When Governor Ned Lamont describes eight inches of rain falling on Connecticut in a single day as a ‘rain bomb,’ he is using the language of warfare to describe a failure of plumbing. To the casual observer, this is a weather event—a statistical outlier in a warming world. But for those who track the movement of capital and the decay of institutions, the flooding in Fairfield and New Haven counties is a signal. It is not the rain that is the story; it is the fragility of the systems that were designed to ignore it. In the current geopolitical climate, where President Donald Trump is reshaping the federal relationship with state governance and deregulation is the primary lever of economic growth, these ‘rain bombs’ are the physical manifestations of a deeper structural insolvency. The Signal in the Static The prevailing narrative around climate volatility focuses on the ‘new normal.’ This is a...