your high horse about how much better the West is, it’s worth pointing out that the relative poverty of the Soviet system also meant that people didn’t have too far to fall when the system collapsed, and, being used to being on their own, many got by on bartering and growing vegetables at the dacha, or anywhere else they could. If you’re interested in an entry point to the Russian experience post-Soviet collapse, check out this book.

The second problem is that the Soviet collapse occurred within living memory (I, for one, remember seeing footage about it on TV as a child). This can make a subject hard to discuss, as anyone with even a passing interest in political economy or current events, must necessarily have some personal take on what happened. And our second point flows from the first; often a historical event needs to be 50 years in the rear view mirror, for us to begin to understand the larger historical significance and impacts of any given historical event. After all, historians still vehemently argue about what the French and American Revolutions meant, and those events are 250 years in the rear view mirror.

All that said, today I’m going to briefly go over some of the most obvious, striking parallels between the Soviet Union in the 1980s and the USA in the 2020s. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list. Nor do the similarities condemn the USA to the same fate as the USSR. But more on that in a bit…

In no particular order, here is a list of trends of the past which mirror the present.

1 - Oil To make a complicated story way too short, the Soviet Union operated a two-tiered monetary system. Domestically, the USSR printed rubles as needed to pay workers, who could then ostensibly use those ruble to buy goods and services. The Soviets ALSO maintained a ‘hard’ ruble which the floated on the international market, and the value of the hard ruble was underpinned by Soviet exports, which overwhelmingly meant oil. The USSR would then use these hard rubles to buy imports on the international market which they could not produce domestically. In 1985, the US ‘persuaded’ Saudi Arabia to flood the world market with cheap Saudi crude. This was presented as a response to loss of market share, but a convenient side effect for both powers, was a crash in the price of oil and a cratering of the Soviet economy. This crashed the price of oil by the late 80s and made imports for the Soviets much more expensive. Speaking of expensive endeavors…

2 - War The United States has been engaged in forever wars, principally in the Middle East, since 2003. The current Epstein War is just the latest in a series of military misadventures which have been maiming and killing American soldiers and (mostly) Middle Eastern civilian populations alike. These wars have cost the US dearly in terms of both blood and treasure, and one shudders to think of what could have been done with the $8 trillion of dollars here in the US over the last 20 years. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 also kicked off a war that lasted way too long and left way too many people wounded, maimed or dead. And while figuring the Soviet budget or the war is a difficult task (remember that dual currency issue?), Soviet leaders from the era admitted the cost of the war contributed in no small part to the downfall of the USSR.

3 - Environment From Chernobyl to Claude, ignoring the costs of environmental disasters, as well as steadfastly refusing to even consider building safeguards into any industrial system, ends up piling extra, unintended costs upon a system. While the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown (it technically wasn’t a FULL meltdown, but who’s splitting hairs) became something of a poster child for industry run amok, it certainly wasn’t the only environmental disaster to occur on the Soviet’s watch. Despite this, Soviet Premier Gorbachev considered Chernobyl a principal cause of the Soviet collapse. Least you feel that the US gets an exemption on this count because we have the Nature Conservancy and National Parks, don’t worry. The blind, headlong rush into building data centers for the AI bubble places all sorts of burdens on all sorts of communities across the US, from the ‘put the cost on poor people’ variety, to the ’we’ve run out of water’ variety, to the ‘don’t drink the tap water’ variety. And data center damage gets heaped on top of the impacts of fracking, mountaintop mining and run-of-the-mill industrial accidents.

4 - Secret Police While this factor doesn’t have a literal price tag associated with it, one cannot underestimate the corrosive impact of an unaccountable police state on the body politic. In the case of the Soviet Union, seventy years of “that’s the Party’s business, not yours” coupled with the failure of the party to deliver on material concerns, led directly to a loss of trust in the system. Keep in mind, that this was a system which survived a horrific invasion by a near-neighbor that cost the lives of, by most counts, 15% of the population. These people were not about to be cowed by the Wehrmacht, but they would take apart their own system a scant two (or so) generations after their 1945 victory of the Nazis. And here sits the US, some 35 years after our victory over the Soviets. Granted, that victory didn’t cost 27 million lives and turn a fifth of the country into a bombed-out battlefield, but when one looks around at the abandoned factory towns of the formerly industrial Midwest and tallies up the costs of the neo-liberal era ushered in by Ronald Regan, well, the parallels might start to get a bit uncomfortable.

