the ruling class
“Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.”
~ Al Capone
By now, a large and growing fraction of our country's population knows that the quality of life of "the 99 percent," supported by less and less income and a smaller and smaller share of humanity's useful and usable production, is in serious decline. Except for the most fortunate of Earth's human cohort of life, current trends include growing economic insecurity, seriously declining health due to intentional planet-wide poisoning, ever larger swaths of the country's real wealth going to very few, a rising tide of violence both at home and around the world, and a tightening noose of censorship and surveillance. The list gets longer every year and has been getting visibly longer since sometime in the late 1950s.

None of this is an accident. Our "problems" are the predictable outcomes of a system — a predatory system — that has been carefully and inexorably designed, outfitted, and inflicted on others for centuries. The rate of destruction of societies, cultures, and whole countries, and the liquidation of the Earth and its life capacities, has increased exponentially for hundreds of years now. Those running the crime syndicate that designs and runs the system are people too dim or too arrogant to know that they've assembled a system that's inherently suicidal. It has multiple reinforcing feedback loops that are called "success to the already successful" in systems language. There are no balancing feedback loops anymore (they've systematically stripped those away over time), so such a system will always self-destruct. There are no exceptions.

For most of our history, humans have had the habit (of necessity in very early times) of depending on the bounty of Mother Earth for our sustenance and survival. If we didn't overdraw our local life capacities and didn't do wholesale damage to enough of life in a place, evolving society and culture could flourish and even provide a net gain in energy and abundance due to human activity. In spite of many local examples of predatory overshoot, humanity has thrived and increased for tens of thousands of years, co-evolving with millions of other species, most of which were also thriving. The abundance, beauty, and elegance of natural systems have been astounding.

The Rise of a Predatory Economic System

As often happens among species, a predator emerges that plays its hand successfully enough to become dominant. At the point of total dominance, the system is doomed. From at least one perspective — that of our human system of inhabiting the Earth — the turning point for humans probably came around the end of the 15th century, as we came out of what may be inappropriately named "the Enlightenment." (In my estimation, just how "enlightened" we were becoming is a matter of debate.) This period also saw the beginning of an exponential rise in our capacity for technological violence.

By 1500, there was a well-established system for the creation of money. Some of that money was used to indebt the local monarchy by loaning the money to pay for its violence racket and defense against rival monarchies, while profiting handsomely from providing the arms that the money purchased. And then there was the enormous scale of opportunity in bankrolling the colonizing of other places and societies and profiting from whatever value there was to steal in the victims' realms.

The first formal manifestation of this sort of global colonial racket may be what came to be called the British East India Company, founded in 1600. This early form of predatory capitalism was used to establish the British Empire and loot the societies and cultures the Empire controlled using its mastery of the violence technology of the day, even as the building of its naval enforcement technology — the heavily armed warship — deforested much of England. Although other countries emulated the British model, the 1 percent in Britain were by far the most successful at this sort of grifting operation. Vandana Shiva has said that Britain extracted about $45 trillion, in today's money, from India alone.

From a system perspective, what established itself in the 17th and 18th centuries was a predatory economic system that orchestrated the stealing of as much of the economic surplus created by societies under its control as its perpetrators could take, using a portion of the take to establish sufficient means of violence to enforce the predation and expand the reach of the racket. When the world was larger, there were lots of rival rackets, mostly organized by nation-state or empire, depending on the scale of system control. But the British racket that is still running today has been, by far, the most successful.

This predatory economic system has come to be known as "capitalism," a term that came into use in the early 19th century. Often (deliberately) confused with the free market economics that was being evolved by the likes of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and David Ricardo during the time of the American Revolution and thereafter, capitalism has an entirely different fundamental system goal — that goal which supersedes all other goals — than a free market economic system. The fundamental goal of the former is the accumulation of capital, ad infinitum, without limit (and over time, the predators have designed this system to deliver the accumulations to an ever-smaller handful of racketeers), whereas the fundamental goal of the latter is the exchange of value in an open and transparent marketplace.

None of Adam Smith's characteristics of a free market economy are true in capitalism today, and largely never have been, the predators having co-opted the free market concept as it was being evolved and designing it to their purposes. At the core of this predatory system are the bankers, going all the way back. There were always money-changers of various sorts through the ages, but nothing like the Bank of England, founded in 1694 by the racket.

