Is Our World “A Business Model” that Keeps Us in One GIGANTIC Debt Trap?

34 min readMay 27, 2022

Saluting the eagle-eye Katherine Bosiacki for making very precious time to edit this

“The rulers of the corporate system are not genuinely elected by anybody, and they are not answerable for the exercise of their more important powers to any elected officials. The privacy of this private government serves mainly to ensure its authoritarian nature … a lawless institution … The great power of the corporate system is both illegitimate and irresponsible because in form it has not been made coherent with other purposes in the society, and in fact it is not devoted to fulfilling the purpose for which it was created — production …

business is a fairly irresponsible form of government since ostensibly it is bound only by its own self-interest. Also, it is unfortunately authoritarian …

a market is also a financial slaughterhouse, where the strong chop up the weak … It is the whole property system, not the money-and-credit system alone, that decisively represents our society’s attempt to control and rationalize the real world of things and the people, pari passu thingified, who live in it.” David T. Bazelon, corporate lawyer turned writer/teacher, wrote about a decade before Richard Nixon unleashed the greatest fiat currency experiment on humanity.

The Whole World in Debt: Cui Bono?

“These Debt Slaves are the Government’s Largest Asset Class …” Wolf Richter

“Debt is an efficient tool. It ensures access to other peoples’ raw materials and infrastructure on the cheapest possible terms … ” Susan George

“The object of warfare is to take over a country’s land, raw materials and assets, and grab them. In the past, that used to be done militarily, by invading them. But today you can do it financially, simply by creating credit.” Michael Hudson

Living a “cradle to grave” business plan in a world packed with Business-as-usual (BAU) models, are you aware:

“Everything we think we know about the world is a model. Our models do have a strong congruence with the world. Our models fall far short of representing the real world fully.” Donella Meadows

Or how anchored on spreadsheets not transparent to us, the top-down BAU system of control makes us complicit in feeding its insatiable (debt) appetite because these models keep many fighting to enact Frederick Winslow Taylor’s dream:

”In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.”

Since measures adopted ultimately put Henry Ford’s factory assembly line legacy system first, don’t very simple BAU models turn us into Pavlov’s dogs — living our lives stuck in models ruled by numbers?

For instance:

“Schools care about test scores, but only because they measure learning. It’s only a measure, until you use it to determine graduation requirements. Investors care about bond ratings, but only because they measure risk of default. It’s only a measure, until you use it to determine capital reserves. Bank regulators care about capital reserves, but only because it is a measure of solvency. It’s only a measure, until you use it to set bank reserve requirements.” David Manheim

“GDP is a metric of economic exchange required for survival in society as it exists … mediated by GDP, you’re only seeing the extremely small sliver that pops into existence when people exchange something involving legal tender … (because) most of human wealth is unmeasured by GDP.” Luke Smith

But in The Tyranny of Metrics, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage our obsession with metrics is causing. Believing the path to success is quantifying human performance, publicizing the results, and dividing up the rewards based on the numbers, organizations have gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself.

Based on a Wall Street-created myth, the latest fad focuses on measuring environmental, social, and governance (ESG) funds that invest in “responsible” companies:

“ESG data is not data, it’s opinion. We can’t and shouldn’t claim direct impact in secondary markets. Investors are one cog in the wheel that turns the global economy. You can’t change the world or fix climate change by buying and selling shares and bonds.” Ashley Hamilton Claxton, Head of Responsible Investment at Royal London Asset Management

Goodhart’s Law states:

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

But born into a world where value is only found in “winners,” and we need fiat currencies to survive, money may be all that you see. Not how the key value metric is to keep the insatiable BAU system running as the system commodifies human labor and turns us into cogs/debt slaves.

Since “the system must be first,” models also greatly simplify what it means to be human.

Alas, in Models Will Run the World, Steven A. Cohen and Matthew W. Granade opined models are the source of the real power behind Artificial intelligence (AI) and big data:

“A model is a decision framework in which the logic is derived by algorithm from data, rather than explicitly programmed by a developer or implicitly conveyed via a person’s intuition. The output is a prediction on which a decision can be made. Once created, a model can learn from its successes and failures with speed and sophistication that humans usually cannot match … In a data-driven business, the data helps the business;

in a model-driven business, the models are the business.”

Is Rent-Seeking the Invisible Core BAU Model?

Legal fiction: “an assumed fact notoriously false, upon which one reasons as if it were true.” Jeremy Bentham, Theory of Legislation

About a year before the Nixon shock, Milton Friedman’s NYT article: “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits …” had seduced American businesses grappling with the initial impact of globalization.

