ENTER THE RABBIT HOLE: Part 1

[Editor’s Note: This essay by Derek Swannson became the voice-over transcript for the documentary film of the same name, which can be found on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/1KumLgto_eo ]

[size=34]Introduction: WHY DIG DEEPER?[/size]
[size=66]The Rabbit Hole can be found at the intersection where deep politics and high weirdness meet in a head-on collision. It’s the psychic abyss that opens up when you discover things about the world that seem like manifestations of pure evil. Like how the Rockefellers used their ill-gotten oil monopoly fortune to fund anti-human endeavors such as MKUltra and Operation Gladio. Or how the CIA’s Project Artichoke was designed to create just the sort of patsy assassin that Lee Harvey Oswald claimed he’d been made into — which, if true, made the appointment of ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles to the Warren Commission the political equivalent of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse, and then allowing that fox to write the official history of chickens.[/size]
Another Warren Commission appointee, Gerald Ford, had coincidentally co-owned a modeling agency with a guy named Harry Conover, who at that time was married to the famous World War II pin-up girl, Candy Jones, who would later claim she’d been tortured and exploited as an MKUltra courier. What are we supposed to make of that — or of the weird fact that the Navy Rear Admiral who commanded the U.S. naval fleet during the false flag Gulf of Tonkin Incident on August 4th, 1964, happened to be the dad of The Doors’ famous frontman, Jim Morrison?
I’ve been burrowing deep into the Rabbit Hole for almost thirty years now — ever since I interviewed William Randolph Hearst Junior as a young journalist and found myself face-to-face with the most appalling example of the human species that I’d yet encountered. In my experience, the ruling capitalists are a vicious bunch. Inflamed by greed, seething with unwarranted egotism, incapable of empathy or self-criticism, and made indifferent to human suffering by the numbing insularity of their obscene wealth, they’ll Fudge you over with the same lack of guilt that a pampered house cat feels when slaughtering a mouse.
But we’re not mice, and the world doesn’t belong to the ruling capitalists and their whorish henchmen any more or less than it belongs to you and me. This video series is dedicated to exposing their Deep State stratagems, in the hope that exposure will lead to widespread social activism and political reform. But of course, this is exactly the sort of project that usually gets suppressed by U.S. corporate media outlets, so I don’t expect many people to watch it.
You might ask: “Why do it then? Why keep going deeper into the Rabbit Hole when what you find there is so thoroughly depressing?” My usual answer is that I don’t like being lied to. I want to know how the world really operates before I die. But there’s more to it than that. It has something to do with the Jungian concept of shadow work. As Carl Jung wrote: “One does become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” I’m convinced that our only path toward collective enlightenment is to confront our collective darkness and expose it to the light of public consciousness. If we try to avoid or ignore the shadow side of society, it will only get worse.
You don’t have to just take my word on this — or even Doctor Jung’s. The Toronto scholar and public intellectual du jour, Jordan B. Peterson, goes a long way toward justifying any random trip down the Rabbit Hole with what he says here:

JORDAN PETERSON: The world is carnage — a place of carnage, but that… that… you can accept that. And if you can’t accept it, then what that means is that you’re not integrated enough — because if you’re integrated enough, then you can accept it. It’s like the test of the integration. So your character isn’t forged sufficiently if you cannot tolerate that. And it’s not like it’s an easy thing to tolerate. Often what people do is they just don’t think about it. They just push it out of their mind. And no wonder! But they pay for that with shallowness, and with self-contempt, and with the inability to bear suffering nobly.

