Decade of Settlements Pt. 2 - Keeping it Personal 2046-2050

Marty Moves to DC

When Marty’s goons bring Autumn to Ann Arbor, his daughter Tonya thinks she would be getting a happy little sister. At this point in the narrative, Tonya is 13 and Autumn is 9, but don’t know each other well, and would have had trouble connecting even in happier circumstances. Instead, Tonya finds the new addition to the family semi-feral, a child who makes every effort to run away during the first weeks. Marty makes a big show of revealing to Autumn the deal he struck with her mother Jillian. This after Autumn makes it as far as Monroe, Michigan. This news mollifies the girl, who reluctantly settles into a spare room. Autumn refuses to make friends with her cousin, and falls in with the most unlikeable, bullied kids in the expensive prep school Marty gets her into. 

Autumn's friend (foreground)
The oligarch's kids (background)

Speaking of Marty, he gets promoted to Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security in 2046 and moves the family to DC, denying Jillian her daughter. Autumn runs away several more times and Marty considers letting her go, but each time feels obliged to get her back because of the promise he made in 2020 to his dying father. Marty vowed to protect his little brother and sister, and any kids they might have. Much as he views serving the state as upholding law and order, Marty views himself as a benevolent patriarch having to discipline his relatives. For their own good, of course. And this isn't out of line for roles he played as the three of them grew up outside of Chicago. Marty beat up an abusive boyfriend of Jillian’s in high school. He took time off from college to accompany his mother to school events involving Bobby. 

Trey finishes a computer science degree in 2047 and goes to work for Homeland Security. As a side project, he installs fiber-optic cameras in autumn’s bedroom. To make sure she isn’t trying to run away again. He tells his dad about it, but swears the cameras only activate when the windows or door of the room open. Marty thinks it a bit invasive, but as always, it is for the greater good of the family. While it does cross his mind that Trey can access the cameras at any time, he tells himself his son would only spy on his cousin if she was up to no good.

In November 2048 outside events draw Marty’s ire. He is furious at the re-election of the Demonstration Party’s President and begins discussing how to rid the security state of the new restrictions placed on their power by the civilian authorities, or the civilian authorities themselves. Other career officers tell him to back off, that the supposed reforms of the Demonstration Party will not make any substantial changes to the power and influence of the security state, and can easily be worked around. This doesn’t sit well with Marty, as he believes the state should make a show of protecting and controlling the populace, and not sneaking around in the background. Put another way, Marty is the kind of man who believes in saying things with your chest out, and others in the security apparatus take note of his objections.

Jillian Puts on a Suicide Belt

Jillian tries repeatedly to contact her daughter without Marty’s permission, but every time she does, Marty tracks whatever method of communication she uses, and informs local police, who come very close to arresting her on multiple occasions.  Beyond desperate, Jillian shows up in Ann Arbor, planning to kill Marty and rescue her daughter. But while she operated a clinic under the radar, that’s quite different from acquiring a gun, evading the police state, and breaking into a house rigged with the security features DollarCoin can buy. She gets busted right away. Fortunately for her, she was unable to buy a black market gun, so she planned to kill Marty with anything she could find in the house if he stood between her and Autumn. 

Want your kid back?
You better have that dough-ray-me!

In response, Marty does what he sees as a kindness, and authorizes a one-day pass to cross the Ambassador Bridge to Windsor, Ontario. He points out that she’s still fairly young (50 in ‘45) and the Canadians need all the doctors they can get. She says she won’t leave without her daughter. Marty lies and says if she can show that she has a career and income within a year, he will send Autumn across the border. Jillian agrees to the deal and moves to Toronto. The government recognizes her medical degree and sets her up in a clinic helping people recover from the respiratory diseases caused by the Gray Winters. When Jillian contacts her brother to show off her one-room apartment and Ontario pay stubs, Marty considers honoring the deal but says it isn’t enough. Autumn is both the third child he and Tina always talked about having but never did, and his sister is a repeat law-breaker who, he feels, cannot be trusted to continue rasing a member of the family. 

Jillian is furious, but what can she do? Passage from Ontario to the USA is, at this point, completely illegal. After decades of broken deals and double-dealing, neither side trusts the other, and both have done everything they can to separate from each other, economically, culturally and politically. Of course, there is a black market moving goods and people back and forth across the Great Lakes, but Jillian doesn’t know anyone in that world that she would trust, and hasn’t made enough to pay the exorbitant prices charged by smugglers. One of her patients does ‘know a guy’ who can get stuff across the lakes, so she sends handwritten letters with the patient’s contact, hoping they make it to her daughter.