The Banking and Finance Racket

Over the last 300-plus years, the global mafia has come to own the process of putting most of what is considered "money" into circulation, either using the imposition of debt on the rest of society or, in more recent times, by simply buying up various financial "instruments" and hard assets by mouse-clicking "liquidity" into some entity's bank account. Using the debt/lien racket creates enough banker wealth to enable them to buy and control much of the productive economy, or at least the larger-scale portions of it. And the larger-scale portion has been expanded dramatically since the late 20th century.

It's this one racket — the banking and finance racket — that drives the rest. In the United States, the racket's primary instrument of predation is the "Federal" Reserve, which the bankers own. In hindsight, Woodrow Wilson knew what he had done in signing the Federal Reserve Act at the end of 1913. In 1920, he said:
I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. We are no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.
Ultimately, any group of people with the unlimited power to create money for themselves will end up owning and controlling the entire planet, which has been their ambition from the earliest days of their criminal enterprise. This is no easy task to accomplish, particularly if the rest of the population has no interest in or resists the looting of their wealth and well-being or their enslavement.

The Racket Protection Racket

One of two means must be used to overcome any resistance the racketeers might encounter. Either the existence and activities of the crime syndicate must remain hidden or camouflaged in some fashion, or unattributed systematic retribution must be carried out against those who resist. Regarding the first strategy, control of all of the communications media in the culture has allowed the racketeers to create and control the narrative of who we are, what we're supposed to be doing, and who gets the benefits of our collective work. Control of the education system, from beginning to end, also sets the population up to regard what the rackets do as right and proper and legal, even if not perfectly done.

But still, many people aren't buying their program, at home or abroad, and this has been true for a century or more. In response the rackets have been ruthless in the protection of their looting and control operations. The violence rackets, including the various elements of the Deep State that have black budgets, are the mafia's enforcers, at home and abroad. Taking way more than half of the public treasury for the purpose, fictional as much of that money may be, they've "brought democracy" to scores of countries. Millions of innocent people have been no more than collateral damage in the rackets' global enforcement of their extortion, blackmail, and theft. Assassinations are routine, both domestically and abroad.

For the unfortunate countries that happen to be sitting atop the rackets' coveted resources (e.g., oil, natural gas, or important industrial minerals), destruction of a whole country isn't too large an undertaking. Most recently, one only need look at Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza to see how perceived threats to the rackets' goals are dealt with. Hasn't it finally become obvious enough that "democracy," the "rules-based international order," and the "Defense" Department are no such things? It's a crime syndicate, folks, and the rest of us are the targets of their various rackets.

In a society run by criminals, there is no such thing as the rule of law. Early on, it's mostly the rackets that successfully exempt themselves from society's rules — as Garrett Hardin put it, it's "mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon." But eventually, the whole of society comes to lose its way, placing little or no value on ethics, morals, truth, fairness, empathy, compassion, or the other social or cultural characteristics that are very much the glue that holds a community of people together, at whatever scale. I don't think I'll find too much disagreement if I note that much of the Western world has lost a lot of its glue by now. This, too, is no accident.

In the vernacular of many major American cities, like Chicago, New York, Las Vegas, Reno, and Miami, a racket manifests as the traffickers and sellers of various highly illegal things (such as illicit drugs) or practices, such as gambling, bank fraud, or human trafficking. And then there are the two short-necked guys who show up at your new restaurant, saying, "Nice place you got here. It'd be a pity if somethin' terrible happened to it. You could use some insurance. Only a couple grand a month. And Tony's & Vinnie's families eat free, right?" Everyone recognizes that sort of extortion racket. We've seen the movie dozens of times.

If the restaurant owner says "buzz off," and nothing happens to him or his restaurant, how well does the racket work? It's a functional imperative for an extortion operation to severely punish anyone who says "no" or challenges or threatens the racket. In the worst cases — presented by those who are most threatening — the opposition will be "sleepin' wid da fishes."

Now, just scale that up. A couple of guys in suits, with briefcases, fly in. "Nice country you have here." [Translation: "And a great storehouse of critical industrial resources."] "It would be highly unfortunate if some sort of major calamity were to befall it." [Translation: "Do what you're told or we'll bring 'democracy' to your country."] Right after his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man came out, John Perkins made it very clear that for a time, he was the guy managing the guys in suits with the briefcases. Anyone who said "no" was dealt with by "the jackals" from the black ops part of the Deep State, which is fully owned and managed by the racket.

So, when viewed as the correct species of system, what's running the Western part of the world, if not more, in the simplest of terms, is the world's longest-running, most successful, and most psychopathic crime syndicate.