So if you’re up for finding out a little bit more about the world you thought you knew — if you’re ready for a skanky glimpse at “the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul” (that’s Jung again) — then here we go….
[size=34]Part One: THE DEVIL OR THE DEEP STATE[/size]

The majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are not interested in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.
— Harold Pinter, Nobel Lecture, 2005

[size=66]Inhis 2018 State of the Union address, President Trump was applauded by craven congressional ass-kissers as he took credit for the huge gains — in employment and in the stock market — that had occurred since his election. He was then awarded an even bigger round of applause — a standing ovation from the Republican side of the room, actually — as he talked up his tax cuts, which will overwhelmingly benefit the rich at a time when the richest 1% of Americans already own over 40% of the nation’s wealth. This comes after decades of prior legislative favors, regulatory coup d’états, and jurisprudence giveaways (like the Supreme Court’s disastrous 2010 Citizens United decision) that have helped the rich amass their wealth at the expense of almost everyone else.[/size]
On the third day after Trump’s State of the Union address, the Dow Jones industrial average closed down 666 points — its worst day since Trump took office. That happened on a Friday. The following Monday, the Dow shed another 1,175 points — the most points it had ever dropped in a single day (although not the biggest one-day drop on a percentage basis; that record still belonged to the 1987 Black Monday crash, generally thought to have been caused by the then relatively new — and still little-understood — program trading bots).
The stock market is so massively manipulated — and now dominated by sneaky high-frequency trading algorithms — that predicting where it will go next is a motley fool’s game, unless you happen to have insider information. But it seems likely — to me, at least — that the Dow’s 666-point drop signaled the end of the market’s historic nine-year bull run. Why do I say that? Well, even if you’re not superstitious, or a believer in the occult, you have to admit it’s a bit odd that the peak of the previous bull run in the world markets occurred on October 31st, 2007 (Halloween, of course…) and after that, the S&P 500 — the world’s most widely tracked index — kept falling until it hit rock bottom at 666 on March 6th, 2009. That was the day to get back into stocks for this latest bull run — buying in at 666, the devil’s number, the Mark of the Beast. So when the Dow dropped 666 points on February 2nd, 2018, it could have been a signal to all the Wall Street demons to reverse direction — to sell their long positions and go short.
All those 401(k), retirement, pension, and college savings accounts that President Trump was talking up? They’re low-hanging fruit, ripe for the harvest from a Luciferic gang of short-selling financial marauders.
You could never get away with any plot line so outrageous and unsubtle if you were writing fiction, but if you’re just reciting the weird facts… well, who can argue? 666. You almost have to believe that someone (or some thing) massaged the numbers. But who could really accomplish that? Was it the devil, or the Deep State?
We’ll probably never know for sure… but if you’re curious, I’ll be taking a look at some of the more likely culprits in what comes next.

Debt is a happiness killer. None of us can be truly happy if we’re saddled with debt.
— Forbes

