Surviving Tomorrow Jared A. Brock

I want to tell you a story about one of my DNA-confirmed relatives on my mother’s side.
Her rather breathy name was Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen. She was born an Austrian duchess, grew up in castles, hung out with Mozart when they were seven, was married off at age fourteen, and when her hubby became Louis the XVI four years later, the eighteen-year-old became Queen of France and Frenchified her name to Marie Antoinette.
At first, the masses loved her. She was pretty and charming, and she knew how to make the public swoon. She spoke a few languages, played a few instruments, and was a capable politician. Talented lady.
Aunt Marie, though, was a profligate spender. She was a fashion addict, a real estate hound, and an inveterate gambler. She never met a costly war she didn’t love. Some of her custom-made hair poufs were three feet tall. In fact, I’m embarrassed to say she earned the nickname Madame Déficit after it was discovered that she had personally spent more than 7% of the nation’s budget.
Meanwhile, the slaving masses were starving to death. Bread was so scarce that it literally started a war called The Flour War in 1775. By then, the public had rightfully turned on Aunt Marie and the rest of the elites who passively extracted wealth from the working class while evading taxation to help pay to keep the country solvent. Even worse, Aunt Marie did her best to block all attempts at economic reform to tax the rich who had benefited most from civilization.
Does this story sound familiar?
Enter the meme queen bubble boy
“We recommend investors not weight Tesla shares in their portfolio in equal proportion to the S&P because Tesla shares are in our view and by virtually every conventional metric not only overvalued, but dramatically so.” — JP Morgan
Like Aunt Marie, Elon Reeve Musk is not a man of humble origins.
Raised in South Africa by a former model and a city councilor/property developer, Musk grew up in lavish luxury in one of the largest houses in Pretoria, enjoying yachts and ski trips and a first-class education at Wharton and Stanford. (But please note that their tax-evaded emerald mine profits probably weren’t apartheid-connected; though he likely introduced convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg, which is all sorts of creepy.)
Elon Musk is quite rightfully a social media darling, even though he didn’t actually start the company that made him famous. (He didn’t start Paypal or SolarCity either.) Up until about two years ago, pretty much everyone had a favorable view of the former-Paypal-turned-electric-car-and-rocket guy.
But just like Aunt Marie, things have taken a turn for the worst:
* The SEC sued him for lying about his publically-traded company.
* Musk has become a blatant market manipulator, whip-sawing the Bitcoin and Dogecoin markets to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.
* As we’ve covered on Surviving Tomorrow before, Tesla is the most dangerous story stock in the world right now, and will likely lose its investors up to $1 trillion dollars in the next crash.
* In the meantime, Elon can see the writing on the wall and has begun cashing in his chips to the tune of $13 billion so far — but wisely, doing so loudly and publically so as not to spook investor-suckers.
People are starting to realize that, though Elon is certainly a very smart and interesting fellow, he definitely has a con-man streak.
Also, he’s cost the hard-working masses a metric ton of money.
Corporate socialism
Like the French kings and queens who lived large off the backs of the struggling masses, Elon Musk has built his twelve-figure fortune off the largesse of taxpayer subsidies.
Tesla has received more than a hundred handouts, grants, awards, and subsidies from the American people:
* We gave him a $465 million low-interest loan in 2010.
* We gave him a $440 million grant in 2014.
* We gave him a $2.6 billion contract in 2014.
* We gave him $1.3 bi

Author’s note: Today is my 36th birthday! If you’re curious to see what I read and drink (or you’re in the mood to spoil the crankiest author on the Internet) here’s my book wishlist and my scotch wishlist. (Sad fact: Due to supply chain challenges, scotch is expected to triple in price later this year, so now is the time!)
Capitalism is evolving from corporations owning the means of production to also owning the products themselves.
We used to have the option to buy movies — now, in order to legally enjoy a movie forever, you have to pay Netflix a monthly fee for the rest of your life.