In the media, the syndicate is referred to (when mentioned at all) by various names: "administration," "Deep State," "military-industrial-security-surveillance-tech state" or "complex," and so on. Each descriptor attaches a misleading variation of a "politically managed governance institution" to what is nothing more than a mafia. The politics are just theater, and if some politician attempts to actually control, eliminate, or manage some part of the rackets, they won't be a politician for long.

Mafia Characteristics

This mafia has a number of characteristics that are patently obvious every day, especially since the Covid racket began.

One characteristic, already mentioned, is their assumption that the rule of law doesn't apply to them. There are at least a few reasons for them to assume this. First, they write the laws, pass the laws, enforce the laws, adjudicate the laws, and profit immensely from that process, including from a prison system in which others end up, but never them. Second, they have consistently, and for centuries, gotten away with committing breathtaking felonies and crimes against the Earth and humanity. Third, none of their key grifting operations — the big banks, transnational corporations, and a selection of carefully built nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) — are legally subject to the law, anywhere. In the U.S., this is implemented through a presidential Executive Order, but it's true throughout the Western world. As Tzipi Livni, Israeli Foreign Minister from 2006-2009 famously said,
I am a lawyer.... But I am against law — international law in particular. Law in general.
Another mafia characteristic is that they hate democracy. It's often messy, and the 99 percent will often use it to thwart the racketeers' grifting operations and their plans for enslaving us all. So, all of their references to threats to "our democracy" are nothing but lies and propaganda. The threats they refer to are threats to their racketeering operations. You should interpret this notion of "our democracy" literally, whenever you hear it; when they refer to the democracy as "ours," they mean it. It's theirs — they own it and control it, and we pay for it.

Simple observation shows that the "leaders" the syndicate installs or supports around the world are totalitarian dictators who support the rackets — or else. Those who cross the syndicate are done away with, one way or another. In the last 40 years or so, the upper levels of Western governments have been infiltrated with racketeering acolytes — people without moral or ethical capacity, and too dim to fully understand the implications of what they've been led to believe by the crime syndicate. The syndicate owns most of the politicians and bureaucrats with any actual power in most of what was once part of the British Empire and most or all of Europe.

Of course, when you're a worldwide predatory criminal racket, it's best that as few people as possible know about who you are, what you're doing, to whom, and why. Toward that end, the rackets have an astounding array of tools with which to hide themselves and their activities — often in plain sight — and to manipulate the public's perceptions. Through a giant matrix of media, think tanks, bought-and-paid-for academic institutions, institutional and individual bribes (funding), astroturf organizations, and blackmailing of key institutional players, they directly control what much of Western society believes about reality and how public resources are allocated and used.

They've controlled Hollywood and the mainstream press and media from the beginnings of those enterprises. Through those channels, they literally have controlled what most people think they know for at least several hundred years. They have used their ownership and control of the most influential communications media during any period in their history to construct society's narrative of who we are and what we do in the world, all of it false or misleading when it comes to their own activities. In modern times and with today's technology, we're awash in their military-grade propaganda pretty much 24/7.

A Moral Vacuum

On the rare occasions when the racketeers are exposed, they lie — incessantly. They lie to your face, even when they know you know they're lying. They're covering up their various rackets and crimes, of course, so they have to lie, and they almost always get away with it. Historically, this has always been true. Ron Unz, describing the writings of historian Albert Lindemann, comments that in history, several of the cultures that the rackets have infested have a notorious reputation for "bribery, corruption, and general dishonesty, with numerous figures of all political backgrounds noting that the remarkable...propensity to commit perjury in the courtroom" makes the administration of justice nearly impossible.

To bend circumstances even more to their benefit, they've trained most of society to suspend moral judgment about almost everything. The only thing that matters is the pursuit of money and power, and the system is designed to reinforce that ethos everywhere in society. They've deliberately conflated the exercise of moral judgment (judging a person's actions) with "judging a person." Nowhere has this moral vacuum, purposely created, done more damage to the Earth and other humans than in science and industry. In that part of our economy, the rackets are engaged in uniformly predatory activities that strip us of our health, our wealth, and our God-given Constitutional rights as we try to defend ourselves and the life capacities of the Earth.

With their immense self-awarded wealth, the rackets quickly co-opt, usually by simple purchase, any new or advanced technology that might make their rackets more successful and bring more wealth, power, and control of society, even as they loot us all into destitution and submission. (Capitalism went down that road from the beginning.) Today, this includes Big Tech, the means of violence, and biological "technology." They will also go to any length, including assassination, to prevent others from developing technology that would thwart any of their rackets.