If this subject seems a bit dour and doomerish, fear not, dear reader! Just because our supposed leaders seem intent on speed-running the Soviet experience here in the US, we don’t have to give ourselves over to fatalism, nihilism, or any other bad -ism. Next time, we will talk about what too many people neglect these days - a positive vision of the future.

Here at Compounding Fractures, we consider ourselves fans of accountability. Dr. Mattson and I discussed, in the wake of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, the moral hazard of, for instance, letting bankers get away with blatant fraud. This principle extends not just to prosecution, but also to people taking responsibility for their actions in a public manner. For instance, when it becomes obvious that tax cuts for the rich don’t grow the economy, and just drive up government debts and deficits, it would be nice to see those pushing the idea resign from whatever position of public responsibility they hold, walk into the sunset, and never be heard from again. So in the spirit of accountability, I thought it might be worth examining the projections made in last year’s post about positive reconstruction.

As I noted in the original post kicking off the series, I did not think the exact scenario would come to pass. The Positive Reconstruction Scenario outlined trends to keep an eye on, trends which might indicate whether we are even on the path towards positive reconstruction as all of this *gestures broadly* falls apart. And make no mistake, *this* is most certainly falling apart. One way or another, we here in the US, and likely a number of other countries around the world, are most certainly in for a reconstruction of the political economic order. All the remans to be seen at this point is whether that reconstruction will be largely positive, or negative. But more on that later. For now, let’s examine the trends.

In the opening post, I suggested the bad economic policies of the current regime would push unemployment to 5% by the end of 2025. Officially, unemployment sat at 4.4% at the end of the year. Setting aside the problem with the short term unemployment rate vs labor force participation and long-term unemployment numbers, our prediction was too high. That said, the last twelve months of BLS jobs numbers appear to be, shall we say, methodically wrong. Each jobs report number has been revised down, with a number of months yielding negative jobs numbers when they’d previously been reported as positive. In other words, who knows? Maybe we are actually at a 5% unemployment rate? Taking a metaphor from baseball, the umpire called a third strike after changing the size of the strike zone. This makes it difficult to know when to swing the bat and when to leave it on your shoulder, because the strike zone becomes whatever the umpire’s boss decides it is.

Okay, the regime can cook our books internally, but not so with exchange rates, right? I speculated that the dollar would drop a full 15% in value against the standard basket of currencies. While the dollar certainly did drop by more than that against currencies like the Euro, Peso, Krona and Real, to name a few, it didn’t drop nearly as much against other major currencies like the Yen and Canadian dollar. Against the full basket, the dollar index dropped from 108 in January 2025 to 98 by December, a drop of roughly 11% overall. I’ll grant that isn’t the full 15%, but it stands in stark contrast to the administration’s claims the dollar would be stronger as a result of tariffs and trade wars. This one is a bit of a foul ball. We made contact with the ball, but it didn’t end up where it should; the dollar didn’t fall as far as expected.

Another specific claim that proved, thankfully, inaccurate, was the suggestion that a certain major US city would see its immigrant mayor deported and the city erupt with anti-ICE violence as a result..I’ll be glad to hold that L for now, though this administration hasn’t been above threatening political opponents with denaturalization and deportation, so I wouldn’t trust them NOT to deport a legitimately elected mayor. After all, they’ve arrested sitting members of Congress and virtually declared war on a decent sized American city in December of 2025. On second thought, maybe my guess on intent, as opposed to the specific facts, wasn’t exactly wrong. In the post about 2025, I did say I expected to see a large-scale assault on an American city by ICE in late 2025, which did happen. It just didn’t happen to NYC, but Minneapolis instead… And if there’s anything we know about the current regime, they cannot resist assaulting immigrants and killing US citizens who call them on it. To continue the baseball metaphor, this was a sacrifice fly. I didn’t think the exact scenario would play out, but needed a run across the plate.

