The Rigged Ladder: Reclaiming Our Power in the Age of Control, Power, and Greed

The Rigged Ladder: Reclaiming Our Power in the Age of Control, Power, and Greed

There’s a phrase you’ll find in the comment section of almost any video about rent, medical debt, or a missed paycheck: the system is rigged. People say it half-joking, half-exhausted. But say it enough times and it stops sounding like a complaint and starts sounding like a diagnosis. Because it is one.

I want to be honest about something first: I’m not writing this to point fingers only outward. Some of what keeps us stuck lives inside us too — in the habits, comparisons, and quiet acceptances we’ve inherited without questioning. But it is also, in plain fact, true that unethical capitalism, and the individuals, families, and industries who practice it, have built a ladder most of us were never meant to climb. This piece is about naming that honestly, about the longer history that proves the ladder can be built differently, and about what we’re doing at Climate Change Community LLC to build something different.

Three Things People Chase, and Why Two of Them Rot

Watching our political moment unravel — and the now-open relationship between the administration and the wealthiest tech and industry interests in the country — has clarified something for me. It isn’t only that the system is rigged. It’s that the products and infrastructure we depend on for survival — fuel, food, medicine, information — are concentrated in the hands of a small number of entities. We are not just governed by them. We are, in very literal ways, dependent on them.

I’ve come to think of the rot as running through three channels:

Control. This is the drive to make everyone else’s story conform to one narrative — including, in its most explicit recent form, religious control over public life. When I first drafted this piece, Project 2025 — the 900-plus-page “Mandate for Leadership” published by the Heritage Foundation — was still a blueprint. It no longer is. According to the Project 2025 Executive Action Tracker maintained by the Center for Progressive Reform and Governing for Impact, the administration initiated or completed 53 percent of the blueprint’s domestic administrative agenda in its first year alone — 283 of 532 recommended actions — including reviving the old Schedule F scheme under a new name, stripping job protections from career civil servants so they can be replaced with ideological loyalists. The plan to concentrate power in the presidency, roll back reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ protections, and reorganize the federal government around a single conservative vision is not coming. It is here, roughly halfway implemented, and it is predominantly — though not exclusively — a project of the right.

Power. Distinct from control — this is the hunger to obtain or keep dominance for its own sake. It shows up on both ends of the political spectrum, and it’s seductive precisely because it works: it shines, it opens doors, it insulates you from consequence.

Wealth. The most insidious of the three, because it’s the one that most directly harms the sick, the young, and the disadvantaged, and does it quietly, spreadsheet by spreadsheet.

When people say “the system is rigged,” they are usually describing what happens where these three currents meet.

What the Numbers Actually Say

I don’t want this to be abstract, so here’s what it looks like in figures, as of the most recent counts.

HUD’s 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report — released this past May — found 745,652 people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2025. That is a 3.4 percent dip from the 771,480 counted in 2024, and the first year-over-year decline since 2016. I want to celebrate that number. I can’t. It is still 27 percent higher than 2013, and beneath the top line the picture gets worse, not better: chronic homelessness hit a record high of 155,750 people — up nearly 90 percent since 2015 — and homelessness among Americans 65 and older rose nearly 7 percent in a single year. People 55 and older now account for one in five of everyone homeless in this country. That last one should stop us cold. We are watching elders — the people who built this country’s roads, hospitals, and classrooms — age into the street.

Meanwhile, the gap between what a company’s top executive makes and what its average worker makes has stretched almost beyond comprehension. The Economic Policy Institute put the CEO-to-worker pay ratio at 281-to-1 for 2024; the AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch, measuring S&P 500 companies, found 285-to-1 for 2024 and 312-to-1 for 2025 (excluding Elon Musk’s outlier package), with average CEO pay climbing to $22.8 million. In 1965, that ratio was 21-to-1. In 1978, it was 31-to-1. Since 1978, CEO compensation has grown by more than 1,000 percent while typical worker pay has grown by about 26 percent. The ladder didn’t just get steeper. It was deliberately re-engineered.

Compare that to Spain’s Basque Country, home of the Mondragón Corporation — the world’s largest worker cooperative federation, founded in 1956, today employing more than 70,000 people and reporting €11.2 billion in sales for 2024, with €632 million in net income. Mondragón’s cooperatives cap the gap between their highest- and lowest-paid workers — historically at 6-to-1, and today, depending on the co-op, no more than 9-to-1. Not as a slogan — as an actual, enforced governance rule, sustained for seven decades. No CEO of a Mondragón co-op makes more than about $1 million a year. If a company like JPMorgan operated under Mondragón’s ratio, its CEO would earn a small fraction of what he currently earns, and his decisions would answer to the people who work under him.

