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In this episode, Whitney and Mark Goodwin discuss their recent article on GREEN+ and its efforts to impose a carbon market on Latin America through satellite surveillance and opaque contractual agreements as well as attempts to obfuscate a shift to totalitarianism as “free market” capitalism and altruism.

Show notes

Follow Mark: @markgoodw_in, BTC Magazine.

Originally published 04/29/24.

Podcast available now on all Podcast apps, Rokfin, SoundCloud, Odysee, Podverse.fm.

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Podcast available now on all Podcast apps. Video on Rokfin and Odysee. Clips on Podverse.fm.

The Carbon Credit Coup with Mark Goodwin.

Whitney joined The Kim Iversen Show to discuss the smart border wall and digital ID. Available on Rumble.

Clips: Border Wall, Anduril, Palantir, War and Manufacturing Consent, RFK Jr

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The Kim Iversen Show.

Available on Rumble and YouTube. Original show link here (Interview starts at 6:23 timestamp).

Interview clips available here. Carbon Credit Market, Digital ID, Smart Wall

Redacted.

Available on YouTube and podcast apps.

Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin joined TFTC to discuss their latest article “Debt From Above: The Carbon Credit Coup.”

TFTC #499.

Available on Rokfin, Odysee, and YouTube. Show notes here.

TLAV.

Sweeping across the shores of Latin America comes a scheme from some of the most predatory figures in the venture capital ecosystem of the United States. It is a brazen attempt to assert foreign influence across Latin America and threatens to reshape the very fabric of the region and the day to day lives of its people. At its core is a serpentine set of contractual obligations, held at the municipal level, cast throughout Central and South America, upheld by an intelligence-linked satellite company, and controlled by a private se­ctor consortium of green-washed financiers aiming to turn the region’s forests into equity and carbon credits. At the same time, it obliges local governments to spend “conservation” funds on projects that further financialize nature and aid the construction of an inter-continental “smart” grid. One of its key ambitions appears to be further entrenching the debt load of the region through the multi-lateral development banks and the dollarization of the continent from the subnational level up through carbon markets upheld by a digital ledger. What seems like a technological marvel aimed at progress and connectivity harbors a darker agenda — one that intertwines planetary surveillance, financial predation, geopolitical maneuvering, and the domination of a resource-rich continent buried in debt.

This grand design, known by the acronym GREEN+ and conceived by stalwarts of the digital dollar and debt schemes of the private sector, has quietly taken root through a web of political entanglements at the local level. Even a key figure in the Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond scandal plays a role. Astonishingly, every capital city of Latin America has eagerly signed on, apparently unaware of the strings attached to these seemingly benign partnerships, while a majority of municipalities in the region have also made commitments with these same groups that will push them to join GREEN+, potentially in a matter of weeks. The (hopefully) well-meaning regional governments have unwittingly paved the way for a sweeping surveillance apparatus tied to American intelligence that threatens to erode privacy and civil liberties under the guise of progress and combating the climate crisis.

Upon further observation, GREEN+’s connections reveal a disturbing narrative of financial interests melding with geopolitical ambitions. The backers of the satellite company share ties with former members of the highest offices of US financial policy and regulation alongside the key architects and profiteers of private capital creation, aiming to consolidate control over monetary flows in Latin America within the redistribution of distressed government debt from the public to the private sector. As this two-part series will show, this concerted effort is not merely about surveillance – it’s a calculated move towards further dollarization, tightening the grip of corporate and technological monopolies over the economic landscape of the Americas.

The scheme’s proponents also speak of how it will significantly advance the “economic” and “regional” integration of the Americas, invoking visions of unity while obscuring the true nature of their agenda for economic domination and stronger regional governance. Their model, eerily reminiscent of the EU’s transition from a free trade union to a bureaucratic behemoth yoked to the US through the Eurodollar, sets the stage for unelected entities to enforce policies through programmable money, enabled by smart contracts on blockchains and designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many. What materializes before us is not just a technological evolution but a quiet banker coup — one that lays the groundwork for land grabs and invasive surveillance under the guise of progress and conservation. It’s a narrative that echoes throughout history, where intelligence-linked figures and predatory financial interests converge to prey upon the Global South, leaving a trail of economic exploitation and geopolitical manipulation in their wake. What masquerades as progress for individuals and the environment at large may very well be the harbinger of a new era of subjugation and control.

GREEN+ THE GREEN+ PROGRAM

In 2022, several groups came together to launch the GREEN+ (Government Reduction of Emissions for Environmental Net + Gain) Jurisdictional Programme, the “first program that will monitor by satellite all subnational protected areas of the planet” and – through contracts with numerous local and state governments – propel and deepen the economic integration of the Americas through the quiet imposition of a continent-wide, blockchain-based carbon market.

GREEN+ has been piloted in a handful of Latin American cities since its founding and is due to launch globally in just a few weeks time. Most of the GREEN+ agreements with “subnational” governments have remained focused on Latin America. Per the program, the subnational agreements have established the “rules and requirements to enable accounting and crediting with GREEN+ policies and measures and/or nested projects, implemented as GHG mitigation activities,” with GREEN+ being described as “the planet’s new subnational government advisory mechanism.”

Key to the program are the services provided by GREEN+ founding member Satellogic, an Argentina-founded company closely aligned with Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Elon Musk’s SpaceX that specializes in sub-meter resolution satellite surveillance. Satellogic, a contractor to the US government and whose founders were also previously contactors for the US’ DHS, NSA and DARPA, will provide surveillance data of the entire world’s “protected areas” to GREEN+’s governing coalition, composed of the NGOs CC35, the Global Footprint Network, The Energy Coalition and other “respected stakeholders.”

According to the press release that details Satellogic’s alliance with GREEN+, the satellite surveillance data “will enable individuals, organizations, and global markets to accurately monitor the compliance of signatory jurisdictions to avoid deforestation.” However, other information in the press release reveals that forests will actually be monitored for the purpose of generating “credible” carbon credits to be traded on exchanges by GREEN+ on behalf of subnational governments. The press release also states that the GREEN+ alliance with Satellogic will “advance the future measurement of energy emissions in the most populated areas of the planet,” i.e. the surveillance of carbon emissions from space. Satellogic launched some GREEN+-affiliated satellites in 2022 as part of its pilot and is due to launch the remainder this April during Miami Climate Week. Satellogic’s past and upcoming launches of GREEN+ satellites were/will be conducted in collaboration with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, also a contractor to the US military and US intelligence agencies.

Satellogic and GREEN+

Though framed as a way to develop economic incentives to mitigate climate change, the program is based on California’s controversial and grift-prone cap and trade program and has been created (and is being implemented by) individuals and companies that are seeking to covertly dollarize Latin America and/or have deep ties to US intelligence. Its ultimate ambitions go far beyond carbon markets and seek to use satellite surveillance to enforce carbon emission levels in both urban and rural areas. It also seeks to impose a new financial system centered around energy, commodity, and natural resource “credits” that are underpinned by extensive and invasive surveillance, underscored by the motto: “Earth observation is preservation.”

The alliance that created GREEN+ includes the NGOs CC35, the Global Footprint Network (GFN), Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Catalytic Finance Foundation (CFF, formerly R20) and The Energy Coalition (TEC); the Gibraltar-based law firm Isolas; the global insurance giant Lockton; the satellite company Satellogic; the “green” blockchain company EcoRegistry; the dominant carbon credit certifier in Latin America, Cercarbono; and Rootstock (RSK), the bitcoin side-chain protocol responsible for “smart BTC.” Several members of the alliance, though how many is unclear, now operate as part of a consortium linked to a company called Global Carbon Parks, which is discussed in greater detail later in this article and now manages major aspects of GREEN+. The NGOs (i.e. CC35, GFN, CFF and TEC) involved in founding GREEN+ are those who actually govern the GREEN+ program from California.

As previously mentioned, the program takes carbon in “effectively conserved protected areas of a sub-national jurisdiction”, i.e. a city, county, province, or state/region, and converts them into carbon credits. Per the program, “these credits are traded on the [carbon] offset market, and income is deposited in a trust fund” that is controlled by GREEN+ and is known as the GREEN+ Trust. That trust is run by unspecified individuals who work for Lockton, Isolas and Rootstock. Alejandro Guerrero, head of Lockton’s Argentina & Uruguay branch, is the only publicly acknowledged member of the trust.

Another website tied to the GREEN+ initiative describes the initial process as follows:

1. Public and private agreements between [a subnational] government and custodians are signed with zero upfront cost.
2. Custodians trade the carbon units that are produced by the subnational governments (the public sector) signing contracts with the private sector in voluntary carbon markets.
3. Those contracts signed by the subnational governments become smart contracts and carbon credits are then tokenized for traceability.
4. The GREEN+ Trust holds government funds in escrow.

Subsequently, “a partial release of trust funds is made periodically during the crediting period of the jurisdictional initiative.” From this “partial release,” “a percentage operational fee” is deducted (the percentage is undisclosed in the program’s documents) and paid to the GREEN+ program while a separate (and also undisclosed) fee is also deducted “for the operation of the GREEN+ Trust.” Disbursements of what remains are made annually over a ten year period and, per graphs produced by GREEN+, those payments remain the same, fixed value even if the value of the carbon credits of the protected areas grows.

From GREEN+

Between 40% and 60% of the funds actually received by subnational governments can be used to “design and execute projects” aimed at conservation, while the rest “is allocated for new jurisdictional decarbonisation initiatives” that can produce additional or “consequential” carbon credits. These “consequential” credits are then “offered as a preferred option to the investors who initially purchased the conservation credits at a 50% discounted price calculated at the current market price.” However, later in the same document, the program says that “the amount required for the initial implementation” of conservation projects “may not exceed 20% of the funds allocated [from the GREEN+ Trust] to the jurisdictional initiative.” Clearly, the amount of funds actually being generated for conservation-related projects is minimal and, even in the best case scenario, is less than half of the capital generated by the carbon credits themselves. However, as we shall see, these “conservation” projects must be done in conjunction with approved partners of Global Carbon Parks, which – like the organization itself – are tied to predatory financial interests and oligarchs with questionable motives.

Of the funds that governments actually receive as part of GREEN+, half are officially meant to go toward conservation-related projects while the other half are meant to go toward decarbonization-related projects. However, on the Global Carbon Parks-GREEN+ website, it notes that the decarbonization projects must be conducted alongside Community Electricity, which forms part of Global Carbon Parks and is closely connected to the GREEN+ alliance member The Energy Coalition (TEC). As will be discussed later, TEC and Community Electricity are together attempting to build an inter-continental “smart” grid in the Americas and are also involved in efforts to develop “smart” cities and suburbs.

As for GREEN+’s conservation projects, the website states that “50% of the resources received by the capital [city as part of GREEN+] must be used for social and environmental impact in protected urban areas with partners such as Cities4Forests.” Cities4Forests was founded by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a World Economic Forum affiliate and contractor to suspected CIA front USAID that is focused on resource “sustainability.” WRI is funded by the US and several European governments, billionaires Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mike Bloomberg as well as Google, Meta/Facebook, the Soros family’s Open Societies Foundations, the UN, Walmart, the World Bank and the World Economic Forum, among others. WRI’s Cities4Forests shares many of the same funding sources, such as the governments of the UK, Germany, Denmark and the US as well as the World Bank and the Caterpillar Foundation. Other funders include the Wall Street giant Citi Group, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Notably, the Rockefeller Foundation and the IDB recently teamed up to create the Intrinsic Exchange Group, which has spearheaded the financialization of nature via the creation of Natural Asset Corporations (NACs). As Unlimited Hangout previously reported, NACs create corporations that take control of natural assets that were previously part of the “commons,” such as forests, rivers and lakes, and then sell shares of those assets to Wall Street asset managers, sovereign wealth funds and other financial institutions in order to generate profit under the guise of “conserving” the asset they target.

From GREEN+

Unsurprisingly, most of Cities4Forests’ projects, such as those that would be built with GREEN+ funds, are similar to NACs in that they focus on using natural assets and “natural capital” to produce new financial and insurance products. Examples of Cities4Forests “conservation” projects include the development of a Forest Resilience Bond and the India Forum for Nature-based Solutions. One of the India-based forum’s “core partners” is the Nature Conservancy, which has been run by Wall Street bankers for years and has pioneered the modern iteration of the controversial “debt for conservation” swap among other “nature-based solutions.” The funders of Cities4Forest and its creator the WRI are also deeply affiliated with groups like the Glasgow Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) and UN-backed climate finance initiatives that openly seek to use debt imperialism to herd the global economy, with a focus on emerging markets, into a new system of global financial governance.

Thus, the “conservation” and “decarbonization” efforts that subnational governments must enact as part of their contractual agreements with GREEN+ will go towards projects tied to either the smart grid/smart city developer Community Electricity or a “conservation” organization backed by Western oligarchs, multi-national corporations and banks that seeks to financialize and monetize nature under the guise of conserving it.

CC35 AND THE SUBNATIONAL PIVOT

CC35, or Ciudades Capitales de las Americas frente al Cambio Climático (American Capital Cities Facing Climate Change), is the most visible organization behind the GREEN+ program and one of the members of its governance committee. CC35’s goal is the economic integration of the Americas (North, South and Central) through coordinated climate change policies, specifically the creation of an Inter-American carbon market, with GREEN+ being the means of implementing that market. The group focuses on “subnational” governments, namely capital cities of the Americas, thereby circumventing national governments with respect to Climate Change-related policy.

Regarding GREEN+, Sebastián Navarro, the secretary general of CC35, stated of the program that: “We will be relentless from the governance of the GREEN+ program with those who want to continue playing with the future of humanity,” adding that their “relentless” approach would be greatly aided by Satellogic’s satellite surveillance capabilities, which would also “generate unprecedented credibility among investors of the carbon credits produced by conservation.” Navarro’s promise to be “relentless” in governing a satellite surveillance regime of American forests for the purpose of producing “high-credibility” carbon markets.

Sebastián Navarro of CC35

While framed as an initiative “born out of Latin America,” CC35 is registered in Miami; Florida (Coral Gables, specifically) and has long been funded and partnered with US-based interests. For instance, CC35’s first partners were R20 (Regions of Climate Action, now the Catalytic Finance Foundation), a group created by former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in partnership with the UN, and the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. From there, CC35 partnered with UN and UN-linked organizations as well as Pegasus Capital Advisors, which also finances CC35 and Schwarzenegger’s R20/Catalytic Finance Foundation. R20/Catalytic Finance, like CC35, focuses its attention on “subnational” governments.

Pegasus Capital is the firm created by Craig Cogut, a key figure in the “junk bond” financial scandal at the now defunct Drexel Burnham Lambert. Drexel’s junk bond department, led by Michael Milken, engaged in blatantly illegal activity and used junk bonds to help fuel the takeovers of major corporations by the era’s infamous “corporate raiders” before the bank’s collapse. Specifically, Cogut was the lawyer who advised the Milken-run and scandal-ridden junk bond department on the legality of transactions, including those that saw Milken become a convicted felon. Following Drexel’s collapse, Cogut teamed up with a group of Drexel alumni led by Leon Black – now best known for his close association with the deceased sex trafficker and “financial adviser” Jeffrey Epstein – to co-found Apollo Advisers (now Apollo Global Management) in 1990. Cogut left Apollo to found Pegasus in 1996 and Pegasus has since became a key player in several UN-supported “green” finance initiatives. Cogut is also financially entangled with Satellogic’s co-founder, Emiliano Kargieman, as will be discussed later.

Cogut subsequently became a board member of Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability, which was created by Michael Crow (and who served on the board alongside Cogut). Crow is chairman of the board of trustees of In-Q-tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. Cogut also served on the board of ASU’S McCain Institute, named for the late Senator John McCain, which has links to Ashton Kutcher’s CIA-linked charity Thorn. Current board members of the McCain Institute include both Crow and former CIA director David Petraeus, as well as Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who co-created the Council for Inclusive Capital with the Vatican. Cogut was also on the board of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), part of the Clinton family philanthropies, and CHAI was largely shaped and influenced by notorious sex trafficker and “financial advisor for billionaires” Jeffrey Epstein, having been the chief reason for former president Bill Clinton’s flights on Epstein’s plane in the early 2000s.

Notably, Cogut is not the only Drexel alum to be involved in “green finance.” The field of “green finance” itself was essentially invented by Richard Sandor, who made millions at Drexel during the 1980s, pioneering “innovative” products like the collateralized mortgage obligation (CMO), which would later contribute to the 2008 financial crisis. Sandor had previously been deemed the “father of financial futures” and is also credited with helping create derivatives. After Drexel’s collapse, Sandor moved on to pioneering carbon emissions trading and carbon markets with the vision of creating “an all-electronic exchange for carbon trading,” a vision that has since taken shape.

Craig Cogut of Pegasus Capital

CC35 has long been led by Sebastián Navarro. Under his leadership, CC35 helped broker the creation of the Subnational Climate Fund, which is backed by Cogut’s Pegasus Capital along with BNP Paribas, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bloomberg Philanthropies and the governments of Germany, the UK, Australia and the Netherlands. That fund focuses on financing infrastructure projects in the Global South at the subnational (e.g. city, state) level, again bypassing national governments. Indeed, the main modus operandi of CC35 is brokering contracts between small, subnational governments and “green” finance entities that are tied to centers of US/European political or financial power.

Navarro is listed as a director of CC35 as are two prominent, right-leaning Latin American politicians: Felipe Alessandri Vergara, mayor of the Chilean capital Santiago from 2016 to 2021, and Nasry Asfura Zablah, former mayor of the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa and former Honduran presidential candidate. Alessandri is a well-known figure in Chilean center-right politics and an ally of the recently deceased former Chilean president Sebastián Piñera. Alessandri is controversial within the Chilean right for his covert support of initiatives generally favored by the left and publicly shunned by his party while serving as Santiago’s mayor, such as climate finance/regional economic integration (via CC35) and his financing of initiatives related to illegal immigration. Alessandri’s successor and supposed political nemesis, Irací Hassler of Chile’s Communist Party, has since taken over for Alessandri as CC35’s Vice President for South America. As for Nasry Asfura, he was the subject of a Honduran political scandal due to his appearance in the Pandora Papers and his alleged involvement in suspicious offshore finance activities. He was also indicted on money laundering and fund embezzlement, but charges were dropped under Asfura’s successor Jorge Aldana, who is now president of CC35.

The current vice president of CC35 for Central America is Mario Durán, the mayor of San Salvador and a close ally of El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele as well as a member of Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party. Durán is poised to take over the leadership of CC35 per a recent announcement from the group. In 2021, Durán signed a contract with CC35 regarding education about the use of Bitcoin in all metropolitan region municipalities in El Salvador, and is the only mention of CC35 promoting the use of Bitcoin. As will be noted again later on, the CC35-led GREEN+ initiative is partnered with Rootstock, which created and develops a Bitcoin sidechain that enables smart contracts on the Bitcoin blockchain. Presumably, the goal is to run GREEN+’s digital carbon market on the same blockchain.

While it may seem odd to an American audience that “regional integration” efforts under the guise of climate change would be led largely by right-leaning politicians, it is important to point out that such integration efforts have historically been led by both left and right factions in Latin America, who compete for dominance over the region. For instance, right-leaning efforts at economically and/or politically integrating the Americas include Mercosur (the Southern Common Market, now championed by the “anti-globalist” Javier Milei) and Prosur (Forum for the Progress and Integration of South America, launched by Chile’s center-right Piñera). Left-leaning efforts include ALADI (Latin American Integration Association) and UNASUR (Union of South American Nations). All of these efforts have failed due to geopolitical disagreements mainly centered around whether to grant membership to countries like Venezuela, Cuba and others with governments estranged from the so-called “Washington consensus” or, more recently, efforts to forge closer ties to Russia and/or China. Given that several important Latin American countries can suddenly change what side of the “consensus” they are on depending on presidential election results, such as recently happened in Brazil and Argentina, these regional integration efforts have failed to gain significant traction over the last several decades. Nevertheless, the end goal of economic integration begetting political integration remains the same. Thus, as CC35 shows, the push to regionally integrate Latin America has now, very quietly, pivoted away from engagement at the national level to the subnational level.

Aurelio Peccei at the 3rd Annual WWF Congress in 1973 THE CLUB OF ROME’S GLOBAL FOOTPRINT

While CC35 is the most visible face of GREEN+’s governing body, it is actually chaired by a group called the Global Footprint Network (GFN). The GFN exists to promote “the Ecological Footprint, which tracks how much nature we use and how much we have, as an accounting tool” for green finance initiatives and originated the concept of “ecological debt” based on that metric. Elsewhere, the GFN calls for “one-planet prosperity” and emphasizes climate finance, a field dominated by predatory Wall Street banks and billionaires, as an economic imperative. They work with governments at both the national and subnational level and establish the carbon emissions limits for localities, states and countries that programs like GREEN+ seek to enforce with satellite surveillance and binding contractual obligations.