To sum up, the 2025 predictions were a mixed bag. At this point, we have a questionable strike zone, a foul ball, and a runner on base. Nothing hit out of the park, but as of my first draft of this post, indicators appeared largely moving along the lines of a positive scenario. But I wrote the first draft three weeks ago. Which leads us to today. Nowhere in the positive reconstruction scenario did I think or even suggest the current administration would be stupid enough to start a war which threatens to send oil over $150 a barrel and cause a global depression. I genuinely expected the administration to focus on clamping down on internal dissent and thoroughly cooking the books before turning their aggression outward. This drastic escalation does not bode well for a positive reconstruction of America’s political economy. Indeed, the game has been delayed due to a thunderstorm, which will make a complete mess of the field. And we will talk about that next time.

…by more than a few metrics, the US economy is in recession, right now. Well, except for the part of it tied to data centers and information technology. The circle of debt trades and stock valuations, combined with the building of more and more data centers, are the only section of the US economy showing any signs of growth. The Epstein class and the corporations they control hoover up every spare cent they can find to finance data centers, the modern-day quipus. But lest you think that slicing off a little sliver of that pie will keep you fed, remember, in this economy, the costs get foisted on all of us, while the gains go to the ownership class. The 0.1%. As with the Great Recession, they are privatizing the gains, while socializing the losses.

In our book, Inequality By Design, Dr Mattson and I lay out in macro terms, how the rise of computing technology failed to deliver the promised economic gains. Sure, you as a cog in the machine worked more efficiently, but you didn’t share in the profits. And if you happened to work for one of those IT firms which promised employee ownership in the 90s? If you were lucky you worked for Google. More likely, you worked for any number of the mid-sized companies that got bought out by larger firms, and you were forced to sell your stock, patted on the head, and shown the door. Once again, we can’t socialize those gains, can we?

For now, what can we do to combat the expansion of the techno-feudal state? For starters, oppose the establishment of data centers in your locality. Don’t fall for the claims about permanent job creation, or the smokestack chasing mentality which assumes that money will just go elsewhere, so it might as well come here. If economic history teaches us anything at all, it could be an axiom that the profits go up, and the costs roll downhill, leaving the population asking questions like: Is your drinking water now poisoned? Is your electric bill tripling? Where are those permanent jobs?

Once again, we see the capitalist privatizing the gains and socializing the losses. But we promised a vision of a better future, did we not? This brings up back to Star Trek and visions of sugar-plum futures dancing in our heads. In one sense at least, the Star Trek vision does indeed offer a positive vision. How liberating would it be, if everyone owned a replicator? Or, at the very least, had free access to one? What could we humans achieve, if the means of production really were in our hands, and not the hands of some elite in-group?

But such a transformation requires two things to change. One - the modes of production must shift away from capitalism, in which the entire engine of the economy is controlled and operated by private interests. One option we could shift to is syndicalism. Under this arrangement, people own and control the companies they work for, which operate in the context of a free-market economy. No central control by rapacious capital or central planners, just people working for their own profit.

If syndicalism represents a shift in the modes of production, then on paper, 3-D printing offers a technology that could wrest control of the means of production from the hands of the Epstein class. So far, it has turned out to be a fun toy with some useful applications. You can print some medical devices with one. More importantly, you can print a gun with one! This being America, if a new technology can’t find an application under the 2nd Amendment, what even is the point?

And that is a real question, isn’t it? What is the point of writing about the means of production in a post-Marxian age? As the propagandists of the Epstein class would have us believe, we aren’t in the late-stages of capitalism, rather, we are in the beginning stages of techno-feudalism. If the fascists and their financial backers get their way, the USA will become a collection of provinces run by techno-feudal lords. Each barony or dukedom run by a CEO who controls the data streams, the modern quipu.

Think you can escape, peasant?

We must resign ourselves to this new normal, right?

I doubt it. For starters, these data streams are much more complex and resource intensive than knotted strands of colorful llama wool. They rely on supply chains of a complexity that puts the late-Bronze Age trade networks to shame. As the global order cracks up, it looks increasingly likely that those computer supply chains won’t survive. The most advanced micro processing facility in the world operates out of a single factory on the island of Taiwan and relies on a supply chain involving literally thousands of companies. Our techno-feudal overlords will send underlings scurrying across the globe to create workarounds in the wake of the failure of any segment of that supply chain, Their prestige and control relies on it. But in those gaps, the rest of us could seize opportunities. Fortunately, basic 3D printers don’t require the same sophisticated microprocessors the data centers do. Not for building simple tools and parts. And as with the past, so will be the future. The new technology becomes widespread, its impacts diffuse, no longer favoring the elites.