This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s a working, decades-old proof of concept that a company can be enormous, profitable, and international and refuse to let its leadership hoard what its workers build.

The Ladder Has Been Rigged Before

Here’s what the “rigged system” conversation often misses: none of this is new, and neither is the fight against it. This country has been here before — and the last time, ordinary people won enough ground to build the middle class our parents grew up in.

Pullman: The Town the Company Owned

In the 1880s, the Pullman Palace Car Company built a company town outside Chicago where it owned everything — the workers’ homes, the stores, the church, even the library. When the depression of 1893 hit, Pullman slashed wages by a quarter or more but refused to lower the rents it charged its own workers. In May 1894, the workers walked out; when the American Railway Union joined in a nationwide boycott, the federal government responded not by mediating, but by sending in troops and securing a court injunction to break the strike. Some thirty workers were killed, and the union’s president, Eugene Debs, was jailed. That is what control, power, and wealth look like when they meet at one address: a company that doesn’t just sign your paycheck but owns your roof, your food, and your Sunday morning.

The Years the Ladder Widened

The generation that lived through Pullman and the Depression answered with structure, not sentiment. The Wagner Act of 1935 protected the right to organize. The Works Progress Administration put 8.5 million Americans to work building the roads, schools, and parks we still use. The Federal Credit Union Act of 1934 turned a movement that had begun with a single cooperative credit association in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1908 into a permanent, member-owned alternative to the banks. And for a while, it worked. By 1965, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio stood at 21-to-1 — a fraction of today’s figure — because the rules had been rewritten to spread what workers built.

Franklin Roosevelt said it plainly in his second inaugural address, in 1937: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”

Then came the long re-rigging. Beginning in the late 1970s, union membership was hollowed out, the tax code was tilted toward capital, and the ratio climbed from 31-to-1 in 1978 to where it sits today. The point of this history is not nostalgia. It’s proof of concept: the ladder is a policy choice, and policy choices can be made again — differently.

The Blueprint Already Exists — We Just Stopped Looking at It

This is the part I think gets lost in a lot of “the system is rigged” conversations: alternatives aren’t theoretical. They’ve been built, tested, and in some cases actively destroyed by the state precisely because they worked.

Oakland, 1969

In January 1969, the Black Panther Party launched its Free Breakfast for Children Program at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in West Oakland. By November of that year, programs were running in 23 cities; at its peak in 1971, the effort reached at least 36 cities and, by the Party’s own count, fed some 20,000 children in its first year alone — one of dozens of “survival programs” the Party ran under the banner “survival pending revolution,” which also included health clinics, legal aid, and cooperative housing.

It worked well enough, and threatened the existing order enough, that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote to his field offices that the breakfast program “represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for.” The state responded not with investment, but with COINTELPRO: agents visited businesses that donated food and pressured them to stop, went door to door telling Black parents the breakfasts were poisoned and could spread venereal disease, and police raided serving sites while children sat at the tables. In Chicago, officers broke into the church hosting the program, mashed up all the food, and urinated on it.

Mutual aid isn’t a new idea. It’s an idea that has, at points in American history, worked well enough to get violently suppressed.

Ruleville, Mississippi, 1969

That same year, in the Mississippi Delta, Fannie Lou Hamer — the sharecropper’s daughter who had been beaten nearly to death in a Winona jail for registering to vote — founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative in Sunflower County with a $10,000 donation and 40 acres of land. It was built for the Black families who were being fired and evicted for exercising the right to vote. Within two years it had grown to roughly 680 acres, with a “pig bank” that turned 35 gilts and five boars into thousands of pigs for impoverished families, plus a Head Start program, community gardens, a garment factory, a tool bank, and low-income housing.

Freedom Farm eventually folded — not because the model failed, but because it never got the institutional backing it needed to survive. I hold that lesson close. Mutual aid that depends on one person’s unflagging energy dies with that energy. Mutual aid built into durable structure — a cooperative charter, a salary cap written into governance, a fund that circulates by rule rather than by goodwill — can outlive its founders. That’s the difference between a moment and an institution.

That’s the lineage I want Climate Change Community LLC to stand in — not as a comparison of scale, but as a matter of principle. We’re building toward a Financial Support Program that functions like a circulatory system for our membership: subscription support flowing back out to the people who need it, structured so that as the company grows, the safety net grows with it. And we’re doing it with a hard rule, modeled on what Mondragón has proven is possible at scale: no one at Climate Change Community LLC will ever earn more than $235,000 a year, no matter how large the company becomes. If we reach 800 members, the excess doesn’t pool at the top. It goes back into the states, cities, towns, and — most of all — the membership itself.

