Next Step is Confiscation Through Some Means: A Response to the 2nd Amendment Critique

 

This article was written by my father before the implementation of the 2nd amendment.

The UN’s Arms Trade Treaty which covers everything from small arms to battle tanks, combat aircraft and warships – came into force on 24 December 2014. This treaty has not been ratified by our Congress but had the support of our Secretary of State, John Kerry who signed it and Our president at that time, who without expressly mentioning the treaty, said in a speech at the UN that all nations “must meet our responsibility to observe and enforce international norms.” The problem with that statement and this treaty is that we the people aren’t in control of what those ‘international norms’ are and as we have seen time and time again, those international norms might be detrimental to our country.

Many preppers and 2nd Amendment proponents believe that the Arms Trade Treaty will first lead to registration of all firearms and when that happens, historically the next step is confiscation through some means. Technically, no treaty can be put into action in the United States unless it has been ratified by a 2/3 majority of the senate. This fact is what most people cite when they are trying to refute any legitimate concerns about the UN Arms Trade Treaty or any other treaty’s potential effect on our country. This sounds well and good and serves to placate some, but for this fail-safe to have any weight you would first need to have a government that followed the letter of the constitution and additionally, that government would need to follow the wishes of the citizens they are representing.

Our government has proven time and time again that following the constitution is simply not something they feel they have to do when it stands in their way. For example, the senate has never voted on the Kyoto Protocol but that hasn’t stopped the EPA from enacting rules complying with the main goals of that treaty. Coal plants are being shut down left and right while the US and China agreed in 2014 to let China keep growing their output of carbon emissions (with coal power plants) until 2030. There are many examples of policies that are enacted that fall well outside the bounds of Constitutional limits on power but that doesn’t stop our representatives does it? On any issue there is more brainpower spent on finding ways around the Constitution than actually following it with the seeming goal of every single facet of law being finally decided by the Supreme Court. It’s as if in our society, the rules we decided long ago to set for ourselves are only as good as the interpretations of people today and if every single thing can be challenged (and in some cases changed), we don’t really have a Constitution at all. What we have is a framework for legal arguments that only establishes a baseline which can be over ruled completely by a simple majority of ideology on the bench.

As for a government that listens to their constituents, that long gone relic of thought is promised by every single person running for office. “I feel your pain” The truth of the matter is that in this day and age, every politician is a benefactor of the same special interests. There are no democrat and republican sides whenever both are receiving money from the same companies. The elected politicians, by overwhelming majority do not care what you say or want because they don’t answer to you. Their actions directly contradict election results, polls and public outcry. The 2014 mid-term elections  held should have sent a very strong signal to the leadership of both parties that the country wasn’t on-board with the policies of the current administration and the direction of affairs with the Congress, however; Obamacare and Amnesty both remain intact without so much as a whimper from our newly elected majority who promised for years to repeal it as soon as they were ‘in power’. To add insult to injury, the Republicans just released a 1 trillion budget proposal just over 24 hours before a procedural vote on it knowing that nobody would have time to read it. Same tricks but a different face is behind the podium. Why should we expect anything different from what we have been seeing?

Do you really feel that there is anything ‘your party’ is going to do to stop elements of this treaty from being implemented if it is in their best interests?

What’s so wrong with simply registering all guns?

What’s the harm in simply registering you say? It makes sense that government would want to know who has guns, so they can ensure that bad people don’t have them. You can’t argue with that logic can you? Well yes I can try. Registration will only be done by law-abiding people. The criminals they will try to get you to believe this registration would stop would never turn themselves or their guns in. If that were true, why wouldn’t criminals be lining up a police offices every day because we do have laws already, don’t we? How is this not obvious to everyone? I maintain that it is obvious to the people who are pushing for any restriction and by that I am referring to registration,  of our 2nd amendment rights.

Do guns kill people? Yes they do, but deaths by guns are a small fraction of the total deaths in the US each year. If you want to know who really kills people you have to look at governments historically.

Yes, you read that right. Governments are responsible for more deaths of their citizens in the 20th century than any other unnatural cause. It is called Democide and is been documented by R. J. Rummel, formerly of the University of Hawaii Political Science Department. He writes:

Most probably near 170,000,000 people have been murdered in cold-blood by governments, well over three-quarters by absolutist regimes. The most such killing was done by the Soviet Union (near 62,000,000 people), the communist government of China is second (near 35,000,000), followed by Nazi Germany (almost 21,000,000), and Nationalist China (some 10,000,000). Lesser megamurderers include WWII Japan, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, WWI Turkey, communist Vietnam, post-WWII Poland, Pakistan, and communist Yugoslavia. The most intense democide was carried out by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, where they killed over 30 percent of their subjects in less than four years.

The best predictor of this killing is regime power. The more arbitrary power a regime has, the less democratic it is, and the more likely it will kill its subjects or foreigners. The conclusion is that power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.

 

But we live in a democracy in the United States and we elect our representatives. We have a rule of law and nothing like the atrocities you mention above would ever happen here. Really? I certainly hope not and so it is with much interest that I have and will be keeping track of what goes on after December 24th and into the future on this topic.