The GFN is intimately connected to the Club of Rome. For instance, GFN’s founder and a member of its board, Mathis Wackernagel, who also co-created the Ecological Footprint concept, is a member of the Club of Rome. Wackernagel’s former mentor and the other developer of the Ecological Footprint, William Rees, was a member of the Club of Rome until 2018. Heiko Specking, a GFN board member, is also affiliated with the Club of Rome as is another GFN board member, Lewis Akenji.

The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 by the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and Scottish chemist Alexander King. Its earliest success was the 1972 report and later book “The Limits to Growth,” which was based on an MIT study and claimed that “if the world’s consumption patterns and population growth continued at the same high rates of the time, the earth would strike its limits within a century.” The book was heavily promoted by the earliest annual meetings of the World Economic Forum, particularly in 1973.

Peccei, who spent a large part of his life living in Argentina, had previously been a member of ADELA, the Atlantic Community Development Group for Latin America. ADELA was composed of powerful Western companies that pooled money to invest in Latin American companies of their choosing, essentially “king-making” the titans of the Latin American corporate world. ADELA’s backers included Bank of America, IBM, Fiat (where Peccei was an executive), and the Rockefeller family’s Standard Oil. The group was part of the Rockefeller-dominated network in Latin America, which also included the International Basic Economy Corporation (IBEC), which has been linked to the 1973 CIA-backed military coup in Chile through the Chilean Rockefeller associate Agustín Edwards, and Deltec, best known today as a main bank for the failed crypto exchange FTX and its close relationship with the stablecoin Tether. Modern iterations of this network include Endeavor and the Council of the Americas (CoA), which will be discussed in the second part of this series. Notably, it was Peccei’s speech at an ADELA conference that spurred his partnership with Alexander King and led to the Club of Rome’s formation.

At the time he got involved with Peccei and made the Club of Rome, King was head of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD was originally established as the OEEC to help administer the post-WWII, US-developed Marshall Plan and was later expanded to become a global organization in 1961. The US remains the OECD’s main funder by a significant margin. The group has long claimed to promote “sustainable economic growth” and “consistently improving standard of living in its member countries,” but – in practice – it routinely favors neoliberal policies that enrich Western-based multi-national corporations. It is closely partnered with entities like the IMF, the World Bank and the broader multi-lateral development banking system that has used debt slavery sold as “economic development” to privatize state-owned assets and sell them off to privileged corporate interests. That system has also been considered by the US military to be part of its arsenal of “financial weapons” used to protect US interests abroad.

The Club of Rome was criticized for many decades for embracing neo-Malthusian thought (i.e. eugenics and specifically population control measures in the developing world) as well as for promoting greater global governance. Some of its members have championed the imposition of a “benevolent” global dictatorship. Criticisms of the Club of Rome have been voiced by academia as well as independent and mainstream media. The group’s attempt to rebrand as an environmental group in order to gain popular support for those same policies was discussed in their 1991 book “The First Global Revolution,” which states:

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

The Global Footprint Network’s methods, products and ideology are very much aligned with the neo-Malthusian “Limits to Growth” view of the Club of Rome as well as the efforts to incorporate nature into financial markets via so-called “nature-based solutions.” Indeed, the GFN’s ecological footprint metric is promoted by groups like the World Economic Forum and the World Wildlife Fund (where Peccei served on the board and which has long been tied to European oligarch and corporate interests). GFN also provides the statistical means of imposing Limits to Growth-style models that control both population levels and industrialization levels on governments by developing “ecological budgets” that, as evidenced by GREEN+, are now interfacing directly with carbon markets.

BUILDING A “GREEN” POWER MONOPOLY

The other member of the GREEN+ governing committee that will control the program as well as Satellogic’s surveillance data is The Energy Coalition (TEC). Notably, it was TEC’s executive director Craig Perkins who said that GREEN+ would also enable the surveillance of carbon emissions of populated areas, presumably via satellite. TEC was founded by John Phillips, who ran Phillips Energy – an oil and gas company, in 1975. Since 1979, it has been closely partnered with local California governments via its Community Energy Partnership program. Currently, TEC is partnered with, and some of its key initiatives are financed by, major California gas companies, referred to by TEC as California’s “investor-owned utilities.” These include Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Southern California Edison, SDGE and SoCalGas.

With the backing of these major oil and gas companies, TEC assures us it is “creating the building blocks for a new energy economy.” One of its main partners in doing so is Community Electricity, which claims to be “building the NASDAQ of the clean energy field.” TEC and Community Electricity, which is backed by Google, have co-designed “a master plan” financed by the California Energy Commission “to implement the largest and first-of-its-kind decarbonization by electrification protocols using DERs [distributed energy resources], carbon emissions management, blockchain, AI and IoT [internet of things] all connected under one plug-and-play platform.” Community Electric designs, funds and develops this technology for GluHomes (formerly GluEnergy), its parent company which shares the same founder as Community Electricity – Felipe Cano. The program is being piloted in the poorest neighborhoods of Los Angeles as well as in disadvantaged communities in Colombia. The goal, per Cano, is to “bring the Americas together” through an inter-continental, “clean” smart grid.

Helena Donoso, Samuel Garcia, Felipe Cano, Santiago F. Maldonado, and Sebastian Navarro – Source

The blockchain involved in these efforts is RSK, the smart contract-oriented sidechain that runs on top of the Bitcoin network. As previously mentioned, RSK is a founding member of GREEN+. The initiative involving TEC, Community Electricity, California’s government, and RSK also seeks “to digitize carbon credit reporting” and to “create opportunities for businesses to redeem credits.” The Community Electricity/TEC program also uses the RSK blockchain to record a person’s energy usage “with the help of RIF, an identity product [i.e. digital identity] developed by RSK Labs.” The Community Electricity system requires a digital ID tied to a digital wallet that “is embedded to store daily profits derived from surplus energy sales” that allow electricity consumers to trade energy credits and become what the company calls “prosumers,” with the goal of creating “an energy social network.” The Community Electricity hardware produced with GluHomes also “utilize[s] AI and machine learning to transform any home intro a smart micro electricity generation utility.”

The group is partnering with real estate developers to develop smart homes connected to their energy-related technology, with a focus on social housing and affordable housing, i.e. housing for lower income families. The goal is to connect together retro-fitted existing homes, new smart homes, a neighborhood co-op of electric vehicles and a reward-payment system called GluPay, which is partnered with Mastercard and Contigo, which designs products “for the unbanked, immigrants, homeless and disadvantaged population,” with a focus on remittance payments. Contigo is currently in talks with El Salvador’s government to have the company’s “Payments Wallet tied into the Salvadoran financial inclusion products.” Contigo is run by Raul Hinojosa, an academic at UCLA who wrote a book entitled “Convergence and Divergence between NAFTA, Chile, and MERCOSUR: Overcoming Dilemmas of North and South American Economic Integration,” which focuses on “the impact of a potential Free Trade of the Americas Agreement.”

The creator of Community Electricity and GluHomes, Felipe Cano has also spent most of his career attempting to economically integrate large swathes of the world. For instance, in 1998, his vision was “to unify both European and US stock exchanges under one platform and protocol, the create the smart grid of the equity market and stock trading in a bilateral, single network.” This vision led him to create ECN Access, which “was the first tech hub in Europe to route the first block of institutional order flows from a European Bank directly to the NASDAQ electronic exchange without intermediaries,” creating what Cano calls “the first smart grid every built.” He then sought to “create a digital market for the energy sector,” which has since culminated in his creation of Community Electricity and GluHomes. Cano is an adviser to TEC and is also a senior partner at Silverbear Capital, where he focuses on investments related to smart cities. According to his bio at Silverbear, Cano is also CEO of “Olidata Smart Cities LLC, a market-maker platform which uses nano-grids and microgrids as the underlying strategy to deploy the Internet of Things Protocol of the future.”

Cano was also, until recently, the president of Global Carbon Parks, which is a consortium of companies, the only known members of which all happen to be companies that founded GREEN+, with the one exception being Cano’s Community Electricity. Global Carbon Parks, unsurprisingly, is now one of the main implementers of the GREEN+ program. Global Carbon Parks is also partnered with Aclima, a start-up backed by Microsoft and the foundation of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Global Carbon Park’s stated mission is to “transform protected areas into natural equity” via public-private partnerships, essentially admitting that the GREEN+ program it now helps manage is about financializing protected natural assets and resources.

Felipe Cano – GluHomes Inc – Source

Global Carbon Parks “transforms” these forests into “natural equity” by measuring, certifying and trading carbon credits in conjunction with the carbon credit certification Cercarbono (discussed later in this article). Their partnership with Satellogic, which goes beyond but also includes the GREEN+ program, uses satellite surveillance “to ensure the integrity of the preserved area” which contains the carbon represented by the carbon credits. The company also promotes their integration with The Energy Coalition and Community Electricity to develop “advanced electricity communities” that develop “renewable energy credits,” which the company claims will “contribute to local wealth creation.” The company is partnered with a financial firm, which does the actual trading of carbon credits for both Global Carbon Parks and presumably GREEN+. However, Global Carbon Parks declines to reveal their identity, merely stating that “They are a financial firm that integrates technical, economic, and environmental solutions.”

In summary, the governance of the GREEN+ program and the group with control over its satellite surveillance data; are tied to or funded by groups that have long used debt as a form of control over the Global South in particular; seek to control the population size and the degree of industrialization in countries; are tied to globalist efforts to economically and politically integrate the Americas; are building a Bitcoin blockchain-based smart grid that surveils and limits energy usage and links energy usage to currency; and are integrating and tokenizing the natural world, including endangered or protected areas, into the financial system under the guise of conservation. Through CC35’s Alcades por el Clima (Mayors for the Climate) initiative, over 15,000 local governments in Latin America have signed agreements with CC35 related to carbon emission trading schemes and limits, led by Brazil (5,564 local governments), Argentina (2,457 local governments), and Mexico (2,481 local governments). Presumably, those carbon neutrality/trading agreements will allow CC35 to push those municipalities into the GREEN+ program, if they aren’t already planning to participate directly (many are).

In other words, the vast majority of Latin America, unbeknownst to the vast majority of its populace, is already contractually yoked to one of the main organizations behind the GREEN+ program – run by interests tied to foreign banks, corporations and even intelligence services. The program is set to launch continent-wide in a matter of weeks. As this article and subsequent article will show, what has transpired is a brazen attempt to conduct a silent coup of the continent’s natural resources, energy production, local governments and economy.

THE GREEN+ TRUST AND THE BITCOIN CARBON MARKET

The GREEN+ Trust, which is to hold and handle the profits from the carbon credits produced and then disburse them to governments if certain conditions are met, is to be managed by individuals “selected from the members institutions of the [GREEN+] Executive Board” as well as from Isolas, Lockton and Rootstock (RSK). According to GREEN+, the Trust is not only responsible for fund custody, but also “the regulation of smart contracts, in coordination with the certification standard [Cercarbono] and the monitoring of mitigation initiatives [conducted by Satellogic].” The only known member of the Trust, as previously mentioned, is Alejandro Guerrero, the head of Lockton’s branch in Argentina and Uruguay.

Lockton, a founding member of GREEN+ and also of Global Carbon Parks, is the world’s largest, privately held insurance brokerage firm that also provides risk management services, employee benefits and retirement services. They are owned by the Lockton family and the company – and the family behind it – are rather secretive. However, the company has been overt about the opportunities they see in the type of carbon market that initiatives like GREEN+ will create.

In a 2023 article, Lockton’s head of Digital Integration and Special Projects, David Briscoe, wrote that making carbon credits “a stable and trusted currency” would “require the support of the insurance market.” This is because, as Briscoe notes, “voluntary” carbon markets come with risks, particularly because “of the financial values involved.” Per Briscoe, these risks include “non- or under-delivery of forward purchased carbon removal credits,” “start-ups involved in the voluntary carbon market may face insolvency risks,” and “fraud and negligence.” Indeed, mismanagement and fraud has been a major driver of why carbon markets have failed to catch on despite relentless promotion and the adoption of ESG and climate change plans by many of the most powerful names in finance and industry. Instead of addressing the rampant fraud in carbon credits directly, it appears that the high probability of fraud and insolvency has been seen as an opportunity to create a new market for the insurance industry, with carbon credit insurance being framed as the only “feasible” means of de-risking the fraud-prone world of carbon markets, which have been criticized by environmental groups and have been shown to have a negligible impact on climate.

Lockton offers a variety of products related to carbon credits and so do its competitors, with the first such insurance having been issued by the UK-based insurance company Howden in 2022. That product was designed to “increase confidence in the Voluntary Carbon Market” and was “incubated” in collaboration with “the Insurance Task Force of the Sustainable Markets Initiative; an initiative led by His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales [now King Charles].” Industry publications have openly posited that carbon credits are likely to be “the next $1 billion insurance market.” Some companies, like Kita and Oka, were created specifically to insure carbon credits. Presumably, Lockton’s involvement with GREEN+ means that Lockton will be insuring the mass of carbon credits to be produced by the program, which plans to harvest carbon credits from all of the world’s “subnational protected areas.” In addition, Lockton’s role as the carbon credits insurer means it will be involved in ensuring that those cities/regions that are to become part of GREEN+ comply with the program’s stipulations in order to receive funds from the trust.

RootstockLabs (RSK)

Another member of the GREEN+ Trust is RSK, or Rootstock. RSK is a federated sidechain built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain that allows smart contract functionality akin to the Ethereum blockchain, leveraging the same programming language known as Solidity. In effect, this means that any smart contract that can be designed and authored on Ethereum, such as identity systems, dollar-pegged stablecoins, or tokenized carbon credits, can be “trivially” ported to Bitcoin. The concept of Bitcoin sidechains was first introduced in October 2014 by a group of Bitcoin developers mainly employed by Blockstream, whose November 2014 seed round was led by Reid Hoffman, that gives “bitcoins and other ledger assets” the ability to be “transferred between multiple blockchains” giving new functionality to “assets they already own” without compromising any of the security innate to Bitcoin’s blockchain. RSK works by allowing users to deposit funds sent using traditional bitcoin transactions into a wallet controlled by a federation (in this case, a known group of Rootstock-selected key signers) that issues a 1:1 token called Smart Bitcoin, represented by RBTC, which fuels the RVM (Rootstock Virtual Machine), a forked version of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine). RBTC is “the native currency” of Rootstock, and is used to pay for the fees required to complete and settle the smart contracts or transactions that take place on the RSK sidechain.

RSK was launched in 2015 by RSK Labs, which was acquired by RIF Labs before becoming IOV (“internet of value”) Labs. IOV labs, as of last week, has rebranded once again to become RootstockLabs. It was co-founded by Sergio Lerner, who became the Bitcoin Foundation’s bitcoin core security auditor the same year he conceived of RSK, and Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar. Gutierrez is the current chairman of RootstockLabs, while Lerner is its chief scientist and they are the president and vice president, respectively, of the IOV Foundation, which enables “interventions that contribute to sustainable development,” specifically the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with a focus on emerging markets and territories. A major goal of the SDGs is to create a new global financial governance system. That system has been described in recent years by top UN climate finance official, central banker, and ex-Goldman Sachs executive Mark Carney, as relying largely on programmable, surveillable digital currencies (namely central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs) and a global carbon market.

According to RootstockLabs and its affiliated foundation, the group’s mission is to harness “the power of digital technology, blockchain, and collaboration” to “break down barriers and create a more equitable society.” They also state that Rootstock Labs was created with the intent of creating “a new open financial ecosystem,” while RIF Labs states it (along with RootstockLabs) is “creating a global financial system that works for everyone.”

Wences Casares – July 2018 – Source

Diego Gutierrez is a long-time associate of Wenceslao (Wences) Casares, an Argentine tech entrepreneur sometimes referred to as the “Peter Thiel of Latin America.” Gutierrez worked with Casares at Argentina’s first Internet service provider, which Casares had launched, and then helped create the Casares-founded Argentinian online brokerage firm Patagon that was later sold to Spanish banking giant Santander. Casares, like Gutierrez, is a long-time promoter and early adopter of Bitcoin and is allegedly responsible for pitching the promise of Bitcoin to elites, like Bill Gates and LinkedIn/PayPal’s Reid Hoffman. Hoffman once referred to Casares as Bitcoin’s “patient zero” in terms of Silicon Valley’s interest in Bitcoin. Forbes has even referred to Casares as “crypto royalty who ran with the original gang of Bitcoin OGs.” Casares subsequently became a board member of PayPal and also part of Facebook’s failed stablecoin project Libra/Diem. He is also a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.

Casares was formerly a partner at NXTP Ventures, one of the oldest venture capital firms in Latin America, and he is credited with introducing the firm’s founders to crypto. NXTP subsequently became a major investor in Gutierrez’s RSK as well as another Gutierrez-founded company, Koibanx, a Latin America-focused asset tokenization company that – per its CEO – is at the “forefront of redefining Latin America’s financial system.” Gutierrez’s Koibanx has been instrumental in developing Bitcoin products and services sponsored by El Salvador’s government as well as enabling the role of Algorand as an intermediary in El Salvador’s Bitcoin ecosystem. Algorand is also a major investor in Koibanx and is currently run by Staci Warden, who aided the cronyist privatization of Russia while at Harvard, oversaw J.P. Morgan’s division of emerging market government debt and led crypto-related initiatives and “global market development” for the Institute of the mastermind of the Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond scandal, Michael Milken.

Gutierrez’s Koibanx has also launched a blockchain-based digital ID in Colombia with over 12 million users and is partnered with Nigeria’s government on a crypto initiative where Nigerians can exchange their intellectual property (IP) for a “stable token” considered “equivalent to the Naira,” Nigeria’s currency that has been completely taken over by the government’s central bank digital currency (CBDC) project. Both of those projects have also been conducted jointly with Algorand. Algorand is a member alongside PayPal and Amazon of the Digital Monetary Institute, which works with central banks, major commercial banks, and Big Tech firms to “examine the distribution and use cases of both retail and wholesale central bank digital currencies, tokenised assets, deposits and capital markets, cross-border payments and domestic interoperability.” The DMI also focuses on “crypto assets and stablecoins.”

NXTP is also an investor in Ripio, an Argentina-based crypto firm partnered with the World Economic Forum. Rootstock co-founder Sergio Lerner sits on the board of Ripio’s P2P lending subsidiary, the Ripio Credit Network (RCN). Ripio is backed by Tim Draper, who is on the board of the Netanyahu family-founded crypto company Bancor, Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group, and Argentina’s richest man Marcos Galperín. Galperín also sits on the board of GREEN+ partner and intelligence-linked satellite surveillance firm Satellogic (discussed in greater detail later in this article). Galperín is intimately connected to the “emerging market” entrepreneurial network known as Endeavor, the board of which is chaired by Edgar Bronfman Jr. and includes Reid Hoffman. Both the Bronfman family and Hoffman have considerable ties to sex trafficker and financial criminal Jeffrey Epstein. Wences Casares was previously on Endeavor’s board and still maintains ties with the group. Ripio is also an Endeavor-backed company.

Marcos Galperin at the World Economic Forum – Source

Galperín’s company, Mercado Libre, is considered the first Endeavor success story, and Galperín sits on the board of Endeavor’s Argentina branch alongside controversial Argentinian oligarchs, like former George Soros protégé Eduardo Elzstain. Galperín’s Mercado Libre is deeply interconnected with PayPal as well as Paxos, the stablecoin issuer creating PayPal’s stablecoin, PYUSD. Mercado Libre’s Mercado Pago subsidiary, Ripio and Brazil’s Mercado Bitcoin (another Endeavor/Mercado Libre-connected company) collectively dominate crypto use in South America, especially its biggest markets – Argentina and Brazil.

Diego Gutierrez’s RSK and Wences Casares’ Xapo, a crypto-focused bank founded in 2014 with a long-standing interest in Bitcoin and stablecoin providers, share a common tie in Joey Garcia, who is on the board of both companies. Garcia is also listed as being Xapo’s Chief Legal & Regulatory Officer. Garcia is a lawyer for and head of the fintech team at the Gibraltar-based law firm Isolas, which is also part of the GREEN+ group and manages the GREEN+ Trust alongside RSK and Lockton. Both Xapo and RSK’s parent, Rootstock Labs, are based in Gibraltar – a UK overseas territory, where Garcia helped develop and lobby for crypto regulations with hopes of having that regulatory regime influence coming regulations in the US and Europe. Garcia is also connected to UN initiatives on digital currencies, with a focus on regulation and law enforcement.

