We've Become Business Partners in the Apocalypse

Tariffs, markets, investing, retirement, and "the magnificent bribe"

Three critically endangered California Condors, each with a wingspan approaching 10 feet (more than 3 meters), soar over a craggy central California landscape. Photo by the author.

Welcome to Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, overshoot, greenwashing, and resistance. It’s written by me, Max Wilbert, the co-author of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, co-founder of Protect Thacker Pass, and organizer with the Community Legal Environmental Defense Fund.

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In 1948, George Kennan, then State Department Director of Policy Planning and one of the most influential men in the United States government, wrote in an internal memo:

“[The U.S. has] about 50 percent of the world's wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.”

This is the naked logic of empire-building, and the true violence of its enactment both before and after Kennan’s memo would surprise many U.S. citizens, but few people elsewhere.

From the genocidal seizure of Native American lands and the transatlantic slave trade to the systematic violence underlying free trade deals that dispossessed millions of subsistence and small-scale farmers in Mexico and facilitated the forced proletarianization of formerly land-based communities in Southeast Asia, the projection of U.S. dominance across the world has always relied on the bullet or the velvet-covered fist.

Over the intervening three-quarters of a century, the U.S. government has facilitated coups, established military bases around the world, cowed nations into economics submission, and wielded both bombs and aid as cudgels to subdue and control the rest of the planet. An economic and military barricade has been erected to protect U.S. citizens — especially elites and, to a lesser but still significant extent, the middle class.

This is the context in which, in April of 2025, the Trump administration first announced, then scaled back, sweeping tariffs on products imported into the United States. The results, in the short term, were economically unprecedented. Markets went into freefall, crashing further than ever before in one day as Trumps policies challenged the prevailing economic orthodoxity on which most U.S. business is built: ideas, intellectual property, capital, and financial products come from within the core of empire, while the dirty and hard industrial labor of actually producing physical products is done elsewhere.

Many seem to assume that Trump’s tariff policy is unintelligible, that it represents stupidity, nothing more than a strongman's attempt to assert his authority. And in the end, that may be true. The market collapse and political backlash to Trump’s tariffs, which led to the administration walking most of the policies back within several days, may prove to ultimately reflect an economic logic that is too deeply entrenched to be changed.

While I don't believe in the moral righteousness of Trump's economic policies — or in the underlying logic of U.S. dominance or indusrial capitalism itself — most of the criticisms I have seen of the tariff policies are simplistic.

I am not an economist. But I am a scholar and opponent of empire, and I recognize a self-conscious attempt to reassert the economic, political, and (by extension) military dominance of the United States as a world superpower when I see one.

Trump is no fool, unfortunately. He sees rising competition, especially from China. He is concerned with maintaining hegemony against the rise of BRICS. And he believes, as articulated in this brilliant piece by

Vincent Kelley

, in reversing the process of globalization and “re-shoring” industry.

Trump and his advisors have a long-term strategy, and in their view, rebuilding U.S. dominance may involve crushing both internal and global economic stability in the meantime. Just like Reagan’s offshoring policies in the 80s devastated the manufacturing heartland of the United States while buttressing the fortunes of the hyper-wealthy, Trump ultimately has no interest in the poor. He is playing the role of imperial leader. He is building power.

We have become business partners in the apocalypse.

The economic turmoil and political backlash to Trump’s tariffs show how U.S. hegemony and the economic growth it powers has become essential to first-world people.

More than half of U.S. households have retirement accounts; that is, rather than cash savings, investments allocated towards buying stocks and other types of financial products. These purchases provide operating funds to businesses, and in return, investors gain the right to sell their stocks in the future. The system operates under the assumption that well-run businesses grow in value over time. The S&P 500, a stock index tracking the largest 500 companies in the United States, grows by an average of 6.8% per year. In this way, everyday people are invested, quite literally, in the growth of capitalism, through monthly monetary contributions.

This cycle, in which capital investment leads to increased production, which in turn generates greater capital — makes sense at small theoretical scales. Say, for example, I’m bad at growing corn, but want to eat some. I lend my tools and contribute money to buy seeds with my neighbor, who’s a skilled farmer. If they have a successful crop, they share the harvest with me, and everyone wins. If their crop fails, we both miss out.