But Mr. Rummel’s statement has weight in historical precedence and is alarming when looked at from the context of where we are as a country today. One could argue that our regime has an increasingly disturbing amount of ‘arbitrary power’. That is power that they have assumed that is outside of the Constitution and the really fun part is they keep giving themselves more of it every day. Some of this power was enacted by law of course, but it is power nonetheless and it never decreases, it only becomes more vast. From the Patriot Act, to NSA Spying, to treaties with foreign nations, harassment of political parties, to illegal searches, illegal detainment without cause, to killing people without a trial and just yesterday they passed a bill which grants the government and law enforcement “unlimited access to the communications of every American”. How much power is that?

What does this mean to preppers?

Our second amendment was written expressly to give we the people a means to protect ourselves from a tyrannical government. This wasn’t about ‘letting us have’ weapons for hunting or shooting clay pigeons. The second amendment says that our right to bear arms ‘shall not be infringed’. It doesn’t say what type of arms meaning that you can assume they only meant musket loaders. It was intentionally open and only spoke to our rights, not the specifics of the weapons.

The Supreme Court even stated in the Heller decision that the second amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects an individual’s right to own firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Even with that they left some ambiguity by allowing certain restrictions to gun ownership. This argument over who can have guns and what limits authority should put on gun ownership is not going away even with this ruling and it seems that challenges to the amendment could happen one day in that ongoing process we have called the courts. I can see that on the horizon again as new actions are taken in an effort to limit the ability American’s have of defending themselves because that is what it is all about. The UN and other anti-gun voices do not believe you have a right to self-defense. So you have to ask yourself why a bunch of representatives from countries that do not recognize the fundamental right to possess weapons are so keen to take ours. They prefer to give that power solely to the State which takes me back to Democide.

Why would we willingly give away our rights to self-defense when time after time it has been shown to be the ones we have the most to fear from are the very ones telling us we don’t need guns?

I have written before about the phrase “From my cold dead hands” and I haven’t changed my opinion. I do not say that phrase lightly, but I wonder if there will be a decision we face in our future that could have far-reaching impacts on the security of our lives. Each of us should carefully consider the larger picture of events that are happening in our world. We may not get the disaster you are expecting, that would necessitate throwing on our bug out bags and living under a tarp. We may face a different enemy who will come to us with a message of “common sense reforms” and wrap this all in a promise of “keeping everyone safe”. Take that with a grain of salt and remember the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag Archipelago. Gulag was his literary-historical record of the vast system of prisons and labor camps that came into being shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 and underwent an enormous expansion during the rule of Stalin from 1924 to 1953. It is a fascinating read and warning to those who can see the echos of history in our country and around the world today.

“During an arrest, you think since you are not guilty, how can they arrest you? Why should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you’ll only make your situation worse; you will make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family?

Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! We did not love freedom enough. Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself.”

For what it’s worth, I do not believe that we will most likely see bands of armed soldiers rounding up whole cities as they did during the Soviet Union days Solzhenitsyn lived through. I do think we will need to make a choice and I think we should be guarded even more so about how far we let things slip away from us. The arbitrary power that keeps building, if left unchecked would be the same as not resisting in Solzhenitsyn’s days. If you don’t put up a fight, you might not like what happens to you.

We say “What part of Shall Not Be Infringed Do You Not Understand” as a way of challenging anyone who believes that guns and firearms only belong in the hands of the military or police. It is an in-your-face type of confrontation that we employ to convey the frustration and absurdity of the issue in our minds. Perhaps that message should be one that we ask ourselves? Maybe we are the ones who need to remember “Shall Not Be Infringed” more so than the people who want to excuse away that right. Maybe the lessons of history and the rights we have shouldn’t be used as an argument with people who will never be persuaded. Perhaps, the message is one we need to take to heart and live out to the expectations of those brave men who recorded this phrase for us. We are the only ones who need to remember this right and by that same token, we are the only ones who can lose it willingly.

Modern Allegations of Elite Exploitation

 

Canada is often celebrated as a beacon of human rights, yet beneath that reputation lies a devastating truth. For generations, Indigenous women and girls have faced disproportionate rates of violence, exploitation, and disappearance. In recent years, disturbing allegations have surfaced suggesting that not only common criminals, but also wealthy and powerful men have targeted Indigenous women and girls, shielded by privilege, systemic racism, and a culture of silence.

Though much of this violence occurs away from public view, the stories of survivors, families, and advocates have exposed a grim reality. In these modern allegations, Canada’s colonial legacy merges with contemporary structures of power and impunity.

Attention: The US is Facing The BIGGEST Threat Of The Century!

So pay chose attention because this video will change your life forever for the good!

A Crisis of Violence and Impunity

Indigenous women and girls make up just 4 percent of Canada’s female population, yet account for 24 percent of female homicide victims. According to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) 2019 Final Report, this violence constitutes an ongoing genocide.

What is less commonly acknowledged is the role of societal elites. Men in positions of wealth, influence, and authority have been accused of perpetrating or covering up acts of violence against Indigenous women and girls. Allegations have emerged through survivor testimonies, advocacy groups, and investigative journalists. These stories point to a disturbing pattern where Indigenous lives are made disposable and those with power exploit vulnerability without consequence.

Modern Allegations of Elite Exploitation

In urban centers like Winnipeg, Edmonton, and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Indigenous women, often living in poverty and targeted by systemic racism, have reported exploitation by wealthy and influential men. Survivors and advocates allege that men from business, law enforcement, and political circles have preyed on vulnerable Indigenous women, using threats, money, and connections to avoid accountability.

Reports have surfaced of wealthy elites paying $25k to hunt and rape women and children have emerged. Perhaps those in our collective societies that are deemed as undesirables are being targeted as a sport by satanic elites.

In British Columbia, the crisis along the Highway of Tears has long been associated with serial violence. Some community members have alleged that certain disappearances involved men with influence who were shielded by indifferent or complicit institutions.

In Winnipeg, the 2022 murder of Rebecca Contois and the linked deaths of Indigenous women believed to have been disposed of in the Prairie Green landfill drew attention not only to the brutality of the crimes but also to how quickly institutions denied families justice and dignity. Families noted that if these women had been non-Indigenous, the police and city would have responded differently.

Advocates argue that this reflects a broader, unspoken reality. Some men with power have long exploited Indigenous women, operating with the assumption that authorities will look the other way.

Allegations Behind Closed Doors

Community organizations, including the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC) and Families of Sisters in Spirit, have reported survivor accounts of sexual exploitation rings involving influential figures. While much of this remains difficult to prosecute due to fear, trauma, and systemic barriers, patterns in the testimonies have fueled longstanding concerns.

In several cases, Indigenous women have alleged being trafficked to private parties attended by wealthy men or powerful officials. Some advocates argue that law enforcement’s chronic neglect of missing Indigenous women cases points to more than just systemic racism. It suggests the active protection of perpetrators in certain circumstances.

As one urban matriarch told a reporter in 2023, “They pick the ones they think no one will miss. And when they have connections, the police don’t follow up. Everyone knows it.”

Why These Allegations Persist

The structures that enable elite violence against Indigenous women are deeply rooted in colonialism. Centuries of policies designed to dispossess, dehumanize, and erase Indigenous women created a society where their lives are undervalued.

Today, this manifests in underfunded social services, high rates of homelessness, addiction, and poverty within Indigenous communities. These circumstances leave women more vulnerable to exploitation. When violence occurs, police indifference, judicial bias, and media neglect compound the danger.

Wealthy perpetrators are further insulated by their resources, influence, and networks. The result is a society where the most powerful can prey on the most marginalized with little fear of reprisal.

Calls for Justice and Truth

The 2019 MMIWG Inquiry’s 231 Calls for Justice include demands for a national action plan on human trafficking, better protections for vulnerable Indigenous women, and mechanisms for Indigenous-led investigations into cases involving high-profile perpetrators.

While the federal government has pledged reforms, implementation has been slow. Many families and advocates feel betrayed by the lack of political will and transparency.

Grassroots movements continue to lead the fight. In 2023, Indigenous matriarch collectives in Winnipeg and Vancouver organized vigils, direct actions, and awareness campaigns calling attention to the intersections of poverty, colonial violence, and elite impunity.

The allegations that wealthy, powerful men have preyed upon Indigenous women and girls in Canada speak to a horrifying continuity between the colonial past and the present. Though evidence is often buried by fear and silence, the patterns of violence, neglect, and protection for perpetrators are undeniable.

If Canada is to reckon honestly with its history and present, it must confront not only the marginalized men who harm Indigenous women but also those in power who have long gotten away with it.

And perhaps, in light of similar crises across the border in the United States, one must ask whether America’s own epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and marginalized people could be connected to the same circles of wealthy, well-connected predators operating in the shadows, protected by systemic indifference and privilege. It is a question that demands deeper investigation and one far too long ignored.

Dedication

This work is dedicated to the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island and beyond, to the ancestors whose strength endures in the blood memory of their descendants, and to the families whose hearts ache for loved ones taken too soon.

To the women, girls, Two-Spirit, and gender-diverse people whose lives have been stolen or silenced by violence, neglect, and erasure, your names, your stories, and your spirits live on in the songs, prayers, and resistance of your people.

To the survivors of human trafficking, sexual violence, and exploitation, your courage in the face of unimaginable harm is a testament to the enduring strength of your ancestors. Your voices, whether spoken or carried silently in your hearts, are sacred and worthy of protection, healing, and justice.

To the families and communities who continue to search, to fight, and to mourn, may you find strength in one another and in the generations who will rise because of your resilience.

To the matriarchs, knowledge keepers, youth, and land defenders who carry the flame of sovereignty, dignity, and truth, may your wisdom and your love guide future generations to a world where Indigenous lives are cherished and safe.

This is for you, in remembrance, in solidarity, and in an unwavering commitment to a future built on justice, healing, and Indigenous self-determination.

Attention: The US is Facing The BIGGEST Threat Of The Century

War Is Just Around The Corner

You’re about to lose everything you’ve worked so hard for your entire life and it’s even not going to be your fault! – your house, your car, your credit card will be worthless…

So pay chose attention because this video will change your life forever for the good!

How Shadow Banks Rule the World

 

In any alternative media space, you are sure to find much talk about US dollar dominance, as well as optimistic forecasts of its imminent decline. This is also true in the radical right, where nationalists pine after an end to US imperial hegemony and the rise of a more multipolar world.

Often though, this hope is little more than wishful thinking, with unlikely challengers to US power much overhyped. This is especially true concerning US dollar hegemony, a topic that is ripe for misunderstanding at the best of times.

It’s important to keep in mind that people have been forecasting the decline of the dollar ever since it attained its status as global reserve currency. As far back as 1960, the economist Robert Triffin was warning of an “imminent threat to the once-mighty US dollar”. Understanding the reason for Triffin’s pessimism, and why it turned out to be misguided, is crucial to understanding today’s global monetary system and the enduring dominance of the dollar.

Triffin’s concerns were more informed than most: his “Triffin dilemma”, as it came to be known, highlighted an inherent problem with a country’s national currency also serving as the reserve currency of choice for the international system. The country supplying the world with the reserve currency has to produce a surplus of money, thereby creating a trade deficit. In other words, the supplier country needs to be continually losing money to fill up the reserves of other countries and make the currency a low-risk option to hold as a reserve. But if the supplier country becomes too indebted to the rest of the world in this scenario, then its currency ceases to be such a low-risk asset, and that’s the dilemma.

After World War II, the US sent lots of dollars abroad through the Marshall Plan, military spending, and the American middle-class importing lots of foreign goods. So how did the domestic US dollar get around Triffin’s dilemma? It didn’t.

The most shocking article can be found below.

Liberal’s hidden agenda: more than just your guns…

Watch this video below to find out the great secrets hidden by the government.

Enter the Eurodollar

Triffin’s dilemma was especially a problem for the US dollar because it was backed by gold. After all, what would happen when the world needed more dollars than US gold reserves could back? Much like the kind of collapse that would happen if everyone tried to withdraw their money from banks at the same time, the whole system faced implosion if the US could not keep its foreign dollars backed up with gold.

The standard story is that this problem was resolved in 1971, when Richard Nixon ended the Bretton Woods international system and finally decoupled the US dollar from gold. But by this point, private banks had already long replaced gold exchange and quietly adopted a new form of exchange, extricated from any reserves or real currency, this was a truly global, offshore economic system outside the purview of central banks. This was the Eurodollar system. In this context, “Euro” is used as a synonym for “offshore” rather than referring to actual euros. So, the Eurodollar system is the shadow, offshore money system denominated in US dollars.

No one is really sure of how the Eurodollar system emerged (more on that later), but by the late 1950s there had been a huge growth in US dollar deposits in European banks, mostly in the City of London. With pre-war practices, these deposits would have been remitted to the central bank or deposited to the banks’ accounts in the U.S., but gradually, banks began to use these dollar deposits to issue loans denominated in US dollars. By 1959, the economist Paul Einzig reported that

The Eurodollar market was for years hidden from economists and other readers of the financial press by a remarkable conspiracy of silence. I stumbled on its existence by sheer accident in October 1959, and when I embarked on an enquiry about it in London banking circles several bankers emphatically asked me not to write about the new practice.

Britain’s economic goal of making London a center for international financial capital manifested in deregulation and comprehensive secrecy protections; this gave the city a competitive edge against other European countries, and put it and its web of British offshore territories at the very centre of this emerging system.

Since the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979, Britain has undergone a great experiment. Economically, the UK became the exemplar of neoliberalism in Europe. Politically, the UK has quietly transitioned to a postnational state, undergoing one of the greatest demographic transformations in the West.

As the Eurodollar market exploded, it became the lifeblood of the global economy, quickly fulfilling a need banks had for an international currency system. Banks could now transact rapidly and efficiently across countries and continents without the need of a physical currency, an innovation that helped unleash economic activity. The Eurodollar system functioned like an early cryptocurrency, existing as a digital ledger and communications network rather than a traditional currency.

Driving the global economy is a kind of bankers virtual currency, created by and used to satisfy the demands of banks, a series of claims and liabilities exchanged between banks to meet their monetary needs. How can you travel to Indonesia and make an instant withdrawal from an ATM, withdrawing from your local bank back home? Only with a vastly complex and efficient communications network connecting the global banking system.

The Eurodollar was the emergence of this system, and central banks have little control over it. For all the scare-mongering from libertarians about “Fed money-printing”, it is international bankers — outside the regulations of the US Federal Reserve — who are the ones in control of creating the US dollar supply on international markets. Big commercial banks create Eurodollars using the offshore system without the backing of the Federal Reserve. This is done through fractional lending, where dollar deposits are used as collateral to loan out a higher amount of dollars.

Again: private banks create money out of thin air by creating debt

Discovering money creation rests with private banks is a revelation that tends to shock people and send them into a state of denial — surely the state would not outsource something this fundamental to private actors.

But don’t take my word for it, a source as good as the Bank of England wrote in a report titled “Money creation in the modern economy” that:

Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves: banks create money whenever they lend to someone in the economy or buy an asset from consumers. And, in contrast to descriptions found in some textbooks, the Bank of England does not directly control the quantity of either base, or broad money. Of the two types of broad money, bank deposits make up the vast majority – 97% of the amount currently in circulation. And in the modern economy, those bank deposits are mostly created by commercial banks themselves.

So international bankers have created a shadow money system, with the Eurodollar system functioning as a kind of “dark energy” of the global economy, ever-present but unseen, something which the US Federal Reserve or any other central bank can do little to control. In fact, no one even knows how much money exists in the Eurodollar system, with estimates measuring it in anything from tens to hundreds of trillions. As the economist Fritz Machlup once told a meeting of his colleagues:

We don’t even know enough about the Eurodollar market to say that it should be controlled.

If you want to visualise what this shadow money system looks like, this is an attempt at illustrating all the instruments involved in the supply of the US dollar:

Still confused? You’re not alone. If this illustrates anything, it’s that the federal reserve and central banking is just a small part of the story. This enormously complex web developed over decades through private institutions, satisfying the need for a truly global money system unconstrained by national barriers.

This Shocking Video Will Completely Change Our World

But in the process of decoupling the dollar from Federal Reserve reserve control, bankers have given themselves the power to create unsanctioned and unregulated money. This translates to enormous power to override national government’s monetary policy and fulfill many of the roles most people assume central banks and their governments are handling:

Because Eurocurrencies give private financial institutions the unrestricted ability to expand the availability of a particular currency, the country whose currency is the target of the Euroinstrument no longer has exclusive control over its money supply.

…

Furthermore, the lack of reserve requirements on Eurodollars creates a potentially infinite money multiplier, potentially leading to an infinite degree of inflation, all without the input of the Federal Reserve or the U.S. Treasury. Thus, the power to control the number of dollars (or dollar-equivalent instruments) in the market has been taken out of the exclusive control of U.S. authority and diffused among foreign banking institutions.

Discussion around economics is still heavily focused on central bank monetary policy and government programs like Quantitative Easing, which helps maintain the illusion that it’s still accountable, elected representatives with the final say.

It’s understandable we are biased to focus on government institutions: it has always been understood that monetary sovereignty is a prerequisite for political sovereignty. But it is now clear that governments have quietly surrendered a great degree of monetary sovereignty to the private interests running the international banking system — one of the most significant and revolutionary political changes ever, yet one hardly discussed.

It’s shocking to discover the scope and influence of this system, and to discover everything presented here has been out in the open for years, strangely ignored or overlooked by popular economists, financial analysts and politicians alike. Yet some esteemed economists like Paul Einzig and Milton Friedman did identify and study this system, and both also wrote of a grand “conspiracy of silence” by the global banking cartel to hide its existence. Since most economic analysis still ignores it, we are left with an always partial view of how the economy functions.

Why the dollar isn’t going away

There is another important realisation that comes with understanding the shadow money system: the Eurodollar is the real global reserve currency. The emergence of the Eurodollar system was an emergent innovation, coming from the many players involved in the global financial system seeking the maximally efficient form of money to handle their business. Understanding this helps us understand why it will be so hard to dethrone the dollar from its dominant position.

Imagine a world without the dollar. Suppose a German manufacturer needs to import raw materials from Brazil. The Brazilian exporter prefers to be paid in Brazilian reals, while the German importer has funds in euro. Only, there isn’t much from Europe the Brazilian company is interested in spending its new euro on, and constantly exchanging currencies can be costly and time-consuming.

However, with the Eurodollar system, the German importer can use its euro deposits to create a Eurodollar deposit in a German bank. This Eurodollar deposit can then be transferred to a Brazilian bank, which converts it to Brazilian reals and pays the exporter. The Brazilian bank can hold the Eurodollar deposit or use it to fund its own Eurodollar lending activities. Everybody wins! (Or so it must have seemed to the people inventing this system.)

Now imagine a government or governments trying to replace this. There are decades worth of highly complex and interwoven technological arrangements that have made this system function seamlessly. The dollar retains its strength because there is a constant demand for US Treasury securities backing this system.

Looking at how financiers are treating these securities, the dollar looks more secure than ever: US Treasury data reveals the foreign demand for these securities has massively increased in recent years. Holdings of long-term US Treasuries by private foreign investors jumped about 52% over the past three years to $3.4 trillion, for the first time overtaking the holdings of central banks.

Notice that the story here is not about US aircraft carriers or puppet regimes, but the private interests of the bankers that make up this system. A lot of dollar-doomers make a case that is all about geopolitics. The US is an ailing empire they say; it has a large and growing list of enemies, as well as potential challengers on the world stage like China, and we are entering a multipolar age where the US cannot dominate the world’s affairs like it did in the 20th Century. That may all be true, but it doesn’t make the Eurodollar system any less efficient for the global banking cartel.

China has put much effort trying to make its yuan a viable alternative to the dollar, and for all that, less than 3% of the world’s foreign-exchange reserves are denominated in yuan. By one estimate, the dollar is a part of 88% of all international transactions, the euro 31%, while the yuan is involved in just 7% (more than one currency can be involved in a transaction.)

If China wanted to make the yuan a true global reserve currency, they would need to embrace massive financial deregulation and abolish their currently strict capital controls, in order to allow massive inflows of foreign held currency and yuan into China. But China needs to maintain its strict financial regulation for domestic economic success, and political stability. China is unlikely to ever decide to abandon the statist model it has followed for decades just to make itself a better hub for the international financial system.

Some have touted BRICS, of which China is a member, as potentially leading the way in establishing an alternative monetary system. On paper, this looks more promising: BRICS countries have 42% of the world’s population, and an estimated 37% of the world’s GDP.

Could BRICS go about establishing a currency? Presumably, it would need a central bank, and presumably that would be centered in China, representing an unacceptable loss of sovereignty to other countries in the alliance, especially India, with whom it has ongoing territorial conflicts. The idea of a “BRICS coin” has been floated a lot over the years, either backed by gold or fully digital. But just last year, the head of BRICS’ New Development Bank made it clear there are no immediate plans for the group to create a common currency.

Even if BRICS were willing to put aside their disagreements and commit to a BRICS coin, it’s hard to see what competitive advantage it would have over the current system. A gold-backed currency? Bankers abandoned gold and embraced the Eurodollar system in the first place because gold-backed currency was a hindrance to their activities.

What about the “R” in BRICS? Perhaps Russia’s fortunes point to a potential alternative to dollar dominance. After all, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US government has weaponised the financial system in ways previously unseen. Is this not a display to the world of the precarity of relying on the good graces of America to sustain your financial system? Many reasoned that if the United States overplayed its hand sanctioning Russia, this is the lesson the rest of the world would take, and then it would only be a matter of time before enough interested parties conspired to take down the mighty dollar.

The most headline grabbing sanction against Russia came when the US and its Western allies invoked what some analysts called “the nuclear option”, and colluded to take Russia off of SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication). This was highly significant, as SWIFT is used by banks worldwide as a kind of instant messaging service. President Biden promised that this would “ensure that these banks are disconnected from the international financial system and harm their ability to operate globally.”

With the basic understanding of the US dollar as something strictly under the control of the US government, many assumed they could just deny Russia access to the dollar by cutting them off from the SWIFT system. But despite the high-profile deplatforming, Russian banks suffered little more than an inconvenience from being denied access to SWIFT, because of how effective the Eurodollar system is.

Eurodollar economist Jeffrey Snider summarised the problem with this attempt at deplatforming the Russian economy:

SWIFT constitutes very little insofar as the inner workings of the offshore banking network is concerned.

…

Deprive some of Russia’s institutions their ability to message to correspondents using SWIFT and they’ll simply communicate (how’s that for more irony!) with them some other way (including just picking up the phone) because the offshore correspondents are still there. They will continue to conduct their monetary business regardless of the method payments requests are sent and received.

Ironically, the very fact the US government could do so little to hinder Russian banks’ access to the Eurodollar market shows why it is so effective, and why the dollar will keep its position for the foreseeable future.

This takes us back to the start of this story, when the Eurodollar market emerged under shady and secretive circumstances in the city of London. I wrote no one is really sure how the Eurodollar emerged, but the most likely theory is that the real origin actually lies with the Soviet Union.

In 1956, the Soviets were also in the position of fearing international sanction for invading a smaller neighbour. After they crushed the 1956 rebellion in Hungary, Soviet officials feared the US would target their holdings of dollar deposits in American banks.

In response, the Soviets withdrew their dollars and moved them to two Russian banks based in Europe: Commercial pour L’Europe du Nord (BCEN) in Paris, and the Moscow Narodny Bank in London. Using those dollar deposits, these Russian banks may have become the first lenders in the global Eurodollar market.

On February 28, 1957, the Moscow Narodny Bank in London lent out $800,000. This modest sum was borrowed and repaid entirely outside the American banking system — or any centralised banking system. Bankers had just discovered an amazing innovation. BCEN in Paris also took some Narodny dollars and lent them out. The Paris bank was known by its telex name EUROBANK, and that, supposedly, is how dollars deposited in banks outside the US came to be known as “Eurodollars”.

And so, in one of the great ironies of history, the 20th Century’s great communist regime sparked an innovation on the financial markets that greatly expanded the power of capital and moved the activities of bankers beyond the scope of governments.

The Eurodollar system became so dominant because of innovations from people trying to avoid US government control of their dollars, and that’s precisely why the system is so resilient — to alternate currencies, to geopolitical shocks, and to the US government itself.

Nothing lasts forever, but for now, global dollar dominance is on pretty solid ground.

Source- https://prepper1cense.com/2025/07/13/how-shadow-banks-rule-the-world/

What happens when billionaires own the zip code, and everything within it? Part two in our series on the future of living in America.

During the Industrial Revolution, company towns sprang up across the United States like dandelions after a downpour. Built by steel tycoons, coal barons, and chocolate magnates, these places were designed to allow workers to live close to where they work — keeping them away from the denigrating poverty of inner cities, and keeping them under close watch.

Some versions were brutal: Kentucky coal towns like Lynch, for example, were notorious for housing miners in shacks with no plumbing and paying them in company scrip that could only be spent on overpriced goods at the company store. Others tried to pass as idyllic: Hershey, Pennsylvania had neat lawns, bowling alleys, and a chocolate-fueled amusement park. Corning, New York had museums and libraries courtesy of the glass company. Pullman, Illinois had stylish worker housing until the company slashed wages but kept rents high, sparking a nationwide strike.

What they all had in common was control. Workers lived where their bosses told them, bought what their bosses sold them, and behaved how their bosses expected. The message was clear: if you want a paycheck, you play by the rules. Sometimes, that meant waking up to factory bells at 4:30 in the morning and attending mandatory church service. Sometimes, it meant not striking, not speaking up, and definitely not trying to unionize.

The company town model was supposed to fade away with the rise of public infrastructure and labor rights. But it didn’t — it just got rebranded.

Today’s version comes with better marketing. The factory bells have been replaced with free yoga, wellness apps and solar panels. “Moral behavior” now means staying within the parameters of a 15-minute city or a biometric security fence. The new company towns don’t just expect conformity — they engineer it.

In this article we look at the modern resurrection of the company town:

• Starbase, Elon Musk’s handpicked city, governed by his employees and gated from the public.

• Lāna‘i, a Hawaiian island once run by Dole Pineapple, now owned by one man.

• Belmont, Bill Gates’ planned desert city built around data centers.

• And Sidewalk Labs, Google's failed attempt to privatize (and surveil) a piece of the Toronto waterfront.

In all these cases, the model is the same: a private entity builds the world it wants, sets the rules, and invites you to live in it — on its terms, not yours. While the new company town may be smarter, greener, and more connected — it’s just as rapacious and controlling as ever.

Starbase, Texas is Elon Musk’s 21st-century company town built on a sandy strip on the Gulf of Mexico formerly known as Boca Chica Village. It began, like so many Musk projects, with a tweet. In 2021, he announced plans to build a city around SpaceX’s rocket launch site and soon began buying up houses in the once-quiet coastal village, turning it into a restricted zone for private launches, tourists, and security patrols.

Some locals resisted, calling it rocket fueled gentrification, but Musk pressed on and in early May 2025, Starbase officially became a city after what may have been one of the strangest elections in modern American history. No campaign signs, no public debates — just 280 eligible voters, most of them SpaceX employees or their relatives. Roughly 90% of them registered to vote within the past year, and most of them were young men. When ballots were cast, the city’s incorporation measure passed 212 to 6. The new mayor is a SpaceX vice president and all the commissioners are also tied to SpaceX. In Starbase, corporate loyalty is literally a civic requirement.

The company has wasted no time consolidating control. Just weeks after incorporation, Starbase moved to adopt sweeping zoning ordinances. Residents received legal letters that noted, in all-caps letters no less, “YOU MAY LOSE THE RIGHT TO CONTINUE USING YOUR PROPERTY FOR ITS CURRENT USE.” Many properties — some held for decades by families who came to fish, hunt, or retire in peace — are now designated as "Mixed Use," "Heavy Industrial," or "Open Space."

The letter informed recipients of a public hearing, which took place this past Monday, June 23, 2025. About 80 people showed up to voice their confusion and anger and ask why they were being strong-armed into new zoning rules they didn’t understand. Some asked how their property rights would be affected, or whether SpaceX might use eminent domain. The city attorney denied it — “not what this is,” he said — but to landowners who feel outnumbered and outmaneuvered, the writing’s on the wall. If SpaceX doesn’t own your land yet, it wants to control what you can do with it. One local said he felt “like a Native American, because these people are coming in… making their rules, and it’s a done deal, basically.” Another expressed amazement at the new map the city is proposing. “Have you seen it?” he said. “It looks like a spider web on LSD.”

And then there are the gates.

Citing “security concerns,” and “folks who aren’t necessarily here for the right reasons,” the city commission — staffed by SpaceX employees — approved the installation of four gated checkpoints, turning formerly public roads into controlled-access zones. Some gates were completed before the vote even took place, raising questions about whether the company was simply rubber-stamping its own decisions after the fact.

“That is a travesty,” said Mike Montes Jr., who attended the June 23 meeting. “I think they are trying to have a private interplanetarian community.”

Officials say residents will still be allowed in and first responders will get access codes. Visitors can be “screened.” But critics — including property owners and even the local district attorney — say blocking public roads violates Texas law.

Meanwhile, Starbase is operating on borrowed money — literally. The city took out a $1.5 million zero-interest loan from SpaceX to fund its startup budget through September 2025. No sales tax. No property tax yet. Just corporate credit from the only business in town.

If this all sounds a bit dystopian to you, you’re not wrong. Starbase is not the techno-utopia it pretends to be. It’s a municipal Halloween costume for a rocket company that wants legal cover to control land, people, and infrastructure without state interference. It's also a legal loophole: by incorporating as a city, Starbase gains more power to shut down roads, access public funding, and operate with municipal authority — all without any meaningful democratic input.

This is not Musk’s first foray into privatized governance. He’s floated plans for Mars colonies governed by “direct democracy” — a term that sounds egalitarian until you realize his company will also own the oxygen supply. Starbase is, therefore, the test site for more than rockets. It’s a dry run for post-national corporate rule.

Then there’s Lāna‘i, Hawaii. If Starbase is a company town for the 21st-century, Lānaʻi is its mirror image: a place steeped in company-town tradition, now rebooted by one of Silicon Valley’s richest men. Once dominated by pineapples, Lānaʻi is a living case study in how private ownership of public life mutates with the times — and why it still matters.

Purchased in 1922 by pineapple magnate James Dole, Lānaʻi quickly transformed into the world’s largest pineapple plantation and a textbook example of a model company town. Dole built not just the fields and packing houses, but also Lānaʻi City — the central town with a movie theater, a park, and homes for thousands of workers and their families. But this was no tropical utopia. As with many plantation towns, workers toiled long hours, earned little, and lived in housing owned by the same company that employed them. Dole controlled the economy, infrastructure, and much of daily life — and when the pineapple business dried up, so too did the island’s economic base.