This essay is not meant as a fluff-piece for the 3D printer industry, rather, we wish to raise the point that until we tackle the root causes of economic inequality, the control of the means of production by tiny elites rather than the people, all other attempts at reform are little more than tinkering around the edges. As ugly as things may seem now, with the rise of mass surveillance and concentration of economic power in the hands of literally a few thousand people, the future of the dark enlightenment is not inevitable.

The Inca Empire collapsed largely due to outside forces: the arrival of Eurasian diseases and Spanish conquistadors, but not due to those forces alone. Atahualpa, the last Sapa-Inca, had just finished securing his power at the end of a bloody civil war, when Pizarro and his conquistadors ambushed him at Cajamarca. It has been suggested by more than one historian, that Atahualpa dismissed the threat the Spaniards posed because he was riding high, drunk on the hubris of imperial victory.

It takes no stretch of the imagination to see similar elites in the modern world acting as if their victories come with no price, with no strings attached, facing no adversaries who might dethrone them. That inattention to the world shifting beneath their feet offers us the finest of opportunities. The edifice of empire is daunting, but not indestructible, and the first step in bringing it down requires we recognize the empire for what it is: the false promise of peace and stability, but fundamentally a mode of control. So ask yourself, how can I, and my community, take the first steps in wresting the means of production from the elite? How can we become the llama-rustlers we want to see in the world?

As I have posited before, and now do so again, economic fascism is the private ownership of the means of production couple with state control of the means of production. You own your labor, physical capital, and human capital, but the state controls it. This broadly describes Peronism in Argentina, Nazism in Germany, or the current US economic system under MAGA. In previous posts I have linked some less than usual means of production such as one’s travel (the El Paso airspace shut down) or the violent control of labor (recent ICE actions). Money, as a medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value is a factor of production used daily by everyone in our economy, but seldom considered in a deep sense.

The re-packaged threat of economic fascism, which is different from what happened in the first half of the 20th century in Germany and the latter half of the same century in Argentina, is the ability to control Memory.1 The ability to control the narrative thread of how one thinks about the world, how one perceives what is real, and how one responds to it. If Korcherlakota is correct, and money (at least in the 1990s) was an efficient way to get around the problem of Memory of past transactions and what is owed, then the MAGA reality distortion field is a pandemic disease on monetary transactions. If you control money, you can control memory. Similarly, if you control memory, you can control money. This implies your credit history, your social media habits, your criminal history and “legal status” all are in danger of disruption to the point of destroying your ability to produce, create wealth, take care of your family and community, save, and prosper.

What then is to be done? Tune out, shut down, turn off, and plug in with your local community. Reach out to mutual aid organizations if you need support or wish to give support. Remember who your neighbor is. Remember what your neighbor has done for you. Remember that your neighbor is a human being. If money is memory, then memory is money; we require the two for transactions and going about the daily business of life. But you don’t need their money to do that. You don’t need their memory to do that. If we are to counter the existing economic fascism, we must reclaim control of our money and our memory as factors of our production.

To further read up on how to understand and respond to the inequalities created by our current economic fascism, see my book with Ben Johnson, Inequality by Design, published by the good people at Upriver Press.

“What is the economese is this man talking about?” you may ask.

Money allows for the users to not hold a history of transactions; you do not have to remember the entire history of give and take with someone else to use money, and thus it makes exchange much easier. People viewed gold and silver as the two metals rare enough and pretty enough to serve this role for a long time, but those mediums of exchange were NOT ledgers of account the way modern fiat currencies are. Without getting distracted by the fiat vs metal debate, the modern system of money and accounting is, at least in the US, only as old as 1913, the year of the founding of the Federal Reserve system. Depending on point of view, the modern monetary system is either an extremely elaborate trust exercise, a giant collective folley, or a bit of both. Any way you slice it, this is an amazing principle of monetary economics, and a great leap forward for reducing the costs to transactions. Money, as an abstract medium of exchange, ties the past to the present and to the future in a way that is relatively new (yes, I know China printed paper money first), certainly rare in human history, and thus something of an experiment.

