Plunder: Financing the Panopticon, by Catherine Austin Fitts

Technology is increasing the productivity of . . . plunder. From Catherine Austin Fitts at solarireport.substack.com:

“If you want long-term success in business, relationships and life, you have to get better at accepting uncomfortable truths as fast as possible. When you refuse to accept an uncomfortable truth, you’re choosing to accept an uncomfortable future.”

~ Steven Bartlett, The Diary of a CEO

Plunder is an ancient story. The promise of plunder brought Attila and the Huns over the Alps to raid the Roman Empire in northern Italy. It inspired the conquistadors of Spain to hunt for silver in Mexico and South America, where they wiped out the Aztec and Incan Empires. Protected by court intrigue and secrecy, pirates have teamed up for centuries with royalty whose reign depended on rich spoils to pay back their bank loans. When the leaders of the British Empire could not maintain a trade surplus, they flooded the Chinese with opium, conquering with addiction and gunboats what could not be secured with manufacturing and diplomacy.

The founding of the Bank of Amsterdam, the Bank of Sweden, and the Bank of England in the 1600s launched the beginning of the economic paradigm I call the “central banking-warfare model”—but we could just as easily call the dominant economic model the “central banking-plunder model.” Plunder in its many forms has been essential to the rich accumulation of capital that helped to build the Western world. You can grow wealth, or you can take it—and in many cases, taking it is the preferred method. Alibaba founder Jack Ma once said, “When trade stops, war starts.”

The long history of Western plunder inspired the formation of the intergovernmental organization known as BRICS (whose current membership includes founding members Brazil, Russia, India, and China in 2009, followed by South Africa in 2010, and Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates in 2024-2025)¹ and the BRICS nations’ ongoing efforts to achieve financial and military independence. More recent history helps explain Russia’s fierce resistance to NATO encroachment—the Russian people have not forgotten the “Rape of Russia”² after the Soviet Union collapsed. As Samuel Huntington observed in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations:

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

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