[size=66]Forbes magazine estimates there are just over 2,000 billionaires in the world today. According to a 2017 Oxfam report, the world’s top eight billionaires own as much wealth as “half the human race.” If you want to know who runs the world, you can start right there — at the top of the pyramid — but you have to assume that at least some of those 2,000 billionaires are just doofus inheritors of their extreme wealth (like the second generation Walmart heirs), without much power beyond the ability to hire and fire their maids and chauffeurs at will. Others might not be billionaires at all (or at least they don’t advertise it), but they nonetheless belong among the ranks of the power elite.[/size]
So, for argument’s sake, let’s say there are eight or nine thousand people at the top. Some you’ve probably heard of, others you haven’t: the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Koch brothers, George Soros, Larry Fink, Ray Dalio, Robert Mercer, Peter Thiel, whoever…. They’re the coddled vampires of this world — the ones who feed off the rest of us.
The shadowy netherworld of the global financial system plays a huge role here, of course. To be a major player in that system — among the upper 1% — you have to keep your conscience in a suitcase (like Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu). You’ll be dealing with governments, multinationals, intelligence agencies, arms dealers, drug cartels, and terrorist groups. Global finance is organized as another pyramid, with the Bank for International Settlements (or BIS) at the top. The BIS is privately-owned by 60 central banks, representing countries around the world that make up roughly 95% of world GDP. From its headquarters in Basel, Switzerland, the BIS acts as a mother ship bank for those 60 central banks, with a balance sheet of over 240 billion dollars.
During World War II, the BIS was used as a trading center for gold looted by the Nazis. Its Headquarters Agreement states that the BIS is inviolable and has complete immunity from all laws worldwide, giving it absolute monetary power. It’s a Free State with its own police force — like Vatican City, the City of London, or the District of Columbia. From within that Free State, decisions are made about global interest rates and the worldwide money supply. Those decisions travel down through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, down through the privately owned central banks (like the Federal Reserve), down through the national and regional banks, and finally, down to the bottom of the pyramid, where all the real wealth originates — labor, natural resources, scientific breakthroughs, and technological innovations — all of it exploitable, all of it vulnerable to being snatched up and turned into more wealth for the bankers and their billionaire overseers.
Their game is called Financialization. The goal is to get as many people as possible at the bottom of the pyramid into just the right amount of debt — not so much that they give up and die (or declare bankruptcy), but not so little that they can easily pay it off. The ideal situation is to have them slowly but steadily trading away their real wealth for more and more loans and mortgages — new debt contracts papering over the financial holes left by old debt contracts, each contract requiring fees and interest payments that suck away at the debtors’ real wealth like “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money…” as journalist Matt Taibbi once memorably described the machinations of Goldman Sachs.
The interest paid on all those debts gets sucked from the bottom of the pyramid straight back up to the top, with every bank involved getting a portion along the way. And the really wonderful thing, for the bankers, is that 90% of the money they loan out is now digital — just ones and zeroes in a computer network’s ledger system — and the rest is fiat currency, backed by nothing. It’s almost as easy for the central banks to increase the money supply as it is for you or me to change the numbers in an Excel spreadsheet. That’s why the cost of almost everything (except TVs) is always going up. The bankers want to see some inflation in every nation’s economy — via increases in the money supply — because inflation, for them, is the next best thing to outright theft. Inflation is really about ensuring that your wages will buy less and less. That makes it easier for the bankers to exploit the labor and resources at the bottom of the pyramid, by forcing more people there to take on more debt.
That’s why one person could support a family with a regular job thirty years ago, but now both adults in the family have to work — or one person has to work two full-time jobs — just to pay for food, utilities, and a modest place to live. Soon, the kids and the family dog will also have to start slaving away — all just so some cabbagehead banker can have new slate tiles in his gourmet kitchen, or spend the weekend partying on some Mafia hovercraft scooting around Hawaii.
(And why, you might ask, do TV prices keep dropping while the cost of almost everything else is going up? Well, the virtual authorities want you to have a TV. As Bill Hicks said: “Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.” TV promotes a false consciousness that keeps you clueless and docile, easier to manipulate with propaganda.)
Financial fuckery of this kind is the primary source of all the misery in the world today. But it obviously works out swell for the bankers and for anyone else loaded with excess capital. Meanwhile, unjust laws, military and police forces, and criminalized intelligence agencies have been put into place to keep the people at the bottom of the pyramid suppressed, enforcing an ever-widening moat between the rich and the poor that will ensure that there’s never a crowd at the top — just eight or nine thousand vile, unrepentant, bloodsucking greed-monsters.
Like the old Gershwin song goes, it’s “Nice work, if you can get it.”
So, to sum up: debt is a weapon, used to control nations and their citizens by the psychopaths and intraspecies predators at the top of the pyramid. When a nation’s government can’t print its own money, and instead funds its deficits with debt, a simple manipulation of interest rates can create economic booms, or recessions and depressions. All it takes is a word from Basel — or in America’s case, the Fed. It doesn’t matter whether you, personally, have taken on debt; your nation’s leaders have already committed you to a huge debt burden without your consent. It’s a debt that will never be fully repaid — a debt that will be passed on to you and your children and their children’s children in countless ways: not just with rising taxes, but also with disintegrating infrastructure, an inadequate healthcare system, and the gutting of social safety net programs like Medicare, unemployment insurance, and Supplemental Security Income — which will eventually lead to mass starvation, riots, wars, and so forth. Any reasonable country would do everything it could to avoid putting its people into debt to those extortionists, the bankers. But as we all know, our top politicians and lawmakers can always be bought off — or blackmailed into submission. That’s the trouble with democracy, with communism, with socialism, with any –ism or system of government, really:
Too many bad guys rise to the top.