In the real world, the investment and the economic growth it powers is far different. Rather than small plots of corn, agribusinesses invest in clearing vast swathes of rainforest for palm oil plantations. Tech companies vacuum up gigawatts of power for sprawling data centers. Speculators bet on every aspect of the economy, and others bet on them. All of this has nothing to do with meeting basic necessities (which current productive forces are, according to some research, powerful enough to do. I’m not sure I buy it. See the footnotes for more^{1, 2}), and everything to do with profit. The drive for profit incentivizes corporate actors to engage in more and more behavior that is harmful to nature.

If this behavior wasn’t rewarded, we wouldn’t see it continue to happen. But in this case, not only are the perpetrators rewarded with paychecks, large swaths of society — including congresspeople, government employees, academics, and more than half of U.S. households — are also financially rewarded through participation in the stock market.

What this means is simple. As the climate crisis accelerates, as the 6th mass extincation spirals further, as chemical pollution reaches record levels day after day, as our overshoot predicament worsens, as more land is paved and more wild places bulldozed, bank accounts continue to rise.

We — that is, anyone with a retirement or investment account, and anyone who cheers when the economy booms and groans when it falls — have become business partners in the apocalpyse.

Mist clings to craggy ridges on Tahoma (Mount Rainier), an ecosystem under serious threat due to global warming. The glaciers on the mountain are retreating, threatening fish, pikas, various tree species, wolverines, and many other species. Photo by the author.

The magnificent bribe

This is what cultural critic Lewis Mumford, one of the most important thinkers in U.S. history, termed “the magnificent bribe.” Mumford writes in his 1964 piece Authoritarian and Democratic Technics:

“Present day technics³ differs from that of the overtly brutal, half-baked authoritarian systems of the past in one highly favorable particular: it has accepted the basic principle of democracy, that every member of society should have a share in its goods. By progressively fulfilling this part of the democratic promise, our system has achieved a hold over the whole community that threatens to wipe out every other vestige of democracy.”

What Mumford means, of course, is that even violent and despotic systems gain power from collective consent. When the people agree to go along with a financial system that is killing the planet and dooming future generations to live in conditions we cannot even imagine, they have been bribed.

Scholars have written of this; how growth is often used as a mechanism not just to generate profit, but to maintain hegemony. By growing the economy, elites are able to distribute benefits to otherwise restive social groups, while still maintaining and expanding inequality. This, in the long-term, is Trump’s game. He seeks to re-energize American empire in the image of William McKinley, his favorite past president, who seized Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and annexed Hawaii as part of a grand imperial vision.

And, broadly speaking, it is working. There is broad knowledge in the global north that consumer culture and economic growth is associated with environmental harm and human rights abuses. And yet, most people do not participate in social change movements, let alone revolutionary movement. Most activism that does take place focuses on reforming this system rather than abolishing it. In other words, most focus on preserving Mumford’s “authoritarian technics” and the growth system that they enable, while attempting to mitigate, regulate, and ban the worst excesses. This is one of the reasons why the pre-requisites for a degrowth paradigm shift are not currently close to being met, and we continue to spiral deeper into ecological collapse.

And this is a good time to insert a word about the Democrats, because the Democratic Party, democratic votes, and progressives in general are the prototypical U.S. example of these politics in action. They seek a friendlier empire: a world of FSC-certified lumber, politically correct advertising, “green” energy and a carbon-neutral military, a circular economy, and clean manufacturing.

This, of course, is a total fantasy, as I outlined in my book Bright Green Lies.

But it is an incredibly appealing vision, especially when one recognizes that there are only two real alternatives: the naked, brutal empire-building vision of the far right, and the revolutionary transformation of society envisioned by people like me. And only in one of those visions will your stock portfolio continue to grow.

Revolution or barbarism

Outside of the middle class and the wealth, the process of globalization as just one manifestation of the harms of industrial capitalism, civilization, and empire has been fiercely contested by the poor, indigenous communities, and many people of the global south. As I wrote last July, reflecting on the anti-globalization movement and the motivations for the 1999 anti-WTO protests in my hometown of Seattle:

A Quarter-Century Later, Battle of Seattle Protesters Proved Right

Organized labor and human rights activists saw [globalization] as a power grab aiming to open national borders to the flow of corporations while restricting worker movement. This, they argued, would lead to twin disasters: offshoring jobs from wealthy nations and leaving workers penniless here, while creating new markets for cheap labor in poor countries with low wages and practically non-existent labor protection laws.