“Milton Friedman has said … ‘There is no such thing as a free lunch.’ But the economy today is all about how to get a free lunch. That is what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were all about, and what government bailouts of the financial sector tend to be about.” Michael Hudson

Aka “rent-seeking” behavior:

“You might think that giving away money is free, but it is not. Even if you hold a random lottery, potential winners still need to take the time to enter. At my $5 hourly wage, my entry cost me $15. I learned later they received 450 entries. If my experience was typical, the rent-seeking cost of all the applicants was $6,750 just to win a $1,000 scholarship. If you add the time to judge the competition and send return letters, the waste gets even greater …

Much rent-seeking is redistributing the surplus of one group of the middle class to another group of the middle class via the government. Although there might be great incentives for one group to seek another’s surplus, there is no added value for society as a whole.” David John Marotta

In the BAU paradigm of control through manufacturing scarcity, competition is rent-seeking:

“Every market is structured and managed. Every economy is a planned economy ... Right now, instead of the government planning the economy, you have Wall Street planning the economy, and that’s more centralized than government planning.” Michael Hudson

As the “invisible hand” (key beneficiaries of the system hidden behind the thick layer of legal fictions/corporate persons) self-organizes how profits are privatized and risks/losses are socialized and outsourced to us, won’t it have carte blanche to grow at everyone’s expense?

Working for such legal models hones you on competing to be better, faster and cheaper to keep your livelihood/status. Isn’t that how you habitually learn to value and normalize inhumane behaviors of cruelty, enabling the most ruthless to take all at all costs?

The Nixon shock happened on August 15, 1971.

On August 23, 1971, some five months before his January 1972 elevation to the bench, the future US Supreme Court justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. drafted a confidential memorandum for the corporate takeover of the dominant public institutions of American society:

“The memo, titled ‘Attack on American Free Enterprise System,’ was breathtaking in its scope and ambition … It was, as writer Steven Higgs noted in a 2012 article …, ‘A Call to Arms for Class War: From the Top Down’.” Bill Blum

Although circulated and discussed within the Chamber and in wider business consortia, the public only became aware of it in September 1972. That month, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson devoted two pieces to describe the memo as “a blueprint for an assault by big business on its critics” as it reflects a “militant political action program.”

To explore the context of root causes for the mess our world is in, do read Why do we do what we do? Aka the world we collectively create to live if you have not done so …

How National Rent-Seeking Models went Global

“ … the way in which the economy was getting rich was actually impoverishing it, and what seems to be getting better and better was really masked by the words that were used by the media, by television, by The New York Times. They were euphemizing all of what was happening. In other words, a euphemism is something to make a bad trend look good. So … if you can distract people to celebrate wealth and splendor at the top of the economic pyramid then they’re going to not be so aware of the bottom 99% and how things are doing below the top 1%.” Michael Hudson

In March 1960, J. C. R. Licklider, “the early computing visionary you’ve probably never heard of ” who went on to found Infocom with staff and students of MIT, wrote about AI in Man-Computer Symbiosis.

Licklider had also mused how a late French philosopher of science and mathematics would tell future frustrated computer users: “The question is not, ‘What is the answer?’ The question is, ‘What is the question?’”

“The information-processing equipment … will convert hypotheses into testable models and then test the models against data (which the human operator may designate roughly and identify as relevant when the computer presents them for his approval). The equipment will answer questions. … It will transform data, plot graphs (“cutting the cake” in whatever way the human operator specifies, or in several alternative ways …). … It will convert static equations or logical statements into dynamic models so the human operator can examine their behavior. In general, it will carry out the routinizable, clerical operations that fill the intervals between decisions.

In addition, the computer will serve as a statistical-inference, decision-theory, or game-theory machine to make elementary evaluations of suggested courses of action whenever there is enough basis to support a formal statistical analysis. Finally, it will do as much diagnosis, pattern-matching, and relevance-recognizing as it profitably can, but it will accept a clearly secondary status in those areas.”

Was that possibility of covert control what led Aurelio Peccei, key founder of the Club of Rome, to Jay Wright Forrester, the founder of system dynamics? Forrester’s book Urban Dynamics eventually pioneered how to centrally model the complex interactions of the world’s economy, population and ecology.

Adapted from my last article:

“Apparently, until the 1960s, businesses drew up plans without understanding the underlying dynamics of ‘systemically putting together all the elements that determined their corporate fate.’

According to Walter Kiechel, author of The Lords of Strategy: The Secret Intellectual History of the New Corporate World, four men — ‘each obsessed with pinpointing how companies achieve competitive advantage over others’ — were key to inventing what we call ‘corporate strategy’ today.”

As these four men set in motion the modern, multibillion-dollar consulting industry in the 1960s, they kickstarted “the bit-by-bit creation of the first comprehensive paradigm that pulled together all the elements most vital for a company to take into account if it is to compete, win, and survive” aka how our lives today revolve around growing Big Business and being centrally self-governed by numbers.”

Creating an Opaque Self-Perpetuating System

“The classical meaning of ‘rent-seeking’ refers to landlords, natural resource owners or monopolists who extract economic rent by special privilege, without their own labor or enterprise.” Michael Hudson

Doing their jobs based on their self-interests, did the four men sell strategy models for self-interested business parties to fight to build the rent-seeking foundation for the zero-sum BAU system of control?

At the June 1970 Club of Rome meeting in Berne, Switzerland, discussions of world problems became the basis for the model that appeared in World Dynamics, which was used in meetings with its executive committee at MIT the following month.

With the decision taken to support research at MIT, Eduard Pestel arranged for the Volkswagen Foundation to support work that resulted in The Limits to Growth book. The former bricklayer co-authored Mankind at the Turning Point in 1974, the second report of the Club of Rome, and wrote Beyond the Limits to Growth, published the year after the Economist signaled us to “Get ready for a world currency” and the founding of BlackRock (1988).

In 1987, the (Second) Most Important Bank You’ve Never Heard of was introduced by Edmund de Rothschild at the 4th World Wilderness Congress as the International Conservation Bank. The Global Environment Facility’s (GEF) was finally established on the eve of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, “to help tackle our planet’s most pressing environmental problems.”

Did the Club of Rome openly declare war on humanity the September before?

“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.” The First Global Revolution

The second Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 was when the United Nations launched Agenda 21 as a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society.”

Urban Dynamics went on to model the behavior of the US economy and the impact of public policy (aka the System Dynamics National Model):

“The National Model identified for the first time the feedback loops causing the economic long wave (or Kondratieff cycle) with peaks followed by major depressions some 45 to 65 years apart. The short-term business cycle (three to ten years between peaks) involves an overbuilding and underbuilding of consumer durables. In a similar way, the economic long wave arises mostly from the overbuilding of capital plant and the excessive debts associated with it, followed by the collapse of production of physical capital and the repayment of debt.” Jay W. Forrester

After Forrester’s 1971 talk at a joint NATO/US conference on cities in Indianapolis, Indiana, William Dietel, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, kickstarted funding how system dynamics was applied to the behavior of economic systems, top-down.

That year saw the setting up of The Inter-Alpha Group of Banks, a financial syndicate controlled by British baron and financier Lord Jacob Rothschild. As a syndicate of six European banks,

“Its composition has changed over the years, as it adapted to changing circumstances, but its essence as a tool for destroying nation-states and their populations for the glory of the British Empire has not changed a whit.” Sam Parker and Joe Mhlanga

Parker and Mhlanga also shared:

“… there are two financial networks of power in the world today. One is based in New York, and is headed by the Rockefeller family. The other is based in London, and is headed by the Rothschild family …

The banks in the group represent the family funds (or fondi) of some of the most powerful families in Europe, and provide a mechanism for those funds to be deployed, hidden from public view. These old families, located in enclaves across Europe, wield enormous power, but do so discreetly, to keep their power and influence hidden from the general public.

… the financier networks that are making these inhuman demands are continuing to loot the planet through a variety of open and hidden bailout schemes, currency manipulations, and derivatives scams — in short, these sanctimonious and hypocritical bastards continue to steal us all blind — destroying the basis for our very existence.”

Was the greatest fiat currency experiment hijacked to systemically centralize modeling putting us and our countries deeper and deeper into debt? If we stop borrowing money and pay back loans, will it falter? Is that why legal fictions modeled on the original corporate raider have to have no greater god than greed? If you borrow more to spend money you don’t have on things you don’t need, won’t that also boost GDP and corporate profits?

When you borrow from a financial institution, isn’t money literally created from nothing? Doesn’t fractional reserve banking also allow banks to hold a small portion of your deposits while legally loaning out the rest?

In 1941, the governor of the Federal Reserve System testifying before the House Committee on Banking and Currency shared how the Fed got the money to purchase two billion dollars’ worth of government bonds in 1933:

“If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money.” Marriner Eccles

But as World War II came to a close, the Bretton Woods Agreement saw the US dollar officially crowned as the world’s reserve currency, initially backed by the world’s largest gold reserves.

In A Fate Worse Than Debt, Susan George called the interlocking network of national banks, Third World elites and Bretton Woods institutions “The Consortium” responsible for the birth and continuation of the debt crisis.

Did “The Consortium” use the National Model to globally model top-down boom bust cycles?

“the measure of success of the central bank is whether we have boom bust cycles.” Richard Werner

Central banks control the money supply of their countries by adjusting interest rates. Invariably, don’t such cycles enable institutional investors to legally have their pick of bargains that we Greater fools have slaved so hard to buy but can no longer afford to keep?

Likewise, is the measure of success of the Bretton Woods institutions to develop progressive Stockholm Syndrome models for the global debt system to legally bankrupt our nations? After World War II, did they build debt trap (aka rent-seeking) models from the bankruptcies of Mexico, Thailand, Argentina, Greece, and Iceland, among others?

When governments fall into the trap of accepting loans in foreign currencies, don’t they become “debtor nations” subject to International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Bank of International Settlements (BIS) regulations?

BIS is the central bank of central banks.

BIS regulations serve only the single purpose of strengthening the international private banking system, even at the peril of national economies. The BIS does to national banking systems what the IMF has done to national monetary regimes.” Henry C K Liu

“When you understand that the BIS pulls the strings of the world’s monetary system, you then understand that they have the ability to create a financial boom or bust in a country. If that country is not doing what the money lenders want, then all they have to do is sell its currency.” Joan Veon in 2003

Do National Debts Impact Our Lives?

“The national debt level has been a significant subject of controversy for U.S. domestic policy … Unfortunately, the manner in which the debt level is conveyed to the general public is usually very obscure. Couple this problem with the fact many people do not understand how the national debt level affects their daily lives.” Investopedia

Since most of our means of survival is already outsourced to legal fictions called transnational corporations (TNCs), we are self-organized to fuel the system, continually scrambling after money — to pay for our shelter (rent/mortgage), food, water, energy, health care, transportation, education, status, etc.

Buried in the 21st century’s Tower of Babel, the world debt clocks tome how they are an “indicator (that) is rising on a daily basis” by displaying the (fixed) “Interest per Second” and “Debt per Citizen,” etc.

Is that used to discreetly tell us that we (and our future generations) are legally liable for whatever’s “legal tender”?

No breakdown is provided other than that it consists of “debt of households, corporations, government and financial institutions” but click to find out your country’s national debt:

“the total amount of money that the government of a country owes to companies, countries, etc.” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary

Whom does a country owe its debt (and the perpetual 6% per annum interest) to? If interests keep compounding, can national debts ever be cleared as interests pay the repayments of the principle?

“National debt can mean the debt of the national or central government …Government debt can mean the combined debt of different layers of government, so combines national, municipal and other levels

Public debt may include government debt and debt of other parts of the public sector, such as public corporations

None of these explicitly appear in the balance of payments statistics, especially as most public debt is owed to the domestic private sector.” Economics Stack Exchange

Since money turns human/real value into exchange value to keep us feeding the BAU casino, are financial-institution-created derivatives of all sorts (aka nothing real) included in the national debt counts?

“A derivative is a financial contract whose value is derived from an underlying asset. These contracts can be bought and sold, resulting in profit or loss, without the investors having to own the actual underlying asset.” Investopedia

“A derivative is a legal bet on the future value or performance of something else … derivatives have transformed the financial system. It has never been so easy to move money from country to country and market to market, nor move it so quickly, nor to take on so much risk in the blink of an eye. Derivatives have fundamentally altered the way markets work. In the space of less than 30 years they have become integral to the whole elaborate structure of international finance … Today, (Jan 2016), we have the biggest financial bubble in history. Every financial institution in the world is bankrupt, or close to it.” Sam Parker and Joe Mhlanga

Egon von Greyerz, commodities trader, on The $2.3 Quadrillion Global Debt Timebomb:

“These investment banks are making casino bets that they can’t afford to lose. What their boards and top management don’t realise or understand is that the traders, supported by easily manipulated risk managers, are betting the bank on a daily basis.”

Then mull over how a derivatives trader explained, “If someone is losing and another is gaining” in The DERIVATIVES TIME BOMB — That Clear and Present Danger HOAX!

In this zero sum system, isn’t someone’s loss another person’s gain? Doesn’t a debt automatically create an equal credit and a credit automatically create an equal debt? Mathematically, shouldn’t debt and credit always cancel each other out? If so, if there is a world debt clock, shouldn’t there also be a world credit clock? Why is there no readily available breakdown of either?

Or see if you can find that as I’ve not been able to.

I explore root causes for the mess our world is in, but not being an economist, I find these responses (summarized) about national debts interesting:

National debts are owed to the financial markets (aka private banks) who lend credit which they create themselves as they control your nation’s central bank. This is due to the fractional reserve system, which perpetually creates debt out of nothing. With money in the system, the “gilt-edged” status of government bonds is used as a security to create up to 9 times its original value (aka credit), which is then lent to the public and businesses. Interest is charged to your government on the original loan and the interest goes to private banks.

Has William Paterson’s “perpetual interest” legacy that birthed the Bank of England in 1694 ensured there will never be enough money to pay back all the debt?

Does a cartel of private banks that make up the financial markets own the US Federal Reserve so nations underwrite their national debts with real people and whatever’s ours as collaterals?

“This Act (the Federal Reserve Act, Dec. 23rd 1913) establishes the most gigantic trust on earth. When the President signs this bill, the invisible government by the Monetary Power will be legalized … The worst legislative crime of the ages is perpetrated by this banking bill … The financial system … has been turned over to … the Federal Reserve Board. The board administers the finance system by authority of … a purely profiteering group. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people’s money.” US Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh

“I would suggest that central banking, which exists in one way or another in all advanced capitalist credit economies, is a form of underwriting. The central bank and its depositors underwrite each other’s promises.
Underwriting is the greatest credit invention of them all … Really all it amounts to is endorsement or guaranty — one man’s credit standing behind, ‘written under,’ another’s … Underwriting … is simply a sophisticated adjunct to the more ancient act of governing.” David T. Bazelon

Although a massive conflict of interests, can our being unwitting cogs/debt slaves have its covert beginnings on Jekyll Island, Georgia in late 1910?

Before you and I were born, did a small secretive group of people — doing their jobs — meet to plot how to systematically control us to extract our real value?

“From now on, depressions will be scientifically created.” US Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh on the creation of the Federal Reserve

Because the same month that the US Federal Reserve was founded, Henry Ford launched his factory assembly line model to pilot what’s been at the core of management science — increasing work rate and reducing wages. That same year, the US Bureau of Internal Revenue was also established to impose a tax on income.

“Banking reform becomes the mantra of neo-liberal globalization while the real systemic risk in the global economy has been socialized globally through structured finance, and the benefits of socializing such risk remains concentrated in the hands of private investors in the rich economies.” Henry C K Liu

Slightly over a century later, is that why we’re now being bombarded by a global marketing campaign that tells us that by 2030, “You will own nothing, and you will be happy”?

An old form of inhumanity repackaged as new?

“Property ownership as we know it is under attack and fading fast. The Internet of Things and digital property ownership systems are being built on the old feudal model.” Joshua Fairfield, Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom

“[T]he powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.” Dr. Carroll Quigley

The key to their success?

“The international bankers would control and manipulate the money system of a nation while letting it appear to be controlled by the government.”

On April 7, 2009, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wrote an article titled “The G20 Moves the World a Step Closer to a Global Currency”:

“A single clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders amounts to revolution in the global financial order. We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity …

SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century.

In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global ‘quantitative easing’. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body … It has been a good summit for the IMF. Its fighting fund for crises is to be tripled overnight to $750bn. This is real money … There is now a world currency in waiting. In time, SDRs are likely evolve into a parking place for the foreign holdings of central banks, led by the People’s Bank of China.”

The following month, did deeply addicted self-interested parties with skin in the BAU game rush to drum up a new market for even greater control?

“In May of 2009, a secret meeting of billionaire philanthropists took place in which they sought to coordinate how to address the world’s environmental, social, and industrial threats. Each billionaire … was given 15 minutes to discuss their preferred cause, and then they deliberated to create an umbrella cause to harness all their interests. The end result was that the umbrella cause for which the billionaires would aim to give to was population control, which would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat. Among those present at the meeting were David Rockefeller, Jr., George Soros, Warren Buffet, Michael Bloomberg, Ted Turner, Bill Gates, and even Oprah Winfrey.” Andrew Gavin Marshall

Four months later, the United Nations proposed a new “Global Currency” to be managed by a “Global Reserve Bank.”

Foxes Surrounding the Hen House

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” Lord Acton

Ten years went by before a new corporate and government marriage quietly took place between the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the UN in June 2019. According to Harris Gleckman, that agreement turned the UN into a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) where “the Secretary-General of the UN is marginalizing the intergovernmental system in order to ‘save’ it.”

Largely composed of a self-selected group of multinational corporations with organizations and individuals they want to work with, they will “work without any common internal rule book to protect the views of all who might be impacted by the group.”

Still based on “the system must be first,” the WEF positions itself as “the international organization for Public-Private Cooperation.” Is the Great Reset a merger of state (public) and corporate (private) power for TNCs to dictate global governance?

“Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Benito Mussolini

As Public-Private Cooperation resets the ways we live, eat, learn and communicate for the common good, will wetware turn humans into technology based on mathematical algorithms formulated and tweaked for powerful corporate interests?

Are you still acting rationally in a world you recognize and understand but that never really existed because it’s all “A Business Model” that keeps all of us in One GIGANTIC Debt Trap?

“Property is not the thing, it is rights in and to the thing. Consequently, the ordinary notion of property, as being made up of things, is almost exactly wrong. Most frequently, property ends up being a right to force someone to act or refrain from acting in a certain way toward a certain thing, or to pay for the privilege of refusal — pay in that biggest of all forms of property, money, the great common denominator.

The generic form of property is a contract, an agreement, a promise … contracts are made up of mutual promises, with the added proviso that in law a man may ‘promise’ by his course of conduct …

the most valuable ‘property’ is not property at all — it is the institutional control over profit-making enterprises and opportunities.

Many of these are created directly by the government, and all are sustained by its underwriting activities. This institutional situation — the capacity or right or opportunity to make a profit — is the keystone, cornerstone, and top-and-bottom-stone of our system of paper-values … What is most important now is the control of property.” David T. Bazelon, The Paper Economy and The Scarcity Makers

As data becomes the future of no/programmable money, John Titus has shared:

“all electronic money is created as debt”

and how in 2020:

“For the first time ever, the Fed used its power to create new reserves in the wholesale monetary circuit to effect the parallel creation of new bank money in the retail circuit, and it did so to the tune of about $3.5 trillion …

What’s more, this plan was presented to the Fed by BlackRock, which the Fed later appointed to assist the Fed in executing the $3.5 trillion plan. To put it bluntly, the actions taken by the Federal Reserve starting in March of 2020 — actions that represented a massive departure from the Fed’s responses to crises before that time, as we have just seen — are exactly what BlackRock told the Fed to do in Jackson Hole, Wyoming … in August 2019, months before the first coronavirus story broke, that BlackRock instructed the Fed to get money into wholesale and retail hands when ‘the next downturn’ arrived — which, as luck would have it, occurred less than a month later.”