One day in April, 2046 her patient delivers a letter in Autumn’s handwriting. Jillian offers to pay the patient three times what the smuggler charged, but the man refuses to take her money. The letter informs Jillian that Autumn and Marty’s family will move to Washington DC in the next few weeks. Jillian asks if there is some way to get letters to the US capitol. The patient reluctantly shakes his head, saying his guy won’t set more than one foot in the USA, and most times he won’t even get off the boat.  

Bobby Chases One More Win

Bobby and Margarita have another kid, then another. The port at Veracruz takes a hit as oil production declines, and Bobby’s family becomes cash strapped. An influx of Caribbean refugees puts a strain on the Mexican economy. After running into a war buddy at a kid’s birthday party, Bobby offers his services to help with the planned insurrection in US Texas. The friend takes him up on it, and Bobby leaves once a month to accompany shipments of weapons and contraband luxury items across the border. This clandestine service puts the family on somewhat stable financial footing. And then Bobby gets an offer he doesn’t want to refuse. 

Mentioned in the bigger picture narrative, the EUM defense ministry plans to use island refugees as irregular fighters to disrupt US logistical networks along the gulf coast. Bobby has a number of skills which make him an ideal candidate for this job: he’s got experience smuggling and operating in underground economies, he’s a veteran of the Ten Month War so he’s politically reliable, and third, his experience in New Orleans specifically. While the argument with Margarita gets heated enough her dad shows up and tries to talk Bobby down, ultimately, Bobby takes the defense ministry up on their offer. In the waning days of 2050, Bobby sets foot on a container ship packed to the gills with illegal weapons and thousands of bags of rice and beans.

The ship sails north, docking in New Orleans on Christmas Day. His old supervisor is genuinely shocked to see Bobby alive, and after some back slapping and serious rounds of drinks, Bobby reveals that he’s not back for good. HIs former boss figures out quickly that Bobby is in the black market business. At this point, almost everyone in New Orleans operates in an economic gray area.

After greasing a few palms, Bobby stores the containers full of weapons in a remote corner of the port. At the same time, he makes a big display of selling rice and beans to the population of the city at below-market prices. This lets him earn some good will, take the collective temperature of the city, and meet people who might back the future insurgents. This move endears his ‘shipping company’ to many in the poorer quarters of the city, it also draws the attention of the authorities. At first, they only monitor Bobby, but when the small boats begin to arrive in large numbers, the city government requests state and federal aid, as the whole pattern closely resembles events in south Texas before the Ten Month War. As the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, both sides swing into action.

I'm sure their intentions are good...

Allison Tries to Get the Band Back Together

Allison hitchhikes across Tennessee. Just because she’s free, doesn’t mean anyone’s looking out for her or those like her. Her grandmother Jenny listened to a song by a famous blues singer of a bygone era, the chorus of which went something like “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” The distant memory of the song repeats in her ears as she trudges west along the side of the crumbling strip on concrete called Interstate 40. 

When she makes it back to Memphis, Allison hardly recognizes faces or places. Many neighborhoods are in complete disrepair, if they weren’t there already. As the legal economy stagnated and money concentrated in the city center, only large-scale, largely automated fabrication facilities remained in operation, employing fewer people. When she turns the corner to the old chicken-fry restaurant, her heart sinks. Asking around, she finds out the place has been boarded up since the Shining City uprising began in 2036. Finally, Allison runs into an old friend who agrees to let her sleep on a mattress of scrap styrofoam and dirty blankets. The next morning, she learns that many moved to the country to find food and work.

Allison wanders around the old Firestone Heights neighborhood for a few days. Her inquiries yield no good results as to the whereabouts of the Bartender and the Cook. While few in the neighborhood recognize her, their eyes light up as they talk around not-so-bad-old days when a poor person could remind a boss or a repo man what might happen when the rich squeeze the poor too tight. Her old friend tries to weasel into bed with Allison one night, and she decides to leave. Stealing some food from the man, she starts walking south.

A few miles out of the city, Allison stumbles upon what, in the 20th century, people would have referred to as a hippie commune. The three extended, polyamorous families welcome her in. The commune needs all the hands it can get, and by this point, Allison is still young enough (37), and worked enough in the prisons and labor camps, that hard, manual labor isn’t intimidating. Putting her back to the plow, she works the rest of the summer and fall tending crops and bringing in the harvest. For the first time in her life, Allison feels rooted, calm, and not constantly looking over her shoulder.

By the next planting season, financial tension, sexual politics, and routine petty rivalries made worse by the hard-scrabble nature of subsistence farming causes the families of the commune to break up. There’s even a physical fight, but it pales in comparison to what she saw in the labor camps. Allison leaves on her own, on foot, and within miles, finds herself face to face with a handful of well-armed men. Allison drops her backpack and pulls a knife, ready to defend herself or die, when the shortest and oldest man’s face breaks into a huge grin. He asks her if she was just a messenger, or one of the Memphis Debt Collectors.