That’s not charity. It’s restructuring, on purpose, before the incentive to hoard has a chance to set in.  Let me repeat this point:

No one at Climate Change Community LLC will ever earn more than $235,000 a year, no matter how large the company becomes. If we reach 800 members, the excess doesn’t pool at the top. It goes back into the states, cities, towns, and — most of all — the membership itself.

My Own Reckoning with Big Tech

I want to share something personal, because I think it illustrates the dependency problem better than any statistic can.

In 2024, I built up a body of work on YouTube — close to 300 videos across two new channels and one long-running one, most of it focused on Adaptive Resiliency, with more recently added content on renewable energy. Then, without warning, my ability to upload was cut off. I tried it on multiple computers, multiple operating systems. It didn’t matter. Alphabet Inc. had simply ended that relationship, and there was no appeal process that meant anything.

I removed almost everything except some old salsa content and sat with what had happened. What it taught me, in a very direct and personal way, is this: when your income, your voice, or your platform depends entirely on infrastructure someone else owns, it can be taken from you in an instant, and you will have no real recourse. The company town is gone; the company platform has replaced it, and Pullman’s logic — we own the roof over your livelihood — now runs on servers instead of soil. I’ve since stepped back from Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. I keep a Twitter account out of necessity for now — but when Climate Tribe Social and SDL5 open their doors to new members, that dependency ends too.

This is, in miniature, exactly what I mean when I talk about control, power, and wealth. It isn’t only about billion-dollar policy. It’s about a platform quietly deciding you no longer exist, with no one to answer to.

The Storm Already on the Horizon

None of this happens in a vacuum. We are heading into what I call the Fifth Emergency — a climate refugee crisis — and the scale of it is not exaggerated, even in the most careful estimates. The last three years, 2023 through 2025, are the three warmest ever recorded, and the first three-year stretch to average more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels; 2024 remains the hottest year on record, with 2025 close behind at roughly 1.47°C above the pre-industrial baseline. The World Bank’s Groundswell report, using its most sobering internal-migration scenario, projects that 216 million people could be displaced within their own countries by 2050 — a number the same researchers say could be cut to roughly 44 million with strong global mitigation and adaptation efforts. Even the more conservative, verified figures are staggering: weather-related disasters have driven an average of 21.5 million people from their homes every year since 2008, hitting a record 32.6 million in 2022, and projections cited by the UN refugee agency put the number of people forcibly displaced by extreme weather and environmental disaster at more than 200 million by 2050.

Structurally, we are not ready for any of it. There is still no international legal category for a “climate refugee,” and climate displacement doesn’t qualify a person for protection under the 1951 Refugee Convention. The cracks in that wall are only beginning to show. In 2020, the UN Human Rights Committee ruled in Teitiota v. New Zealand — a case brought by a Kiribati man facing sea-level rise — that governments may not deport people to places where climate impacts threaten their right to life, even as it denied his particular claim. And on July 23, 2025, the International Court of Justice issued a unanimous advisory opinion holding that states have binding legal obligations to protect the climate system, and that failing to act may constitute an internationally wrongful act — opening the door, for the first time, to reparations. The law is moving. It is not moving fast enough for the people already packing their bags.

I want to be careful here, because I’ve also seen the number “1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050” circulate widely, including in places I once trusted. Migration researchers have sharply criticized that figure — it traces back to a think-tank estimate built on the assumption that everyone ever displaced stays displaced forever — and I’d rather tell you the harder, real number than the more viral, shakier one. The truth doesn’t need exaggeration to be frightening.

This is why fighting each other — while the entities benefiting from our division keep growing richer — is exactly the outcome those entities are counting on.

Green AI, and Why the Desert Isn’t a Metaphor

I use AI as a collaborator in almost everything I build now, and I’m not going to pretend the environmental cost of that is nothing. Data centers are a legitimate concern — training a single large model like GPT-3 has been estimated to consume around 5.4 million liters of water in total, and a deployed model “drinks” roughly a 500-milliliter bottle of water for every 10 to 50 medium-length answers it gives you. Global AI-related water withdrawals could reach 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic meters annually by 2027 — more than the annual water withdrawal of four to six Denmarks — and roughly two-thirds of the data centers built since 2022 have gone up in water-stressed regions, which tells you exactly whose water the industry plans to use.