That is, until another tycoon came along.

In 2009, the island was included on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of America’s most endangered historic places. Three years later, in 2012, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison bought 98% of the island for $300 million. The purchase included two Four Seasons resorts, the water utility, much of the housing, the community pool, and even the island’s movie theater. And in 2019, Ellison added one more asset to his collection: Lanai Today, the island’s only newspaper.

That’s right — the billionaire landlord is now also the publisher of the local press.

Ellison has remade Lānaʻi in his image: a wellness-focused, ultra-elite retreat where tourists arrive on private jets, dine at Nobu, and soak in curated luxury. At the same time, residents live in what critics call a "plantation 2.0" system. They work at Ellison’s hotels, rent homes from his holding company, shop at his grocery store, and read his newspaper. And while many residents express gratitude for Ellison’s pandemic generosity — he waived rent and kept people on payroll — others say the cost is quiet compliance.

Maui County Councilman Gabe Johnson put it bluntly: “This is still a plantation town, it’s a one-company town. To speak out in public, there’s risks involved for anyone.”

Residents who speak up about housing shortages, shrinking public services, or the mysterious drone testing project have to weigh those complaints against their livelihood. For many, Ellison is their landlord, employer, infrastructure provider, and de facto government. Dissent becomes a gamble.

Ellison claims he wants to turn Lānaʻi into a model of sustainability — powered by hydroponic farms, Tesla solar panels, and “an adults-only, luxurious wellness enclave.” But critics note that sustainability in this context often means control: of food, housing, jobs, and now, information.

[As an interesting aside, that previously mentioned drone project involves assembling and shipping giant unmanned drones called Hawk30, which have a wingspan of 260 feet and a cruise speed of nearly 70 miles per hour. Propelled by 10 electric motors and onboard lithium ion batteries, the drones are designed to carry 5G transmitting equipment for up to 6 months at about 65,000 feet in the stratosphere.]

Meanwhile, housing on Lānaʻi is tight and what little is available comes with sky-high rents. As of mid-2025, only about two dozen homes are available for sale — ranging from $315,000 for a 400 square foot condo to $17 million for an 8,500 square foot, 7-bedroom mansion.

Ellison’s defenders say he saved Lānaʻi from decline. He fixed the pool. He restored the movie theater. He preserved the resorts. But these efforts, while real, come with a catch: centralized ownership of nearly every lever of island life. In a place with just 3,000 residents, there’s no anonymity — and no public space truly free from the touch of Ellison’s empire.

From Dole to Ellison, Lānaʻi remains a study in soft coercion — where power is quiet, but absolute. If modern technocracy demands centralized data, urban control, and seamless citizen management, Lānaʻi may be its testbed. But unlike NEOM’s mirrored city or Telosa’s blueprint fantasy, this one already exists.

Belmont, Arizona, Bill Gates’ desert experiment, hasn’t even broken ground yet. Back in 2017, Gates quietly bought 24,800 acres of land west of Phoenix through his investment firm, Cascade, for $80 million. The plan is, by now, pretty obvious: Build a smart city with autonomous vehicles, sensor-stuffed homes, and traffic systems that think faster than you do. If it ever happens, the city will support 80,000 homes, 3,800 acres of industrial and office space, 470 acres for public schools, and enough infrastructure for around 180,000 people.

Nearly a decade later, Belmont remains an empty stretch of sand baking under the Arizona sun with no construction, no water, and just the vaguest promise that if you build a city around the internet of things, the people will come.

Perhaps Gates is wary of making the same mistakes Sidewalk Labs made when it set out to build the future of cities on Toronto’s waterfront. It had the backing of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and a willing partner in Waterfront Toronto, a government agency responsible for redeveloping the lakeshore. But three years later, the $900 million project collapsed under its own weight — before a single shovel hit the ground.

On paper, Sidewalk Toronto offered all the usual utopian trimmings: heated sidewalks, robo-taxis, underground waste collection, dynamic buildings that shifted with the hour. But that was just the surface. Underneath was a far more radical proposition: to remake not just infrastructure, but governance. Data collection would be ubiquitous. Public systems — transportation, waste, energy, even benches — would be managed by software and sensors, with Sidewalk Labs at the helm.

That’s where it lost the public.

From the start, Toronto residents asked hard questions. Who would own the data? Who would make the rules? What kind of city turns public life into a private dataset? Sidewalk’s answers came too late — and rang hollow. The public wasn’t just wary of surveillance, they were wary of a tech company writing the rules of city life behind closed doors.

Waterfront Toronto tried to negotiate better terms, but it didn’t have the legal or political authority to manage what was, essentially, a transfer of public power to a private actor. The project wasn’t just a land deal — it was a Trojan horse for privatized governance.

And Toronto, in the end, said no.

This matters, because other companies are trying again elsewhere. Meta wants to build Willow Village in Menlo Park. Google has designs on Downtown West in San Jose. Each promises to solve the urban problems governments have failed to fix — housing, transit, climate — with data and design.

But if they don’t learn from Sidewalk Labs, they’re doomed to repeat its failure.

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