Needs more kudzu...

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. 

Decade of the Shining City Pt. 4 - Keeping it Personal: 2041-2045

Don't Pal Around with Terrorists

Marty Junior takes the information he gleaned from the home surveillance of the Reactionary Party candidate to his superiors. Not his direct supervisor, but as far up the chain of command as he can confidently reach, to an Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security. This woman reviews the data and agrees that the kind of double dealing their elected official engaged in compromises the security of the homeland, and green-lights an operation by Marty’s office to expose the elected official. But first, we need to take a quick digression into the land of endless surveillance and drones. 

The Shining City and their affiliated insurgents learned long ago to avoid electronics, as they’re all compromised by the state. Stationary platforms and fixed installations are constantly sabotaged, often by 10 and 12 year old boys with rocks. No community will give up its kids to the state, so unless the kids get caught red-handed, the damaged equipment must be replaced, often at not-insignificant cost. Even more nefarious, some contractors install the equipment, but do lazy jobs of it, leaving the state blind in huge swathes of US cities. And the Upper Midwest is a hotspot of armed insurgency, so the sabotage is even more widespread. 

Frustration with the surveillance problems leads Marty to an inevitable conclusion; surveillance needs to go airborne. While drones have been in use since at least the early 2010s, they’ve never been able to operate uninterrupted due to power constraints. Yes, loitering UAVs can operate up to 30 hours, but smaller drones can, even in the 2040s, only operate on one battery charge that lasts between 30 and 90 minutes. What has changed in between is the quality of optics. Even small drones can now reliably recognize faces at further distances, even in poor-visibility situations, like the blanket of smoke from Canadian wildfires.

I'm sure they'll only target bad guys.

     Marty’s office monitors the elected official for a number of weeks, until he hears the words he’s waited for; “Meet me at 1:30.”  A trusted subordinate launches ten drones, each armed with a grenade and linked to a facial recognition database. The drones follow the official’s SUV through Detroit for half an hour. The vehicle enters the lowest floor of a defunct parking garage. The drones loiter for a bit, until locating a group of six young men, all suspected of affiliation with insurgent groups. The young men enter the parking garage from different directions. After waiting a few minutes, the drones swarm the group and detonate their grenades. None of the young men survive. Neither does the elected office and his driver.

The one reporter brave enough to ask for comment on the official’s death gets fed a (mostly true) story, that the representative was meeting with insurgents and was therefore a valid target. The message to the public is simple: “don’t pal around with terrorists.” The message going around the inner circles of power is a bit less nuanced: “no one is safe.” Marty receives a promotion to the level of Assistant Secretary, and the woman who green-lit the operation moves up to the rank of Deputy Secretary. If he’s bothered that the insurgents and the elected official probably wouldn’t have been convicted in a court of law, based on the circumstantial evidence Marty presented, just as when we met him, Marty loses no sleep over it. After all, he’s one of the good guys. 

"We Live in a Country Where Children Have to Die to Save Their Mothers"

The background is a bit too nice for a single mom 
living in a slum, but this was the best the Internet
could do with the prompt given.

Jillian couldn’t get out of bed for months after Vern’s death. The handful of nurses that stuck with her after the closure of the clinic began to drift away. While they want to help her get over the death of her son, they need to feed themselves and their families too. And none are trained to help a parent handle the grief over the death of their child. Autumn, her now 5-year-old daughter, scrounges what she can from friends and distant relations to keep the two of them fed. Eventually, the eviction agents arrive, and their things, along with the mother and daughter, end up on the street.

Eviction does come with something of a silver lining. It snaps Jillian out of her grief. With winter quickly approaching, the low-hanging clouds blowing in off Lake Erie take on a distinct battleship gray as before the blanket the city in feet of snow. The family makes it into Ashtabula’s only homeless shelter, which can offer little more than a paper-thin wall between people and the elements. Autumn develops a serious cough, and cannot keep down the meager food Jillian’s work as the clinic’s resident doctor brings in. Perhaps its pity or inspiration, but one of the transients of the clinic knows, ways, to get the antibiotic Autumn needs. Taking matters into his own hands, the man gets a handful of pills to Jillian and her daughter. The cough eases and the girl’s health improves.

This single act of thievery, and kindness, inspires Jillian to restart her medical practice. Over the coming years, she and Autumn live in the shelter and administer what medical care they can, to the impoverished and the homeless. This brings her minor local celebrity as some kind of local saint. The story makes it onto the curated, state-controlled internet, and comes to her older brother’s attention. 