The involvement of this network in GREEN+ speaks to an effort to utilize the Bitcoin blockchain in the creation of a new global financial system centered around digital currencies and carbon markets. As carbon markets have developed, it has become clear that the carbon market which central and commercial bankers wish to build (with UN backing) will be blockchain-based and that carbon credits will be tokenized and traded on digital exchanges, such as the Goldman Sachs and Blackstone-backed Xpansiv, which is partnered with GREEN+ members Cercarbono and EcoRegistry.

There are efforts to make Bitcoin the blockchain on which these markets (or at least key parts of them) will run, hence the relatively recent effort to create a more “sustainable” and “net zero” Bitcoin. RSK is clearly part of this effort, as evidenced by their involvement in GREEN+, where they are managing the smart contracts of GREEN+ carbon credits, as well as their partnership with the California Energy Commission and GREEN+ member The Energy Coalition on creating “an experimental market for carbon credit trading” on top of Bitcoin.

The importance of RSK within the maturation of the carbon credit market in the blockchain era is two-fold; the direct and immediate interoperability between tokenized assets representing green finance instruments and bitcoin, and the leveraging of the most distributed and most secure blockchain in the world, Bitcoin, as a universal ledger for the execution and settlement of otherwise impossible smart contracts. Rootstock allows Bitcoin the protocol to become the enabling and enforcing environment for all aspects of climate capitalism – green bond authoring and settlement, parametric insurance clauses, the tokenization of carbon emission offsets, and the issuance of dollar stablecoins that denominate the entire system and globalize the US Treasury market.

Diego Gutierrez of RootstockLabs – Source

As recently mentioned, Diego Gutierrez of RSK was a very early adopter and promoter of Bitcoin and today runs Bitcoin Argentina while also being a co-founder of Latin America’s largest and oldest Bitcoin conference. In an interview with Argentinian outlet La Voz early last year, Gutierrez stated that, in order for Bitcoin to become part of the global financial system that is emerging, there would have to be a “trade off” that would mean stripping Bitcoin of its “ethos” and “part of its disruptive potential.” In other words, in Gutierrez’s view, Bitcoin must cease to be a threat to central and commercial banks as it integrates into the system those banks have designed and uphold and will become their tool. There is perhaps no greater evidence of this than the recent pivot of BlackRock’s Larry Fink on Bitcoin and its promise as a “technology for asset storage” and the wild success of BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF. Gutierrez also tellingly stated in the same interview that there would soon be a move away from fiat and fiat-backed stablecoins to commodity-backed stablecoins that would make the companies and entities that control those commodities (which would include carbon in this emerging financial paradigm) more powerful than central banks and eliminate the need for central banks entirely.

Wences Casares, Gutierrez’s close associate, created his bank Xapo to help “solve the disjointed nature of our world economy” and to act as “the bridge between bitcoin, US dollars and stablecoins.” As a consequence, Xapo has been a key player in efforts to dollarize bitcoin and has developed close relationships with Circle (USDC), Tether (USDT) and Lightspark, whose founder David Marcus invested in Xapo while head of PayPal. Marcus also previously worked for Facebook and co-created Facebook’s Libra/Diem stablecoin project, where Casares was on the board and which was allied with Xapo. Xapo’s initial advisory board was composed of former longtime head of Citibank John Reed, Visa founder Dee Hock and former Treasury Secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers. Summers is best known for his close association with Jeffrey Epstein and his role in repealing key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act at Citi’s behest, which is widely believed to have provoked the 2008 financial crisis. While on Xapo’s board, Summers became a leading voice behind the effort to “put a price on carbon” and implement carbon taxes and carbon markets. In 2015, together with these men, Xapo claimed, they would build “the global bitcoin ecosystem.”

THE GREEN+ REGISTRY

Working closely with the GREEN+ Trust is the carbon credit certification standard chosen by GREEN+, Cercarbono. In addition to certifying the carbon credits produced by the program, Cercarbono also has a role in choosing which initiatives participating jurisdictions can implement with funds received and are also involved in fund custody alongside the GREEN+ Trust. Cercarbono was launched in 2016, shortly after Colombia – where Cercarbono was formed – passed a law establishing a carbon tax. Cercarbono’s founders created the company because the law created a “need for a national certifying entity that would provide solutions to the climate problem.” Further Colombian legislation in 2017 spurred the company to expand into carbon markets. It has since become a leading voluntary carbon credit certifier in Latin America.

In 2018, Cercarbono formed a partnership with EcoRegistry, a blockchain registry that is also part of GREEN+ and “develops services and platforms for reporting, monitoring and registering environmental assets and carbon units.” The program says the company also “addresses the issuance, monitoring and cancellation of the carbon credits generated by the jurisdictions in close coordination with the certification standard and the Trust Fund.” EcoRegistry provides a unique serial number to each carbon credit issued and allows for close monitoring of that credit on-chain. As a consequence, it works closely with the lead of GREEN+’s monitoring unit, the intelligence-linked satellite surveillance firm Satellogic. EcoRegistry is also a part of the Climate Action Data Trust, or CAD Trust. The CAD Trust was discussed in previous reporting from Bitcoin Magazine and Unlimited Hangout and is an effort led by the World Bank and funded by Google (among others) in an effort to construct what they refer to as “climate wallets.” IETA, discussed below, is also a member of the CAD Trust.

Tokenized, Inc.

The World Bank has been exploring tokenization and digital ledger technology in order to create “a modular and interoperable end-to-end digital ecosystem for the carbon market.” Through the Digital for Climate (D4C) working group, the World Bank aims to build “the next generation of climate markets” by directing governments to create National Carbon Registries reliant on blockchain technology. The data produced by these registries will be “link[ed], aggregat[ed] and harmoniz[ed]” by the CAD Trust. D4C itself leverages the Chia blockchain, developed by BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen. Part of the D4C’s “Climate Tokenization Suite” includes the aforementioned Climate Wallet to facilitate the exchange of carbon credit tokens, requiring an active connection to a Climate Action Data Trust node to function.

EcoRegistry is also part of the Climate Chain Coalition, whose other members include disgraced WeWork CEO Adam Neumann’s new venture Flowcarbon, the Cardano Foundation, the Google-backed oracle service Chainlink, and the Sustainable Bitcoin Protocol (SBP), which seeks to “encourage [bitcoin] miners to utilize environmentally friendly energy sources using tokenization.” The SBP aims to turn “sustainability into an investable asset” when they create what they refer to as a Sustainable Bitcoin Certificate (SBC), a verified “on-chain environmental asset” representing “bitcoin mined using clean energy.”

The SBP website further specifies the incentivized opportunity for additional revenue streams for Bitcoin miners, stating that “unlike carbon credits or RECs which are retired,” each individual SBC is a tokenized asset which “permanently represents the sustainability of one bitcoin.” Due to an upcoming 50% reduction in the rate of bitcoin issued per block – referred to as a “halving” – alternative sources of income for miners can be the difference between thriving and barely surviving in such an unforgiving market. While initially issued alongside the mining of every new bitcoin, the SBC itself can later be sold to other investors. Depending on future regulations of energy in relation to Bitcoin mining operations in the United States, non-mining businesses might look to purchase these certificates from miners as a means to offset the carbon footprint of their bitcoin holdings.

In effect, the SBP aims to incentivize carbon neutrality for Bitcoin miners while simultaneously allowing investors to meet ESG goals while holding bitcoin on their balance sheet, the latter exemplified in their partnership with Bitcoin custodian BitGo. Their website explains that they “believe Bitcoin has a unique potential to expedite the clean energy transition” and due to being “the world’s first commodity derived from a network,” every bitcoin mined is “fully fungible in both price and also carbon footprint” – culminating in a “sustainability opportunity unlike any other industry.” If a large company with a large carbon output ­due in large part to the sheer energy demands of being a multi-national company – traveling employees, large scale data centers, and simply offices that require electricity – was holding bitcoin on their balance sheet, they could purchase large amounts of SBCs to source yield on the appreciating certificate token while also generating accounting opportunities to reach metric-based ESG goals faster.

The co-founder of SBP, Matthew Twomey, previously worked at Goldman Sachs, OSL and Deutsche Bank, while Head of Climate Strategy Elliot David previously held positions at the US Department of Energy, as well as worked with the Clinton Foundation within their Clinton Climate Initiative on their Island Energy Program. Listed among the SBP Advisors are Natasha Barrientos (S&P Global and the United Nations), Dr. Julia Nesheiwat (the Atlantic Council), Emma Todd (World Economic Forum) and Kelvin Chang (Coinbase and Microsoft).

Cercarbono and EcoRegistry share several noteworthy partners and affiliations. For example, both are members of Asocarbono, an alliance of different companies and actors running or supporting Colombian carbon markets, that has written about the issue of “carbon rights” within voluntary carbon markets. According to the UN, “carbon rights” “comprises two fundamental concepts: 1) the property rights to sequester and store carbon, contained in land, trees, soil, etc. and 2) the right to benefits that arise from the transfer of these property rights (i.e. through emissions trading schemes).” The issue itself portends the possibility that those who purchase carbon credits will obtain the “property rights” of the carbon sequestered in trees and other natural elements found in the area tied to those carbon credits, opening the door to land grabs through carbon markets. Notably, there is no clear definition of carbon rights and it is unclear, due to the fact that their contracts with jurisdictions/governments are not publicly available, how GREEN+ views the issue of carbon rights in relation to property rights.

AirCarbon. Note: Prices on October 7, 2022 – Source

EcoRegistry and Cercarbono are also both partnered with AirCarbon Exchange (ACX), “the world’s first fully digital carbon exchange,” established in 2019 with the Singapore Sustainable Energy Association – subsidized by the Singapore government’s Enterprise Singapore ­– and backed by the UN. ACX was founded by CEO Thomas McMahon, an over 30 year veteran of the commodities and derivatives industry, having spent over 20 years at the New York Mercantile Exchange before establishing himself in Singapore, where ACX is based. ACX is Singapore’s first international carbon credit exchange, chosen by McMahon “due to demand for carbon credits from the airline industry.” The exchange uses distributed ledger technology, specifically the Ethereum blockchain, to trade six different tokenized carbon credits, boasting settlement for “as low as $3 per 1,000 CO2 tonnes.” While ACX began mainly by focusing on the airline industry, the exchange now has over 160 clients ranging from financial institutions to project developers. Between January and August 2021, over 5.7 million CO2 tonnes were traded on the exchange. Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund, acquired a 20% stake in the company, with the intent to build a carbon exchange in the UAE. ACX is also partnered with IETA (more on them below), as well as the Carbon Business Council, and the International Sustainability & Carbon Certification (ISCC). It can be assumed that ACX will be the exchange on which GREEN+ carbon credits will be traded due to its partnerships with GREEN+’s credit certifier and registry.

Both Cercarbono and EcoRegistry were also recently integrated into Xpansiv, which “operates the leading multi-registry, multi-asset environmental portfolio management system and market data service” as well as CBL, the “largest spot exchange for environmental commodities, including carbon credits and renewable energy certificates.” Xpansiv is backed by Blackstone, which poured $400 million into the company, with other investors including British Petroleum (BP) Ventures, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs. Xpansiv’s CBL has partnered extensively with CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) Group, which is one of the world’s main derivatives exchanges, and together they have produced several futures contracts on carbon markets.

Cercarbono and EcoRegistry also both share an affiliation with the International Emissions Trading Association, or IETA. Founded in 1999 under the auspices of the UN, IETA “is dedicated to the establishment of linked trading systems to ensure efficient and competitive GHG [greenhouse gas] markets.” Its inaugural members included the titans of the oil and manufacturing industries. Current members include AngloAmerican mining, Saudi Aramco, Bank of America, Bayer/Monsanto, Cargill, Chevron, Citi Group, Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, Koch Industries, PetroChina and the Mossad-linked commodities company Glencore. Another company that is a member of IETA is StoneX, which is partnered with the aforementioned exchange ACX and is sponsoring the launch of GREEN+ satellites in Miami later this month. IETA is also part of the aforementioned Climate Action Data Trust, along with EcoRegistry, the World Bank and others.

IETA is also notably behind the ICROA accreditation program, which Cercarbono and most other carbon credit certification standards of note have received. These include the world’s leading carbon credit certifier Verra, which was recently embroiled in a major scandal when it was revealed that 90% of their most common category of carbon credits were “worthless” despite being ICROA (and IETA) approved.

Satellogic SATELLOGIC – OBSERVATION IS PRESERVATION

As the digital carbon credit industry grows into a multi-trillion dollar market upheld by smart contracts on a distributed ledger, so too does the need for participants to access metric-specific data to insure the eventual pay outs of green bonds. For example, the company Atos, best known for its Olympic Games IT partnership since 1989, raised $916 million in sustainability-linked bonds at the end of 2021. According to a press release in November 2021, the bonds were issued with “an eight-year maturity and one percent coupon,” with a clause that the annual interest rate paid during the “last three years will be unchanged if the company reduces its annual GreenHouse Gas CO2 emissions (Scopes 1, 2 & 3) by 50 percent in 2025 compared to 2019.” While these particular bonds were not authored using a blockchain, there remains the now-sudden economic incentive – a one percent coupon on nearly $1 billion – to deliver verifiable real world data to the participants, the state of which determines the eventual payout. These bonds were issued with BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, and J.P. Morgan acting as Global Coordinators and with Joint Bookrunners such as HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Banco Santander, Bank of America Securities, and Wells Fargo Securities, among others, with Rothschild & Co “acting as financial advisor to Atos SE.” An article from Data Center Dynamics on the raise makes note of the common trend of “sustainability-linked financing” among data center and communication firms, referencing how NTT, Aligned, Airtrunk, KPN, Baidu, and Nabiax all raised “funds or converted existing debt to include interest rates tied to sustainability and ESG goals” within the last year.

Atos and techUK

When the eventual payout of billions of dollars in cleverly-authored green bonds comes down to accurate measurements of carbon molecule density over a vast land mass, such as a South American rainforest, the market for reliable data service providers has quite literally left the atmosphere. As the debt instruments of the private sector evolve alongside the proliferation of blockchain technology, the data that makes these smart contracts execute to eventually settle the issued bond no longer goes to a human arbitrator, but rather a consciousness-free protocol that reduces a pair of potential outcomes to a single output. In the case of a sustainability-linked green bond, if the carbon emissions of a business are not empirically reduced beyond a relative metric at a certain time – both data points of which are determined at the issuance of the smart contract and thus willingly agreed-upon by both parties – the coupon on the bond is not paid out. With the carbon credit market presenting itself as one of the preferred debt instruments of the modern era, the aforementioned Satellogic – an intelligence-linked company focused on privatizing the data from satellite surveillance with an advisory board full of key players in the digital debt system – finds itself ready to act as a crucial pillar of the encroaching new financial system.

Emiliano Kargieman of Satellogic – Source

Satellogic was co-founded in 2010 by Emiliano Kargieman, its current CEO, and Gerardo Richarte, its current CTO, after spending “some time” at the NASA Ames Campus in Mountain View, CA. According to press releases on their website, Satellogic is “the first vertically integrated geospatial company” that is building “the first scalable, fully automated EO [Earth Observation] platform” with capabilities to “remap the entire planet at both high-frequency and high-resolution” in order to generate “accessible and affordable solutions for customers.” Their listed mission is “to democratize access to geospatial data through its information platform of high-resolution images and analytics” to help solve the world’s most pressing problems” of which they list “climate change, energy supply, and food security.” Other Satellogic documentation reveals that by “democratize,” they mean expand satellite surveillance from the public sector (i.e. governments and security agencies) into the private sector. Due to their “patented Earth imaging technology,” Satellogic “unlocks the power of EO” to deliver “high-quality, planetary insights” at “the lowest cost in the industry.”

Both Kargieman and Richarte previously worked for Core Security Technologies, which Kargieman co-founded, with clients such as Apple, Cisco, Homeland Security, NSA, NASA, Lockheed Martin, and DARPA. In 1998, Core Security was recognized as an “Endeavor Entrepreneur” by the Endeavor Foundation and in 2002, Morgan Stanley invested $1.5 million into Core Security, with the bank gaining a seat on the board. The company was also funded by Bank of America in its Series A. Kargieman later founded Aconcagua Ventures in a joint venture with Craig Cogut’s Pegasus Capital, and served as a Member of the Special Projects Group at the World Bank. As previously noted, Cogut’s Pegasus Capital is also a main funder of CC35. Another Core Security Technologies employee that migrated to Satellogic with Kargeiman and Richarte is Aviv Cohen, a former Israeli intelligence officer who is now Satellogic’s head of “special projects.”

Satellogic’s seed round raise was funded by Ariel Arrieta and NXTP Ventures, Starlight Ventures – which Kargieman advises – and Santiago Pinto Escalier of Endeavor. As stated earlier in this article, NXTP is a funder of GREEN+ member Rootstock as well as the tokenization firm created by Rootstock’s co-founder, Koibanx. Chinese tech giant Tencent, which owns a significant stake in Elon Musk’s Tesla, invested in Satellogic’s Series A as did Endeavor Catalyst, which is run by LinkedIn/PayPal’s Reid Hoffman, and Valor Capital. Valor Capital, whose partners include figures tied to US military and intelligence activities in Latin America as well as CBDC development on the continent, invested in Satellogic’s Series B, again joined by Tencent, with the Inter-American Development Bank (mentioned more than once in this article) joining in the company’s Series C funding round.

In July 2021, Satellogic went public with a $1.1 billion valuation through a “merger with Cantor Fitzgerald’s CF Acquisition Corp. V,” with J.P. Morgan serving as the “exclusive financial advisor to Satellogic,” with a “concurrent PIPE offering of $100 million led by SoftBank’s SBLA Advisers Corp” alongside Cantor Fitzgerald and “other top-tier institutional investors,” including former US Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin’s Liberty Strategic Capital. Mnuchin’s recently created venture capital firm, along with Softbank, are major investors in Cybereason, a controversial company tied to Israeli intelligence that previously simulated the hacking of US critical infrastructure in order to cancel a US presidential election and spur the declaration of martial law. Mnuchin’s firm also includes Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, and previously attempted to recruit former Mossad director Yossi Cohen, who instead went on to join Softbank. Joseph Dunford, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Trump who is now senior managing director of Mnuchin’s firm, is on the advisory board of Cybereason while Mnuchin is on its board of directors. Both Mnuchin and Dunford simultaneously sit on the board of Satellogic and Mnuchin is Satellogic’s chairman.

Satellogic Board of Directors

Satellogic’s board also includes Howard Lutnick, longtime head of Cantor Fitzgerald (as well as Jeffrey Epstein’s neighbor and a major Clinton donor); Marcos Galperin, the founder and CEO of MercadoLibre who is closely associated with Endeavor, a Satellogic funder; Former Facebook and Twitter lawyer turned venture capitalist Ted Wang; Tom Killalea, former Chief Information Security Officer and Vice President of Security for Amazon who is also on the board of Capital One; and Miguel Gutiérrez, a Partner and a Co‐Chief Investment Officer at The Rohatyn Group. Gutiérrez previously worked with Nicholas Rohatyn at J.P. Morgan, where Rohatyn positioned the bank to become a leader in taking ownership of distressed government debt in the 1980s and 1990s, with a focus on Latin America. Gutiérrez was involved with J.P. Morgan’s debt markets in Argentina, before becoming its head of Latin America Emerging Markets and later head of Global Emerging Market Sales.

The press release about Satellogic’s SPAC paints a clear picture of the hefty value proposition behind the public offering, which boasts that Satellogic is the “proven leader in Earth Observation” with “17 commercial satellites” currently in orbit, more than “the next four Earth Observation companies combined.” The satellite company’s vertical product stack offers “enhanced analytics capabilities” with “commercial, sustainability, and government applications” by providing a “live catalog” daily of “every square meter of Earth,” providing “vital information to power the conversation around global challenges” such as “climate change, water and energy use, and food supply.”

In the SPAC press release, Cantor’s Howard Lutnick stated that “Satellogic is uniquely positioned to dominate the Earth Observation industry. Its technology, data, and analytics have vast use cases across countless industries.” Kargieman echoed these remarks: “We think this is a winner takes most or winner takes all market. This is a supply limited market – governments just can’t get enough data today; there’s not enough satellites out there.”

