Decade of Settlements Pt. 1 - The Bigger Picture: 2046-2050

A Few Words About the Wider World

Dr. Mattson and I got some unwelcome, though not overly bad, news. The principal editor of Upriver Press, the publisher of our upcoming book Inequality by Design: How A Rigged Economy Fractures America and What We Can Do About It, informed us that due to tariffs and trade policy, the distribution group responsible for printing and distributing our upcoming book recommended we push back the publication date to mid-August. Our opportunity to get put on an ‘enemies of the state’ list got pushed back by six weeks. Hooray!

Go on and pre-order it.

    On a more positive note, the book is available for pre-order! Just click that like up there, visit Upriver's page for the book, and follow any of the links to your favorite online bookseller. May I recommend using the tab for Bookstore.org? If you want to stay off the internet when purchasing subversive material which lays bare the gross inequalities of the new Gilded Age and offers positive idea about what to do about it, please visit a local bookstore. I'm sure they would be happy to pre-order it for you, and every pre-order helps with search engine recognition and recommendations.

    That enough about the present. Let's wind the clock forward to 2046 and see what’s happening across North America, shall we? 

Perestroika in the USA

By 2046, the grandees of the Demonstration Party, and their oligarch backers, find themselves firmly in control of the USA. Their candidates swept to power both during the 2042 midterms, then won the White House and many governors' mansions in 2044. With these wins and a return to less stage-managed democratic debate, comes a loosening of corporate censorship and the release of a million prisoners held without due process. The scandals of the Reactionary Party, about which a great many were aware but didn’t dare speak of, are put on full public display, though crucially, scant few of Reactionary politicians or bureaucrats are actually prosecuted for their lawlessness. This is in part because the Demonstration Party enjoys the backing of oligarchs guilty of crimes when the Reactionaries were in power, but it also stems from a desire by Demonstration Party politicians to participate in the graft and corruption. Unlike the true believers in Mexico, the Demonstration Party has no core ideology beyond ‘do what the oligarchs say, just be polite about it’.

Gorbachev was 54 when he became Soviet Premier.
Our future reforming US President would have been
born in 1991 and turned 35 this year. 

We might say that the USA in the 2040s resembled their old rival, the Soviet Union, during the 1980s. Yes, the powers that be allowed political and economic openings, and in a few cases, those modest reforms produced desirable results. But openness and reform come about because of costly mistakes, not from a desire to truly reform the system. And in the preceding years, the costs had been quite high.

For starters, the USA lost the Ten Month War. Besides the territorial losses, the defeat drove down the value of an already quite weak dollar on international markets, which triggered a severe economic recession that lasted most of 2042 and 2043. Compounding this, all the profits siphoned from the functional economy into the US government’s cryptocurrency, DollarCoin, lost most of its value with the chaos at the server farms. While the problem was new an unique, the effects were not. The loss of data and collapse of DollarCoin’s value causes a contractionary financial crisis like 2008 or 1929, and the effects resemble the Great Depression. The official US unemployment rate hits 20%, personal and business savings vanish as ones and zeros turn to zeros, causing factories, businesses and banks to close. Bread lines proliferated in the shadows of half-vacant skyscrapers and mostly-abandoned strip malls. 

 In line with high-emissions scenarios, global temperatures reached 2 degrees celsius over pre-industrial levels in 2048. Annual rainfall between the Mississippi River and Pacific ocean dropped significantly. The Great Plains, once America’s breadbasket and stockyard, withers under scorching summers and bone-dry winters. The only areas of the country that actually fared better in the wake of the Ten Month War are the agricultural areas of the Upper Midwest, Tennessee River watershed, and the Atlantic Coast. There, rainfall totals and growing seasons increased. Soaring input costs for farmers: higher prices for fuel, fertilizer and pesticides, combined to crash the industrial model of factory farming. Fortunately for them, and the wider populace, the flow of people from metropolitan areas to the countryside provides a ready and, mostly, willing labor force. 

Your choice is this, or living off scraps in the city...