Document processors like Word and editing suites like Adobe used to be purchasable — now I will have to pay $4,800 over the next forty years to submit books to my publishers, and my wife will have to sacrifice more than $25,000 to a $313 billion company just so she can keep her job.
It’s all part of corporate America’s rapid shift to subscription serfdom.
And Toyota just dipped their claws in the pond.
The scam of the century
Toyota was founded in 1937.
Today it’s a $295 billion corporation.
They netted over $3.1 billion in the past year.
And they’re desperate to get their hands on that sweet recurring revenue.
They’re not the first automaker to milk their customers:
* BMW tried it with Apple CarPlay.
* Tesla tried it with Internet Connectivity.
* Mercedes tried it with EQS rear-wheel steering.
(Imagine having to pay for steering.)
Now, Toyota wants its customers to pay a monthly fee to start their own cars.
Since at least 2010, Toyotas have had the option to include remote start if you pay for the right key FOB.
Not anymore.
Now you have to get their Remote Connect subscription.
But here’s the really twisted thing: The key FOB uses radio waves to connect to the car — it doesn’t require Toyota’s Remote Connect servers at all.
The really scandalous thing? The fee will be charged to all vehicles built after November 12, 2018.
In other words, people are paying for a product that they once got for free, but if they don’t continue to pay for the product they’ve already paid for, they don’t get to use the product they’ve already paid for.
Imagine if you paid $50/year for a Medium subscription, and suddenly Medium emailed you and said, “Hey, we know you already paid to read Jared A. Brock’s articles this year, but if you want to keep reading Jared A. Brock’s articles, you’re going to have to pay another $80/year.”
How is this even legal?
Consumers didn’t ask for this
But corporations don’t care, because they don’t work for consumers.
They’re anti-human eternal entities whose legal reason for existing is to extract wealth from the commons and deliver it to elite shareholders.
Their poverty-making model is simple:
* The elite shareholder class impoverished the contributive masses via systemic inflation and purposeful wage stagnation.
* Second, they got us hooked on monthly payment plans for the things we wanted and needed but couldn’t afford to buy lump-sum anyway. (When was the last time you paid cash for a car or even a piece of furniture?)
* Now, corporate elites are working on a new scheme to steal our time, impoverish our lives, and ram us back into serfdom once and for all:The end of ownership.
I have argued for some time that streamers like Netflix and Prime are illegal monopolies — by keeping their products exclusively rent-by-the-month and never making them available to purchase anywhere else, they are systemically excluding people from participating in culture. There are tens of millions of people who can’t get approved for credit cards or can’t afford a $100+ annual fee for life just to watch a movie every once in a while.
But the real danger happens once any human necessity is commodified as an investment — it’s eventually sold to the highest bidder, which is always an extractive, tax-evading, anti-human, multinational investment corporation.
A mattr

Coca-Cola is bad AF.
Not only are they a giant sugar monopoly that has devoured over 400 of their competitors, but they’re partly responsible for hundreds of millions of cases of diabetes around the globe in their 135-year history.
When I visited North Korea, I only saw two Western brands — BMW, and Coca-Cola.
Last week, the Senate passed a bill called the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.
Unanimously.
(That’s a gigantic deal in America.)
For those unaware of the situation, Ch!na has been genociding a people group in a western province called Xinjiang. While several million Uyghurs have already been sent to concentration camps or placed under Orwellian surveillance, we have no idea how bad things could ultimately get. Looking back fifty years from now, it may very well be our generation’s Rwanda or even a Holocaust-level ethnocide.
Despite Republicans and Democrats all agreeing to ban imported products from the region, Coca-cola, Nike, and Apple decided to lobby against the bill.
…
…
…
We need to have a conversation about corporations.
Implausible deniability
The reason that Coke, Apple, Nike, and others oppose the bill is that they all source products from the area. They say the protections are “too broad” and might slow or halt their ability to turn a profit off the backs of cheap overseas labor. (Okay, they didn’t say that last bit out loud, but we all know that’s exactly why they make shoes in Asia and not Connecticut.)