This is also true for the private sector. Satellogic showed CNBC a then-current investor deck which exemplified the true economic potential of dominating “the Earth Observation industry.” Kargieman noted that the company had completed “a pilot program” with “a major oil and gas corporation,” in which the company required surveillance data for “about 1,800 miles of pipeline every other week.” Doing this visual audit with airplanes “cost about $750 per mile,” whereas Satellogic “demonstrated similar detection capabilities” for less than $60 per mile. While Satellogic failed to clear $0 of revenue in 2020, the company was expecting to see that “tick up” due to new contracts that began generating revenue in the spring of 2021. According to an investor slide deck, the company had a backlog of about $38 million in signed contracts around when they went public, but was predicting “$800 million in opportunities over the next two years.”

In their full year 2022 financial results update, Satellogic CEO Kargieman tallied “34 satellites in orbit” making “the largest commercial fleet of sub-meter resolution satellites” and thus “well positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for Earth Observation data and satellites.” Kargieman claimed their revenue grew “42% year-over-year” due in large part to their “Asset Monitoring” and “Constellation-as-a-Service” businesses. Satellogic’s new Space Systems, or satellite sales business, “creates a satellite purchase program that aims to lower the financial barrier to Earth Observation spacecraft ownership” according to CFO Rick Dunn. “Space Systems is designed to offer governments asset ownership to enhance national geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) with global tasking autonomy… Going forward, revenue will be driven by our continued growth in Asset Monitoring.”

Luciano Giesso, Sales Director for Satellogic has stated that Latin America is “an area of focus for us.” He explained a current trend of Latin America being “increasingly focused on space technologies” in order to “create new infrastructures” that “unlock the benefits of satellite data” throughout multiple industries. The press release states Satellogic’s position is informed by their view that “countries unequipped with their own satellites” are thus “limited in their ability” to meaningfully “capture data about their policy implementation and infrastructure.” Satellogic’s Dedicated Satellite Constellation Program is specifically marketed as a product for “strategic national interests” allowing “governments of all sizes” to create “unique earth-observation programs” to “support key decisions and manage policy impact, measure investment and socio-economic progress, and foster collaboration, data and information sharing, and innovation.”

The stated mission of Satellogic is to privatize and monopolize Earth Observation in the form of satellite surveillance sold as a service to both the public and private sectors. Palantir, a private sector intelligence firm led by PayPal founder Peter Thiel and created with CIA funds to replace a controversial DARPA mass surveillance and data-mining program, committed to a five year strategic partnership wth Satellogic. Satellogic’s partnership with Palantir enables its “government and commercial customers”, which include the CIA and J.P. Morgan, access to Satellogic’s Aleph platform APIs to feed raw satellite imagery to Palantir’s MetaConstellation and Edge AI. This partnership builds on a previous collaboration between Satellogic and Palantir to “field unique AI capabilities to the orbital edge,” including “live upgrades to the satellite’s onboard AI” that enables “an ultra-low-latency maritime use-case.” Palantir and Satellogic customers, which include the Pentagon’s Space Systems Command, Space Force, SpaceX, the government of India, and others, will soon have access to the Edge AI platform running on Satellogic satellites “to offer customers tailored AI insights” which is expected to increase Satellogic’s business of “data products, streamline pipeline management, and further scale customer delivery required for weekly and daily world remaps.”

Palantir

“The holistic capabilities of Palantir’s Foundry will be instrumental in helping Satellogic realize our mission to improve life on Earth through geospatial data,” commented Matthew Tirman, President of Satellogic North America. Tirman later made note that within this agreement, Satellogic will provide “Palantir’s US government customers” with access to “high-resolution satellite imagery” which will “drive analytical insights across a range of mission-oriented use cases.” Other notable private-public sector partnerships of Satellogic include the Endeavor-funded SkyLoom, which in late 2021 partnered with Honeywell to “produce laser crosslinks” for both commercial and military satellites, including for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, as well as with CIA contractor Amazon Web Services, to facilitate the “50 gigabytes of data per day” per satellite, which “beams to Earth with the help of the Amazon.com Inc. unit’s AWS Ground Station service.”

While it is surely a profitable venture, what Satellogic truly enables is venture capital access to high resolution data of every single square meter on Earth. Space surveillance as a service allows the operators themselves to fill up on up-to-date information of the world’s industry, energy use, transportation, commodity storage, and asset consumption – information that could influence a firm’s decision while playing in the private markets. It could also be used by the public-private partnership engineering global technocratic policies that seek to limit consumption, industrialization and energy use by the public and enforce them via space.

Outside of this metric-driven advantage, the aforementioned transition to a universal ledger upholding and settling the majority of financial (including purely speculative) activity will require obscene amounts of data. If the private sector’s so-called commodity-backed, Real World Asset tokens are to take off in any meaningful way, highly reliable satellite imagery will be needed to uphold billions of dollars of value. Any push towards smart contract-derived money representing tangible objects will demand exactly the data Satellogic intends to not only supply but sell as a service – to any firm, or government.

BLOCKCHAIN – THE NEW ENABLING ENVIRONMENT

The idea of green finance, in which private firms utilize data and physical elements from the real world to create novel economic instruments such as bonds based on carbon emissions, necessitates government-upheld agreements and eventual court-based litigation as the ability to find consensus, thus acting as the enabling environment, for the settlement of large values of securities between the public and private sector. Regulation and contractual agreements between governments and their commercial sector partners require not just the literal letter of the law, but vetted insurance brokers, data firms, legislative bureaucrats, and various other accredited lawyers to dictate the grounds in which business can be legally conducted. The private-public partnership has become continually blurred by the relaxing of regulation restricting how corporations can influence current and aspiring politicians via campaign fundraising. In turn, this group of purchased public sector employees must repay the corporations responsible for their successful attempts at gaining office, leading to the push for further dissolution of certain laws that prevented their donors from gaining footholds within a once-regulated market. No longer is the public sector primarily beholden to their constituents, but rather their corporate donors.

This ongoing dynamic has led to a runaway feedback of legal corruption and conspiracy between these ostensibly delineated sectors. The net result of the public-private partnerships that upholds the CC35, Green+ and Satellogic collaborations is due to the calculated focus on regional governments, thus finding their enabling environment through pacts and treaties at the subnational level.

Steve Mnuchin – Source

Once larger regulatory “fish are fried,” the fight for further interoperability of digital assets (such as dollar instruments) moves down to the regional governments of the Global South. For example, the regulation allowing US banks to custody digital assets and stablecoins was put forth by former OneWest official and Coinbase VP Brian Brooks while he served as comptroller of the currency under Mnuchin in the Trump administration. Once world governments, local and national, are forced onboard the universal ledger, the enabling environment will trend towards the ledger itself – a product of the private sector – and further out of the hands of the public sector.

This capturing of the commons by the private sector via a revolving door of public-then-private operators has been done before, such as during the Plaza Accord, the creation of Brady Bonds, the dissolution of Glass-Steagall, the demolition of Enron, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID-19 fiscal response. The intended future of blockchain – now that US regulators have embraced Bitcoin as an asset and universal ledger – is to serve as the new enabling environment, complete with its very own digital dollar instruments, most likely backed by US government debt.

There are very few people in the world more responsible for the digitization of the dollar than Steve Mnuchin and Howie Lutnick – the former’s VC firm now consists of several members from his stint at the Treasury, while the latter’s firm Cantor Fitzgerald holds the securities for Tether, the world’s largest dollar-denominated stablecoin that recently crossed $100 billion issued – and here they are partnering with the richest man in Argentina and the founder of the largest online marketplace (as well as crypto marketplace) in Latin America, Marcos Galperin.

The network of firms associated with Galperin’s MercadoLibre – Xapo, Paxos, Circle, Visa, among others – is rife with board members and venture capital from the “PayPal Mafia,” as well as the Argentine advisor group Endeavor. These powerful organizations, successors to groups like ADELA that spurred the creation of the Club of Rome and chose the winners of Latin America’s corporate landscape, have made it clear that they foresee this fundamental market transition. They have quietly positioned themselves to dominate the main pillars of the new financial system in Latin America and the world at large: regulated banking services, global marketplaces, payment processing, digital asset infrastructure, and capital creation monopolies. As we will see, this financial system is not about “inclusion” or “sustainability” as professed, but about using and deepening Latin America’s debt burden to force policy changes while enforcing foreign control over the region’s economic activity and governance, all under the watchful “eyes” of US intelligence-linked satellites.

To Be Continued.

Debt From Above: The Carbon Credit Coup.

Billionaire Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface (BCI) company Neuralink made headlines earlier this year for inserting its first brain implant into a human being. Musk says such implants, which are described as “fully implantable, cosmetically invisible, and designed to let you control a computer or mobile device anywhere you go,” are slated to eventually offer “full-bandwidth data streaming” to the brain. 

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are quite the human achievement: as described by the University of Calgary, “A brain computer interface (BCI) is a system that determines functional intent – the desire to change, move, control, or interact with something in your environment – directly from your brain activity. In other words, BCIs allow you to control an application or a device using only your mind.” 

Developers and advocates of BCIs and adjacent technologies emphasize that they can help people regain abilities lost due to aging, ailments, accidents or injuries, thus improving quality of life. A brain implant created by Swiss-based École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne (EPFL), for example, has allowed a paralyzed man to walk again just by thinking. Others go further: Neuralink’s goal is to help people “surpass able-bodied human performance.”

Yet, great ethical concerns arise with such advancements, and the tech is already being used for questionable purposes. To better plan logistics and boost productivity, for example, some Chinese employers have started using “emotional surveillance technology” to monitor workers’ brainwaves which, “combined with artificial intelligence algorithms, [can] spot incidents of workplace rage, anxiety, or sadness.” The example showcases how personal the technology can become as it is normalized in daily life. 

But the ethical ramifications of BCIs and other emerging neurotechnologies don’t stop at the consumer market or the workplace. Governments and militaries are already discussing — and experimenting on — the roles they could play in wartime. Indeed, many are describing the human body and brain as war’s next domain, with a 2020 NATO-backed paper on “cognitive warfare” describing the phenomenon’s objective as “mak[ing] everyone a weapon…The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century.” 

On this new “battlefield,” an era of neuroweapons, which can broadly be defined as technologies and systems that could either enhance or damage a warfighter or target’s cognitive and/or physical abilities, or otherwise attack people or critical societal infrastructure, has begun.

In this exploration of the race to apply the latest neurotechnologies to war and beyond, I investigated how the neuroweapons of tomorrow, including BCIs that may allow for brain-to-brain or brain-to-machine communication, have the capacity to expand conflicts into a new domain — the brain — while also bringing a new dimension to both hard- and soft-power struggles of the future. 

In response to ongoing neurotechnology developments, some allege “neurorights” will protect peoples’ minds from possible privacy infringements and myriad ethical issues that new neurotechnologies may pose in the years to come. However, neurorights advocates’ close proximity to the very organizations advancing these neurotechnologies deserves scrutiny and potentially suggests that the “neurorights” movement is poised instead to normalize advanced neurotechnologies’ presence in daily life, perhaps forever changing humans’ relationship with machines.

The Military–Intelligence Complex’s Decades-Long Pursuit of Neurowarfare 

Indeed, neuroscience’s very origins lie in war. As Dr. Wallace Mendelson explains in Psychology Today, “Just as American neurology was born in the Civil War, the roots of neuroscience are embedded in World War II.” He explains that while the bond between war and neuroscience has contributed to meaningful advances for the human condition, like the improved understanding of ailments like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), it has left some worried about neuroscience’s possible military applications.

Controversial yet well-known government attempts to learn more about the brain include Project Bluebird/Artichoke, a 1950s era project that worked to determine whether people could be involuntarily made to carry out assassinations through hypnosis, as well as the especially infamous MK Ultra, where human mind control experiments were carried out in a variety of institutions in the 1950s and 60s. These projects’ respective conclusions, however, did not signal an end to the US government’s interest in invasive mind studies and technologies. Rather, governments internationally have been interested in the brain sciences ever since, investing heavily in neuroscience and neurotech research. 

Initiatives and research explored in this article, like the BRAIN Initiative and the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N³), are often portrayed as altruistic strides towards improving brain health, helping people recover lost physical or mental abilities, and otherwise improving quality of life. Unfortunately, a deeper look reveals a prioritization of military might. 

Enhance…

The military is intensely interested in emerging neurotechnologies. The Pentagon’s research arm DARPA directly or indirectly funds about half of invasive neural interface technology companies in the US. In fact, as Niko McCarthy and Milan Cvitkovic highlight in their 2023 writeup of DARPA’s neurotechnology efforts that DARPA has initiated at least 40 neurotechnology-related programs over the past 24 years. From the Interface describes the current state of affairs as DARPA funding “effectively driving the BCI research agenda.”

Source – US Army Recruiting Command

As we shall see, such projects, many of which focus on somehow enhancing the capabilities of the recipient or wearer of a given piece of technology/augmentation, are making activities like telepathy, mind-control and mind-reading — once the stuff of science fiction — at least plausible, if not tomorrow’s reality.

As McCarthy and Cvitkovic explain on their Substack, for example, the 1999 DARPA-funded Fundamental Research at the [BIO: INFO: MICRO] Interface program led to significant “firsts” in brain-computer interfaces research, including allowing monkeys to learn to control a Brain Machine Interface (BMI) to reach and grab objects without moving their arms. In another project from the program, monkeys learned how to “position cursors on a computer screen without the animals emitting any behavior,” where signals extrapolated from the monkey’s movement “goals” were “read” and decoded to move the mouse.

McCarthy and Cvitkovic also highlight that, in more recent years, DARPA-funded scientists have also “created the world’s most dexterous bionic arm with bidirectional controls,” have used brain-computer interfaces to accelerate memory formation and recalling, and have even “transferred a ‘memory’ (a specific neural-firing pattern) from one rat to another,” where the rat receiving the “memory” almost instantaneously learned to perform a task that typically took weeks of training to learn.

Scientist Miguel Nicolelis discusses an experiment where a monkey uses its thoughts to control a monkey avatar and a robot arm. Filmed at TEDMED 2012.

Likewise, the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative, a US government initiative founded in 2013, is aimed at “revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain” to accelerate the capacities of the neurosciences and neurotechnologies. Inspired by the earlier Human Genome Project, which ran until 2003 and generated the first sequence of the human genome, the BRAIN Initiative markets itself as an initiative working to address common brain disorders, like Alzheimer’s and depression, through intense research of the brain and its operations.

Led by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and DARPA, its prominent private partners include the Allen Institute for Brain Science (Paul Allen, the founder of the Institute, was the co-founder of Microsoft), the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Kavli Foundation, and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. This mix of actors effectively makes the BRAIN Initiative an opaque, public-private partnership. 

Like many neurotechnology and adjacent initiatives, the BRAIN Initiative depicts itself as a research-forward, public effort that can improve human well-being. Yet, cash flows suggest that its priorities lie more in the military sphere: as per 2013 reporting from Scientific American, DARPA is the biggest funder of the BRAIN Initiative. 

What does DARPA’s interest in the BRAIN Initiative amount to, practically speaking? Apparently, the stuff of science fiction. 

Indeed, an article titled “DARPA and the Brain Initiative,” (an apparently now-deleted page on DARPA’s website) explores DARPA’s eclectic collaboration with the BRAIN Initiative. Co-projects include the the ElectRx program which “aims to help the human body heal itself through neuromodulation of organ functions” through injectable “ultraminiaturized devices,” the HAPTIX program, which is working on neural-interface “microsystems” that communicate externally “to deliver naturalistic sensations” (especially to make prosthetic limbs “feel” and “touch” naturally), and the RE-NET Program, which aims to create technologies able to “extract information from the nervous system” quickly enough to “control complex machines.” Altogether, such projects apply state-of-the-art technologies to the brain to maximize its utilization in and out of conflict, perhaps one day allowing for self-healing, a rehabilitated sense of “touch” for those with lost limbs, and brain-machine communications systems that utilize thoughts to operate war machinery. 

Adjacent neurotech efforts include DARPA’s Next-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N³) program, which has a budget of at least $125 million. According to DARPA’s 2018 funding brief for the project, a “neural interface that enables fast, effective, and intuitive hands-free interaction with military systems by able-bodied warfighters is the ultimate program goal.” In plain language, the project is about developing technology that can help warfighters interact and command military infrastructure (planes, drones, bombs, etc.) with their thoughts and without the need for an invasive, Neuralink-style implant.

Research for DARPA’s Cognitive Technology Threat Warning System (CT2WS) “combines soldiers, EEG brainwave scanners, 120-megapixel cameras, and multiple computers running cognitive visual processing algorithms into a cybernetic hivemind.” Source – Extreme Tech

DARPA has provided funding to a number of institutions and organizations, including Rice University and Battelle, a Columbus, Ohio-based science and technology development company and military/intelligence contractor, to take on critical research towards these ends. According to a Rice University 2019 press release: “Rice University neuro-engineers are leading an ambitious DARPA-funded project to develop MOANA, a nonsurgical device capable of both decoding neural activity in one person’s visual cortex and recreating it in another in less than one twentieth of a second.” In fact, MOANA project researchers have been working on the wireless linkage of brains, even using a remote control to hack into fruit flies’ brains to command their wings.

Meanwhile, Battelle’s N³ funds are developing BrainSTORMS (Brain System to Transmit Or Receive Magnetoelectric Signals), an injectable, Bi-Directional Brain Computer Interface which one day could, in tandem with a helmet, be used by someone to direct or control vehicles, robots, and other instruments with their thoughts.

In addition to investment in neurotech projects facilitating brain-based communications and operations of various technologies, neurotech advancements include improving or “augmenting” the brain’s capacity to operate in myriad ways that will assist fighters on the battlefield. “Enhancements” that claim to improve soldiers’ battlefield performance are not a new phenomenon and have previously included currently illicit drugs, like cocaine. Recent developments in neuroscience have jumpstarted new possibilities, with technologies and techniques including BCIs, neuropharmocologies, and/or electric currents to stimulate the brain potentially, according to the Small Wars Journal, “improv[ing] warfighter performance by enhancing memory, concentration, motivation, and situational awareness while negating the physiological ills of decreased sleep, stress, pain, and traumatic memories.”

Indeed, “augmented cognition” has been an area of focus for DARPA, which worked to develop “technologies capable of extending, by an order of magnitude, the information management capacity of war fighters” in the early 2000s. More recently, University of Florida computer science and information researchers announced in 2022 that they received DARPA’s support to “work to augment human cognition by providing task guidance through augmented reality (AR) headset technology in extreme environments, including high hazard and risky operations.” 

And similar initiatives to better understand, and otherwise enhance, the brain and its capacities to take on myriad (especially war-focused) tasks are ongoing. Notably, Spanish researchers developed a “human brain-to-brain interface” in 2014 that would allow humans to communicate with each other by only thinking. The project was funded by the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technology (FET), which is often described as a DARPA equivalent, indicating international interest in developing adjacent technologies. 

Other such efforts around the globe include the EU-funded Human Brain Project (2013-2023), the China Brain Project (CBP), Japan’s Brain/ MINDS Initiative, and Canada’s Brain Canada. Dr. Rafael Yuste (whom I shall discuss in more detail), who helped propose the BRAIN Initiative, is also the coordinator of the International Brain Initiative, which coordinates neurotech efforts and policymaking discussions on the subject at the international level.

BRAIN Initiative Infographic, Source – Harvard

Dystopian or not, DARPA and its collaborators and counterparts have been working over the decades to make once-unbelievable activities like brain-to-brain and brain-to-machine communication plausible, if not likely, in the years to come. As we will see, such technologies’ impact on the international stage, the battlefield, and daily life alike will be profound if realized.

…Or Destroy? 

Ultimately, the advantages of emerging BCIs and adjacent tools on the battlefield and in conflict are double-sided, as any advancements made to boost a warfighter’s performance can often be applied towards destructive purposes. In neurowarfare, in other words, the brain is capable of being enhanced as well as attacked.

As a 2024 RAND report speculates, if BCI technologies are hacked or compromised, “a malicious adversary could potentially inject fear, confusion, or anger into [a BCI] commander’s brain and cause them to make decisions that result in serious harm.” Academic Nicholas Evans speculates, further, that neuroimplants could “control an individual’s mental functions,” perhaps to manipulate memories, emotions, or even to torture the wearer. Based on these considerations and speculations, if BCIs are used en masse at either the warfighter or civilian level, it seems plausible that some attacks could hone in on the BCIs of hostile persons (warfighters or otherwise) to manipulate the contents of their minds, or even brainwash them in some capacity.

Meanwhile, academic Armin Krishnan even posits that forms of mind control found in nature, such as those utilized by gene-manipulating parasites, could eventually be possible. In a 2016 article on neurowarfare, he wrote:

Microbiologists have recently discovered mind-controlling parasites that can manipulate the behavior of their hosts according to their needs by switching genes on or off. Since human behavior is at least partially influenced by their genetics, nonlethal behavior modifying genetic bioweapons that spread through a highly contagious virus could thus be, in principle, possible. 