But there is a path forward, and it’s already being tested, not just imagined. Desert-region data centers powered by desalinated seawater are a live proposal in some of the driest parts of the world right now — the Gulf states are actively exploring desalination and non-freshwater cooling infrastructure specifically to keep AI’s water footprint off the freshwater supply local communities depend on, and researchers have modeled co-located data centers and desalination plants that use a facility’s waste heat to actually make desalination more efficient, turning a liability into a resource. It isn’t a perfect fix — desalination brine and energy demands are real environmental costs of their own — but it’s a far better direction than draining freshwater basins that families and farms depend on.

And there’s a second half to this: not every AI tool needs a data center at all. Smaller, well-designed models can run locally, on a laptop or PC, without ever touching a hyperscale facility. That’s what I mean by Green AI — using the tool without feeding an infrastructure model that treats water-stressed communities as an acceptable cost of doing business.

What We’re Building, and Why the Date Matters

On August 24th, we open the doors to the Emergency Control Center — Response Hub inside Climate Tribe Social, alongside SDL5, our home for Self-Directed Learning. These aren’t side projects. They’re the actual infrastructure of everything above: a place where the Financial Support Program lives, where the $235,000 salary cap is a matter of public record and not a promise, and where a future “607 Program” — a partnership between states and an accountable federal government — can eventually take shape around a shared, united response to the Climate and Ecological Emergency.

Subscriptions start modestly — around $30 a year gets you on the list, and current blog content will be free to read. There might be one subscriber for a while. I’ve said that plainly before and I’ll say it again, because I think honesty matters more than projecting false momentum. But every mutual aid structure that ever mattered — Mondragón, the Panthers’ survival programs, Hamer’s Freedom Farm, the credit union movement before them — started the same way: small, principled, and stubborn.

I want to be clear that this isn’t a claim that all wealth or all industry is unethical. There are companies, families, and individuals with real resources who operate from genuine care for where humanity is headed. They tend not to seek attention, which is part of why we don’t hear about them as often as we hear about the ones who do. That matters, because the goal here was never to demonize wealth itself — it’s to demonize the extraction that treats human beings and the earth as line items.

Dr. King put it more precisely than I can: “We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” He said that in 1967, and it is, if anything, more true now.

Nelson Mandela said it most directly: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” He knew of what he spoke — during his eighteen years on Robben Island, the prisoners turned their lime quarry into a classroom, teaching one another history, politics, and languages, until the authorities restricted even that; they called it the University of Robben Island. That’s the whole point of SDL5, and of Climate Tribe Social. Education isn’t a side benefit. It’s the thing the unethical side of this equation needs us not to have — because an informed, connected community is a community that can’t be quietly managed.

I’ve heard young people say, plainly, “what’s the use?“ That breaks something in me every time. But I don’t believe our future is dismal. I believe it’s undecided — and Rebecca Solnit said the rest of it better than I can: “Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency.” The deciding happens in exactly the kind of small, stubborn, principled action described above — not in cynicism, and not in waiting for someone else to fix it.

So: subscribe when the doors open on the 24th. Study the laws. Vote. Show up for mom-and-pop shops instead of the platforms that just cut you off without a conversation. And build the ladder we should have had all along — one that doesn’t require stepping on anyone to climb it.

Sources

• HUD, 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, Part 1 (Point-in-Time Count), released May 2026; analysis via the Bipartisan Policy Center and the National Low Income Housing Coalition

• Economic Policy Institute, “CEO pay increased in 2024 and is now 281 times that of the typical worker” (September 2025)

• AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch, company pay ratio data (2024–2025)

• Mondragón Corporation 2024 annual results, via The News Cooperative; Craftsmanship Quarterly on Mondragón’s pay-ratio caps

• California African American Museum and Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare, on the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for Children Program

• SNCC Digital Gateway, on Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm Cooperative

• Center for Progressive Reform & Governing for Impact, Project 2025 Executive Action Tracker (February 2026)

• World Bank, Groundswell: Preparing for Internal Climate Migration (2021 update)

• UNHCR and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, weather-related displacement figures

• UN Human Rights Committee, Teitiota v. New Zealand (2020)

• International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion on Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change (July 23, 2025)

• Copernicus Climate Change Service, Global Climate Highlights 2025; World Meteorological Organization (January 2026)

• Li et al., “Making AI Less Thirsty” (arXiv), on AI’s water footprint

• Bloomberg News, “AI Is Draining Water From Areas That Need It Most” (2025)

• Middle East Council on Global Affairs, “Desert Bytes: Why Gulf AI Ambitions Must Align with Energy and Water Realities”

• Migration Policy Institute, “Climate Migration 101: An Explainer”

• Franklin D. Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address (January 20, 1937)

• Martin Luther King Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?” (SCLC Convention, August 16, 1967)

• Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark