Part 1. America Is Run By a Cartel
And nothing will change until we dismantle it
After the murder of George Floyd, much of the nation took to the streets to protest police brutality. In response, the police brutalized even more. They beat people, gassed people, ran people over, and shot eyes out. It was an entire summer of assaulting peaceful protestors, but zero police officers were held accountable for it. Meanwhile the qualified immunity laws haven’t budged.
So let’s just say it plainly: America is not a democracy. In a democracy the government represents the people, but our government represents the rich and powerful. That’s why we’re getting beaten down by our own police- they don’t work for us. And it’s not just the police, nearly every one of “our” institutions has been turned against us: our financial system, our healthcare system, our educational system, our political system, our judicial system, our CIA, the list goes on.
These systems prey on us.
Consider that our healthcare has become so extortionary that it’s now the leading cause of bankruptcy. A recent study found that replacing insurance corporations with Medicare for All would save 68,000 lives a year. That’s 68k people who couldn’t afford to be alive. For anyone who isn’t wealthy, American healthcare is either an ongoing tragedy or an inevitable one.
The vast majority of people desperately want it to change. But we don’t decide these things. Studies show that public support for a law has zero correlation with whether a law will pass. Thus we arrive at a key question…
If we’re not in charge, who is?
Who actually runs this country?
We know that our institutions operate on behalf of the rich and powerful, but how does that work exactly? Below are the 10 richest people in America. Are these the people responsible for our corrupt institutions?
In short, the answer is no. Most of the people on that list would prefer if our systems were not corrupt, and some are even trying to fix it. So who then? To answer that, we need to take a step back and appreciate that money is not the only source of power in society. There are three foundational systems of power, which overlap to form the operating system of our lives.
The 10 richest people are just the top players inside the green circle. Real power is in the center, meaning those who hold power in all three at once. Those who control the center aren’t just players- they make the rules of the game. So who controls the center? There are two options: somebody or nobody. Most people assume nobody, and see the center as an ever-changing flux of competing factions. But does that match the reality we see? Does the American power structure display the jolts and churn of competition?
No, quite the opposite. For over a century the American establishment has been remarkably consistent. Presidents from both parties come and go, and nothing fundamentally changes. That level of continuity points to the exact opposite of a competitive battle in the center.
It suggests a monopoly.
Meet the American Mafia
In the early 1900’s John Rockefeller and JP Morgan were the two richest people in America. Each was a major player in finance, and had influence in politics and media, but was far from dominant across all three circles. Then they decided to join together and form a superteam. Their organization has no name, but given their penchant for secrecy and criminality I will refer to it as the American Mafia.
Their first gambit was the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. There is a wonderful book on this, but in short it transferred control of the financial system from elected officials to a group of private bankers working for them. Next they leveraged their immense financial power against the remaining two circles (politics + information), and became backroom rulers of the United States.
But hey, don’t take my word for it.
For the last 100 years every attempt to fix our corrupt systems has failed, and the American Mafia is why. My parents’ generation was the last to really challenge them back in the 60’s. Fresh off a relatively successful civil rights movement, idealism was thicker than pot smoke and a larger people’s revolution felt imminent. Then JFK was murdered. MLK murdered. Malcolm X murdered. RFK murdered. Bullet by bullet, the boomers watched their dream of a functioning democracy decapitated.
And it wasn’t just American leaders being murdered. Over the next 50 years, the Mafia systematically attacked countries across the world, and now controls a vast international network of power.
Despite mountains of evidence, the mere suggestion that this organization *might* exist is off limits in contemporary discourse. If I had a larger readership I would be ridiculed by establishment media with two simple words: conspiracy theorist. But the conspiracy aspect is actually not that important. We’ll never know what happens behind closed doors, and it doesn’t matter. People working in Corporate Media or at the FED aren’t being asked to keep secrets, because the Mafia’s power doesn’t rely on secrets. Their power comes from control of our systems, and the systems are right in front of us. We use them every day.
Power is in the Systems
The power of the people is 100% reliant on the three systems in my diagram: money, politics, and information. Healthy systems connect us together and make us powerful. Broken systems disconnect us, rendering us weak and vulnerable.
The structure of a system is therefore critical. Centralized systems are relatively easy to disconnect because they have a single point of failure. Decentralized systems are much more difficult to disconnect.
This is why the founding fathers did their best to implement decentralized systems- to protect the American people from the monarchy they defeated:
- Democracy is a decentralized political system
- Freedom of speech is a decentralized information system
- Gold backed money is a decentralized system for measuring value
The key is that none has a central point of control. But the American Mafia has taken centralized control of all three, and weaponized them against us.
Centralized Money: Central Banking
The centralized nature of our financial system is right there in the name. But it’s also helpful to understand how they rigged the system to steal from you. The magic trick is that the bankers gave themselves the right to create new money. Generally with fiat currencies the government is the only entity allowed to create money. In our rigged system, only the bankers are allowed to create money. Imagine that- private citizens allowed to create money simply by typing numbers!
This may all seem a bit academic, but make no mistake, it’s the crime of the century. In addition to providing the American Mafia an endless supply of money, it allows them to steal from us three times over. First, it forces our government to borrow money from the bankers instead of just printing it themselves, which is why the National Debt is currently $28 Trillion. Second, all the profits from lending money (interest payments) are going to the banks rather than flowing back into society. Together these two thefts are why the government never has enough money, and taxes us so heavily.
The final theft is inflation. Banks have created an astronomical amount of new money, which has destroyed the value of the dollar.
The ever weakening dollar has hit the middle and lower class like a nuclear weapon, because the less you have, the more cash dependent you are. Meanwhile the rich are protected from inflation because they own all the stuff rising in price: stocks, houses, etc. It’s a system designed to create kings at the top, lords of the upper class, and impoverish everyone else.