Speaking of the past, let’s take that trip to the mountains. The Andes Mountains specifically, around the year 1438 AD. Emperor Pachacuti’s army just defeated the invading Chanka and stood poised to expand from central Peru in all directions. And like every other great empire in history, this empire would build extensive road networks, enable trade, build temples and monuments, and integrate a wide variety of people into a single state. By the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in 1532, the Inca Empire stretched 2,500 miles north to south, and operated the largest land empire in the Americas. And like so many other empires, it didn’t just run on a highly militarized state pushing around a bunch of peasants. The Inca (who were a ruling class, not an ethnic group or nation state) controlled access to a key resource: llamas.

Marxist scholars would classify the mode of production in the Inca Empire as a tributary mode of production; the state extracted tribute from the laboring masses in exchange for stability, appeasement of the gods, and, one assumes, not killing them. But what interests us just now is not the mode of production, but the means. And in the Andes in the 15th century, the means of production were llamas. As adorable and derpy as llamas look, in the 15th century, control of llama herds meant control of the one source of large animal labor on the continent, and in the context of the Incan Empire, private ownership of llamas was strictly forbidden. All herds belonged to the state which was run by the emperor, the Sapa Inca. And what made the llama so important, other than their muscle power, their meat, and their cute, doofy faces? Their wool.

The people of the Inca Empire spun that wool into yarn, which they turned over to imperial administrators as taxes. This yarn was then turned into any number of useful goods, but perhaps the most important was rope. It served the obvious function of securing loads of goods to llamas, but the uses don’t stop there. The Inca built bridges across the yawning chasms that separated people on one ridge of mountains from another, using little more than llama wool ropes and wooden planks. Llama wool literally held the empire together. One wonders if Dr. Seuss based the thneed on it, given its almost universal set of uses. Anyway, the Inca empire itself was a highly centralized regime. There was no private property, only state property. And the state controlled the llamas. Before you run away screaming this was some proto-communist evil empire, take a deep breath, because the parallels to the modern world are actually more disturbing.

In 15th century South America, llama yarn filled one other, crucial role. The Inca system of recording data involved complicated systems of yarn tied in knots called quipu. These knotted and dyed ropes could only be read by a tightly-controlled caste of quipu-readers.The average person couldn’t read the messages that moved goods from one part of the empire to another. They only received instructions and moved goods from one imperial warehouse to another. The emperor and his governors not only controlled the means of production, they controlled access to the information that ran the empire’s economy.

The quipu was many things. In the physical sense, it was a means of production, but was also a medium for transmitting information, as well as a medium of exchange. The quipu was a physical good, a stand-in for money, AND a wealth of information. In a very real sense, the quipu was the phenomenon Mr. Kocherlakota referred to as “money is memory.” IF you knew how to read it.

Is this starting to sound familiar?

In today’s digital world, what are the means of production? Sure, oil and rare-earth metals are crucial elements. You can’t make a microprocessor without them, but they are factors, not so much the means themselves. That would be data processing. You want something built? Designed? Delivered? There’s an app for that! And who controls the data streams? Big tech companies like Google. Amazon. Facebook. Microsoft. Palantir. NVIDIA.

The similarity between the kipu-readers of old and today’s gatekeepers of AI strikes us as startling, as AI seems poised to both wipe out many jobs and empower those who operate it wildly disproportionate economic power. And make no mistake, the billionaires who control the means and mode of production are not interested in sharing that control with anyone. To put a twist on a saying by a wise old man, it’s a small club, and you ain’t in it.

And the current efforts of that small club involve not only creating a technology that concentrates an awful lot of economic power in the hands of just a few people, but creating an economy of perpetual renters. As much as certain segments of the US electorate love to bang on about how the globalists are communists, concentrating the means and modes of production into the hands of just a few capitalists is not communism or socialism. It is the end result, one might even call it the late stage, of a capitalist system that always tends towards monopoly. But because we here at Compounding Fractures don’t like discussions of economics going in an entirely dismal direction, next week we will discuss both a technology and a technique that could help break this attempt by the Epstein Class to install themselves as the new Inca.

