“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” — Marshall McLuhan The tool being built today has a name: Pax Silica. The belief behind it is older. It is the faith that experts can manage what markets and democracies cannot. It is called technocracy. The movement emerged after…
“Woe to those who plan iniquity, to those who plot evil on their beds! At morning’s light they carry it out because it is in their power to do it. They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them. They defraud people of their homes, they rob them…
“And it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark.” — Revelation 13:17 Pax Silica is a U.S.-led strategic initiative launched…
The 1694 inversion and the Ponzi geometry of the American retirement system “It should be clear that modern fractional reserve banking is a shell game, a Ponzi scheme, a fraud in which fake warehouse receipts are issued and circulate as equivalent to the cash supposedly represented by the receipts.” —…
“War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” — Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (1935) Major General Smedley Butler…
How Financial Extraction Was Invented—and Why We Mistook It for Reality “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until…
“Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.” — attributed to Mayer Amschel Rothschild There is a narrative circulating today—let us call it the Promethean narrative—that offers a seductive explanation for global chaos. It tells its followers that the…
How the State Is Buying the Economy and Reshaping the Global Monetary System “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”— John Adams A few weeks ago, I woke with thoughts about Trump that I…
How the Fed Bails Out the World With Your Savings “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” — Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises The Man Who Downgraded America In August 2011, Deven Sharma did something unprecedented. As president of Standard & Poor’s—one of the three major…
Wars. Waste. Wall Street. Welfare. “The economy doesn’t work for you — it works to extract from you.” —Michael Hudson Financialization is a word you have probably heard in economic news, but its true meaning is rarely explained. The popular media treats it as the natural growth of finance in…