Debt is, by its very nature, a cancer on economic growth. As debt levels rise, it consumes more capital by diverting it from productive investments into debt service. As debt levels spread through the system, it consumes greater amounts of capital until it eventually kills the host.
— Lance Roberts, “There Will Be No Economic Boom”

[size=66]Due to skyrocketing college tuition rates, more and more of our children are entering the workforce already in debt up to their eyeballs. For most, that means there’s no time to travel, or experiment with alternative ways of earning a living. As soon as they graduate, they’re forced to trade in their hopes and dreams for mind-numbing work routines and a subscription to Netflix.[/size]
Forbes magazine recently estimated that “the average American household with student debt owes about $49,000. Graduates in their twenties spend more than $350 per month, on average, on student loan payments and interest. Since the average ‘entry-level’ job was worth about $50,000 a year in 2016 for new graduates, ‘truly average’ college grads in America can expect to see their earnings garnished by between eight and ten percent for roughly ten to twelve years after they graduate.”
That’s assuming you can find a decent job and keep it, which is no sure thing in our post-industrial, financialized economy. Even with a college degree, you might find yourself working as a dog groomer at your local Wee Beasties Pet Emporium, or as a men’s denim specialist at Macy’s. And thanks to lobbyist-crafted legislation signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1998, unlike almost any other type of debt (such as home mortgages, car loans, or extortionary medical bills), student loans are now almost impossible to discharge through bankruptcy procedures.
So student loans might be better described as indentured servitude contracts, rather than debt, because there’s no escaping them.
It doesn’t end there. Credit card debt is piling up nationwide. Health insurance costs have doubled, or even tripled, for many middle-class families since the oxymoronic Affordable Care Act was signed into law in 2010 (although it’s been a tax-subsidized boon for others). And if you were foolhardy enough to buy a home in a state with high property taxes, you might have found those taxes being used against you to make your home unaffordable. That’s what happened to me in New Jersey, where a long history of government corruption has resulted in some of the highest property taxes in the nation. “The Sopranos” was filmed there for a reason.
It’s no coincidence that our collective financial fate has grown worse as the technocracy has assembled its ever-evolving surveillance horror show (as revealed to us by those two exiled enemies of the State, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, among many other brave whistleblowers…). As former Assistant Secretary of Housing, Catherine Austin Fitts, has explained:

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: When you look at what’s happening with debt, something very new is happening in the last twenty years that we’ve never seen before. We’ve seen debt used as a control mechanism, and we’ve seen financial entrapment of nations — and economic hits on nations using debt — for centuries. So the game is old as the hills. But when you combine digital systems — y’know, payment systems, phone systems… with, um, artificial intelligence and relational databases, and now the cloud — what you’re talking about doing is being able to run economic hits at the individual level, globally. Okay? So — and this is why the Snowden revelations were so important — because if you look at them in combination with debt, we’re talking about a much more invasive entrapment system. That system can now literally reach through sovereign nations and start controlling everything from municipalities to households directly.

Corporations like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Microsoft have become the eyes and ears of an Orwellian Big Brother that’s forever spying on us. The technology for totalitarianism is already in place. It’s only a matter of time before someone (or some thing) turns the key.