Krishnan’s observations regarding what’s possible are chilling; the realities of Rice University researchers already having “hacked” into fruit fly brains and commanding their wings via remote control, as previously described, perhaps moreso.

While chemical warfare has largely been banned on the international level, gaps in legislation and enforcement leave room for possibilities of different types of chemical attacks or manipulations that target the brain. In this respect, Krishnan posits that biochemical calmatives and malodorants could incapacitate populations on a mass scale, or oxycontin could otherwise make them docile, subduing them for an enemy’s benefit.

Ultimately, as academics Hai Jin, Li-Jun Hou, and Zheng-Guo Wang posit in the Chinese Journal of Traumatology, putting the brain front-and-center as a military target that can be injured, interfered with, or enhanced could “establish a whole new “brain-land-sea-space-sky” global combat mode.” As I will show, this emerging “brain-land-sea-space-sky” global combat mode appears poised to change how conflicts between nation states are realized and fought entirely.

Neurowarfare as a Geopolitical Force

As the world endures major wars in Ukraine and now the Middle East with Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza, “neurowarfare” is also on the horizon. Indeed, the technologies outlined in the previous sections appear slated to transform geopolitical relations as both hard- and soft-power tools, which could then be used to manipulate populations’ life styles, world views, and even cognitive abilities to make them pliable to someone else’s will.

Of course, various soft-power tactics have long worked to influence the minds, political allegiances, and socio-economic realities of civilians in “hostile” territories. The US, for example, has often used extensive propaganda campaigns as part of its “color revolution” efforts for regime change in countries with governments deemed inconvenient to American geopolitical goals.

James Girodano gives a speech at the Modern War Institute at West Point in 2018, Source – YouTube

Yet, neuroweapons, if used on a broad scale, seem positioned to take things to another level. As Georgetown University Neurology and Biochemistry Professor and Director of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies’ Center for Neurotechnology Studies Dr. James Giordano explains in a 2020 article entitled Redefining Neuroweapons: Emerging Capabilities in Neuroscience and Neurotechnology, neuro-based advancements could theoretically be used to exercise socio-economic power elsewhere, or otherwise disrupt societies in ways that do not involve explicit military action. 

Shockingly, he mentions that these disruptions could theoretically be done through the “denigration” of hostile groups’ cognitive or emotional states:

Indeed, neuroS/T [neuroscience and neurotechnology] can be employed as both “soft” and “hard” weapons in competition with adversaries. In the former sense, neuroS/T research and development can be utilized to exercise socio-economic power in global markets, while in the latter sense, neuroS/T can be employed to augment friendly forces’ capabilities or to denigrate the cognitive, emotive, and/or behavioral abilities of hostiles. Furthermore, both “soft” and “hard” weaponized neuroS/T can be applied in kinetic or non-kinetic engagements to incur destructive and/or disruptive effects.

As Giordano elaborates in another article, the “disruptive capabilities” of neuroweaponry make them especially valuable in non-kinetic engagements because they could put the perpetrators at a strategic advantage, where kinetic responses to non-kinetic neuroweaponry, however profound, may appear too aggressive. (In this context, “kinetic” engagements can be best described as overt or hot military engagements, where active and sometimes lethal force is used. Conversely, “non-kinetic” engagements refer to more covert strategies and activities to counter an enemy, including within the diplomatic, digital, economic, and perhaps now the “neuro” spheres.) Giordano goes on to say that if a recipient of neurowarfare does not sufficiently respond to an attack, the neuroweapon’s “disruptive influence and it’s [sic] possible strategically destructive effect become increasingly manifest.” In other words, neurowarfare seems positioned to drive nation states’ geopolitical strategies and how geopolitical tensions fester or explode in the future.

As Giordano has implied via his references to “socio-economic power,” it appears non-kinetic neurowarfare seems likely to impact not only soldiers and military outcomes, but also civilians and the societies they live in, especially as states initiate hostilities. As a 2020 NATO-sponsored study on why “cognitive warfare” matters, “future conflicts will likely occur amongst the people digitally first and physically thereafter in proximity to hubs of political and economic power.”

Namely, as Krishnan notes in a 2016 academic article, it seems possible that neurowarfare could even manipulate political leaders and populations to suppress their free will, enabling perpetrators to assert their political will on entire populations without resorting to kinetic responses. Here, a variety of tools (especially those described earlier in this article) could be used in tandem to disorient, placate, or devastate the masses on a large scale. Krishan writes:

In a defensive function neurowarfare may be used to suppress conflicts before they can break out…Occupied populations could be more easily pacified and incipient insurgencies could be more easily suppressed before they gain any traction. Calmatives could be put into the drinking water or populations could be sprayed with oxytocin to make them more trusting. Potential terrorists may be detected using brain scans and then chemically or otherwise neutered. This obviously creates the possibility of creating a system of high-tech repression, where in the words of writer Aldous Huxley “a method of control [could be established] by which a people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs by which any decent standard they ought not to enjoy.” 

As Krishnan mentions, aptly bringing Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” prescription for the future into the conversation, current circumstances have set the stage for possible manipulation and top-down,“high-tech repression” at all levels, making it difficult for those experiencing it to even understand their previous freedoms have been stripped from them. 

Indeed, Krishnan explains that neurowarfare could transform hostile societies’ culture and values, or even collapse them based on the emotions these technologies could induce:

Offensive neurowarfare would be aimed at manipulating the political and social situation in another state. It could alter social values, culture, popular beliefs, and collective behaviors or change political directions, for example, by way of regime change through ‘democratizing’ other societies…However, offensive neurowarfare could also mean collapsing adversarial states by creating conditions of lawlessness, insurrection, and revolution, for example, by inducing fear, confusion, or anger. Adversarial states could be destabilized using advanced techniques of subversion, sabotage, environmental modification, and ‘gray’ terrorism, followed by a direct military attack. As a result, the adversarial state would not have the capacity to resist the policies of a covert aggressor. 

Ultimately, as per the circumstances described by defense and neuroscience/technology analysts and academics in the space, neuroweapons could become an unprecedented new driver of soft power, where minds are a target of influence in ways that were previously unimaginable. Subsequently, in kinetic exchanges, minds could become targets to denigrate or destroy in the world of neurowarfare. However, increasingly it seems that the line between kinetic and non-kinetic is becoming blurred as war moves to target, not just physical reality, but human’s internal reality through the brain.

Neurorights or Neuromarkets?

As emerging neurotechnologies increasingly jeopardize the mind’s sanctity in and outside of war-time conditions, some are calling for the protection of the brain through “neurorights.” Groups like Columbia University’s Neurorights Foundation, whose stated goal is “to protect the human rights of all people from the potential misuse or abuse of neurotechnology,” have sprouted to advocate for the matter, and “neurorights” policy discussions are ongoing in high places, like the European Union and the United Nations Human Rights Council. Chile, meanwhile, has been praised by groups like UNESCO for its legislative efforts in the area, which have included adding brain-related rights to the country’s constitution. 

“Neurorights” have been depicted in the media as protections that ensure emerging neurotechnologies are only used for “altruistic purposes.” However, a closer look at neurorights initiatives and adjacent legislation suggests many of those pushing for “neurorights” are in fact facilitating the emerging technologies’ normalization within the consumer market and everyday life through the creation of legislative frameworks. This opens up possibilities for what Unlimited Hangout contributing editor Whitney Webb describes as “neuromarkets.”

Indeed, those backing “neurorights” efforts deserve scrutiny for their close proximity to the very defense industry and adjacent institutions proliferating the controversial neurotechnologies I’ve described earlier in this article. For instance, Dr. Rafael Yuste, who heads Columbia University’s Neurorights Foundation and the university’s Kavli Institute, helped pitch the now heavily DARPA-influenced and funded BRAIN Initiative to the US government. He is also the coordinator of the BRAIN Initiative’s 650 international centers, and has participated in projects like those I outlined earlier in this article. Through research and genetic engineering on mice, for example, Dr. Yuste has “helped pioneer a technology that can read and write to the brain with unprecedented precision,” where he can even “make the mice ‘see’ things that aren’t there.” 

Rafael Yuste speaks at the Fundación Juan March conference in Madrid in 2015, Source – YouTube

Despite Yuste’s proximity to the very organizations researching and promoting questionable neurotechnologies, he’s one of the primary actors behind Chile’s neurorights legislation (as opposed to Chileans). Indeed, the legislation appears less revolutionary within the context of Chile’s legacy as a testing ground for neoliberal policymaking efforts created abroad. 

What’s more, legal scholars have argued “neurorights” as proposed are inherently “flawed” from a legal standpoint, with Jan Christoph Bublitz writing that the neurorights proposal “is tainted by neuroexceptionalism and neuroessentialism, and lacks grounding in relevant scholarship.” Alejandra Zúñiga-Fajuri, Luis Villavicencio Miranda, Danielle Zaror Miralles and Ricardo Salas Venegas argue that the neurorights concept is legally “redundant,” and “is based on an outdated ‘Cartesian reductionist’ philosophical thesis, which advocates the need to create new rights in order to shield a specific part of the human body: the brain.” 

Whether the legal system is just in the first place is debatable. Still, it’s odd that neurorights legislative proposals are being pushed around the world despite being apparently unable to withstand scrutiny from legal scholars. Indeed, neurorights legislation is under consideration in a number of countries, especially in Latin America, apparently in a manner reminiscent of many recent top-down, global policy initiatives that have come to pass in previous years (i.e. the global response to a novel coronavirus in 2020).

In any case, neurotechnologies like BCIs and their normalization at the consumer level could pose myriad ethical problems. For example, DARPA’s augmented cognition efforts to soup up warfighter brains as described earlier in the article, if brought to the consumer market, could quickly wreak havoc and perhaps even create cognitive inequities if inaccessible to most. As Dr. Yuste himself told the New York Times, “Certain groups will get this tech, and will enhance themselves… This is a really serious threat to humanity.” 

To address this alleged problem of “accessibility,” one of the neurorights proposals crafted by Yuste and the Morningside Group (a group of scientists which, after being called together by Yuste, has worked to identify priorities they consider neurorights) is the “right to fair access to mental augmentation.” But it’s not hard to imagine neurorights legislation facilitating a number of dystopian scenarios, as the very availability of such tech may well put economic or social pressure on the general population to receive or use it, perhaps in the forms of state-subsidized BCIs or even state-mandated BCIs for some professions or groups of people.Even those in wealthier countries could cognitively augment themselves in ways unavailable in poorer countries (it seems unlikely, after all, that truly equal access to “cognitive augmentation” could be facilitated internationally), bringing them new, untold advantages with global, geopolitical impacts. 

Neurorights and Neuromarkets Whitney discusses the ulterior motives and background of the individuals behind the push for “neurorights” at the national and international level and why it’s more about making new markets than protecting our rights.

In any case, it’s curious that “equitable access” to cognitive augmentation is being legislated upon through “neurorights initiatives” without substantive debate as to whether such augmentation should be allowed in the first place or is even safe.

Ultimately, rather than protect people from the possible ethical harms of emerging neurotechnologies, neurorights legislation ultimately appears poised to normalize and facilitate the arrival of BCIs and other advanced and often dystopian neurotechnologies discussed in this investigation into daily life.

Neurowarfare: Another Step Towards Transhumanism?

Altogether, ongoing strides to enhance, and in turn, degrade or destroy warfighter capabilities on the battlefield through tools like BCIs and other implantables, neuropharmocologies, and even efforts to augment cognition may well transform the nature of warfare, kinetic or otherwise, as militaries put the brain front and center in conflict. 

Touted as a way to sidestep the possible ramifications of these technologies, “neurorights,” which have been proposed by persons closely affiliated with the organizations creating the tech in the first place, ultimately appears to be about normalizing the tech and introducing it to and integrating it within the public sphere.

Critically, the increased and growing presence of neurotechnologies for use in daily life could well normalize and accelerate efforts towards transhumanism, a dystopian goal of many amongst the power elite to unite man and machine in their push for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a revolution they claim will blur the physical, digital, and biological spheres. After all, if technologies that can read minds, make prosthetic limbs “touch,” or use thoughts to control machines become everyday tools, it seems the sky’s the limit with respect to how humans could use them to transform societies — and themselves, for better or for worse. 

Ultimately, such efforts towards transhumanism are being pushed from the top with little room for meaningful public debate. These efforts are also often intertwined with ongoing pushes towards stakeholder capitalism and efforts to hand decision making processes and common infrastructure to an unaccountable private sector through “public-private partnerships.” 

Indeed, in light of such advances, both sovereignty and humanity is under attack — on and off the battlefield.

Weaponizing Reality: The Dawn of Neurowarfare.

Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin discuss digital debt, digital finance and the global finance and governance system currently being created.

Big Picture with James Patrick.

The disastrous situation at the US-Mexico border is, and has been, intentionally produced. Throughout the last several administrations, regardless of campaign and other public rhetoric, the porous nature of the border has remained unresolved. On several occasions, the situation as it has developed has been blamed largely on incompetence and government inefficiency. Though some administrations have been tougher than others in regards to terrestrial migration (under some metrics), the US-Mexico border has not been sealed off so to force entrants to cross through officially recognized and managed ports of entry.

Under the current administration, it has been pointedly obvious that even the sections of the border that do contain physical barriers are being dismantled on purpose, all the while illegal crossings have risen to unprecedented levels. Whatever the motives for this deliberate policy on the part of the Biden administration, the end result has been the widespread characterization of the crisis as an “invasion,” priming the voter bloc usually most concerned with border security – the American Right – for military-style “solutions.”

While the justifications for the frenzied media coverage are based on the actual reality that the border is indeed highly insecure (and has been for some time), the policy responses from American politicians reveal that there is a bipartisan consensus about what must be done. Tellingly, the same “solution” is also being quietly rolled out at all American ports of entry that are not currently being “overrun”, such as airports. That solution, of course, is biometric surveillance, enabled by AI, facial recognition/biometrics and autonomous devices.

This “solution” is not just being implemented throughout the United States as an alleged means of thwarting migrants, it is also being rapidly implemented throughout the world in apparent lockstep. The reasons for the unspoken, but obvious, global consistency in implementing invasive, biometric surveillance is due to the fulfillment of global policy agendas, ratified by nearly every country in the world, that seek both to restrict the extent of people’s freedom of movement and to surveil people’s movements (and much, much more) through the global implementation of digital identity. Those policy agendas include mainly the UN’s Agenda 2030 or Sustainable Development Goals, specifically SDG 16, as well as Interpol’s Global Policing Goals.

While the American Right has been rather outspoken in its rejection of the UN’s Agenda 2030, and the digital ID project at large, the distress over the border situation is being used to manufacture consent among this specific group for “solutions” that are focused on expanding surveillance and biometric collection as opposed to the implementation of physical barriers.

The Virtual Wall

The Hawaiian shirt-wearing inventor of the VR headset Oculus Rift, Palmer Luckey, has become the face of America’s “virtual border wall.” Luckey, the brain behind the defense tech firm Anduril, is a long-time associate of Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, with Luckey having met Thiel at 19 when Luckey presided over his first company Oculus Rift, which was later sold to Facebook. Thiel was then on Facebook’s board and was also instrumental in the rise of the social media company. Luckey’s Anduril is also backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund and another Palantir co-founder, Joe Lonsdale, is also an Anduril investor.

Anduril is one of the main beneficiaries of government contracts to build autonomous surveillance towers along the US-Mexico border, which are now also being rolled out along the US-Canada border. As a consequence, they are likely to be among the beneficiaries of the Senate’s current proposal for “border security,” which sets aside $170 million for additional towers to be build.

Under the Trump and now Biden administrations, Luckey has been vocal about how Anduril will create “a digital wall that is not a barrier so much as a web of all-seeing eyes, with intelligence to know what it sees.” As noted by WIRED in 2018, Luckey and Anduril has long been pitching its technology “as a complement to – or substitute for – much of [then] President Trump’s promised physical wall.”

Luckey was a donor to Trump’s inaugural committee and his apparent mentor, Peter Thiel, was a key figure on Trump’s transition team, particularly for defense. The company dresses itself in “America First” rhetoric, especially when it comes to border security, framing itself as a beacon of “Western democracy” and nationalism in an age of globalism. Despite this, Anduril is part of a network that fronts for the long-standing surveillance ambitions of the same American “Deep State” that Trump supporters revile.

An Anduril surveillance tower deployed on the US-Mexico border, Source: FedScoop/Anduril

Luckey’s Anduril would not exist without the assistance of Thiel and several executives from Thiel’s Palantir. As Unlimited Hangout has reported in multiple articles, Palantir is a CIA front explicitly aimed at resurrecting the controversial surveillance dragnet once housed by the Pentagon’s DARPA known as Total Information Awareness (TIA), which sought to use warrantless, dragnet surveillance of Americans to prevent crime and terrorism before it happens (i.e. pre-crime, a field which Palantir has since pioneered and which was essentially made DOJ policy by Trump’s Attorney General William Barr).

One of those Palantir executives who later came to Anduril, Trae Stephens, worked at a government intelligence agency (he declines to specify which one) before joining Palantir. From there, Stephens joined Thiel’s Founders Fund and ended up on the boards of some of the most controversial Founders Fund-funded companies, such as Carbyne911. Financed in part by Jeffrey Epstein and the brainchild of former Israeli Prime Minister (and Epstein associate) Ehud Barak, Carbyne’s platform also involves invasive data collection from civilians and “predictive policing” functionalities. On Carbyne’s board, Stephens originally sat alongside Barak as well as Israeli intelligence-linked figures like Pinchas Buchris (former commander of Israel’s Unit 8200), Lital Leshem (“former” Israeli intelligence operative who know works for documented CIA asset and former head of the infamous mercenary group Blackwater, Erik Prince), and Nicole Junkermann (an Epstein associate who has since rebranded as a venture capitalist in emerging technologies and FinTech). Stephens remains on Carbyne’s board, where he now sits alongside former US Homeland Security chiefs Michael Chertoff (Bush administration) and Kirstjen Nielsen (Trump administration).

Thanks in part to Thiel’s influence over the early Trump administration, Stephens was chosen to oversee Trump’s transition team for the Defense Department, where he “steered” Trump’s early Pentagon policies. At the time, Stephens was also in talks with Luckey to create a new company. After Luckey left Facebook under a cloud of controversy in late March 2017, he and Stephens created Anduril and other Palantir executives were recruited to join the company. Within a year of its existence, Anduril had already netted millions in contracts from the Department of Homeland Security. Stephens has remained at Thiel’s Founders Fund since co-founding Anduril.

Not unlike Palantir, Anduril is also a modern reboot of a failed DHS initiative from around the same time as TIA. The Secure Border Initiative Network (SBInet) was a Bush-era DHS effort that sought to build a virtual border wall that could not only deter and detect illegal border crossings, but also automatically designate those illegal crossers a “threat level” as well as predict “illegal border activities” before they occur. Like Anduril, it relied on surveillance towers and a litany of sensors spread throughout the environment. The program, though shuttered by DHS in 2011, never actually ended, as the DHS report announcing the “end” of SBInet stated the following:

DHS is currently developing a comprehensive border technology deployment plan that will build upon successful technology currently deployed and provide the optimum mix of proven surveillance technologies by sector. Where appropriate, this technology plan will also include elements of the former SBInet program that have proven successful.

Just like Anduril’s marketing strategy, SBInet was pitched as a cheaper, more cost-effective and “faster” means of securing the border than the construction of physical barriers. Anduril has openly laid out its strategy to avoid the pitfalls of SBInet; whereas SBInet was doomed to fail by hiring incompetent contractors to build and sell the system to the government, Anduril plans to own the system it builds and lease it to the government, which – according to Trae Stephens – “creates an incentive to keep development costs low.” Despite claims it is “low” cost, since 2017, massive DHS contracts have been given to Anduril to fulfill many of the original ambitions of the SBInet project and, despite the construction of hundreds of towers and millions spent, the border remains more insecure than ever.

One of Anduril’s earliest advocates was Congressman Will Hurd, a former officer in the CIA’s clandestine operations division who now represents Texas in the House of Representatives. With Hurd’s help, Anduril was able to place their first prototypes for the “virtual wall” on the border-adjacent private property of an anonymous rancher. Custom and Border Protection (CBP) then conducted their first official pilot of Anduril towers in 2018, leading to the Trump administration’s approval to deploy Anduril’s towers along the entirety of the south-western border in 2020. That approval saw Anduril awarded a five-year and still-ongoing contract and also saw the contract designated a “program of record,” meaning it is deemed essential enough to be a dedicated item in the DHS budget.

