INTRODUCING the PLUNDER STATE

                            Introducing The Plunder State  

What is It?  It is a sad fact of life that in most of the world today, especially the United States, a dangerous three-tier class of social parasites has arisen that I call the Nobility, the Plunderers, and the Enforcers. Just for fun, let’s assign them a collective label. I’ll refer to them as the Ruling Classes or just as the Rulers. 

The purpose of this article is to impress upon you the fact that you are being robbed on a far greater scale than you probably realized, and to prepare to explain, in a subsequent article, a way that you can interact with members of the Ruling Classes, if you must, with minimum risk of being killed, robbed, caged, or otherwise brutalized. While this method may not always work, it comes closer to that goal than any other approach. In fact, I’ve never known it to fail. And in many circumstances it is spectacularly successful. I call the method “Moral Kung-Fu” - or MKF for short.

The Enforcers are the police forces, the enlisted military, the mercenaries, the intelligence “assets”, the hired assassins, the “confidential informants”, the courts and their functionaries, the jail and prison personnel, and the civil services present within all government agencies. These are the most dangerous parasites and the ones public individuals are most likely to encounter. Although trained to exhibit many sociopathic traits, members of this group are  only rarely devoid of empathy, compassion, and conscience. So they can usually be reached at the human-to-human“ level of discourse – which is the essence of MKF.

The Plunderers are the various gang leaders to whom the Enforcers report. They include elected and appointed politicians, and their lower level appointees, the lobbyists who negotiate the politicians’ bribes, and the corporate executives who hire the lobbyists and directly benefit by bribing the politicians. They also include the operators of mainstream media – the news publishers, magazines, TV and radio networks, and academic institutions, as well as the commercial banks. And one should probably include the “Intelligence Community” - the alphabet soup of snoops and spies who surveil the rest of us.

In this group of parasites you will find an elevated percentage of conditioned sociopaths and true psychopaths. These are fairly easy to recognize by their obvious aspirations of promotion to the Nobility.

As for the Nobility, they are the ownership class, the so-called “elite” or “powers-that-be” of which you’ve probably heard from time to time. They are the owners of the central banks, the Federal Reserve System, the World Bank, the Bank for International Settlements, and the International Monetary Fund. In this class of parasites, it is very common for the decision makers to be charming psychopaths. These are the kings and courts of our modern feudal system. Fortunately you will probably never have to deal with them directly.

Extent of the Plunder 

The extent of the plunder perpetrated by the Ruling Class is so great that it is impossible to wrap one’s mind around the reality. The human brain simply cannot grasp what the numbers actually mean – they are so big.

Still, until one has an inkling of the magnitude of the problem, it is hard to understand the vast benefits to be had when MKF becomes widely known and utilized. For this reason it behooves us to review a few facts that provide a partial summary of the extent of the damage being done to our species by members of the Ruling Classes.

• The Raw Numbers
  The financial damage inflicted on us by the Rulers can only be described in terms of trillions of dollars. A trillion is a number so big the mind needs some help to grasp what it means. Please visit this link for some illustrations that depict such numbers.
  http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/us_debt/us_debt.html .
  
  As you can see, the “national debt”, that represents what the US government has “borrowed” from future generations yet unborn, would look like 21 skyscraper -sized stacks if piled on pallets in $100 bills. Make no mistake – this is plunder, because there is no way this “debt” can ever be repaid to the people from whom its value was stolen.
  
• Military Fraud
  The day before the attacks of 9/11/2001, it was announced that the Pentagon alone had “lost” or “misplaced” (couldn’t account for) another 2.3 trillion dollars. The next day the forensic accounting office that was tracking the “missing” money was destroyed and all its records lost when the office was hit with a missile. The resident team of accountants were all killed in the attack.
   
• Taxation
  One of the biggest forms of plunder in the US and around the world is taxation. Direct, indirect, and hidden taxes account for about half the income of wage earners in the US. If this practice were ended, the average standard of living would essentially double. Consider, for a moment, what you could do with your savings if you were allowed to keep the money you earned and to spend or invest it as you see fit. Would you be buying bombs to be dropped on innocent people half way around the world? Most people would not.
   
• Inflation
  One of the most difficult forms of plunder to assess accurately is inflation. Both central banks and commercial banks routinely create money out of nothing and charge interest when they lend it. Since the founding of the Federal Reserve in 1913, the buying power of the dollar has consequently dropped by about 98%. This means that in 1912 you would only have paid 2¢ for an item that costs you $1.00 today. This means that, were it not for taxation and inflation alone, you would be almost 50 times as well off financially as you are today.
  
  Think what that means. Imagine how you would live if your salary was 50 times what it is today. This represents just a portion of what the Rulers have stolen from you. For a thorough and entertaining explanation of how the Federal Reserve was created and how it affects us, I recommend the following speech by G. Edward Griffin: https://realityzone.com/product/creature-from-jekyll-island-lecture-1-cd/
   
• Cartelization
  Most cartels are groups of business people who form an organization to maximize its members’ profits and to establish and maintain a shared monopoly in their chosen field. Most of them call themselves “professionals”.
   

In order to jack up their pricing structures above the normal market levels, they contract with government plunderers to enforce their rules. They sell this idea to the public by claiming that their rules protect the public from unscrupulous and incompetent practi-tioners. In this way they virtually eliminate competition. As a result, every commercial activity that requires a government-issued license is controlled by a cartel.
 