I’m disgusted by what we’ve become in America. I truly believe there is brain death in this country. Everything we see is designed to sell us something. The only thing they want to do is take our money.
— John Carpenter, Writer-Director of They Live

[size=66]There’s an argument to be made that John Carpenter’s campy but politically-subversive sci-fi satire, They Live, was deliberately suppressed right after George H.W. Bush and his dim-witted sidekick, Dan Quayle, won the 1988 Presidential election. They Live was inspired by Ray Nelson’s short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning,” which had caught Carpenter’s eye after being adapted into graphic novel format in 1986. The original story depicts a colonizing force of butt-ugly space aliens hypnotizing the people of Earth into subjugation, primarily through the use of television and subliminal advertising. (We didn’t have smartphones back then, but I’m sure the aliens would have glommed onto those, too… or even invented them for us.)[/size]
Carpenter’s brilliant twist was to turn the aliens into Young Republicans and other assorted corporate sell-outs who, when viewed through a pair of magic Ray-Bans, look like skin-flayed, bug-eyed, Upper One-Percenters. In other words, Yuppie Skeletor Motherfuckers aligned with the U.S. political establishment at a time when Reaganism and Thatcherism was all the rage. Carpenter has described the film as counter-propaganda — a way of “giving the finger to Reagan when nobody else would.” He’d carried a small but intense hope that it would help persuade American voters not to elect another union-busting, middle-class-hosing, Deep State stooge as their president. Tragically, for all of us, that’s not the way things turned out.
They Live was the weekend’s top-grossing film when it debuted on November 4th, 1988, four days before the election. It was generally well received by film critics (with the notable exceptions of those two pro-establishment propaganda outlets, The New York Times and The Washington Post). The movie easily made back its four million dollar investment over the first weekend. By the second weekend, it was in fourth place at the box office, earning an additional 2.7 million — pretty decent numbers for those days.
They Live’s distributor, Universal Pictures, had been running an ad campaign that depicted a skeletal alien in a suit and tie standing behind a podium, as if campaigning to a crowd of unseen voters from beneath a sleek toupee that bore an eerie resemblance to Dan Quayle’s real hair. Soon after Bush and Quayle won the election, co-star Keith David observed: “Not that anybody’s being paranoid but… suddenly you couldn’t see (They Live) anywhere — it was, like, snatched.” They Live supposedly bombed at the box office after its second weekend, but a film can’t make any money when it’s not showing anywhere. You have to wonder if then-President Reagan called in few a favors from his film industry pals like Lew Wasserman and Jack Valenti to get They Live pulled from theaters. It’s since become a cult classic that’s looking more and more like a documentary every day.
[size=66]Okay, hold on here a minute… I have an update: On April 22nd, 2018, my friend Matt Alford got in touch with John Carpenter and asked him for his thoughts on this They Live suppression theory. Matt’s a British academic and the co-author (with Tom Secker) of National Security Cinema, so he has the kind of credentials that seemed likely to elicit a response from Carpenter (even though Matt has been known to wear goofy hats, dress up as Pocahontas, and cavort in public with Pussy Riot’s parents). Carpenter ended up replying to Matt on Facebook. In their email exchange, Carpenter explained that They Live’s rapid disappearance from theaters was likely just due to bad marketing. According to him, the studio executives were surprised when They Live opened at #1 at the box office during its first weekend and “they got so excited” that they “decided to tie the film to the elections and changed the ads the second week to being more political than the original ads.” When the picture art changed, it changed the dynamics. “Meanwhile, they had already dialed back the ad buy, anticipating a not great response to the movie. The combination of smaller, black and white ads in the movie sections that didn’t reflect the ad campaign made for confusion.” Carpenter concluded: “Some things are not dramatic — just stupid.”[/size]
Of course, even John Carpenter would have no way of knowing if They Live’s marketing director had been given a tap on the shoulder and told to deliberately screw up the ad campaign so the movie wouldn’t reach a wide audience. Stranger things have happened via Operation Mockingbird and its offshoots — but that’s another story.