Trump, in the latter years of his presidential term, began to embrace the type of virtual wall that Anduril would enable even more so than the physical barrier he had campaigned on. In January 2019, for example, Trump stated “The walls we are building are not medieval walls. They are smart walls designed to meet the needs of frontline border agents.” The “smart walls”, Trump went on to say, would include “sensors, monitors and cutting-edge technology.”

Under the Biden administration, Anduril’s star has continued to rise. This is partially due to the millions the company has spent lobbying Congress, but also facilitated by the long-standing bipartisan love affair with building a “smart wall” on the Southern border. CBP was given millions for autonomous surveillance towers along the border in the 2021 US Citizenship Act and then again in the 2022 omnibus bill, with millions more granted last year. The lion-share of that money is destined for Anduril’s coffers. This year, if the Senate’s bipartisan “border security” efforts are any indication, Anduril stands to gain even more contracts to build ever more autonomous towers, which are now accompanied by autonomous drones and other connected devices. Luckey, despite Anduril’s claims that there will always be human oversight of its products, has stated that his vision for the future of warfare that Anduril is helping to build will soon result in humans playing ever more insignificant roles.

Palmer Luckey works on an Anduril product, Source: Inceptive Mind

While Anduril is one of the main companies building the “virtual wall,” they are not alone. General Dynamics, a defense firm deeply connected to organized crime, espionage scandals and corruption, has developed several hundred remote video surveillance systems (RVSS) towers for CBP while Google, another Big Tech firm with CIA connections, has been tapped by CBP to have its AI used in conjunction with Anduril’s towers, which also utilize Anduril’s own AI operating system known as Lattice. Anduril is merely the visible face of the “virtual wall” that has positioned itself in close proximity to Trump’s political movement and is sure to benefit if Trump is re-elected later this year. However, Anduril has been more than happy to cozy up to the Biden administration, having praised Biden for calling to develop border protection measures using “high-tech capacity,” which they have say they’ve “delivered.”

Yet, despite support from both political parties, millions upon millions of funding and several hundreds of towers and supporting devices deployed, this “virtual wall” has done nothing to stop the drastic increase in illegal migration into the United States. Why, since the towers were deployed, are illegal crossings skyrocketing? Why is it that the proposed solution to this “invasion” is to build even more towers? One could argue that the answer to those questions lies in the fact that the border crisis is being used to manufacture consent amongst Americans for the implementation of a surveillance panopticon, not just on the border, but well into the interior of the country.

The Thiel-Funded, All Seeing AI

Anduril’s other government contracts suggests that the company’s installations on the border are only a small component of what a completed “smart wall” might entail. In addition to their contracts with CBP, Anduril is a major contractor for the Department of Defense and supplies (or is soon to supply) the military with autonomous aircraft, such as its Ghost platform and autonomous underwater vehicles. Like the drones that interface with their surveillance towers on the border, they are framed as useful for surveillance and reconnaissance, but are also able to deliver payloads, i.e. they are able to be outfitted with weapons of war. They have also been developing weapon systems that appear to fall under the controversial category of autonomous weapons, meaning that the unmanned device could kill without meaningful human oversight. These drones utilize Lattice, the same AI-enabled operating system as those that run Anduril’s border towers and surveillance drones. Last year, Anduril unveiled a new version of Lattice that “is designed to foster dynamic collaboration among autonomous systems,” e.g. allowing surveillance drones/towers and weaponized ones to be interoperable and conduct missions together without necessarily needing a human to coordinate them.

An Anduril underwater drone developed for the Australian military, Source: Breaking Defense

Anduril’s ambitions go far beyond dominating the Pentagon’s push into autonomous vehicles and AI and the Southern border’s “virtual wall.” Anduril’s website describes how Lattice can be deployed to surveil and protect the 16 critical infrastructure sectors that have been identified in the United States, including “dams, energy, nuclear reactors, transportation systems, water and wastewater, and communications.” “Securing critical infrastructure is vital for the U.S. and beyond, and, similar to our border security solution, Lattice can take over the dull work of monitoring cameras and sensors for threats to critical infrastructure sites and free up humans to do something about it,” the company states on their website. The company has also pitched Lattice for use in detecting and responding to wildfires and conducting civilian search and rescue missions. Luckey has stated that Anduril ultimately plans “to turn American and allied warfighters into invincible technomancers.”

The potential dangers of Anduril can only fully be fleshed out when considering the family of Thiel-backed defense/intelligence companies as a whole. For instance, Thiel’s Palantir, which has numerous ties to Anduril aside from just Thiel, is the engine that intelligence agencies and militaries (in the US and beyond) use to analyze drone footage, satellite imagery, and open-source data and turn that visual and non-visual data into actionable intelligence. It has been openly described by mainstream outlets like Bloomberg as “using War on Terror tools to track American citizens” and has long been a major driver of “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime. Another Thiel-funded venture, Clearview AI, has developed AI-powered facial recognition tools that were trained off of billions of photos scrapped from the internet, many of them from the Thiel-backed social media platform Facebook and the Facebook-owned Instagram. Despite being a favorite of US law enforcement and DHS, Clearview AI has been sued numerous times over privacy violations and its database has been banned in numerous countries including Australia, Britain, Italy and Canada. Like Palantir, which mainstream media has acknowledged for years as knowing “everything about you” and even called an “all-seeing eye,” Clearview AI’s tools are allegedly able to “identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.”

In looking at the overlap shared between Palantir, Anduril, Clearview AI and even Elon Musk’s SpaceX (which has been backed by Founders Fund since 2008 and is tied to Anduril co-founder Trae Stephens), one wonders if this Thiel-backed family of companies could eventually serve as an interoperable system for total AI surveillance. Troublingly, there are numerous indications this is already happening. Furthermore, given their common links to Thiel, it seems that such an outcome was likely always the intent.

For instance, as Stavroula Pabst previously reported for Unlimited Hangout, Anduril and Palantir, both contractors to military and intelligence agencies, are currently collaborating on the Army’s Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) program. In addition, Anduril has announced that its Lattice AI system “is now for everything” and designed to be interoperable with the products of other contractors. All three of these Thiel-backed companies have been testing the interoperable use of their products already in the Ukraine conflict and appear to be using Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip for the same ends.

How Peter Thiel-Linked Tech is Fueling the Ukraine War As war in Ukraine continues, controversial defense contractors and adjacent companies like Palantir, Anduril, and Clearview AI are taking advantage to develop and level-up controversial AI-driven weapons systems and surveillance technologies. These organizations’ common link? The support of the controversial, yet ever-more powerful Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.

Often, these technologies are tested and used abroad first before they are deployed at home, something that even mainstream media has acknowledged that Palantir has been doing for years. The so-called War on Domestic Terror has long been about retooling the weapons of the War on Terror as a means of curbing domestic dissent and Palantir is just one of several companies aiding that shift. Similarly, Clearview AI, despite claims that the company is Trump-linked and tied to right-leaning political circles, has bragged about its utility to the US law enforcement community by highlighting the company’s role in identifying those involved in January 6th, which the company’s CEO refers to as an “insurrection.” After January 6th, Clearview AI’s use by US law enforcement jumped by 26%.

However, Thiel, Luckey and others in this network who are building the domestic panopticon often claim that they are defending “Western values” and “democracy” by embracing military and intelligence contracts. They also rely heavily on “America First” rhetoric. These companies contrast themselves to companies like Google, where employees have previously scuttled the big military contracts over ethical concerns, even though figures like Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO who is a big backer of the Democrats and the Biden administration, are similarly developing autonomous weapon technology also under the guise of “defending democracy.” These Big Tech oligarchs ultimately agree about the plan, though Thiel and his ilk are much more vocal about their willingness to overlook ethical quandaries in the pursuit of ever more lucrative government contracts and cloak themselves in right-leaning, “America First” rhetoric.

An example of Anduril’s marketing materials and narratives, Source: Shack News/Anduril

This intelligence-linked web of Thiel-backed companies is poised to follow this same trajectory with respect to the “smart wall” being erected on the southern border as well as the northern border. While framed as only surveilling border crossings, the surveillance towers, drones and related devices being deployed are able to spy beyond the border and into American border cities and towns. While Anduril’s towers in particular are often framed as being placed in rural, sparsely populated parts of the southern border, there are several that are located close to major urban centers.

There is also the issue of the so-called “Constitution Free Zone,” which refers to the “border region” claimed by the US government that extends roughly 100 miles inland from all of the US’ terrestrial (including coastal) borders. It is estimated that 2/3 of all Americans live within this “border region”, which also includes 9 of the 10 largest US cities. The blatant overreach has been criticized by left-leaning (e.g. the ACLU) and right-leaning groups (e.g. the CATO Institute) alike. Whenever there are frenzied pushes in the media (mainstream and alternative alike) demanding new border security measures, many forget or are simply unaware that the government defines “the border” as much, much more than just the physical US-Mexico border and – thus – military-style measures rolled out on “the border” could also be rolled out much more inland.

The “Constitution Free Zone” may soon have implications for the border “smart wall.” Those surveillance devices could also be utilized, once they are capable, to surveil within the government-defined “border region,” where the violation of basic civil rights by law enforcement and CBP is a well-documented phenomenon. Given that intelligence agencies have been known to engage in the warrantless wiretapping of Americans for well over a decade, it seems likely that the “smart wall” could be used for much of the same.

Though some recent US court cases have tackled modern video surveillance tactics by law enforcement, it is still possible for them to collect data from surveillance cameras without a warrant if the intent is to “guard against […] crime.” The precarious state of civil liberties in the US, combined with the growing dominance of a small, close-knit and intelligence-linked group over the surveillance infrastructure of the State, should be carefully scrutinized, not rapidly rubber-stamped on the back of media-generated panic.

Agenda 2030 and Global Policing Goals

The bipartisan consensus around an Anduril-built “smart wall” likely has its roots in the same global agenda that is spurring the rapid implementation of biometric entry/exit systems at ports of entry throughout the Western world. For instance, this is the year where the European Union’s biometric entry/exit system is due to launch, whereby travelers crossing the EU’s new “digital border” system – whether terrestrial or aerial – will have to provide their fingerprints and submit to facial scans if they wish to enter an EU member state. Despite claims that the “digital border” would facilitate easier travel and reduce wait times, current estimates reveal that the new system is likely to take almost ten times longer per entry. The UK, despite leaving the EU, is also poised to “make its borders digital” by 2025, i.e. next year, with Canada implementing similar policies.

A pilot of BorderXpress biometric kiosks at Keflavik International Airport in Iceland in 2020, Source: Biometric Update

In the US, the move toward the “real ID” system, which is to come into force in 2025, will see biometric collection in the US become a requisite for domestic flights and any other “official purposes” that the DHS Secretary can unilaterally determine require a “real ID.” The “real ID” also provides favorable provisions for digital IDs, such as digital drivers licenses (such as the “Florida smart ID” being piloted in Ron DeSantis-governed Florida) and other “mobile digital documents and digital cards.” Elsewhere in the US, in airports, the push for digital IDs and facial biometric scans continues to rapidly advance.

It is quite obvious that the “smart wall” being built on the US’ southern and northern borders is intended to be part of the same “digital border” system that DHS has been designing and gradually implementing for most of the past 20 years. For instance, CBP currently utilizes the same biometric facial comparison technology used at numerous land, sea and air ports of entry throughout the country and plans to continue to expand its use nationwide. As noted above, Anduril’s towers or its affiliated drones could easily be equipped with facial recognition or other related technologies, while official terrestrial port of entries are already using the same biometric system being rolled out at American airports. In addition, many of those seeking to cross the southern border are being onboarded to the CBP One app, which CBP initially claimed would result in a “safe, orderly and humane” border processing when it was launched in January 2023. That app also collects biometric information from applicants of certain nationalities, a functionality CBP will likely expand in the future as reliance on its app increases.

The apparent global coordination of biometric entry/exit systems is no coincidence, as it is a policy initiative deeply connected to the UN’s Agenda 2030, or the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Specifically, it is tied to the implementation of SDG 16, which contains provisions for digital identity systems, among other things. The UN has chosen the global law enforcement entity Interpol as its “implementing partner” of SDG 16, a decision that ultimately spawned Interpol’s SDG-aligned Global Policing Goals (GPGs). The GPGs were approved and adopted by Interpol’s 196 member countries in 2017. As previously noted by Unlimited Hangout, Interpol is a dangerous organization to trust with the vast power these goals and their associated policies will bestow upon them, as they operate as a “pay-to-play” organization and have been embroiled in several significant corruption scandals.

SDG16: Part 1 — Building the Global Police State The United Nations claims that the purpose of Sustainable Development Goal 16 (SDG16) is to promote peaceful and inclusive societies and to provide access to justice for all. Hiding behind the rhetoric is the real objective: to strengthen and consolidate the power and authority of the “global governance regime” and to exploit threats—both real and imagined—in order to advance regime hegemony.

One of the GPGs, GPG No. 2, is to “promote border security worldwide.” Interpol specifically notes that the implementation of this goal will involve establishing “advanced global standards for an intelligence-led border management, including standards for border surveillance, border checks and related equipment.” These standards, they continue, “should be underpinned by technology and digital advancement and risk analysis.” Elsewhere, they discuss how the implementation of this goal will also involve “managing and sharing biometric data, including with the use of the Interpol’s Biometric Hub [“a state-of-the-art system for identifying criminals˝] and other hubs.” Interpol has teamed up with biometric digital ID companies Idemia and Onfido as part of this effort. Both of those companies facilitated vaccine passports during Covid-19 and are currently helping to create digital driver’s licenses in some US states.

Interpol is mainly funded by the European Commission and the governments of Germany, the US and Canada, all of which – as noted above – are implementing the same biometric entry/exit systems on similar timelines. However, many other Interpol member countries are similarly ramping up their adoption of biometric, digital IDs for foreign travel and domestic use, including the West’s ostensible adversary countries, like Russia and China. The vast majority of the world’s countries, whether West or East, have signed onto Interpol’s GPGs and the UN’s SDGs, both of which push for comprehensive, biometric digital IDs interfaced with a digital currency wallet (whether a CBDC or private sector-issued equivalent). Globally, these agendas are being rolled out rapidly, forming the foundation for the next era of highly centralized global governance.

However, in some countries, such as the United States, where a significant portion of the population has become wary of digital IDs and digital, programmable money, unprecedented efforts are being made to sell these globalist policies via right-leaning talking points in contrast to years prior. For instance, digital, programmable money is being developed in the US, not as a CBDC, but a mix of regulated stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits. Even global carbon markets are being framed, not as being about climate change, but about innovation and profiting off a new class of assets. Now, it seems, the biometric “digital border” tied to the UN’s SDGs – a key component of the infrastructure for digital ID – is being sold mainly to the populist right and being rolled out under the guise of tackling illegal immigration. Not unlike Israel’s “smart wall,” these walls can be “turned off” when a crisis needs to be manufactured and, just like so much else, used to sell the same agendas that are pushing us all into a global, public-private panopticon.

Manufacturing Consent: The Border Fiasco and the “Smart Wall”.

Whitney joined What Bitcoin Did with Mark Goodwin to discuss their new article, Tokenized, Inc: BlackRock’s Plan To Own The Fractionalized World.
Listen at WhatBitcoinDid.com or any podcast app.

What Bitcoin Did.

Whitney discusses cyberattacks, digital ID and CBDCs. Available on Podcast apps.

Macroaaggressions #417.

Originally published at BitcoinMagazine.com

Just one day after the January 11 approval of 11 Bitcoin spot ETFs – including BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) – by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, BlackRock Chair and CEO Larry Fink sat down with Bloomberg’s David Westin to discuss the implications of the world’s largest asset manager entering the Bitcoin market. Not one to mince words, Fink articulated a clear framework for his company’s approach to Bitcoin, and furthermore for BlackRock’s intention to replicate similar ETF products for other assets. “If we can ‘ETF’ a Bitcoin, imagine what we can do with all financial instruments.” Fink continued, speaking about Bitcoin itself, stating “I don’t believe it’s ever going to be a currency. I believe it’s an asset class.”

Bitcoin: Commodity, Not Currency

While the BlackRock Chair was not shy about expressing other aspects of the potential build of tokenized, digital markets, these two statements in particular illuminate the coveted path forward for how the biggest institutions intend to carefully integrate Bitcoin into the legacy financial system. Fink even went so far as to turn the abbreviated noun “ETF,” an exchange-traded fund, into a verb, gloating about transmuting the Bitcoin protocol into just another speculative commodity – all the efforts of miners and nodes across the world to decentralize trust in issuance and settlement reduced to a paper offering by their iShares division.

The biggest players in the United States dollar system are all but clamoring over each other to offer such products to their retail customers, understanding that this axiom neuters Bitcoin as a viable currency capable of competing with the day-to day bargaining and settlement utility of the dollar. There are many reasons to believe the US dollar system has much to gain from a dollar-denominated appreciation of bitcoin, but significantly less so if the protocol itself is capable of serving the everyday transactional needs of billions across the globe. One of the most common rebuttals to the claim that bitcoin cannot scale to become a functioning currency is the Lightning Network. While the trustless method of shared unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) via hashed time locked contracts (HTLCs) payment channels is quite novel, the ultimate endgame for such a model servicing billions necessitates a large amount of liquidity (in bitcoin terms) locked up within the network. A centralized Lightning Network brings about many issues of privacy, transactional censorship, and even user access restrictions, not to mention the mathematical realities of demand for Bitcoin’s limited blockspace when opening a billion channels.

Many FinTech companies, such as Lightning Labs and Blockstream, have spent millions in capital developing methods for utilizing Bitcoin as a way to issue tokenized assets, such as stablecoins like Tether’s USDT, in order to transact dollar-denominated tokens via Lightning channels or federated sidechains. While the institutional adoption dreamed of by early Bitcoin adopters has certainly come to fruition, the actualization and methods of these institutions is clear: bitcoin must remain an asset, and all effort on scaling it as a currency should be directed towards the dollar. Fink himself in the same Bloomberg interview stated “We believe ETFs are a technology no different than Bitcoin was a technology for asset storage.” Bitcoin Spot ETF products encourage many practices far outside the norm of the typical Bitcoin user within the near decade and a half of its existence; e.g. trusting a custodian with your keys, limiting exchange to US business days and hours, and aggregating individual exposure into a collective paper claim managed and surveilled by highly-regulated brokers.

The anti-State revolution that has dominated most Bitcoin discourse since 2009 has become colored by red, white, and blue ticker tape. Furthering the idea that the US has much to gain from the adoption and co-option of Bitcoin is the tangible stash of coins distributed within its borders; MicroStrategy’s 189,150 bitcoin, the 215,000 bitcoin seized by the Department of Justice, Block.one’s 164,000, Grayscale’s 487,000 in GBTC, and now the new US spot ETF offerings hold a combined 170,174 bitcoin as of 1/31. This is inarguably a meaningful portion of the circulating supply of bitcoin, not to mention the likely possibility of further treasuries held off the books by American investors. Bitcoin is already making US ETF inflow history, as the combined growth within the first two weeks has already outpaced the decades-long entirety of the silver spot ETF market. Any liquidity needed for an institutional Lightning Network that could compete with legacy payment providers such as Visa or MasterCard is already safely nestled within the borders of the United States, and thus well-within reach of the regulatory arms of the DoJ, SEC, Treasury, and Federal Reserve.

Within the S-1 Registration Statement filing for the iShares’ Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) application is a clause that states:

“The Trustee will dissolve the Trust if…a U.S. federal or state court or regulator, or applicable law or regulatory requirements, requires the Trust to shut down, or forces the Trust to liquidate its bitcoin, or seizes, impounds or otherwise restricts access to Trust assets;”

While this may appear as simply due diligence for a securities offering, there is recent precedent of an iShares product being liquidated after pressure from the SEC due to geopolitical advancements, specifically the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In a press release from that same day, the iShares MSCI Russia ETF (ERUS) announced the suspension of “right of redemption of fund shares pursuant to an exemptive order issued by the [SEC]”, effective August 3, 2022, in order to “permit the fund to liquidate its portfolio.” Two weeks after the announcement, the press release stated that “BlackRock will begin liquidating ERUS by distributing its current liquid assets to shareholders,” after removing the estimated fees associated with the liquidation and transactions. Russian forces’ incursion into Ukraine triggered capital controls and sanctions from the consortium of related regulatory arms of the US government, which in turn restricted BlackRock – and all non-Russian investors – from participating in the Russian securities market. The final clause of the press release communicates that due to the unknown circumstances, “there can be no assurance that shareholders would receive any liquidating distribution relating to the Russian securities and depositary receipts after the initial distribution.”