Nike, of course, denies that they use Uyghur slave labor, but this is a rotten company that’s been saying this for four decades while regularly getting busted for using sweatshops, child labor, inhumane conditions, extremely underpaid workers, environmental poisoning, abusing women, and other human rights abuses. (TLDR: Don’t buy Nike products, ever.)
If Nike isn’t involved in any abusive behaviors, it really makes you wonder why “A factory in eastern Ch!na that manufactures shoes for U.S. company Nike is equipped with watchtowers, barbed-wire fences, and police guard boxes.”
And this is just one company at the tip of the iceberg.
Abuse for everyone
“We have found no evidence of any forced labour on Apple production lines and we plan to continue monitoring.” — Apple PR (Spoiler alert: There is evidence.)
At least 82 companies have been implicated in using Uyghur slave labor, including Apple, Google, BMW, GM, Mercedes, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony, Microsoft, Adidas, Abercrombie & Fitch, Calvin Klein, Lacoste, HP, Land Rover, Nintendo, Oculus, Victoria’s Secret, and Volkswagen.
After being busted for using Uyghur labor, Nike posted a statement on their website swearing they no longer rent slaves, but a follow-up investigation by the Washington Post showed it simply wasn’t true.
This is problem #1 for multinational corporations:
They cannot be trusted.
Every corporation’s sole legal reason for existing is to extract wealth from the planet, workers, and consumers, in order to return profits to private shareholders. How could we possibly trust their word when they say they’re doing no harm?
Worse still, even the “best” and most “ethical” multinationals have supply chains that are so complex that they often don’t even know they have abusive practices in their supply chain… and their incentive is to keep it that way.
Just look how easy it is to look the other way and profit from the abuse of human beings:
Vile, right?
Do you know who doesn’t have any slave-related sourcing worries?
The local organic farmer’s market where I buy my vegetables. I can literally see the field behind the cash register.
When businesses are local, you don’t need to trust them — you can just verify with your own eyes.
Guilty until proven innocent
People are innocent until proven guilty.
But if your legal fiduciary reason for existing is to create private profits for private shareholders, then the public has the right to declare corporations guilty unt

Last week, I published an article entitled A Stock Market Crash Is Coming and Everyone Knows It. Rather than acknowledging that this market bubble is a giant scam and everyone is still trying to find ways to profit from it, my horribly greedy little readers all just asked the same question:
“So where should we invest our money, then?”
Obviously, not all my readers are horribly greedy little people.
Just 98% of you. ;)
We can’t help ourselves, can we? We’re so enculturated into this commodified, consumerist, individualist anti-culture that we can’t even fathom simply not playing the extraction game.
Yes, self-preservation is in our nature, but for most investors, the motive isn’t to protect truly-earned wealth — it’s to make an easy killing, even if it means a hard living for someone else.
Passive investors aside, I do sympathize with the hundreds of millions of people who are going to suffer in the next three years. Either the market will crash and wipe out half the market, or the Feds will continue to print so much new cash to avoid a crash that your savings will be worth half their current value.
Probably both.
When the bubble does burst — and it always bursts — tens of millions will lose homes. Tens of millions will lose jobs. Millions will go bankrupt. Thousands will commit suicide. Millions will never recover.
So where should we ethically and morally invest our money now, simply to protect it from the coming crash?
First, let’s start with what won’t work for people who are committed to longest-term widest-spread wellbeing for Earth and its inhabitants:
Gold
The gold standard was once useful, but as we enter the digital-first age, gold will play a smaller and smaller role in international finance until it’s as arcane an investment as seashells and beaver pelts. Plus, it costs money to store and protect gold, it isn’t easily tradeable, it doesn’t have a lot of real-world usefulness, the government can confiscate it at any time, it’s no longer a true hedge against inflation, and it’s not a productive asset.
But none of this matters to ethical people.