In August 2020, an employee at the Rockefeller Foundation called for A Bretton Woods for AI: Ensuring Benefits for Everyone. The following year, the foundation reminded G20 Finance Ministers to pressure the World Bank and to accelerate the issuance of $650 billion in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) by the IMF.

In December 2020, articles on The Great Reset: BlackRock Is Fueling a $120 Trillion Transformation on Wall St. started surfacing.

Four months later, the IMF played up how Dangerous Global Debt Burden Requires Decisive Cooperation. With effect from April 2021, their latest projections sing that global public debt has reached 100% of global gross domestic product (GDP), up from 83.3% in 2019 and 96.4% in 2020 and lists the 20 countries with the highest debt-to-GDP ratios.

Last December, it shared “The 2021 update of the IMF’s Global Debt Database documents the largest one-year debt surge after World War II. As countries were hit by the pandemic, global debt rose to $226 trillion, or 256 percent of GDP in 2020. Borrowing by governments accounted for slightly more than half of this increase, as global public debt jumped by 20 percent. The share of public debt in global debt reached new highs not seen in more than 50 years, reflecting a large cumulative increase since the global financial crisis. Private debt rose by 10 percent in 2020, partly reflecting the support of central banks and government.”

To quote W. Edwards Deming again, isn’t every system perfectly designed to get the results it gets?

But WEF’s Klaus Schwab insists, “The problem that we have is not globalization. The problem is a lack of global governance, a lack of means to address global issues.”

So, is the “invisible hand” now self-organizing us — from the world’s dumbest idea (with fiat currencies) to the world’s most dangerous (with our data) — to have us crowd-actualize our lifelong digital prison?

According to LifeSiteNews, UN Chief António Guterres announced the creation of a fund on April 1, 2020 — and simultaneously asked nations to contribute the equivalent of at least 10% of the annual income of the entire planet to a massive “human-centered, innovative and coordinated stimulus package” to be administered at the international level.

That is the equivalent of approximately 8.7 trillion USD, an unprecedented amount that’s 2,900 times greater than the UN’s annual budget of 3 billion USD.

The proposed plan would effectively place a global agency, presumably the UN itself, in charge of propping up the economies of the world by placing it in charge of 10% of global income.

Guterres also wanted 100 billion USD for the World Health Organization (WHO) to build an “interconnected Global Health Emergency System for data, workforce, and supplies.”

Between May 22–28, 2022, the WHO is hosting its (annual) 75th World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland. Delegates from at least 194 nations will vote on whether additional sovereignty, control and legal authority will be handed to it. If approved, the WHO could override national governments and have the authority to dictate international health emergencies.

Calls for Digital Rent-Seeking Models

“You are not the product, you are the abandoned carcass.” Shoshana Zuboff

Today, the water we swim in is an umbrella paradigm presided by legal fictions with no greater god than greed as they dangle wages, jobs and opportunities so you voluntarily surrender your time, ideas, energy, skills — YOUR (INNATE) VALUE — to them for money. Much like Voluntary Servitude?

What is the context of Davos elite Ida Auken’s 2030 spin: “I don’t own anything. I don’t own a car. I don’t own a house. I don’t own any appliances or any clothes … One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much”?

Are derivative model bubbles tanking the greatest fiat currency experiment even as automation, robotics and AI replace humans so old cash cow models that feed the system (e.g., income taxes, pensions, buying/owning properties) won’t work going forward?

Since better, faster, cheaper is the core BAU fixation for the BAU system to be first, what profit-maximizing businesses will want to keep shelling out money they no longer need to?

Is that why there are so many rent-seeking calls/white papers for new digital models/forms of control?

Because before data can be the future of no/programmable money, the market has to be created for cryptos, blockchain and smart contract models to become the “trustless” solutions where we only trust the platform/system.

In 1996, the NSA released the “How to make a mint: The cryptography of anonymous electronic cash” paper.

Typical of the BAU casino of control through scarcity, Bitcoin mining is a lottery. Each computer mining Bitcoin “buys lottery tickets” (uses electricity) to try to win freshly minted Bitcoins in a proof-of-work (POW) Consensus. The POW algorithm determines who wins the rights to add blocks to the Bitcoin blockchain but the more numerous the miners, the harder it gets to strike the lottery.

D-CENT: Freecoin Toolchain Design and application to Pilots suggests how social POW can standardize behaviors for the common good through rewards:

“… the Digital Social Currency pilots will experiment and test a new notion of proof-of-work: the Social Proof-of-Work … proof that a member in the system is endowed with coins as a reward to an action in the real world while abiding to community rules and enhancing collective values.”