Their hijacking of the science undergirding the violence racket and their perversion of the biological sciences are the two biggest threats to life on the planet today. Science in itself is morally neutral — no one is harmed by someone learning "the science." But much of what science knows at any given time is weaponized by the crime syndicate. This is used to confiscate everything of real value within their grasp or to make billions from treating the chronic illness, damage, and dysfunction they inflict on societies and cultures everywhere. The biological science behind treating our diseases and disabilities is also the same science that can help the rackets to kill us, when and how they choose. They've always "followed the science," which is to say they've always used the science for their own purposes, utterly without moral or ethical considerations.

What criminal organization that you know of considers the ethics or morals of their rackets before they launch them? The rackets have no ethical or moral capacity whatever, and we're foolish to demand or expect it. Ethical and moral bankruptcy is one of the Dark Side's defining characteristics, which should be reason enough for society to prevent their control over anything but their own existence.

Bribery being another key tool of the rackets, they will never be short of the cash needed to bribe anyone into doing the rackets' work, shutting their mouth, and doing as they're told. If the many forms of bribery don't work, there's always the next step — character assassination or banishment. When you own society's organs of communication and have multiple governance agencies at your disposal to apply the retribution, this isn't a difficult thing to do. The most obvious recent examples come from the weaponization of the euphemistically named "Justice" Department.

Control is often established in the first place by "owning" the right people. This is a process of carefully grooming and installing in key positions of societal control people who have demonstrated moral failure, who can be easily set up and blackmailed. Establishing these control files was a large part of the criminal work of Jeffrey Epstein.

If blackmail doesn't do the job — or what a person knows or might make public becomes threatening to the rackets — a huge menu of "accidents" or fabricated "suicides" is available, with no one ever investigating what actually happened or who else might have been involved. The Clinton administration experienced an astonishing number of this sort of "died suddenly" situations. Because the rackets control all of the relevant investigative and judicial machinery that exempts them from the rule of law, the syndicate carries on regardless.

As we consider what has happened to the West and much of the rest of the world since the beginning of 2020, we need to let go of the myths and narratives that have allowed a giant matrix of crime syndicates to destroy the Earth, destroy our countries, destroy or take our lives, steal our stuff, and confiscate our future. The perpetrators are criminals. They're not bankers, politicians, CEOs, CIA agents, generals, hospital administrators, lobbyists, high-level bureaucrats, or whatever else — they are gangsters in suits and uniforms.

If you have trouble believing this, or seeing events this way, ask yourself a couple of questions. First, does the syndicate know about all the damage they're causing to people's lives (if not their deaths)? If the answer is "no" or "maybe," then they're not nearly as bright as the average American, but I don't think that's true. If the answer is "yes," then ask the second question: Do they have the power to stop the damage? If the answer is "no," then you're asking about the wrong people, and you need to figure out who is actually in charge of the rackets that are destroying people's lives and the planet. If the answer is "yes," but they're not stopping the damage, then it's intentional, and the reason for the intention doesn't matter. It's not a mistake, it's not an accident, it's not the result of unforeseen consequences. It's a plan. It's that simple.

And if it's intentional, what do we plan to do about it? Let them continue, until there's no future worth living in? The criminals have figured out that their predatory capitalist system, designed as it is for the 99 percent to produce ever increasing amounts of wealth for them to steal, even as they impoverish, sicken, and kill us, is destroying the planet. They know this. But rather than redesign the rackets to dramatically reduce their impacts, which would radically curtail their revenue and mostly benefit the 99 percent, they've decided to cull the population. That would be us, unless we finally wrest control back from the psychopaths and sociopaths. And remember — they're lying, about everything. They have to. They're the world's most dangerous mafia.

As 2024 continues to unfold, they are demonstrating in places like Gaza and Ukraine (after earlier demonstrations in places like Iraq and Libya) that there is no limit to the savagery they're willing to employ to carry out the plans for their totalitarian domination of the planet, a planet with a lot fewer humans and a lot less life than exists today. They not only don't care about how many people die, they believe that the more who die the better, and it doesn't matter how they're killed. Given the utterly self-destructive nature of their predatory program, it's easily arguable that they're insane. Either that, or they're so overwhelmingly arrogant, narcissistic, and powerful by now that their lack of intelligence is no barrier to what they can accomplish. These characteristics will very likely be fatal to life as we've come to know it if the racketeers are not stopped. In time scales we can comprehend, extinction is forever.
"A man carried a monkey about for a show, and because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain...."
~ William Blake, commenting on the beliefs of Emmanuel Swedenborg in the 1700s