They avoid investing in shiny metal because gold is disastrous for the earth, it’s horrible for people, and it’s a pyramid scheme that only makes you rich if you can sell it to someone for more than you paid for it.
So gold is out.
Bonds
Bonds are garbage and basically pay negative yields versus real inflation.
But that doesn’t matter to ethical people.
They avoid bonds (and all other forms of debt) because they don’t want to play any part in the system of interest/usury that all major religions have unanimously been telling to ban for thousands of years.
They understand that interest wrecks lifelong havoc on societies because of the magic money multiplier effect, and they can’t make themselves complicit with a system that’s mathematically designed to enrich the rich and bankrupt the poor.
So bonds are out.
Commodities
Commodities prices have been soaring lately, but there are serious volatility issues, and as recently bankrupted British natural gas companies can attest, looming trade wars and supply chain challenges make this an extremely risky investment category.
But that doesn’t matter to ethical people.
They understand that human necessities like water and food and energy and heat shouldn’t be commodified in the first place. If the price of rice doubles because investors bid up the price, thousands of children literally starve to death. Commodities need to be de-commodified, because lives hang in the balance, and the market doesn’t care who lives and dies, so long as shareholders reap an ever-rising profit.
So commodities are out.
Real Estate
Residential real estate in most cities is probably 40–60% overpriced right now.
But that doesn’t matter to ethical people.
As with commodities, they understand that human shelter shouldn’t be commodified. Despite the nearly overwhelming temptation to hoard houses

It is unlikely that the American stock market will crash in 2022.
Consumer spending is ramping back up, inflation is soaring, credit’s cheap and easy, and politicians are so desperate to keep this hot potato from dropping on their watch that they’ll go to nearly any length to avoid a crash.
That said, there’s no excuse not to be vigilant and extremely wary in these economically absurd times.
We can only be certain about one thing: Uncertainty.
With that in mind, let’s look at ten of the most likely surprises that could crash the stock market despite all attempts to keep the house of cards rising ever higher.
1. No more free money
The Biden administration has signaled its intention to stop printing as many stimulus trillions this year as they did last year. This is a good thing for the economy, but passive market extractors don’t like it one bit.
If the Dems fully shut down the printing press, it could trigger a market crash. But they won’t. They’ll slow it down for a bit, watch the markets totter, then fire it back up again and say, “Well hey, we tried.”
Can you blame them? Wouldn’t you print free money if you owned the money printer and could use it to get yourself re-elected?
2. Snowpocalypse
All that is necessary to extinguish the human race is for winter to blow a little colder, a little longer.
No, I’m not talking about a Day After Tomorrow situation.
More of a Texas energy fiasco, which left 4.5 million without power and water, cost tens of billions, left thousands with crippling debt, and saw more than 200 people (including a baby) freeze to death.
Anti-human corporations rarely let a good crisis go to waste, and several energy companies made billions off the two-week emergency, with some companies jacking prices 180X. (I’m of the opinion that corporatists should go to prison for putting profit over people, but “the free market is always right,” remember?)
Don’t pretend this can’t and won’t happen again.
In fact, natural gas prices in Europe have already spiked 10+X this winter and the heavy snow hasn’t even arrived yet.
It’s the same for New England.
With all the accidental and purposeful supply chain shortages — and, let’s be honest, corporations price-testing consumers who’ve been saving for the past year — if we have a particularly cold or long winter, it could be economically disastrous for millions of people.
The problems are many and obvious: Most houses are poorly insulated and bleed heat; they don’t have woodstoves; they don’t have grid-independent backup generators; they don’t provide occupants with a way to survive without reliance on faraway fossil fuel corporations. That’s the whole point.
If winter hits hard and long and the cost of heating spikes 100+X for the duration, millions of people will be forced into bankruptcy, which will almost certainly crash the stock market.