Environmentalists saw the [1999 World Trade Organization, or WTO] meeting as an oligarch’s summit to organize efficient and rapid extraction of resources from the environment — in other words, to turn a living planet into dead commodities and into profit as quickly as possible. They argued that corporate-friendly neoliberal trade policies would decimate environmental protection worldwide and facilitate ever-greater “externalization” of costs in the form of pollution and ecological sacrifice zones.

Students, faith groups, indigenous communities, and racial justice organizations also saw the WTO and their brother organizations — The World Bank and International Monetary Fund — as being instruments of a violent form of economic neo-colonialism.

While the protests in November 1999 were successful at shutting down the WTO summit, the neoliberal agenda of so-called “free trade” has been the dominant economic paradigm for most of the intervening years. Since 1999, the size of the global economy has more than doubled from $55 trillion to nearly $120 trillion. But contrary to what you might think, this hasn’t effectively reduced poverty; the vast majority of this explosion in wealth has gone to rich.

On the ecological front, the neoliberal project of free trade, globalization, and deregulation has skyrocketed an already destructive system into the stratosphere.

Annual greenhouse gas pollution has increased from 25 billion tons in 1999 to 37 billion tons in 2022. In 1999, humans used about 120,000 terawatt-hours of energy, but by 2022 that had increased to 179,000 terawatt-hours — nearly a 50% jump. To meet that demand, fossil fuels and biomass (cutting down trees and burning them) accounted for nearly 80% of the new energy production in this period.

Plastic production has more than doubled since 1999, and in total more than two-thirds of all plastic ever created has been pumped out of factories in the years since. Global population increased from 6 to 8 billion. And the abundance of wildlife plummeted an average of 18% between 1999 and 2018 — when measured against an already seriously diminished 1970 baseline.

Almost a quarter-century later, the goals and messages behind the WTO protest have been proven correct. Corporate globalization has been a disaster for workers, the poor, and the planet. Wealth inequality has increased in almost all parts of the world, including strikingly inside the United States. Meanwhile, in poor nations like Mexico and Bangladesh, sweatshops that often amount to virtual slave labor have proliferated, and the dismantling of tariffs and trade restrictions in favor of neoliberal free trade policies has destroyed domestic markets such as traditional organic farming.

But all of this does not mean that Trump’s policies are right, merely that they are another form of empire, another attempt to project domination.

Our politics must go beyond our pocketbooks

I cheer when the economy crashes, despite the fact that it is hard on me and harder on many others. Paid subscriptions to this platform are falling. And yet, the health of the economy, as it exists today, is a measure of how fast the living planet is being turned into more dead commodities. The more data centers built, the more forests cut down, the more miles driven, the more acres paved, the better the economy does. And conversely, times of economic recession have corresponded to the only times we’ve seen declines in greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, and so on.

This, of course, is only one way to run a society. Most cultures throughout history have nothing at all resembling this system of investment and yet manage to take care of basic needs and well-being. It is possible for human beings to live without destroying the land. And it is profoundly wrong that as they age, the only viable way for many people to not end up destitute and homeless is by investing in capitalism. For the poor, the magnificent bribe is more a latent threat than golden handcuffs.

One thing is certain. While the magnificent bribe has been supremely effective, conservative and liberal elites alike are leading us deeper into the ecological apocalypse. Come economic ruin or miracle, our politics must go beyond our pocketbooks.

[1] Especially when treating modern luxuries such “internet access” or “electricity” as wants rather than needs.

[2] Other research challenges this hypothesis. For example, this paper looking at global agricultural production looks beyond whether enough calories are produced, instead assessing macronutrients, and finds that “the global agricultural system currently overproduces grains, fats, and sugars while production of fruits and vegetables and protein is not sufficient to meet the nutritional needs of the current population. Correcting this imbalance could reduce the amount of arable land used by agriculture by 51 million ha globally but would increase total land used for agriculture by 407 million ha and increase greenhouse gas emissions.” Another study finds that there isn’t enough naturally-produced Omega-3 fatty acids to meet human needs; humans have essentially tapped all natural sources, yet human population continues to grow, accelerating “nutrient overshoot.”

[3] In Mumford’s work, the term “Technic” is used to refer to both the social and technical aspects of a given technological system of development.