This out-migration from the cities reverses almost a century of population decline in rural areas (and not just in the USA, though that is where we are focused right now). With this, comes all the tensions of new arrivals trying to fit in with existing populations. The local experience of any given new arrival varied wildly. Some counties welcomed ‘the ‘fugees’ from the big cities. Others referred to them as vagrants. And in many places, the experience of a newly arrived family, friend group or individual, could be decisively influenced by something as simple as who they met in the first weeks. But one experience is common; these new arrivals voted first with their feet, and then, at the ballot box.

By liberating themselves from the corporate-run cities and DollarCoin economy, they finally feel free to express their disgust with the oligarchy by voting for the other allowed option. These votes are protest votes rather than support for the Demonstartionist wing of the two-party system. So even as the Demonstration party sets about dismantling the worst aspects of the corporate oligarchy, the rural people want more. While the Demonstration Party President wins a decisive re-election in 2048, the 2050 midterms produce an electoral backlash so familiar in US politics. But instead of voting for the Reactionary Party, huge numbers, in some cases over 50%, of voters, select third-party candidates. Some of these candidates were cranks and nutjobs, but most ran under a loose coalition which took its name from one of the larger protest groups from the 2028 General Strike, calling themselves, in hushed whispers out of earshot of listening devices or suspect people, ‘the Solidarity Movement.’ And we will discuss their victory and its implications next week.

The red word means 'solidarity' in Polish. The movement was a great example of working people reclaiming their country from authoritarian rule. I hope it goes as well for the USA. But let's not bring back 1980s fashion, okay?

An Open Sore Begins to Heal

On the great plains of the Athabasca Union, giant machines tear and gouge the Earth, digging greedily, and deep, for tar. Despite the clear role carbon emissions play in the heating of the planet, until the dark winters of 2041 and ‘42, most Canadians would wring their hands and implore someone to do something about climate change, then go home. But that winter, the costs of the anthropocene become unmistakeable. The fires which triggered the Gray Winters consumed transportation infrastructure, grinding the export of tar sands oil to a halt. Even if customers in the Japanese-led East Asia Conglomerate or the Fraco-Polish Union want to buy their oil, the railroads and pipelines lay in ruins. This sparked a serious, sometimes violent, debate within the Athabasca Union: if we are going to rebuild, do we rebuild a petro-state or an agro-state?

I'm sure the value created for shareholders was worth it...

This conflict came to a head in the summer of 2047. With polar sea ice gone with the (relatively) hot weather, and a willing buyer in the Japanese military, the surviving tar sand operator loads a dozen barges with oil and ships them down the Athabasca River, bound for a port of the Beaufort Sea. Protests erupt along the river, but remain largely peaceful. Unfortunately for everyone involved, low water levels in the river cause the lead barge to wreck. Hundreds of thousands of liters of oil begin to flow downstream towards Lake Athabasca. One of the crewmembers, fueled by meth and pro-petro propaganda, comes to the conclusion the wreck must have been sabotage. He declares that if the farmers and Indians don’t want the oil exported, no one gets to have it. He sets the barge on fire, which promptly sets the other barges in the convoy afire.

The local environmental devastation is bad enough, but it ignites what has become a tinderbox of tensions between the aforementioned farmers and First Nations on one side, and the oil-workers and city dwellers on the other. Through the fall and, much shorter, winter the Athabasca Union threatens to come apart, with each group withholding what they believe the oher needs. For the faction referred to as the petro-people, this means any oil and gas doesn’t get sold outside of the cities. Not petroleum for heating homes, none for running farm machines. For the Farm and First faction, this means no food flows into the city. The Farm and Firsters will shiver all winter, but the Petro People will starve. 

At this point, Pacific Columbia and Ontario feel they must intervene, but neither nation wants to send in military forces; the leaders in Ontario feel they have to leave what’s left of their army on the southern border to keep an eye on the USA, while the Pacific Columbians are busy dividing up the northern Pacific between themselves and the East Asia Conglomerate. So both countries agree to do the next best thing - they send delegations to Edmonton. The delegates quickly find the leaders of each side are not interested in talking, so they appeal to the AU’s mounties to step in, arguing that, after the Gray Winters, Canadians shouldn’t try to kill each other. This appeal actually works, and the Mounties step in to forcefully requisition food from the farms for the cities, and fuel from refineries for the countryside. Neither side put up much resistance, and a fever seems to break. Both sides agree to split the difference, subterranean oil extraction can continue, but open pit tar sand mining will stop.