3. Rising interest rates
The Feds are desperate to slow down this “transitory” inflation. (Don’t tell your Congressperson, but words actually have meanings. Transitory means brief, momentary, fleeting. If this yearlong inflation is just a passing cloud, then why are they so worked up about trying to fix it?)
If politicians cared about the masses — which they do not — all they’d need to do is aggressively tax corporate profits and billionaire wealth, but such things are unthinkable in hyper-individualist America.
That understood, their go-to mechanism is raising interest rates. But as Data-Driven Investor points out, a 1% interest rate hike could scythe 30–40% off the stock market. I don’t expect them to do so, but if house, stock, and food prices jump another 30% in the year ahead, it’s crazy to think that they’d rather crash the markets than tax the billionaires who benefit from all these outrageous price increases in the first place.
4. COVID-22
Sometimes I forget that we’re still in the middle of a global pandemic and a quarter of the Ameri

"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." —Ludwig von Mises
The stock market is going to crash in the next three years and wipe out half the market.
Either that or the Feds will continue to print so much new cash to avoid a crash that your savings will be worth half their current value.
For tens of millions of zero-asset Americans, and those with the means and discipline to save for the future, these punishing scenarios amount to six of one, half-dozen of the other.
But the grifters who’ve profited wildly from the debt-fueled rise in real estate, stock, and crypto prices don’t care.
Because they’re all in on the scam.
Pretty much everyone agrees
You know the market is a fraud when share prices double or triple despite profits getting crushed by a global pandemic.
A crash is coming, it’s just a matter of when and how large.
* The Economist’s Intelligence Unit thinks a bubble burst is highly probable.
* Jon Wolfenbarger, of the Mises Institute, thinks this crash will be worse than 2008, dropping at least 60%.
* Michael Burry (of The Big Short fame) thinks we’re in a massive bubble and the looming crash will be the worst in history.
* Approximately 50% of Wall Street strategists think the S&P 500 will end the year below current levels. (Bank of America thinks -10%, Morgan Stanley thinks -20%.)
* Investor John Hussman (who predicted the dot-com bubble burst) thinks the market will crash 66%.
* Jeremy Grantham thinks we’re in a bubble the size of 2008 or 1929.
* The European Securities and Markets Authority thinks we’re in a bubble.
* Mega-criminal Warren Buffett thinks a crash is coming and has over $140 billion ready to deploy.
* The top 15 non-financial companies (including Apple, Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta/Facebook) think a crash is coming and have stockpiled more than $1 trillion to go shopping when it does.
Here are five reasons why we’re in this bubble, and why it’s going to burst:
1. Insane new investors
Kids these days.
Boomers robbed them of their future, so instead of even bothering with futile attempts to build real, productive, contributive businesses in the face of government-controlling tax-evading multinational monopolies, they decided to passively play the markets instead.
Enter commission-free predator apps like Robinhood. In the past two years, millions of young people have jumped onto these platforms and are treating the stock market like the casino it is.
Unlike traditional value investors who pore over thousands of pages of documents in order to make sound decisions about stock purchases, young people essentially trade the news, or even mere tweets. Just look at who’s run Tesla up to a trillion dollars, even though it’s not worth 1/20th that much:
But you’ll never convince a bitboy or a Tesla maniac that meme-stonking isn’t a risky house of cards that’s bound to collapse.
After all, everyone’s an expert during a hysterics-fueled bull run.
Joe Kennedy, the infamous father of President JFK, managed to dodge the 1929 crash after having an epiphany while getting his shoes shined on Wall Street, saying:
“When even shoeshine boys are giving you stock tips, it’s time to sell.”
But rents and food prices are going up, and when this bubble does pop, all these young people won’t have jobs or free Internet money.
2. Borrow-to-invest
Why hasn’t the world learned our lesson by now?
If you let millions of people borrow money to buy the same stock…The stock price will go up…Which allows stockholders to borrow more money…So they can buy more stock…And create massive market bubbles that eventually burst and destroy millions of lives.
Easy credit is what caused the Great Depression, people.
I’ll sa