Marty visits Ashtabula to take stock of his sister and niece. They appear underweight and poorly groomed to him. He offers to take them in, promising good food and a clean, warm place to live. Jillian wants desperately to take him up on the offer, but she sees something in his eyes that chills her more than the gray snow falling outside. Jillian politely refuses his help, and Marty sweetens the deal, offering to have her criminal record expunged and allowing her to return to legal medical practice. When she continues to refuse, he threatens to have her jailed for medical malpractice and Autumn removed from her care.

The next day, a pair of Marty’s agents show up to remove Autumn from the shelter. Jillian will not relinquish her daughter to her now-estranged brother, and a scuffle ensues. The people of the shelter put themselves between the doctor and her daughter, and the government goons. Guns get drawn, and Autumn, now 11, understands what must be done. She agrees to leave with the agents so that her mother will not be harmed. Through all-to-familiar tears, Jillian says goodbye to a second child in five years. That night, some concerned friends from the shelter hustle Jillian out the back door as Homeland Security Agents shut the place down and begin arresting anyone with so much as a suspicion of a criminal record. 

Los Estados Unidos Quieren Tú

Nationalism: Getting young
men to kill each other since
at least 1848...

Bobby sets to work in Veracruz building a new life for himself. He doesn’t live among the diaspora from the USA, instead moving in to a shack in the dockworkers neighborhood. While the peso fluctuates wildly with each twisting turn of the Revolution, those employed loading and off-loading ships always manage to keep themselves fed. Within a few years, Bobby finds himself senior man on a dockworker’s crew, stakeholder in the dockyard’s collective ownership cooperative, and perhaps most surprising, happily married to a local girl named Margarita, with a baby on the way. 

That’s right. By 2041, a 32 year old gringo with no history of staying too long any one place finds himself something of a pillar of the community. And with this stability, an old urge kicks in. Maybe it’s wanderlust, or imposter syndrome, but when the call goes out for volunteers to join the liberation of the north, Bobby signs his name. He justifies it to Margarita and the baby by saying he’ll be far behind the lines working logistics. And this is his chance to strike back against the empire that drove him from his homeland. Margarita threatens to leave him, but he swears to a number saints that he will return as soon as the war is over. 

While not exactly being lied to, he does serve in a support role which is technically non-combat, Bobby soon discovers the asymmetric warfare which defines the Mexican invasion of South Texas. On multiple occasions, his logistics unit finds itself under attack, typically from US airstrikes. While he never suffers direct injury, Bobby does rescue five other men from burning vehicles, earning the Cruz de Vida, an honorary title bestowed for, well, saving the lives of fellow soldiers. There’s a different distinction for saving the lives of civilians. Revolutions love to bestow honors on those who fight for them, and La Joventud is no different in that regard.

Bobby returns to Veracruz in the summer of 2042 to a much-relieved Margarita and little Roberto. The dockyard re-hires him, and the community welcomes him back. Now that he’s fought back and won, the taste becomes intoxicating. Bobby looks north across the Gulf, and wants another victory.

You Only Do Two Days

Allison tries to conceal her terror and glee, finding that both emotions can cohabitate in the same person, at the same moment. While the authorities snatched her off the street on suspicion of a crime, the crime in question has nothing to do with the bombing the Debt Collectors carried out. Instead, they think she engaged in a series of burglaries in one of the posh condo buildings downtown. Though she had nothing to do with these crimes, Allison soon discovers that innocence will not keep her out of prison. Her head is shaved and she is shoved into a general holding cell with dozens of other men and women of Memphis’s underclass.

Since 2036, she bounced from county prison to state penitentiary to a slave labor camp in the Smoky Mountains. Officially, the facility is named the West Creek Labor Rehabilitation Facility, but no one there lives under any illusions about the camp's true purpose. Fortunately for her, on the first day of detention back in ’36, a fellow inmate recognized her as the girl he’d talked to about an onerous set of payday loans. While she insisted that she didn’t know what he was talking about, the rest of the inmates got the message. Allison never found herself on the receiving end of any inmate on inmate crime. Even the guards largely left her alone, to pass year after year in state custody.

None of the inmates of the slave labor camp knew anything about the Demonstration Party’s landslide wins in 2042, which included winning control of the governor’s mansion in Tennessee. After several years of prodding by human rights activists, the governor visits the West Creek camp on a ‘fact-finding’ mission. Once there, he seems genuinely shocked at the conditions. When he finds out many of the inmates were never even convicted of a crime, he demands the facility release all prisoners held without trial, on their own recognizance. The warden of the facility drags his feet, until the new governor threatens to throw the warden in with the inmates. On June 21st, 2045, Allison walks free from prison after seven long years. When she gets back to Memphis, and people ask her how long she was in, she tells them she did just two days, the day you go in, and the day you get out. 

This, but with less concrete and more canvas tents.