How do we do this? By metaphorically keeping the wool and running off with the herds. Next week, we all become llama rustlers for a day!

What is money? It is not wealth. You can own and control wealth. But the greenbacks in your wallet, the checking account at that credit union, and the 401(k) with whatever prestigious sounding financial institution that gets bailed out (as if it was a bank - but not regulated like one), are not as in control as you think. You don’t control the types of assets with which they invest. Just “trust me bro” that a diverse portfolio gets “all the gains!” (insert rolling eyes emoji here). So, it matters who the MAGA install as Federal Reserve chair. And it seems that the traditional Keynesian choice of Jay Powell is yielding to the sycophantic faux-Libertarian that is Kevin Warsh. It matters if the Federal Reserve can push back against the inflationary interests of a high-debt, high-tax Republican party (tariffs are taxes, fight me). Money, as a factor of production, is yours to own, but is vulnerable to state control, specifically the inflation tax (seignoriorage) that MAGA wants you to pay.

What then can you do to gird your financial loins against the MAGA assault on Federal Reserve and monetary independence? We have suggested before a significant involvement in mutual aid organizations. That stands. Inflationary pressures will destroy your savings faster than you can say “Argentinean Peronism”. Convert your monetary assets into community assets. Support your local food banks. Support labor unions. Support mutual aid. If the Federal Reserve loses independence, then inflation specifically within food and energy purchases will increase, and your cash won’t mean much. Further there won’t be a competitive banking system to offer you anything remotely resembling a competitive savings or lending rate. Taxes (Tariffs) will drive the basket of good purchased by those in the lowest 20% income distribution even higher.

Given such a case, the lower 20% must focus on their ability to produce. They must guard their time (see the post on El Paso and the FAA), they must guard their communities, and they must guard their non-money assets in a way that is not beholden to the monetary authority of MAGA. Cash may be “king” but bartering and community investment are the peasant survival and revolt.

To further read up on how to understand and respond to the inequalities created by our current economic fascism, see my book with Ben Johnson, Inequality by Design, published by the good people at Upriver Press.

Labor is, as Marx pointed out, one of the most important factors of production. Economists to this day, from Solow to Acemoglu, include a measure of labor (L) in their elegantly mathematical production functions. Our health insurance is tied to employment / labor (L). Our income is tied to employment / labor (L). If you are not part of the 1% (and if you are reading this substack, congrats, you are not) your wealth in general is tied to employment / labor (L). ICE is not targeting criminals. Nor are they targeting undocumented. ICE is after the easy hits of immigrants who are registered with the Federal Government to work. How else do they have the names and addresses of so many? They cannot “own” the labor means of production, but they can control it. The cruelty, the malice, the violence, are the goal and the method.

So, ICE, as a MAGA construct, has been funded to bring about the control of Labor through violence, fear, and intimidation. Similar to the para-military death squads of fascist Argentina under the Peronists, Trumpists seek to enforce an economic fascism where Labor either cooperates, or it is “desaparecido.” The idea is control, and we cannot let them have it.

And so, we find ourselves with the question of what to do? We can provide information for our fellow workers. We can seek out the mutual aid within our community. We protect ourselves, and we protect our neighbors. We can make noise and raise the temperature just above freezing to help melt the ICE.

To further read up on how to understand and respond to the inequalities created by our current economic fascism, see my book with Ben Johnson, Inequality by Design, published by the good people at Upriver Press.

One could even go back a century and connect the Star Trek mythos to the westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, with the enterprise standing in for a company of US Cavalry, but, you know, a racially diverse US Cavalry. Wouldn’t we all feel better about the genocide of the Native Americans if Mr. Spock was there to point out the ill-logic of liberating a people by murdering them? So this critique is fine so far, though to be fair to later Trek, Next Generation, and especially Deep Space Nine did look at the contradictions of the initial show, and grappled with the moral quandaries inherent to government power versus the conscience of the individual. But the critique missed a point that I think is crucial, not just to understanding the lore of the hypothetical space navy, but to understanding a fundamental tension of political economy since the dawn of agriculture. And this missed point involved the replicator.