In effect, the government steals your right to contract freely, as the US Constitution supports, and sells it back to you. In the end you pay through the nose for the services of doctors, lawyers, dentists, veterinarians, plumbers, electricians, financial advisors, accountants, and many others. According to Business News Daily and the Institute for Justice, as many as 1/3 of all jobs in the US now require a license.
 

It is of interest to note that in other countries, where these licensing requirements don’t exist, the same or similar services can be had at a fraction of the prices charged in the states. In such countries, many tangible products are also far cheaper because no license is required to sell them. Good examples of this are pharmaceutical products and natural medicines. It is impossible to really estimate how much cartelization costs the consumer; but it clearly represents a form of plunder comparable to the others we’ve described.

• Prisons and Jails Data on the true cost of prisons and jails is difficult to come by, but the best estimates I’ve seen indicate that the penal system overall costs the public about a trillion dollars a year. Half of this cost is borne by the tax-payers and the other half is derived from the inmates and their families. It is also noteworthy that among federal inmates, the number incarcerated for “victimless crimes” is typically 6½ times the number incarcerated for violence and property crimes.
   
• Fines and Forfeitures To really understand the dynamics of fines and forfeitures, it is necessary to first understand the definition of “crime”, because only restitution for a crime can morally justify confiscation of a person’s assets. In the simplest of terms, a crime is an act that creates a victim – a real live human being who has been killed, physically injured or constrained, or whose property has been stolen or damaged. All the law dictionaries agree on this point – or did the last time I looked.  

Strange as it seems to us, most of the plunder in the form of fines and forfeitures is a response to so-called “victimless crimes”. The organizations responsible for this form of plunder usually attempt to cover their asses by calling the acts of their victims “violations” or “infractions” - thereby claiming that their victims may be treated like criminals, but without some or any of the protections criminal law usually provides to criminals. A jury trial, for example. Or evidence beyond mere accusation.  

Civil Asset Forfeiture is performed by cops based upon their suspicion that the asset they steal was obtained by your participation in a crime. Based solely on their suspicion, they can take your cash, your personal valuables, your fancy car, and even your house and your bank account. In most states the burden of proof will be on you to prove you didn’t commit a crime to acquire your asset. This is a very expensive undertaking and rarely results in retrieval of your assets.

According to Armstrong Economics, in 2014 the Enforcers and Plunderers confiscated (stole) some $4.5 billion in the US. According to the FBI the total value stolen by burglars that year was only $3.9 billion. So now the asset confiscation based on suspicion exceeds the proceeds of all the country’s burglars by more than 15%.  

Fines levied by judges comprise an interesting aspect of the Plunder State. According to Boston Consulting Group, between 2009 and 2016, north American banks paid fines of 204 billion for their misdeeds. Yet there is no evidence that any of that money went to the victims of bank fraud. Compared to the magnitude of typical banks’ fraudulent operations, $29 billion a year is really trivial – a small piece of the cost of business-as-usual, as far as the banks are concerned.

At the other end of the scale – the end at which most of us operate, traffic courts are hugely successful Plunderers. Consider the facts reported by StatisticBrain.com. According to them:

• Speeding tickets alone reap $6.232 billion a year in the US from 112,000 people a day. This doesn’t count all the other victimless non-crimes for which people are ticketed - “infractions” like improper lane change, failure to signal, driving while intoxicated, broken taillight, phoning while driving, driving without seat-belt, driving without a license, without registration, without insurance, etc.
  
  None of these behaviors are crimes; yet if one objects to or resists this roadside assault, one can be maced, electrocuted, bludgeoned, knifed, shot, or caged. These folks are certainly treated like criminals.   

Stolen Wealth
From the foregoing, certain conclusions seem obvious:

• The Ruling Classes have stolen, and continue to steal, vast amounts of financial wealth from the rest of us.
  
• Between the “war on drugs”, the “war on terror”, and the rise of the modern police state, the Rulers have managed to legalize their whole system of plunder, thereby making it very difficult to resist meaningfully.
    
• Plunder is the world’s biggest industry. It takes different forms, but is readily recognized by the pain and impoverishment it inflicts.
   
• If the current circumstance isn’t quickly challenged, it could easily lead to extinction of our entire species, because the Nobility appear to believe they can survive a third world war – and seem bent on provoking one – to maximize their profits and plunder.
  
  Meanwhile, millions of people worldwide are suffering and dying on a scale never seen before. In the past century the Plunderers and Enforcers have killed almost 300,000,000 of their own people – not counting the effects of warfare.
  
  The most important conclusion is, perhaps, the realization that it is the Ruling Classes that are the real criminals – not the non-Rulers who are being preyed upon. If you try to keep what you’ve earned, the Rulers call it “tax evasion”. If you attempt to help someone else keep what they have earned, they call it “money laundering” or “conspiracy”. If you manufacture silver coins that could be used as money, they call it “counterfeiting”. If you manufacture and sell natural medicines, they call it “drug trafficking.” The pattern is simple. The Rulers invariably accuse their potential competitors of doing what they themselves are doing.
  
  So in my next post I’ll begin to address the question of how one can push back with MKF.
  
  Until then, Live free,
  Bob Podolsky