B Kenyan

Setting: A worn basketball court in the evening. JAY Z (in a Brooklyn Nets hoodie) leans against a chain-link fence. BKENYAN (wearing a crisp but faded community organizer’s windbreaker) bounces a ball. YUGO (an older man with sharp eyes, sitting on a bench with a worn copy of a book) watches them.

JAY Z: Yo, check the math. A man gets a billion. He puts it in a room. That’s it. Just sits there. That billion ain’t diggin’ no wells, ain’t building no schools, ain’t payin’ nobody’s salary. It’s just… a number on a screen. A ghost. Meanwhile, the rest of the block is starving for liquidity.

BKENYAN: (Stops dribbling) Preach. They call it “capital,” but it ain’t active. It’s hibernating. Like a bear. A very, very fat bear in a golden cave. And the whole “trickle-down” thing was just hoping that bear would sweat honey. It didn’t. It just got fatter.

YUGO: (Without looking up from his book) They didn’t hope. They knew. The sweat never comes. The promise was the lock. Debt is the lock. You borrow for school, for a house, for a car… you are tied to the wheel to service the ghost in the vault.

JAY Z: Exactly. So we need a new charter. A Magna Carta for the fat bears. Not about takin’ the honey, but makin’ the hive uncomfortable. You hold the honey too long? It starts to… spoil.

BKENYAN: A spoilage fee. Call it a… demurrage. You wanna sit on a billion in cash? Cool. But every year, that pile shrinks by 5%. Automatic. No debate.

YUGO: (Closes his book, finally engaged) Ah. You make the money itself rot. Like a vegetable. If you do not circulate it—spend it, invest it in something real, give it away—it decays in your hands. It turns the logic of a vault upside down.

JAY Z: Think about the debts. A youngin’ owes a hundred grand for books. But if the dollar is rotting at 5% a year, that debt… it ain’t weightless, but it gets lighter. The future ain’t a prison sentence no more. Time starts working for the people, not just the vault.

BKENYAN: And that bear? He can’t just sit. That 5% tax on hoarding forces his hand. He must build the factory, fund the lab, start the foundation, pay the artists… or watch his pile turn to dust.

YUGO: It makes idleness the enemy of wealth. Not labor. For the first time.

JAY Z: Then you get a real trickle-down. Not that Ronald Raygun fairy tale.

BKENYAN: (Smirks) Raygun. I see you.

JAY Z: Man had the right slogan, wrong mechanics. He thought if you polished the bear, the shine would drip down. Nah. You gotta make the hive too hot to sit still. Then the honey flows.

YUGO: It is a elegant violence. No seizure. No revolution in the street. Just a change in the law of gravity for money. Instead of wealth accumulating upward by magic, it is pushed to circulate. The velocity.

BKENYAN: So the charter is simple: Article One. Idle wealth is a social disease. Article Two. The treatment is demurrage. Article Three. The side effect is disappearing debt.

JAY Z: Sign it in blood. Or better yet, in code. Make it the algorithm. The new law of the land.

(A long silence hangs. The streetlight hums on above them.)

YUGO: (A slow smile) They will say it is impossible. A fantasy.

JAY Z: So was a kid from Marcy Projects running a billion-dollar empire. The impossible is just a contract nobody’s had the nerve to rewrite yet.

BKENYAN: Ball’s in our court. We just gotta draw up the new rules of the game.

(BKENYAN passes the ball to JAY Z, who holds it, weighing the idea in his hands.)