When Ponzi Schemes Fail

 

When Ponzi Schemes Fail

By Karen Kwiatkowski

February 5, 2024

 

 

 

The current US government has become “a form of fraud that … pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors” – in other words, a Ponzi scheme.  No doubt the social security, Medicare/Medicaid and government retirement systems meet this definition of fraud directly.  But we may also apply it to other sectors of the federal government, including how the government funds defense, conducts a vast system of student loans, or pays the interest on the federal debt.

Consider the cost of the Pentagon, and the related cost of the CIA and the federal intelligence apparatus.  These agencies spend over a trillion dollars each year, with annual built-in increases – all without a single declared war being conducted since 1941, nor any of the numerous executive-directed and illegal “war-like” activities being won, or even remotely paying a dividend to taxpayers.

Homeland Defense is no different – trillions spent since 2001, and borders wide open, literally

uncontrolled in a way unimaginable even 20 years ago. Democracy in America (... Tocqueville, Alexis de Best Price: $2.59 Buy New $4.51 (as of 03:25 UTC - Details)

Payable federal student loans constitute $1.7 trillion.  The US taxpayer via Congressional authorization made this money available, and as it is paid back (or not), more tax-funded loans go out. For most people, time in college and degrees don’t substantially increase real inflation-adjusted income; yet Congress continually authorizes this spending program.

New money flows to all these programs every year, just as the USG seamlessly rolls over old debt for new, with no measurable value is created for anyone except for the government and banking elites running the scam.

I don’t mean to complain about the various Ponzi schemes conducted by the US government, or even to suggest that we – the taxpayers – have little choice in where or how our government spends its annual haul, and its unlimited borrowing in our name.  This situation has existed and grown worse for my entire lifetime.  I may not intellectually accept it, or even understand it,  but I bear it along with every other American alive today.

But I am curious.  What happens when a Ponzi scheme is exposed – generally by “investors” who suddenly, or gradually, realize their “investment” is gone, wasted, unavailable, for naught?

Legally, in dealing with an exposed Ponzi, the first thing the courts do is work up a clawback.  Government agencies and companies have rules outlining the use of clawbacks, “provisions whereby money already paid to an employee must be returned to an employer or benefactor, sometimes with a penalty.”

When dealing with corrupt and intentional Ponzi schemes, it is the courts and bankruptcy trustees who must determine the clawback – literally a clawing back of resources paid out to more recent recipients of dividends or payments in order to “level the playing field” and to restore a small portion of the “investment” to all investors.  Investors, at least the more recent ones, will pay twice for the crimes of others.

Most investors in your typical Ponzi are blissfully ignorant until the Ponzi scheme collapses.  Most investors are also innocent of major crimes, and are truly considered victims.  In the case of the American taxpayer, long engaged in supporting the federal Ponzi schemes, he or she is ignorant, innocent, and victimized.  Astonishingly, the American taxpayer is, and always has been, unable to opt out of the fraud.

When the several interrelated USG Ponzi schemes collapse, and they are moving in that direction rapidly, how will it be resolved?   Who will see a clawback from their more recent dividends and payouts from the schemes?  What will be left to distribute?

Will the bankruptcy trustees go after the major corporations surrounding the beltway for their overpriced contracts for things we never needed and can’t use, and cancel current contracts abruptly?  Will they go after people in their 80s and 90s who have collected far more in social security and Medicare than they ever paid for?  Will the vast array of recipients of government spending and grants and subsidies face a clawback for what they’ve received in the past five years in order to create a larger pot from which to pay all 200 million Americans their nickel on the dollar?

If a clawback was attempted on working or retired poor, it’s unlikely there would be much to seize – those inflation damaged dollars have long been spent. However, half of the assets counted as part of the “US” is in the hands of baby boomers, for a net (inflated) value of over $73 Trillion.  If something could be done by interested parties to legally to extract that wealth to help “even the playing field” for the rest of the post-Ponzi country, that would be good, right?  Targeted viruses, assisted suicide, and untested vaccines with death-enhancing side effects no one saw coming couldn’t hurt either, I presume.

Politically connected corporations and industries will be protected from clawback by their Congressional dependencies, lackeys and satraps, which is to say, the entire US Congress.  Nationalization of industries, as conducted under FDR and envisioned by every president since, with layer upon layer of executive orders, like this one signed by Obama, is another choice in a case of the USG Ponzi collapse. MyPillow 2.0 Cooling B... Buy New $89.98 (as of 03:25 UTC - Details)

Inflationary monetary policies are part and parcel of the Ponzi scheme we Americans have been forced to fund.  The inflation tool itself is nearing the end of its useful lifespan. What will come next?

Clawback.  I heard the term last week in an old episode of a crime show.  It may have been about the Bernie Madoff case, I don’t recall.  It made me think of David Rogers Webb’s The Great Taking.  In the book, and the video, Webb explains the coming bankruptcy of the US government, and how its intensely socialized network of connected businesses, banks and beneficiaries plan to deal with it.

Webb introduces the book with this

…the taking of collateral, all of it, the end game of this globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets, all money on deposit at banks, all stocks and bonds, and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment, land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will be similarly taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses, which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history.

Webb has done a huge service to the American taxpayer, explaining how he and she are unwitting Ponzi scheme investors, pseudo-owners, and future victims of the bankruptcy trustees.

After reading the book in December, I was inclined to put Webb’s explanations and predictions on a mental shelf, useful but not entirely prescriptive.  Then, I was alerted to the SEC’s existent plan to create National Asset Companies, and its accelerated public comment timeline.  This whole project, quietly initiated several years ago, was paused in January as a result of pushback, but the battle in this space will continue.

A US government all encompassing Ponzi scheme is something we should think about and consider.  All Ponzi schemes collapse. There are established procedures and predictable outcomes for these collapses. We may like to think that we, as taxpayers, will be able to clawback our ill-fated and wasted investments.  But that is not how clawback works.  We, as living and current Ponzi “investors” – albeit forced, unwitting, and duped – will be the targets of the clawback.

Webb describes an ongoing hybrid war, where only one side is prepared to win.  Only one side even has a plan to win – that’s what the Great Taking is about.  Living inside a Ponzi scheme on its last legs, we will pay twice for the crimes of others, and we will probably be grateful to get out of it alive.

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