In the east, a different problem does not find an easy solution. Or at least, a solution reached by compromise. The populations of the United Maritime Provinces (UMP) and Republic of Quebec suffer disproportionately during the Gray Winters, as their populations were overwhelmingly elderly. For Quebec, the population drops from 10.5 million in 2040 to 6.8 million just five years later. For the UMP, drop is even more extreme, from 1.8 million to just over 1 million. As mentioned two weeks ago, this reaction to the Gray Winters triggers the rise of Doomsday suicide cults, evangelical movements, and exhibitionist hedonism. In Quebec, an extremist Catholic cult seizes control of the Parliament building and tries, for about six weeks, to turn the province into a theocracy ruled by the Catholic Church. Ultimately, this movement fails, but it signals a traditionalist shift in the Quebecois population. The moderate Bloc Quebecois loses a vote of no confidence, and in the subsequent elections, the right-wing Dieu et Pays (God and Country) party wins in a landslide. This movement reflects a broader trend towards Francophone chauvinism, the replacement of secular schools with parochial ones, and the adoption of ‘distributism’ as the economic model for the Republic.

Ryan assures me that this man was not,
as is the case with many central 
European economists, a fascist.

What is distributism? Austrian economist Race Mathews, argued that the right to property was fundamental, and his theories found an enthusiastic patron in the Catholic Church. The underlying idea holds that spreading economic power as widely and deeply as practicable inherently inoculates a society against kleptocracy and oligarchic control. By transferring economically productive assets to a broad population, and setting up guilds to enforce standards and ethics, distributism would, as the theory goes, provide a relatively egalitarian economic order, as well as a cohesive social order. By 2050, the Republic of Quebec operates a distributist economy which, while not the most dynamic, is the most stable of the five successor states. In the same year, for the first time since 1971, the Quebecois total fertility rate reaches the replacement rate of 2.1. Both the economic model and the stabilizing of the birth rate do not go unnoticed in the Franco-Polish Union, but more on that next week.

It's Not Just Hollywood That Indulges in Bad Sequels

If the Ten Month War broke the united front of the oligarchy in the USA, it ensures the survival of the Joventud movement and the Revolution of 2030. The elections of 2036 and 2042 took place under the close surveillance of the Joventud movement, and was a choice between revolutionaries. While this strict control was seen as necessary to secure the survival of the revolution, by the late 2040s, the leadership of Joventud votes to open local, state and national elections to all political parties. They bet that voters will reward them with another six-year presidency and control of the senate.

Step One: Build Canal
Step Two: ???
Step Three: PROFIT! 

And this bet makes sense. The Mexican economy, bolstered by international trade with Brazil, Japan and Europe, continues to grow. The opening of the Tehuantepec Canal further bolsters the Mexican economy. But the real driver of both economic stability and growth lies in the economic policies of the revolutionary government: credito social. In short, this theory advocates turning banking into a public utility. Rather than functioning as a for-profit industry, the monetary system would lend directly to citizens at the sort of basement-level interest rates currently enjoyed only by the banking sector. Savings would also be held by credit unions or directly by the monetary institution, in this case, each state’s credit union. This policy combines with policies revoking corporate charters and turning control of private industry over to worker-run co-ops, pushing profits down the economic ladder. The Joventud candidate easily sweeps to reflection without any need of ballot box stuffing or voter disenfranchisement. 

Unfortunately, winning the peace isn’t as easy as winning an election. During the decade or so of conflict, the EUM built up, and in many cases co-opted, an extensive security state to combat the narcos, from the old government and the USA. Now, that security state looks north for another threat to justify further expansion of the army and enforcement agencies. After all, if the first Ten Month War went so well, why not fight another one?