One does not have to look too far back into recent history to see the last time the United States found itself face to face with its own geopolitical crisis during the COVID-19-induced lockdown and stimulus spearheaded by the Trump administration. BlackRock was chosen by the Federal Reserve during the third week of March 2020 to manage three debt buying programs, not to mention Canada’s central bank hiring Fink’s firm to advise commercial paper purchases, nor the contract they were given by the European Union banking system to aid in sustainability. “People like Larry Fink we’re talking to, that’s BlackRock – we have the smartest people, and they all want to do it,” Trump told reporters during a White House press appearance in which he announced the largest stimulus package in the country’s history – a $2 trillion bill.

Before entering the White House, Fink had helped manage Trump’s finances, and after a 2017 meeting with his administration, made note of his previous relationship by stating “In every meeting we had, he talked about doing more…I didn’t think ‘doing more’ meant [being] the president.” It was no surprise then that just three years later, Trump would be employing Fink once again to manage the stimulus distribution programs alongside former majority BlackRock shareholder, Bank of America. “I do believe it’s going to continue to bring opportunities for us,” Fink stated during a 2020 earnings call, referring to government assignments. As if predicting the coming profiteering off the unprecedented government lockdowns, in a 2011 interview with Bloomberg, Fink went so far as to say “Markets don’t like uncertainty. Markets like, actually, totalitarian governments… Democracies are very messy.”

BlackRock and Fink’s habit of aiding the government during moments of crisis started long before 2020, however, with the asset manager also playing a large role in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. The 2008 crash significantly influenced a shift in financial markets, with investors increasingly embracing ETFs. Having held only $531 billion in 2008, according to data from Bloomberg, these funds now hold approximately $4 trillion in the US – a substantial and consequential increase.

BlackRock’s ascent to prominence owes much to its strategic embrace of ETFs. Originally focused on bonds, the firm managed assets worth about $1.3 trillion at the end of 2008. BlackRock’s pivotal move into ETFs came with its acquisition of Barclays Global Investors in 2009, which followed Barclays’ decision to sell only after opting out of UK government bailout assistance. It was in this merger that BlackRock purchased the iShares brand from Barclays. The New York-based BlackRock paid $13.5 billion to the London-based Barclays, and by the time the deal closed at the start of December 2009, BlackRock had doubled its assets under management from $1.44 trillion to $3.29 trillion. This made BlackRock the world’s biggest money manager – a crown it still wears. Presently, BlackRock also holds the distinction of being the world’s largest global issuer of ETFs.

BlackRock’s involvement in government advisory services solidified critical partnerships in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. The company secured mandates to manage portfolios laden with toxic assets from entities like Bear Stearns, American International Group Inc., Freddie Mac, Morgan Stanley, and others, leveraging CEO Fink’s expertise in structuring mortgage-backed securities, a field which he had helped pioneer.

As Fink stated in 2020:

“I started at First Boston in 1976..I was the first Freddie Mac Bond Trader…and so the mortgage Market was just in its infancy…And then in 1982 we had the ability to put a PC on our trading desk. Before that you had no ability to put a computer on that trading desk. And it was very clear to me that if we could have computing power on the trading desk, we were going to have the ability to dissect cash flows of mortgages. That led in 1983 to the first carving up of a mortgage into different tranches. And so we created the first CMO.”

Fink had started his career at a trading desk at First Boston in 1976, and was quickly made head of a division in the then-unknown mortgage-backed securities market, which is estimated to have eventually added $1 billion to the firm’s books. He was also instrumental in the $4.6 billion securitization of GMAC auto loans at the start of 1986 and became the youngest member of its management committee at 31 when he was made managing director. After getting caught on the wrong end of then-Fed Chair Paul Volcker’s unprecedented interest rate manipulation in the late 1980s, his desk lost $100 million in the second quarter of 1986. First Boston made it clear that when Fink finally left the firm in 1988, he had been fired.

Despite his difficult exit from First Boston, over the next two decades Fink’s new firm BlackRock would become an integral figure within the public-private merger of the US dollar system. For example, in the summer of 2011, then-US Treasury secretary Tim Geithner was negotiating the raise of the debt-ceiling. After an agreement was made on the last day of July, Fink was the second number dialed from Geithner’s office, only behind then-Fed Chair Ben Bernanke. The Treasury secretary also made calls that day to Lloyd Blankfein, then-CEO of Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon. According to reports, Geithner had called Fink “at least 49” times during the previous 18 months – a testament to BlackRock’s political influence.

Much like it positioned itself close to regulators and governments during 2008 and 2020 to maximize profiteering within the private sector during a global economic crisis, BlackRock today finds itself cozied up to the public sector as the country deals with the downstream effects of the largest stimulus packages in history, and the US dollar system readies itself to embrace bitcoin in a meaningful way.

Many of the popular arguments for why bitcoin is a better store of value than gold or other precious metals are predicated on the idea that the underlying price discovery within their markets reject fractionalized gamification and tokenized re-hypothecation due to the ever-auditable nature of Bitcoin’s blockchain. The practice of “papering” gold is but the antiquated mechanic of the coming tokenized world. “We have the technology to tokenize today,” Fink told CNBC. “If you had a tokenized security… the moment you buy or sell an instrument, it’s known it’s on a general ledger that is all created together.” Market makers such as BlackRock entering the Bitcoin space are relying on Number Go Up-induced amnesia of their lengthy forays into asset manipulation, alongside a false understanding of blockchain’s technology ability to limit fraud. Fink finishes his handwaving by outright stating: “This eliminates all corruption, having a tokenized system.”

Corrupting the Ledger: Market Manipulators

At the end of 2023 on December 23, just two weeks before the Bitcoin Spot ETFs were approved, BlackRock named American banking titan J.P. Morgan, alongside Jane Street Capital, as “their authorized participants” in filing with the SEC. At the time, this made BlackRock the first Bitcoin Spot ETF applicant to select who would be responsible for acquiring the necessary bitcoin, in this case on behalf of the iShares issuance. This was seen as a surprising move due to J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s recent negative comments on Bitcoin. “I’ve always been deeply opposed to crypto, bitcoin, etc.,” the Board of Directors member for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York said during a Senate Banking Committee hearing last December. “The only true use case for it is criminals, drug traffickers…money laundering, [and] tax avoidance.” He later added, “If I was the government, I’d close it down.”

Despite the public rhetoric from Dimon, J.P. Morgan debuted the Tokenized Collateral Network, or TCN, in October 2023, as the largest US bank by assets facilitated a transfer of tokenized money market funds from BlackRock to Barclays for collateral within an over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives trade. A few years prior to their ventures in blockchain settlement and Bitcoin ETF participation, J.P. Morgan won the rights to manage over a $1 trillion in assets for BlackRock, taking the business from State Street Corp in a deal struck in January 2017, firmly placing J.P. Morgan behind only BNY Mellon for total assets under custody. Later on, in 2021, BlackRock announced further diversification from custodian State Street with partnerships with BNY Mellon and Citigroup to custody assets from their iShares division. BlackRock said Citigroup will handle around “40% of the funds” while J.P. Morgan takes 30% and “BNY Mellon and State Street each take 15%.”

While Fink may believe that somehow blockchain technology will supplant corruption in financial markets, he routinely finds himself paired with the notorious criminal banking enterprise led by Dimon. After a three-week trial at the end of Summer 2022, Michael Nowak and Gregg Smith – the former head of the J.P. Morgan’s precious-metals business and lead gold trader – were convicted on fraud, manipulation, and spoofing charges by a federal jury in Chicago. The US Justice Department alleged “the precious-metals business at J.P. Morgan was run as a criminal enterprise” in their biggest ever case of financial fraud. During closing arguments, head prosecutor Avi Perry stated that “they had the power to move the market, the power to manipulate the worldwide price of gold.”

In a September 2020 release from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC stated that:

“…from at least 2008 through 2016, JPM, through numerous traders on its precious metals and Treasuries trading desks, including the heads of both desks, placed hundreds of thousands of orders to buy or sell certain gold, silver, platinum, palladium, Treasury note, and Treasury bond futures contracts with the intent to cancel those orders prior to execution. Through these spoof orders, the traders intentionally sent false signals of supply or demand designed to deceive market participants into executing against other orders they wanted filled. According to the order, in many instances, JPM traders acted with the intent to manipulate market prices and ultimately did cause artificial prices.”

The order also found that J.P. Morgan Securities, a “registered futures commission merchant” had “failed to identify, investigate, and stop the misconduct.” Despite “numerous red flags, including internal surveillance alerts, inquiries from CME and the CFTC,” and even with an employee alleging misconduct, JPMS “failed to provide supervision to its employees sufficient to enable JPMS to identify, adequately investigate, and put a stop to the misconduct.” The CFTC order also notes that at the start of investigation, J.P. Morgan “responded to certain information requests in a manner that resulted in the Division being misled.”

J.P Morgan was forced to pay nearly $1 billion to settle allegations of fraud within the precious metals and Treasury markets, with the final $920 million tally being by far the largest fine by a financial institution caught manipulating markets since BlackRock shareholder Bank of America’s nearly $17 billion dollar fine for its role in the financial crisis of 2008. “At almost $17 billion, today’s agreement with Bank of America stands as the largest the department has ever made with a single entity in American history,” stated then-Associate Attorney General Tony West.

Then-Attorney General Eric Holder and West disclosed on August 21, 2014 that the Department of Justice had finalized a $16.65 billion settlement with Bank of America Corporation – the most substantial civil settlement with a single entity in American history — to address federal and state claims against BofA and its past and present subsidiaries, including Countrywide Financial Corporation and Merrill Lynch. As part of this resolution, the bank committed to a $5 billion penalty under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) – the most significant FIRREA penalty ever – and pledged billions of dollars in relief to distressed homeowners. The Justice Department and the bank resolved several ongoing civil investigations related to the “packaging, marketing, sale, arrangement, structuring and issuance” of residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and the bank’s practices regarding the underwriting and origination of mortgage loans. The settlement incorporated a statement of facts, in which the bank acknowledged selling billions of dollars of RMBS without disclosing key facts about the quality of the securitized loans to investors. The bank also admitted to originating risky mortgage loans and providing misleading information about the quality of those loans to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).

As for BlackRock itself, the SEC fined the firm $2.5 million in October 2023 for “failing to accurately describe investments,” in additional to $12.5 million in April 2015 for “failing to disclose a conflict of interest of a portfolio manager who ran another business,” as well as $340,000 “to settle charges that it improperly used separation agreements in which exiting employees were forced to waive their ability to obtain whistleblower awards.” Outside of the US, The Financial Services Authority of the UK fined BlackRock nearly £10 million in September 2012, the second-largest fine levied by the FSA – £33 million paid by J.P. Morgan for the same charge – for “failing to protect client money.”

BlackRock and its partners have been a part of some of the largest financial crimes in US history, not to mention the sudden liquidation of iShares’ ERUS due to pressure from the SEC after certain geopolitical developments. Fink wants you to believe the tokenization of real world assets via the blockchain will eliminate corruption – the very corruption his company and affiliates have been demonstrating is entirely possible in supposedly highly-regulated markets for decades.

Within the announcement for J.P. Morgan’s Tokenized Collateral Network, Tom McGrath, the Deputy Global Chief Operating Officer of Cash Management at BlackRock stated “Money market funds play an important role in providing liquidity to investors in times of high market volatility. The tokenization of money market fund shares as collateral in clearing and margining transactions would dramatically reduce the operational friction in meeting margin calls when segments of the market face acute margin pressures.” Fink’s firm was exceptionally well-positioned to take advantage of the “high market volatility” and “acute margin pressures” of both 2008 and 2020. It appears that is no different today.

As BlackRock dramatically shifts from shying away from Bitcoin due to projected ESG-related concerns downstream of its energy usage, and pivots into a full-on embrace of blockchain as a foundation of the future financial market it intends to dominate, a walk through Fink’s recent dealings in “green finance” remind us not to follow the rhetoric spewed, but rather the flow of the greenbacks themselves.

Nature, the New Gold

BlackRock’s manipulative tactics also apply to its overtures in ESG investing and carbon markets, both of which have long been championed by Fink until anti-ESG sentiment pushed him to soften his public stance. Despite Fink’s decision to avoid using the term ESG, he and BlackRock remain committed to “climate finance” and “green finance,” not because of an environmental benefits it may produce, but because of the new markets and asset classes it seeks to create.

In 2020, BlackRock, J.P. Morgan and Disney were criticized in an investigative report from Bloomberg for their substantial involvement in carbon-offset projects run by the Nature Conservancy. More specifically, BlackRock, J.P. Morgan and Disney had purchased a significant amount of credits from the Nature Conservancy to offset their CO2 emissions. However, those credits were ultimately found to be meaningless, as many of the credits were tied to forests that were never danger of being cut down, but were publicly framed as being endangered and thus “preserved” by the carbon offset credit scheme. In other words, BlackRock and others were buying “empty” carbon offset credits so they could posture as being “green” and placing themselves in a very advantageous position for any future implementation of a global carbon market (something which Fink has frequently promoted).

While the Nature Conservancy is technically an environmental non-profit, it has functioned as a front for Wall Street banks to test out a host of “green” finance and climate finance initiatives, including but also going far beyond carbon markets. For instance, for many years, the chair of the board of the Nature Conservancy was Henry “Hank” Paulson, the long-time Goldman Sachs executive who served as Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush and during the 2008 financial crisis. One of the firm’s recent presidents, Mark Tercek, also hailed from Goldman Sachs. Its current board includes top executives from J.P. Morgan, Santander, the Carlyle Group, and Goldman Sachs. Until a few years ago, Larry Fink himself was also on the Nature Conservancy’s board.

In 2014, the banker-dominated Nature Conservancy launched NatureVest, the group’s impact investing arm which “aims to help institutional investors and wealthy individuals understand and harness market opportunities for investing in nature.” The founding sponsor of NatureVest was J.P. Morgan, which remains very involved in its activities, and the current head of NatureVest, Matthew Arnold, was previously Head of Impact and Sustainable Finance at J.P. Morgan. NatureVest is one of the main groups pioneering debt-for-nature and debt-for-conservation swaps. These swaps, such as the one overseen by the Nature Conservancy in Belize in 2021, restructure part of a country’s debt through “blue” or “green” loans tied to powerful banks like Credit Suisse that are then used, not to finance any real conservation, but to force a country to take out private insurance policies to “mitigate the financial impact of natural disasters” as well as “political risk.” Countries that have engaged with these Nature Conservancy-brokered swaps have also been compelled to adopt Marine Spatial plans designed by the Nature Conservancy, some of which prevent locals from using coastal ecosystems for essential economic activity and sustenance, such as artisanal fishing.

In 2021, the same year as the Nature Conservancy’s debt-for-conservation swap in Belize, Larry Fink publicly spoke about the need to “reimagine” the World Bank and IMF. Fink’s comments, delivered during COP26, were directly related to the efforts of the Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), where Fink is a principal, to re-create the “global financial governance system.” This “reimagining” ultimately involves expanding the “debt slavery” model for which the World Bank and IMF have been heavily (and rightfully) criticized in order to spur “sustainable development.” Notably, the World Bank has called debt “a critical form of financing for the [UN’s] sustainable development goals,” particularly in emerging economies. More recently, this past November, a unit of BlackRock developed a plan to reform multi-lateral development banks, including the World Bank, reforms they claim would “free up to $4 trillion in climate change funding.”

The co-chair of GFANZ, current UN envoy for climate action and central banker Mark Carney, had spoken of the need to re-create the global financial system a few years before he oversaw GFANZ’s creation under the auspices of the UN. Speaking at Jackson Hole in 2019, Carney – then governor of the Bank of England – called for an entirely new financial system built around “multipolarity” and “inclusivity.” He concluded his speech by stating: “Let’s end the malign neglect of the IMFS [international monetary financial system] and build a system worthy of the diverse, multipolar global economy that is emerging.” Carney has since made it clear that this new IMFS should involve new “multipolar” currencies, including CBDCs, and global carbon markets.

GFANZ, which comprises some of the most powerful private banks and financial institutions in the world, has been very open about their ambitions. Their goals include merging the powerful private banks and institutions that compose GFANZ with multi-lateral development banks (MDBs) in order to capitalize on “a vast commercial opportunity” – i.e. using the existing model of MDBs to trigger market deregulation through debt slavery to facilitate the “green” investments of GFANZ members, all under the guise of furthering “sustainable development,” “multipolarity” and “inclusion.” GFANZ’s ambitions also include the creation of global carbon markets as part of its broader push to recreate “global financial governance” by “seizing the New Bretton Woods moment.”

Since 2021’s COP26, GFANZ and Larry Fink have both suffered public relations snafus related to public and political pushback against ESG investing. However, Fink’s recent comments on ETFs and tokenization, as well as his dramatic change in opinion on Bitcoin, show that powerful figures like Fink are still determined to remake the global financial system, but are seeking to frame their ambitions differently to avoid pushback from anti-ESG campaigners and influencers.

Instead of framing their plans for a new global financial system as a “planetary imperative” aligned with Net Zero initiatives and other ESG-related indicators, Fink’s recent rhetoric indicates a desire to frame the new system in ways that will be better received by the political right – as a way to reduce crime and corruption and as the key to next generation wealth and finance. Despite this drastically different framing, the ambitions of Fink and his allies as it relates to creating a new global financial system still rest tremendously on climate finance and the tokenization of natural assets.

For instance, Fink’s and GFANZ’s calls to “reimagine” the IMF and World Bank are rapidly being realized, with these institutions being retooled to better impose new products and paradigms on developing countries. For instance, last November, the IMF and World Bank joined with the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and Switzerland’s central bank to collaborate on tokenizing “some of the financial instruments that underpin their global work,” specifically promissory notes. Per the press release on the collaboration, officially known as Project Promissa, the effort is tied to simplifying “the process for making development money available for emerging and developing economies” (the target markets of GFANZ) as well as the implementation of central and commercial bank-issued programmable money, such as CBDCs. One BIS official quoted in the press release commented that the tokenization process allowed for “encoding policy and regulatory requirements” into a “common protocol” to tackle money laundering and illicit activity – an apparent hat-tip to built-in KYC/Digital ID functionality.

The World Bank in particular has been exploring tokenization extensively for the purpose of creating “a modular and interoperable end-to-end digital ecosystem for the carbon market.” Through its Digital for Climate (D4C) working group, the World Bank and its partners – including the UNDP and the European Space Agency – seek to build “the next generation of climate markets.” D4C hopes to accomplish this specifically by directing countries to create National Carbon Registries based off of models produced by the UNDP and World Bank that rely on blockchain technology. The data produced by these registries will be “link[ed], aggregat[ed] and harmoniz[ed]” by D4C’s metadata layer, the Climate Action Data Trust – co-founded by the World Bank and Google’s philanthropic arm, among others.

Key to this digital ecosystem is D4C’s tokenization engine, which would facilitate transactions by allowing an “original issuing authority” to issue tokens that receive the “environmental attributes” of carbon credits that would be traded on-chain. D4C utilizes the “green” Chia blockchain, developed by BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen. Part of the D4C’s “Climate Tokenization Suite” includes a Climate Wallet, currently an extension of Chia Wallet, for trading carbon credit tokens. It requires an active connection to a Climate Action Data Trust node to function.

As reported last year by Unlimited Hangout, the World Bank has been busy developing the global interoperable Digital ID database via its ID4D project. The World Bank’s D4C program similarly aims to produce global interoperable registries and digital infrastructure for global, tokenized carbon markets, markets that will invariably include Digital ID functionality, ostensibly to reduce “double counting” of carbon and illicit financial activity. As noted by Fink in his statements on mass tokenization, there will eventually be “one ledger” where everyone and every asset has their own number. For now, it seems, this one ledger is taking shape through the “decentralized” and interoperable databases and other infrastructure being set up by the “reimagined” World Bank. The World Bank announced plans in December to launch carbon markets in 15 countries – all of which are in the “Global South” – beginning this year. Based on the press release, these countries will be utilizing the “cutting edge technology” and standards the World Bank has developed through D4C and related initiatives.

While the World Bank is seemingly leading the charge on carbon credit tokenization and the infrastructure necessary to trade it, offerings from the private sector will likely be built to be interoperable with each other as well as the infrastructure produced by initiatives like the World Bank’s D4C. For instance, Ripple, which recently pledged $100 million to “ramp up” global carbon markets, was one of the blockchain networks used in the World Bank’s research on the Interledger protocol, research which the World Bank referred to as “very promising.” Ripple’s remittance product was previously endorsed by the World Bank and Ripple co-founder, Chris Larsen, was previously an advisor to the IMF on blockchain technologies.

