This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor

Kiss the Ring - by Mr. Fish

Kiss the ring. Grovel before the Godfather. Give him tribute, a cut of the spoils. If he and his family get rich you get rich. Enter his inner circle, his “made” men and women, and you do not have to follow rules or obey the law. You can disembowel the machinery of government. You can turn us and the natural world into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. You can commit crimes with impunity. You can make a mockery of democratic norms and social responsibility. Perfidy is very profitable at first. In the long term it is collective suicide.

America is a full blown kleptocracy. The demolition of the social and political structure, begun long before Trump, makes a few very, very rich and immiserates everyone else. Mafia capitalism always leads to a mafia state. The two ruling parties gave us the first. Now we get the second. It is not only our wealth that is being taken from us, but our liberty.

Since the election of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, currently worth $394 billion, saw his wealth increase by $170 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, worth $254 billion, saw his net worth increase by nearly $41 billion.

Tidy sums for kneeling before Moloch.

At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by the slash and burn campaign of the Trump administration have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions, into Musk’s six companies, according to a review by The New York Times.

The mafia state ignores legal constraints and regulations. It lacks external and internal control. It cannibalizes everything, including the ecosystem, until there is nothing left but a wasteland. It cannot distinguish between reality and illusion, which obscures and exacerbates gross incompetence. And then the hollowed-out edifice will collapse leaving in its wake a shell of a country with nukes. The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. So did the Mayans and the sclerotic reign of the French monarch Louis XVI.

In the final stages of decay for all empires, the rulers, focused exclusively on personal enrichment, ensconced in their versions of Versailles or The Forbidden City, squeeze the last drops of profit from an increasingly oppressed and impoverished population and ravaged environment.

Unprecedented wealth is inseparable from unprecedented poverty.

The more extreme life becomes, the more extreme ideologies become. Huge segments of the population, unable to absorb the despair and bleakness, severs itself from a reality-based universe. It takes comfort in magical thinking, a bizarre millennialism — one embodied for us in a Christianized fascism — which turns con artists, morons, criminals, charlatans, gangsters and grifters into prophets while branding those who decry the pillage and corruption into traitors. The rush towards self-immolation accelerates intellectual and moral paralysis.

The mafia state makes no pretense of defending the common good. Trump, Musk and their minions are swiftly repealing executive orders regarding health, environmental and safety regulations, food assistance, as well as child care programs such as Head Start. They are fighting a court order to halt their dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has ensured that Americans have been reimbursed with more than $21 billion due to cancelled debts, financial compensation and other forms of consumer relief. They are abolishing the U.S. Agency for International Development. They are closing federal defenders’ offices, which provide legal representation to the poor. They have cut billions of dollars from the budget of the National Institutes of Health jeopardizing biomedical research and clinical trials. They have frozen permits for solar and wind projects, including sign-offs needed for projects on private land. They fired more than 300 staffers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency that manages our nuclear stockpile. They are gutting the workforce of the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and the United States Geological Survey.

The mafia state, its blueprint contained in Project 2025, ignores the dire lessons from history of extreme social inequality, political disintegration, wanton ecological plunder and the evisceration of the rule of law.

We are, of course, not naturally destined for freedom. It was two millennia before democracy reappeared in Europe after its collapse — largely because Athens became an empire — in ancient Greece. The mafia state, not democracies, may be the wave of the future, one where the wealthiest one percent of the globe owns some 43 percent of all global financial assets – more than 95 percent of the human race — while 44 percent of the planet’s population lives below the World Bank’s poverty line of less than $6.85 per day. These calcified regimes endure solely because of draconian systems of internal control, wholesale surveillance and the evisceration of civil liberties.

We have at the same time wiped out 90 percent of the large fish such as cod, sharks, halibut, grouper, tuna, swordfish, and marlin and degraded or destroyed two thirds of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet. Lack of access to safe drinking water, and the resultant spread of infectious diseases, kills at least 1.4 million people annually — 3,836 per day — and also contributes to 50 percent of global malnutrition, according to the World Bank. Between 150 and 200 million children are impaired by malnourishment. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is well above the 350 parts per million that most climate scientists warn is the maximum level for sustaining life as we know it. By May of this year, atmospheric CO2 levels are forecast to reach 429.6 ppm, the highest concentration in over two million years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the measurement could reach 541 to 970 ppm by the year 2100. At that point huge parts of the planet, beset with high population density, droughts, soil erosion, freak storms, massive crop failures and rising sea levels, will be unfit for human existence.

Clans, in the later period of the Easter Island civilization, competed to honor their ancestors by constructing larger and larger hewn stoner images, which demanded the last remnants of the timber, rope and manpower on the island. By the year 1400 the woods were gone. The soil had eroded and washed into the sea. The islanders began to fight over old timbers and were reduced to eating their dogs and soon all the nesting birds.

The desperate islanders developed a magical belief system that the erected stone gods, the moai, would come to life and save them from disaster.

The belief by Christian nationalists in the rapture, which does not exist in the Bible, is no less fantastic. These Christian fascists — embodied in Trump app...