After the Second World War, the former British Empire was cooked. The US was the new boss in town, and it told their British friends to let go of their colonies. The war had drained the UK, and it was in no position to resist. The US territory itself came out of the war unscathed, save for some remote islands in the Pacific which had been touched by serious violence. And the US lost plenty of men, but nowhere near the numbers of, let's say, Russia. The US Dollar was 'King', as confirmed at Bretton Woods. Pegged to gold, it became the trade currency of choice, replacing the British Pound.
While their physical Empire collapsed, the British financial institutions sought to save their influence, and did so through the creation of the 'EuroDollar'. Way before there existed anything like a 'Euro'. They used a loophole in the British system, which had granted the 'London City' a fair bit of autonomy in 1067, believe it or not. A deal struck with William the Conquerer, upheld by traditionalist 'Magna Charta' Britain. That full story was the subject of a documentary released nine years ago. You can find it HERE, but first read on. As the documentary shows, the British Central Bank, and financial institutions in the 'City', created a system of tax-havens, using the last of their colonies. Obscure, remote islands around the world, like the 'British Virgin Islands', next door to the 'US Virgin Islands', where Epstein later owned his 'Little St James', by the time the US went the same way. Back then they attracted US banks, and their wealthy clients, with constructions to escape taxes through various 'Trusts' and a wide array of legal loopholes, closely coordinated with 'Westminster'. This 'spiderweb' held all of Britain ransom, because this financialization of the economy was killing the industry, as the Pound was too expensive for its own good because of it.
In the US they caught up late in the game, when pressure on the Dollar, as a result of the military spending related to the war against Vietnam, ended the gold-peg, creating a world of fiat currencies. But there was something else, which explains the 'Epstein Network' phenomenon as an extension of this morally and ethically corrupt monetary system. During the pre-war years, during the 'prohibition' in the USA, organised crime had become a 'thing' in the US. The focus is always on the Italians, but the Jewish mob was at least as important. One individual stood out, serving crime syndicates in general. His name was Mayer Lansky, the 'Banker of the Underworld', and head of 'Murder Incorporated', which handled contract killings for the syndicates, using professionals who did not ask any questions. During the war, the OSS, which would later become the CIA, went to bed with the mob, using its extensive network spanning the globe for espionage and sabotage purposes. This was considered 'smart thinking' at the time, comparable to creating Al Qaeda to end the Soviet Union in the Eighties. I'll leave you to be the judge on that. I'm only telling it as it is.
Lansky was an ardent zionist, and after the war he helped the armed Haganah, the guerilla-predecessor of the IDF, to the arms they needed, still in close cooperation with the CIA, creating the conditions for Israel to emerge as a sovereign state in this British protectorate Palestine. In support of that he needed the FBI to stay out of his hair as he moved weapons through US ports. So Lansky also organised 'honey trap' gay-sex parties in the 'Blue Room' of an expensive New York hotel with a man named Roy Cohn, the fiercely anti-communist, homosexual prosecutor from the Bronx, New York, in the trials of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They used underage gay prostitutes to entrap J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI. That story HERE, and HERE. Having the long-serving head of the FBI on a leash served Lansky and Cohn well. And by the way, Roy Cohn is widely considered to be Trump's 'Godfather', who taught the real-estate developer a few things about how to run a profitable business in New York.
So, somewhere in the Seventies, the US began to notice that money earned in the US was leaking away to tax-havens run by the 'City'-bankers, and it wanted in. Now, this venomous mix of bankers and bought politicians creating 'vehicles' for the ultra-wealthy, and multinationals, to escape taxes, and a 'Kompromat'-oriented Network of 'insiders' (the 'elite'), brought us the 'Epstein Network' reality. Today it encompasses not only the political landscape, banking and the MIC, the 'Military Industrial Complex', and Western 'Intelligence agencies', but all of 'Hollywood' and the music industry, and 'Tech', with a switch from using gay prostitutes to underage girls to glue this sordid system together. A system based on 'favours', 'insider trading', and a 'coded' way of escaping the burden of having to pay for anything.
My own country, Holland, switched from a mainly industrial, agricultural and trade based economy to a likeminded 'service economy' in the Eighties, to serve the 'Euro-zone'. It struck all kinds of deals with wealthy individuals, such as Bono and other 'celebreties', and wealthy Multinationals, functioning as a tax-haven, where needed using the Caribbean island of Curaçao, while the Dutch themselves are taxed to the hilt. As stipulated above, financialization of the economy comes at a cost, since you are throwing away your ability to compete with productive countries elsewhere, *while* you will have to find ways to force those productive countries to use your currency, your 'services'. During the 'Unipolar Moment' this worked like a dream, on the back of the 'petrodollar', with the 'Eurodollar' system, and subsequently the Euro riding piggyback. But if you become greedy, and start to use your Network to extort the productive countries, things will eventually derail as the 'peasants' will eventually revolt. And that is where we are today.
Both Putin and Xi made their moves to stop the outflow of money made in their countries, creating 'incentives' for the wealthy and multinationals in their country to re-invest the money they made in Russia and China respectively. These 'incentives' were not offers of even more attractive tax breaks, but threats that if they didn't cooperate, they were no longer welcome in the country. They could take their money, buy a soccer club, and a couple of politicians in the US, UK or Europe, and enjoy the remainder of their life, or play ball. And the results were spectacular.
When Trump announced that he wanted to 'Make America Great Again', bringing back the industry and manufacturing, I was waiting for him to do something similar, and end the tax-breaks for the billionaire-class and exempt multinationals, but that was never his plan. He wanted to keep those, and expand that system even further, while taxing the productive countries, and countries with all the natural resources, or 'capture' them militarily in an even more openly aggressive way as those who went before him as US presidents after Kennedy. This cynical attitude echoes the sounds those creepy ultra-wealthy are making when they say they want the government to increase taxes on the wealthy. George Soros, Bill Gates and the Clintons are saying such things every now and then. Because they themselves have no money, on paper. Everything tucked away in 'Trusts', 'Private/Public Partnerships' and 'Charities'. The cynicism is off the scale, but people fall for it again and again.
Both 'left-leaning' and 'right-leaning' readers need to wake up, and realise they are being played. Set up against the other, while the Vultures are laughing all the way to the bank. With every new odd Trump statement 'markets' respond, and 'insider trading' sucks billions from those 'markets' for the benefit of the few in an end-run, before this whole shit-house collapses. I did everything I could over the years to warn people, but the 'perks' of tagging along were still too attractive. Now there are no 'perks' left. Get your ass up here! This is bootcamp! Get ready for war with Russia and China, but first we need to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age. How do you rate our chances to emerge from all of this victorious? Describe a 'victory' to me.