D-CENT Digital Social Currency pilots are experiments in reputation management where the creation of money is “motivated by social interactions for the common good”:

“Essentially, YOUR proof of social activity that can be measured and validated. If you succeed in showing your actions meet such a criteria, you will be rewarded some form of crypto tokens. Most likely some digital carbon credit based voucher that can only be spent according to allowance thresholds and digital autonomous governance rules (AI based). These are all smart contract tokens.” Bantam Joe

Won’t this turn humans and whatever we own into digital fuel for the insatiable BAU system?

As the UN dictates and enforces standardizing what it means to be a sustainable human for the global rent-seekers, isn’t the ultimate dream of domination to have the dominated exploit one another?

Aside from all the digital model experiments, including with cryptos, blockchain, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), distributed-ledger technology (DLT), non-fungible tokens (NFT), Internet of Things, Web 3.0, smart contracts, tokenization, social/complementary currencies and DeFi, which Alex Dunsdon thinks is more appropriately called “derivatives finance”:

“Lock up fiat as collateral
Mint new coin
Then lever coin
Then lend coin
Then rehypothecate coin
4 or more new coins created from one single coin
Kinda like the fractional reserve banking it wants to disrupt, no?
New boss = same as the old boss?”

The More Things Change, the More They Remain the Same

“we live in a world more legally tailored for corporate persons than humans.” Charlie Stross

“Unearned income is income that really is paid to an unnecessary class. They used to be called the idle rich in the 19th century … [Veblen] called them the vested interests. They were the people who actually run society and they secure their status by dumbing down economics. Veblen wrote wonderful books about the decay of education, which he said was the ideology of the ruling class. The purpose of economic education is not to explain how the world works, but to give a vocabulary that will confuse people into believing that the world has to be the way it is, so that there is no alternative, instead of thinking about possible reforms.” Michael Hudson

The more things change, the more many will try to defend what they do because addicted to BAU thinking and doing, not many realize the system keeps stealing our most important essence — what it means to be human.

As so much is intentionally opaque at the systemic level, many believe business models are our reality.

While control is rapidly being centralized into fewer hands at the international level, technocrats are still busy pitching their distributed and decentralized models, blatantly oblivious to how centralizing the BAU system is.

Were you riled by news of how so few people own as much as more than half the world’s population, the Panama/Paradise/Pandora Papers, how giant companies are richer than entire countries, etc.?

Was that to stage implementing a significant shift in international tax rules?

Tax the Rich is co-authored by Morris Pearl, “a former managing director of BlackRock,” who chairs the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of hundreds of high-net-worth Americans committed to making all Americans better off by building a more prosperous, stable, and inclusive nation, and ensuring that millionaires, billionaires, and corporations pay their fair share of taxes.

But will people enriched by the BAU system really solve the problems that have enriched them?

Is BlackRock, the corporation that controls the world’s corporations, banks and public institutions, the “invisible hand” behind the campaign to tax the rich so YOU will OWN NOTHING, and you will be HAPPY”?

At the sixteenth G20 two-day summit held in Rome, Italy in October 2021, a global agreement was reached to see the profits of large businesses taxed at at least 15%.

According to Reuters, the tax deal proposed by the US, will be enforced by 2023.

What the G20 leaders agreed to:

keep the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees compared to pre-industrial levels within reach
accelerate their actions toward achieving global net zero greenhouse gas emissions or carbon neutrality by or around mid-century
reaffirm developed countries’ climate finance commitment to jointly mobilize $100 billion per year, and welcome new commitments by some G20 members
implement the new rules for a more stable and fairer international tax system, including a 15% global minimum corporate tax, by 2023
advance efforts to ensure better and more timely access to COVID-19 vaccines in low- and middle-income countries
establish a G20 Joint Finance-Health Task Force to ensure adequate financing of pandemic prevention, preparedness and response

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) plan aims to reduce incentives for tax planning and avoidance by US and foreign multinational companies by limiting tax competition and changing where companies pay taxes.

The Global Tax proposal is divided into two independent plans: Pillar 1 will focus on changing where companies pay taxes and Pillar 2 will establish a global minimum tax.

Check out Baker McKenzie’s Pillar One — Draft Model Rules for Regulated Financial Services Exclusion and Pillar Two: Model Global Minimum Tax Regime revealed.

The Metaverse is already being slammed by sales tax.

“Governments of ‘advanced’ countries now have debt levels that are high by historical standards. If there is another major financial crisis, the plan seems to be to use Cyprus-like bail-ins of banks, instead of bailing out banks using government debt. In a bail-in, bank deposits are exchanged for equity in the failing bank. For example, in Cyprus, 37.5% of deposits in excess of 100,000 euros were converted to Class A shares in the bank.” Gail Tverberg

“… global financial markets and global corporations are programmed to destroy life — the lives of working people, the life of community, and the living wealth of the planet — to make money for the already wealthy. And they do it with extraordinary efficiency.” David Korten

Should we get ready for taxes on unrealized gains, but perhaps not in the way you envisage?