Setting aside the magical nature of bending of the laws of physics, not to mention the computing power that must be necessary to assemble random atoms into “tea, Earl Grey, hot,” technology like the replicator would represent a true watershed moment. Imagine for a moment a world where 3-D printers were ubiquitous and capable of printing almost anything. I don’t want to bend the aforementioned laws of physics too much, so let’s not assume they can print food or a new car, but they CAN produce anything close to the size of the machine itself. Even if they can’t print a new car, they could print the parts to build one…

In such a scenario, as in an essay on the economics of Star Trek, creator Feral Historian posited that replicator technology really could be BOTH an end to scarcity AND a way of moving control of the means of production into the hands of the many, rather than the few, or the one. That wasn’t a Marxist reference, either. If you didn’t get it, come back to this essay after you’ve watched Wrath of Khan.

As a quick aside, we should define ‘means of production’ versus ‘modes of production’ just so we are all on the same page. In the, typically Marxist, reading of economic history, ‘means’ of production refers to the physical things used to generate wealth by a society: machines, factories, raw materials, etc… The mode of production usually means the human systems by which a society organizes economic production: feudalism, mercantilism, capitalism, socialism, syndicalism, etc… For the purposes of the following posts, we will mostly talk about the means of production, though occasionally, the modes of production may rear their wooly heads as well.

That said, there is a Marxist-adjacent point to be made here, both about the hypothetical future, and the dreary recent past. Unfortunately, since time immemorial, or written accounts of it anyway, human economies across time and space have been a repeating cycle of a tiny in-group controlling the means of production. In ancient Sumeria, that meant control of the bronze-making process, and by extension, control of access to irrigation networks, which were crucial to survival in the Fertile Crescent in the 4th millennia BC. Control of that farmland, and the excess wealth it created, made the cities of Ur, Uruk and later, Akkad, wealthy beyond imagination. At least at the time.

Over the centuries, the modes of production change, but the cycle remains depressingly familiar. Most often this meant the means of production involved one form of coerced human labor, augmented by animal and some mechanical power. Eventually, the means of production shifted to using fossil fuels in place of human labor over the course of the 19th century. In each case, a small clique secures control of the means of production, and everyone else labors to make them fabulously wealthy. And as with each elite in-group before them, the industrialists got bored, or perhaps frustrated that their palace wasn’t as magnificent as the neighbors, so they celebrated with a cataclysmic conflict that the rest of us must suffer through. The edifice of empire collapses, the old means of production become widespread, humanity takes a step up the tech tree, millions die prematurely, and a new group seizes control of a new means of production. Rinse. Repeat. Hooray. Prograss.

But let’s bring things back to replicators and Star Trek, shall we? There’s one of those cycles of control of the means of production that bears further investigation as we progress through this, so far utterly shitty, 21st century AD. But to examine the future, we have to investigate the past. Look around the house for a serape and a pair of organic, free trade sandals, preferably hemp. Next week we will take a stroll along a mountain path!

While we may, on February 13th as I write this, treat this episode as a joke since the FAA reinstated air travel, it should not be taken lightly. Real people found themselves grounded and concerned about their livelihoods and loved ones. The initial Trump FAA response was a 10-day lockdown, which would have destroyed the productive potential of thousands of hours of labor, human, and travel capital used to generate wage income. I hate to sound so much like an economist here, but that is what I am and that is what this is about. The Federal government flexed its muscle and demonstrated it could destroy the wealth and productive capacity of an entire city for flimsy and capricious reasons, even though those laborers, travelers, and yes capitalists “owned” those factors of production. But they did not control them in this time of American fascism.

So what is to be done, when the federal government can ground the flight you paid hundreds to thousands for to see your family? Resilience preparation. Travel by air is but one means of production you can take. Resilience is found through mutual aid organizations in travel. For those with the means of providing a car for travel purposes, reach out to your local mutual aid organizations and provide what you can. For those who need it, ask. Do not rely on the travel infrastructure “owned” by private industry but controlled by the federal or state government. Support your local infrastructure of travel service in the case that the fascists begin to disrupt and control the means of travel. If you have ideas, feel free to post them in the comments.

To further read up on how to understand and respond to the inequalities created by our current economic fascism, see my book with Ben Johnson, Inequality by Design, published by the good people at Upriver Press.