While the new President doesn’t like their proposal, it seems viable, and solves a serious political headache. Over the course of the mid-2040s, hurricanes and rising sea levels ravaged a number of Caribbean islands. Half a million refugees arrived on Mexico’s eastern shores, and the revolutionary government is not particularly interested in housing them indefinitely, but has no obvious place to send them. So the head of the defense ministry proposes arming the men, providing them with coastal water craft, and sending them north to invade the Mississippi Delta region. Shutting down the main route of US exports will further destabilize their larger neighbor, and should allow the Mexican army time to seize the rest of Texas, as well as Colorado, Utah and Nevada.

But this idea rests on a few very faulty assumptions. First, the invasion of the USA worked in 2041 because the Mexican army sent advanced units to blend in with sympathetic local populations. That will not prove as effective in 2050 as it did in 2041. Second, success in the Ten Month War hinged on using asymmetric warfare against an opponent who expected their technology to do all the fighting. The Demonstration Party engaged in extensive overhauling of the US Defense Department to rely as much on troops with guns as high-tech systems. Third, the plan relies on the Haitian-led Caribbeans to serve as proxies for the EUM, disrupting US military logistics in preparation for a ground invasion. The problem should be obvious, but no one in the cabinet meeting takes seriously that there’s no guarantee these mercenaries will mindlessly serve their suppliers in Mexico City, rather than pursue their own interests.

Fourth, and perhaps most tragic, the Joventud leadership sets their plan in motion in the months before US midterm elections. By the time the political earthquake underway in the USA manifests in the shocking victory of the Solidarity movement in November 2050, the leadership figures their plans are too far along to recall. This proves tragic, because Solidarity might prove a friendly partner to the EUM, rising to push out a corrupt oligarchy much as Joventud had in 2030. But the minister of defense is a hardliner, operating on the assumption that whoever leads the US, they will work to push Mexico back into a junior role on the continent. So the minister of defense gets his way and the President signs off on the operation, which they set to go off on New Years Day, 2051. But again, we will catch up with this thread in a few weeks. 

Better Late Than Never

We haven’t discussed the Caribbean or Central America much in this series. They will experience a good many of the six trends I outlined in earlier posts, so to run through them quickly, Costa Rica, with its large US expat population and dependence on the US dollar, will, in this scenario, experience a devastating economic collapse, probably sooner rather than later. This will quickly lead to state collapse, at which point, all bets would be off on which way things will go. In this scenario, we briefly touched on an ethnic Maya uprising against the Mexican state, which resulted in the Union of the Yucatan, Guatemala and El Salvador. If this union survives, and in a de-dollarised, multi-polar world, I think it could, I would expect El Trio to expand into a sort of trade union or maybe even a political union including Belize, Honduras and Nicaragua. Without the constant threat of US military intervention and the constant de-stabilizing impacts of the US drug war, the medium-term prospects for Central America could be quite bright. Amazing what a few decades of not getting your house broken into and ransacked by goons will do for you. Panama, without the use of the canal, would end up in dire straits, and probably subject to intervention by Colombia, but that outcome is quite scenario-contingent.

On the islands of the Caribbean, human affairs will go all over the place, as some islands are more susceptible to climate change and US economic collapse than others. The Bahamas are exceptionally prone to tough times in the unfolding scenario for two reasons: their economy is largely dependent on the US both for tourism, but also for maintaining food imports. Second, the Bahamas are low-lying islands, and by this point in the scenario, will be subject to the same sorts of sunny-day flooding currently experienced just across the straits in south Florida. While a lowland-flooding catastrophe hasn’t featured much in this scenario, we’re getting there. Keeping close to south Florida, Cuba will also benefit from a de-dollarisation of the world economy and an end to the US-led economic embargo. This will mostly leave the people of Cuba a little better off economically, but those gains will come under constant threat thanks to the increased severity of hurricane season. Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico are mountainous enough that low-land flooding isn’t much of a near-term threat, though as with Cuba, more intense hurricanes remain a huge threat six-months out of the year. And as with Central America, I expect all four places to largely benefit from a lack of US-led intervention and de-dollarisation. Even Puerto Rico, with an economy tied to the mainland, might benefit from getting out from under the onerous debts placed on them by US lawmakers.

This was a quick tour, and I don’t plan to dig as deeply into the trajectories of either region as the ‘big three.’ Yes, they will come into the narrative from time to time, but they will stay out of the main focus. At least for now.