“Ultimately, this is about taking control of nature, redesigning it and rebuilding it to serve the whims of the controlling elite … Transhumanism fills people’s hopes and minds with dreams of becoming superhuman, but … the true goal is the removal of that pesky, human free will itself.” Daniel Estulin

“Humans are now hackable animals. The whole idea that humans have this ‘soul’ or spirit’, … and they have free will — that’s over.” Professor Yuval Noah Harari, WEF’s Klaus Schwab’s top advisor

Since “most of human wealth is unmeasured by GDP,” is the ultimate goal of the Great Reset to have the dominated exploit one another? As data becomes the future of no/programmable money, are Ethereum’s “soulbound tokens” a model for that?

Vulture funds awaiting?

“ … a vulture fund is simply a type of highly profitable financial investment, in which a fund buys risky sovereign debt cheaply and then sues to enforce it. Purely a business transaction and totally legal!

What most people find offensive about these funds is that while international organizations like the World Bank and IMF negotiate reduction in sovereign debt, these funds, by purchasing those debts at a discount and suing debtor countries, indirectly force these countries into situations where they have to divert money saved from debt relief, that would otherwise have been earmarked for poverty reduction, education and health, to paying these cheaply acquired debts.” Vulture Funds and Sovereign Debts

Remember the UN launched Agenda 21 as a “comprehensive blueprint for the reorganization of human society” in 1992?

“To help tackle our planet’s most pressing environmental problems,” the GEF’s documents even tell us how debt-for-nature swaps work:

“Debt-for-nature swaps are voluntary transactions in which a portion of a developing country’s hard-currency debt is canceled or reduced by a creditor. In exchange, the debtor agrees to allocate a portion of its cancelled debt in local currency to environmental programs or projects. Initially, most were private swaps in which international environmental NGOs raised the funds and initiated the process. In recent years, many swaps have been bilateral, where both the creditor and debtor are governments. Other creditors can include commercial banks or commercial firms owed money by governments of developing countries.”

Generally touted as a win-win for debtor nations (with debt relief for the debtor and environmental protections that benefit the globe), this scheme does come with strings attached. For instance, the ceding of certain land for environmental “development,” or imposing certain regulations and restrictions on a country’s existing industries.

As cogs/debt slaves, will bank bail-ins have us surrendering our souls?

“One man’s bail in is another man’s bail out. And the financial instruments to be bailed out are derivatives. The plan, in other words, is to rob Peter (you and your family) to pay Paul (Wall Street and the City of London).” Sam Parker and Joe Mhlanga

“It was the privatisation of Congo’s state cobalt mine and the looting of its riches, all at the behest of the World Bank, IMF and privateers, that drained Congo’s treasury … vultures can only feast when the system kills, when, for easy profits, economies are turned into rotting carcasses.” Vultures feed when economies are turned into rotting carcasses

Will we ultimately become Genetically Modified Humans because the tyrants behind the “invisible hand” want to harvest our bodies, minds and souls so they can become immortal gods?

Silicon Valley’s quest for immortality — and its worrying sacrifices:

“2003 also saw the completion of the Human Genome Project, which was thought to hold answers for solving many age-related diseases by identifying the key genes that caused them. Yet the answer to avoiding the deterioration that comes with age has remained elusive.”

“The elite are planning to develop successful life-extension technology in the next few decades that will nearly stop the aging process and they fear that with the current population of Earth so high, the masses will be using resources that the elite want for themselves.

The Guidestones are the New World Order’s Ten Commandments. They’re also a way for the elite to get a laugh at the expense of the uninformed masses, as their agenda stands as clear as day and the zombies don’t even notice it.” Mark Dice

I’m just scratching the surface here, but isn’t everything we think we know about our world “A Business Model” that keeps us in one GIGANTIC debt (rent-seeking) trap to force us to pay perpetual interest to the financial sector?

Isn’t that what the BAU system of control hides in plain sight?

Too much is opaque but is the orchestrated BAU casino of control really in the best interest of society? If “the system must be first,” and the whole world is in debt, who really truly benefits?

Can we really solve our systemic problems with the same thinking used to create them?

A few “last” articles ago, I thought I was writing my final article for the “Hacking mindsets” series, but this also got too long. There will be one more to wrap up, hopefully.

References

Countries Teetering on the Verge of Bankruptcy

15 Countries That Are Going Bankrupt Because of COVID

What Happens When a Country goes Bust

When Did the “Invisible Hand” Start Robbing Everyone? This day, in 1971

Lines of Credit: Ropes of Bondage

Adam Smith On the Social Construction of Scarcity

Who Controls the Money Controls the World

The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve

All rights belong to Paul Grignon for the Money as Debt trilogy.

Debt by Design (2017) Book (Free PDF | Buy Printed)

Money as Debt (2006) Documentary (LBRY | BitChute)