And that’s exactly what it’s done.
The daily battle for money and survival may seem like a fact of life, but scarcity is actually a creation of this rigged system. There is no “natural” reason for poverty or scarcity in the modern world; the earth has more than enough resources for everyone. With a healthy financial system there would be plenty of money to substantially lower taxes and still fund city budgets, schools, daycare, healthcare- you name it.
Finally, note that this is not a criticism of capitalism, this is theft. The American Mafia is stealing from the American people. The fact that they have legalized it doesn’t change what it is. They have created a system that siphons the wealth of an entire society, and leaves the rest of us to battle over crumbs.
Centralized Information: Corporate Media
Everyone knows the corporate media lies and manipulates the public. The part most people get wrong is that they think each media company is doing it to support their own agenda and profits. For example, you may think that if you watch both CNN and FOX, maybe you can find truth in the middle.
Wrong.
The American Mafia owns them all.
Not only do they own both sides, they even created the sides. By using corporate media to frame every issue as a horizontal battle between left and right, the American Mafia has written itself out of the script of modern political discourse.
Any rational observer would say that America is in a class war, meaning the top versus everyone below. Look again at the wealth chart- these are the sides:
The left/right narrative is just gaslighting intended to distract us from how we are all being robbed by those at the top. For example the media love suggesting that our criminal systems are merely capitalism at work, and that anyone demanding fairness is a lefty socialist. But really they are just rebranding criminality. A thief stealing wallets could be called a capitalist, but isn’t that besides the point? Not according to the Mafia Media, who proceed to label anyone demanding their wallet back as a socialist.
The entire debate between capitalism and socialism is irrelevant because our system is neither- it’s whatever serves the Mafia and their friends. That’s why we see “socialist” bailouts for specific rich people and “capitalist” poverty for the lower classes.
Centralized control over the entire left/right media spectrum provides the American Mafia an astonishing level of power. Check out this quote from the Bush administration:
The aide [rumored to be Karl Rove] said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community’… That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.’
I mentioned before how dependent we are on these systems. Centralized control of information is literally the ability to define reality. If it’s not being discussed in the New York Times, is it real?
Ask yourself, is the American Mafia real?
Any doubt you have is a taste of their power.
Centralized Politics: Oligarchy
If you talk to people about systemic problems like I’m describing, they will almost always say the same thing:
VOTE. Vote or die. This is the most important election of our lifetime!
But how is that working out? The issue with this strategy is that the American Mafia is not just a political party, they control the entire political system. In fact the Mafia love elections, because they reinforce the idea that everything is our own fault. So instead of fighting them, we fight each other. Focusing on elections also means we wait years, deferring all our energy and frustration, and then what happens when we reach our incredible moment of power? We choose between two members of the Mafia.
To be clear, I’m not saying elections aren’t important. My point is that the current political system is not designed to express the will of the people. It’s designed to destroy our will by feeding it into a meat grinder of left/right division, gerrymandering, voter suppression, esoteric rules, media manipulation, and dark money. The current political system is where change goes to die. As activists we must acknowledge that, and revise our strategy. When you march as far as you can, only to move backward, you feel helpless.
But we aren’t actually helpless, we’ve just been disconnected from our power like an unplugged string of Christmas lights. People like JFK and MLK presented such a grave threat to the American Mafia because they had the power to reconnect us. The American population is currently 328 Million, whereas the Mafia is literally a handful of people, or a couple thousand depending how you define it. Once we have a strategy that connects us back together, we’ll win quite easily.
First though, it’s important to understand how they have divided us. For millions of years humans have been playing survival of the fittest, and it’s left us with a primal instinct for self-preservation and violence. More recently however, our brains have developed abstract reasoning, and a new survival paradigm has emerged. The new logic is that your own safety is linked to the safety of everyone, so rather than fighting others, it’s better to take care of them and treat them as equals. Democracy was born of the premise that all people are of equal merit, and thus deserve equal say.
But this stands in stark opposition to a long evolutionary history of kill or be killed barbarism, and not everyone has joined the age of enlightenment. From the Native American genocide, to the enslavement of Africans, to the subjugation of Women, American history is less the story of Democracy and equality than it is a white supremacist campaign with good marketing. Today many of the most “patriotic” Americans brandish the flag as a symbol of superiority, and reject the equality paradigm entirely.
With supremacists the American Mafia has found natural allies, because they agree that the systems should be rigged. First you have the rich, who see leveling the playing field as a threat to their privileged status. Next are the bigots, who abhor the notion of a level playing field full of minorities and women. Last are the religious, the OG supremacists who worship an all-knowing white man in the sky.
Given this pre-existing faultline, dividing us was a simple matter of making it worse. Each day, FOX News pours gasoline on the supremacist fire, creating stories about caravans of rapist immigrants or 90% tax rates for the rich. The result is a group of people so utterly frightened that they’re willing to openly subvert democracy and even attempt an insurrection.
The right/left political divide in America is thus not a debate over the best way to run a democracy; it’s a power struggle between democracy and fascism. And the radicalized right puts the left in a bind. Either you vote for the Mafia member on the left, or the right will destroy democracy itself.
In summary, the American Mafia is blackmailing both sides. It’s a sinister game that distracts us, divides us, and devolves us to the worst of our nature.
So it’s time to stop playing.
The New Strategy: Opt-Out
Each of us is incredibly powerful, but we’re currently using our power to perpetuate systems that make us weak:
- We consume the Mafia Media
- We work for and trade Mafia Money
- We vote for Mafia Members
We know these systems are corrupt, but what else can you do? Historically there has been no other option.
Until now.
Click to read Part 2: An Invitation to the Second American Revolution.