Another private sector player in the emerging, global tokenized carbon market is Flowcarbon, backed by Adam Neumann, the disgraced founder of WeWork now best known for mismanagement and fraud. The company plans to “accelerate decarbonization through the tokenization of carbon credits and maintaining a record of the transactions on the blockchain.” Reuters has described Flowcarbon as a “blockchain-enabled carbon credit trading platform” that has raised millions via an ICO of the company’s “Goddess Nature” token, which is “backed by a parcel of certified carbon credits from nature-based projects.” Flowcarbon’s tokenized carbon credits are integrated in the Gold Standard registry, a carbon credit standards body and registry whose data will be collated and managed by the World Bank’s Climate Action Data Trust. Flowcarbon’s partnership with Gold Standard will allow Flowcarbon to “create high integrity tokens backed by Gold Standard’s credits,” per Flowcarbon’s CEO.

However, in keeping with Fink’s promise that everything will be tokenized, the efforts to tokenize nature have already gone far beyond carbon. For instance, The Latin America-focused branch of the multilateral development banking system, the Inter-American Development Bank, helped create, along with the Rockefeller Foundation, the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG), which is the entity behind Natural Asset Corporations (NACs). Per the IEG, NACs pioneer “a new asset class based on natural assets and the mechanism to convert them to financial capital.” These natural assets, the group states, “include biological systems that provide clean air, water, food, medicines, a stable climate, human health and societal potential.” NACs, once they lay claim to the natural asset they identify, launch an IPO and become the issuers of shares in that natural asset which are then sold to institutional and individual investors, corporations, sovereign wealth funds, etc., thereby fractionalizing the natural asset the NAC was created to capture. While the IEG has claimed that funds raised by NACs will aid conservation efforts, they admit elsewhere that NACs are designed to reap massive profits off of this massive new asset class based on the commodification and fractionalization of the natural world. Though the IEG’s partnership with the New York Stock Exchange seems to have fallen through to an extent (at least for now) due to political pushback, NAC pilots persist in Latin American nations such as Costa Rica.

Some companies have already moved to tokenize these natural assets to facilitate and accelerate their financialization and fractionalization. For example, the Estonia-based venture capital firm Single Earth “tokenizes land, forests, swamps and biodiversity: any area of rich ecological significance.” Companies (and eventually individuals, they promise) can then “purchase those tokens and own fractional amounts of those lands and natural resources, getting carbon offsets in return as well as ongoing ownership rights.” These tokenized forests and other natural assets serve to back Single Earth’s proprietary MERIT token, which has been framed by outlets like Forbes as “more legitimate” than both fiat currency and Bitcoin. The company’s goal is to “make nature the new gold” by monetizing it “for just being there,” creating a “fascinating combination of environmental impact and financial profit.”

Some national governments have already made plans to tokenize their land and natural assets, namely the Central African Republic. One of Africa’s most impoverished countries, the CAR has been working to tokenize its land and natural resources, including timber and diamond reserves, since 2022 and passed legislation last year to advance their efforts. The initiative hails from the country’s digital currency hub known as the Sango project. In addition to the efforts to tokenize natural resources that have never before been part of the financial system, the push to tokenize the most well-known natural resource commodities, e.g. oil and gas, has also advanced considerably, with several companies having developed platforms for trading tokenized oil and gas reserves. Renewable energy sources are also increasingly a target for tokenization.

Other VCs, such as Union Square Ventures, have written about the mass tokenization of natural assets from a different perspective. Instead of the more common claims from groups like Single Earth that tokenizing nature will “save the planet,” Union Square Ventures sees tokenized natural assets as soon “form[ing] the basis of a new type of digital collateral” that could be used in “lending, insurance, stablecoins, and other on-chain financial products.” They suggest that “a new stablecoin could be backed primarily (or maybe entirely) by natural assets.” Proposals for such stablecoins have been made before, such as proposals for an IMF-issued Climate Coin. That proposal called for the coin’s collateral pool to be composed of “a majority reserve of sustainable assets, eventually reaching 55% of land and forests, 25% in renewable energy initiatives, 15% in the top 500 most compliant ESG companies, and 5% in biotech research initiatives.”

In January of last year, one of Australia’s largest banks, National Australia Bank, announced its plans for a “green” stablecoin in partnership with an agritech company called Geora. The stablecoin, characterized by the bank as a tokenized deposit, is poised to be used in “carbon credit trading activities” and will utilize blockchain to verify “green” assets that back the stablecoin. The ambitions of the partnership are apparently larger than just their “green” stablecoin. For instance, the bank’s partner in this endeavor, Geora, “envisages a future where tokenized agricultural products, agri-assets [i.e. land holdings, prospective harvests, etc.], are used as loan collateral” while the bank plans to use blockchain to “track that borrowers comply with the green covenants of” their “Agri Green loan” offerings.

Geora’s vision for the future is, in fact, already here. A Visa-backed company known as Agrotoken describes itself as the “first global tokenization infrastructure for agrocommodities” and offers stablecoins tied to grains grown in Argentina and Brazil. Urging farmers to “tokenize your grains and pay anything you want,” farmers can then exchange their “agrotokens” for “seeds, vehicles, machinery, fuel, services” and even “use them as collateral for loans.”

Already existing stablecoins, such as Celo’s dollar and euro stablecoins, have already invested a considerable portion of their reserves in tokenized natural assets, such as rainforests. The Celo network is also partnered with the aforementioned company FlowCarbon in order to “create the first liquid market for live carbon credits on-chain that is designed to make carbon offsetting widely accessible and transparent.” Celo also recently announced a partnership with Circle whereby Circle’s USDC stablecoin will launch natively on Celo and is poised to become the network’s gas currency. Celo, backed by Jack Dorsey’s Block, Reid Hoffman, Coinbase Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, among others, has been open about its ambitions to become one of the main blockchains for tokenized real world assets, particularly tokenized natural assets. For instance, Celo co-founder Rene Reinsberg remarked the following after the Flowcarbon partnership was announced: “From the start, we designed Celo to bring natural assets on-chain in a meaningful way to enable a regenerative financial system.”

The Tokenized World

“We believe we’re just halfway there in the ETF revolution…Everything is going to be ETF’d…We believe this is just the beginning. ETFs are step one in the technological revolution in the financial markets. Step two is going to be the tokenization of every financial asset.”

– Larry Fink, 1/12/2024 on Bloomberg Television

During a January 17, 2024 panel at the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Jeremy Allaire, CEO of the USDC stablecoin issuer and BlackRock affiliate Circle, made note of Fink’s comments on tokenization from a few days prior on Bloomberg. “It suggests confidence that tokenization is going to be coming on in a significant way. That we’re going to see some of the very biggest asset issuers in the world issuing tokenized versions of those assets this year. That’s significant.”

The stated significance of the tokenized issuance of assets, whether via blockchain technology, such as Circle’s dollar instrument USDC, or even the traditional ETF model, such as within the creation of iShares’ IBIT, cannot be understated in the influence of pricing within the commodity market. In fact, within the IBIT S-1 filing listed risk factors, it clearly states that “Prices of bitcoin may be affected due to stablecoins (including Tether and USDC), the activities of stablecoin issuers and their regulatory treatment.” Further in the S-1 is the mention that an affiliate of the Sponsor “has a minority equity interest in the issuer of USDC” and “acts as investment manager to a money market fund, the Circle Reserve Fund” of which Circle uses to “hold cash, U.S. Treasury bills, notes and other obligations issued or guaranteed as to principal and interest by the U.S. Treasury, and repurchase agreements secured by such obligations or cash”, all of which “serve as reserves backing USDC stablecoins.”

In Spring of 2022, Circle announced a $400 million funding round led by BlackRock, which included a “strategic partnership” to be the “primary asset manager of USDC cash reserves and explore capital market applications for its stablecoin, among other objectives.” Allaire told TechCrunch at the time that “Our broader strategic partnership with BlackRock, announced today, will allow us to explore new use cases where USDC may be an efficient resource in the financial services value chain.” According to the Circle Reserve Fund product website on BlackRock’s website, the fund is sized at $23.6 billion dollars, including double-digit percentage investments from Citigroup (13.45%), Royal Bank of Canada (11.59%), Goldman Sachs (10.41%), and Wells Fargo (10.35%).

In an article Allaire penned for the WEF just two days before the 2024 panel at Davos titled “Blockchain is in from the cold — and stablecoins are set to change the financial system forever,” the Circle CEO made mention of the increasing interest in stablecoins, tokenization and blockchains by legacy banking institutions as illustrated by BlackRock’s Circle Reserve Fund. “This growing embrace of blockchain is reflected in the strong interest among traditional financial firms. In just the last few months, BlackRock, J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered, HSBC, Goldman Sachs and other major financial institutions have all announced projects that deepen their involvement with blockchain.”

Fink, in a previous mentioned interview with CNBC stated: “I think we’re going to create digital currencies, we’re going to use technology for it. We’re going to use a blockchain.” Allaire went on to further push stablecoins’ importance as “the critical element that underpin[s] this new internet financial system,” making a prediction that “Trillions of dollars of real economic activity could take place on the internet financial system in the next few years.”

In September 2023, Deutsche Bank, of which BlackRock holds over 6.3% of voting rights, announced a partnership with Taurus, which received regulatory approval from Switzerland’s Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) to offer tokenized securities to retail clients in January 2024. This is notable in that retail users can now access accounts within the regulated securities market to purchase digital assets and tokenized securities. “Our core belief at Taurus is that private markets 2.0 shall be digitized, so that buying a private security becomes as easy as buying a book on Amazon,” Head of Product Yann Isola said. “The growing demand for real-world asset tokenization, the fastest growing market segment in the digital asset space, validates this belief.”

This is hardly a position held solely by Isola or Allaire, as the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), WEF, BNY Mellon, and Citigroup are all making bold predictions for vast increases in the market share of tokenized assets. According to BCG, in less than ten years, asset tokenization will exceed $16 trillion and account for 10% of global GDP. The WEF, however, stated that this 10% will not take until 2030, but rather by 2027. BNY Mellon, the custodian of Circle’s USDC reserves, says that “Since tokenization leverages smart contracts, it could manage both the financial investment as well as facilitate the voting and/or ownership rights associated with the investment,” taking us from a shareholder capitalism model to “incorporating a stakeholder capitalism model.” BNY Mellon succinctly explains the advantages of the tokenized model, concluding with the premise that through tokenization, all assets can be fractionalized:

“Tokenization of assets involves the process of digitally representing real, physical assets on distributed ledgers, or issuing traditional asset classes in tokenized form. Within the context of blockchain technology, tokenization is the process of converting something of value into a digital token that’s usable on a blockchain application and a token represents a share of ownership in the underlying asset. This process can work for tangible assets like gold, real estate, debt, bonds, and art, or certain forms of intangible assets such as ownership rights or content licensing. What is even more exciting is that tokenization allows for transforming ownerships such that traditionally indivisible assets can be fractionalized into token forms.”

The investment bank Citi took a similar approach to their thesis on the tokenization, claiming an “80-fold increase from the current value of real-world assets locked on blockchains” by the end of the decade. Citi noted in their “Money, Tokens and Games” March 2023 report that they “forecast $4 trillion to $5 trillion of tokenized digital securities and $1 trillion of distributed ledger technology (DLT)-based trade finance volumes by 2030.” Citi claims the “private/unlisted market is more suitable for blockchain adoption,” citing the “resulting liquidity, transparency, and fractionalization,” whereas for public securities, tokenization provides advantages “such as efficiency, collateral use, golden sources of data, and ESG tracking.” The report again mentions fractionalization within a section titled “Traditional Securities Tokenization,” claiming “the use of DLT to record transfer of securities can improve the efficiency of existing processes as paperwork and manual processes are eliminated… allowing for fractionalization and use as collateral.”

Citi goes on to articulate that “once this intermediate, skeuomorphic ‘straddle’ state is crossed,” tokenization of RWAs via blockchain “breaks [us] free from the old and ideally directionally trends towards the envisioned end-state.” The mentioned end-state is further described as “digitally native financial asset infrastructure, globally accessible, operating 24x7x365 and optimized with smart contract and DLT-enabled automation capabilities, which enable use cases impractical with traditional infrastructure.”

One day after the approval of the Bitcoin Spot ETFs, on January 12, 2024, BlackRock announced the acquisition of one of the largest infrastructure fund managers in the world, Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP). The agreement was made with a package consisting of $3 billion in cash and around 12 million shares of BlackRock stock, totaling around $12.5 billion. Within the announcement, a quote attributed to Fink expressed his belief in the long-term financial implications of the modernization via the digitization and tokenization of the infrastructure sector:

“Infrastructure is one of the most exciting long-term investment opportunities, as a number of structural shifts re-shape the global economy. We believe the expansion of both physical and digital infrastructure will continue to accelerate, as governments prioritize self-sufficiency and security through increased domestic industrial capacity, energy independence, and on-shoring or near-shoring of critical sectors. Policymakers are only just beginning to implement once-in-a- generation financial incentives for new infrastructure technologies and projects.”

In a conversation with Andrew Sorkin on CNBC that same day, Fink was clear in his assessment that “the future in private markets will be infrastructure,” and his company’s partnership with GIP doubled BlackRock’s $50 billion in infrastructure AUM by adding over $100 billion in client assets across “infrastructure equity and debt.” Among GIP’s notable investments are international airports such as Gatwick, Edinburgh, and Sydney, the CyrusOne data center, “Suez (water and waste), Pacific National and Italo (rail), Peel Ports and Port of Melbourne,” among a handful of leading renewable energy platforms such as “Clearway, Vena, Atlas, and Eolian.” BlackRock also appointed Adebayo Ogunlesi, GIP Chair and CEO, to its board, following the finalization of the acquisition. On CNBC, Fink further articulated his reasoning for the merger with a tell-all explanation of the future of infrastructure merging with the private market:

“I have been long advocating that deficits matter. The future of governments funding their deficits on their own balance sheets is going to become more and more difficult. We’re in a conversation with many governments of doing more public-private transactions. We are seeing more and more corporations, instead of selling divisions, they are selling blocks of assets. Sometimes 100% and sometimes 50% and going into partnership and building the infrastructure. We all know the need of re-calibrating our power grid as we digitize everything. We all know that more and more countries are focusing on energy independence and some of them are focused on decarbonization. All across these investments, we are talking trillions of dollars. We believe the big macro trend in the future is going to be much heavier reliance on private capital – retirement assets –– to co-invest with companies and governments with infrastructure. [emphasis added]”

The idea of BlackRock perpetuating the trend of private sector investment in infrastructure via pension funds is hardly a recent development. In an interview with Business Insider in July 2021, directly after the passing of a $3.5 trillion infrastructure deal by the Biden administration, Alan Synnott, Global Head of Research and Product Strategy for BlackRock Real Assets commented, “Direct government spending on infrastructure is an important part of financing the maintenance of existing infrastructure and of developing new infrastructure. In addition, policies, tools and regulations can help catalyze opportunities for the private sector to participate.” Synnott later added, “the growth of infrastructure investment by pensions in the US is happening anyway.”

GIP’s Ogunlesi, a former partner at First Boston with Fink, was named the lead director on the board of directors at Goldman Sachs in July 2014, but will be stepping down from that role by the time of this deal’s closure. Notably, Ogunlesi was also a member of President Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum alongside Fink. Other Forum members included Jamie Dimon; Paul Atkins, Former Commissioner of SEC; Bob Iger, CEO of Disney; Rich Lesser, CEO of Boston Consulting Group; Doug McMillon, CEO of Wal-Mart; Jim McNerney, CEO of Boeing; Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM; Kevin Warsh, Former Member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System; and Mark Weinberger, CEO of EY.

The Forum was chaired by Stephen Schwarzman, the CEO and Founder of Blackstone, who, in exchange for a 50 percent stake in the business, initially gave Fink and the founding team of BlackRock the $5 million credit line that started the company in 1988.

The Universal Ledger

Fink, in his recent statements on the coming tokenization “revolution” also emphasized how this dramatic shift would be enabled by everything that will be tokenized, as well as those interacting with the tokenized economy, having a unique identifier and having every transaction tracked “on one general ledger.” He stated specifically that:

“We believe the next step going forward will be the tokenization of all assets and that means every stock and every bond will have its own, basically, CUSIP [i.e. the system used to identify most financial products in North America]. It will be on one general ledger. Every investor, you and I, will have our own number, our own identification. We can rid ourselves of all issues around illicit activities around bonds and stocks and digital by having tokenization…. We would have instantaneous settlement. Think of all the costs of settling bonds and stocks, but if you had a tokenization, everything would be immediate because it is just a line item. We believe this is a technology transformation for financial assets. [emphasis added]”

Fink’s statements are an apparent head-nod to the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs, sometimes referred to as Agenda 2030), which BlackRock has long supported, both in terms of public support and in terms of pressuring companies it influences to implement SDG policy goals and tracking their progress towards their implementation. SDG 16, in particular, contains provisions for biometric and interoperable Digital IDs to be developed by the private sector that all meet the technical standards laid out by the UN-backed ID2020 (now part of the Digital Impact Alliance). This is being done to provide the illusion of decentralization, when – in reality – these different ID systems will all be required to export data harvested from the Digital ID system to a global, interoperable database. That database is likely to be the World Bank’s ID4D.

UN documentation on the SDGs directly links Digital ID to the implementation of what it refers to as “financial inclusion.” Elsewhere, UN officials have described increasing financial inclusion as “imperative” to delivering the SDGs. As Unlimited Hangout previously reported:

The UN Task Force for the digital financing of SDGs explored how to “catalyse and recommend ways to harness digital financing to accelerate the financing of the Sustainable Development Goals.” It published a “call to action” with the objective of exploiting “digitalization in creating a citizen-centric financial system aligned to the SDGs.” The UN Task Force’s “action agenda” recommended “a new generation of global digital financing platforms with significant cross-border, spillover impacts.” According to the regime, this would, of course, require the strengthening of “inclusive international governance. Cross-border spillovers, or “externalities,” are the actions and events occurring in one country that have intended or unintended consequences in others. […] It is claimed that cross-border spillover could be managed by including “digital ID and data markets” in a system of “SDG-aligned digital financing.”

Another, related UN document, entitled “Peoples’ Money – Harnessing Digitilisation to Finance A Sustainable Future,” the UN describes how long-term financing for the SDGs and related infrastructure should come directly from the “peoples’ money,” i.e. regular people’s bank accounts, upon the implementation of “citizen-centric, SDG-aligned digital finance.” Essential pre-requisites for this system, the document states, “includes the core digital connectivity and payments infrastructure, Digital IDs, and data markets that enable financial innovation and low-cost service delivery. [. . .] Universally-available, reliable, secure, private, unique Digital IDs are critical to enabling people to access digital finance.” Other documents related to SDG implementation and “SDG-aligned digital finance” from entities like the Bank of International Settlements call for every business entity, from the largest to the smallest, to have “decentralized identifiers,” i.e. DIDs. In other documentation, the BIS, as well as the UN, have treated CBDCs and Digital IDs, including DIDs, as synonymous and essential to achieving the so-called “financial inclusion” agenda. Transactions of different yet interoperable CBDCs, and their private sector equivalents, are poised to be tracked on a single, global ledger, not unlike Digital ID. In fact, it appears it is all meant to be stored on the same ledger.

As stated in 2018 by Peggy Johnson, then a top executive at Microsoft, a ID2020 co-founder:

As discussions begin this week at the World Economic Forum, creating universal access to identity is an issue at the top of Microsoft’s agenda. [. . .] Last summer that Microsoft took a first step, collaborating [. . .] on a blockchain-based identity prototype [. . .] we pursued this work in support of the ID2020 Alliance — a global public-private partnership[.] [. . .] Microsoft, our partners in the ID2020 Alliance, and developers around the globe will collaborate on an open source, self-sovereign, blockchain-based identity system that allows people, products, apps and services to interoperate across blockchains, cloud providers and organizations. [. . .] We will also help establish standards that ensure this work is impactful and scalable. Our shared ambition with ID2020 is to start piloting this solution in the coming year to bring it to those who need it most, beginning with refugee populations.

These programs, from ID2020 and also from the UN’s World Food Programme, tie a person’s iris biometrics to a Digital ID that links directly to that person’s digital wallet, where aid money is disbursed, meaning that – if a refugee wants to eat – they must participate in a cashless, biometric-based financial system where financial transactions and key aspects of identity, including education credentials and health records, are stored. With the World Bank poised to serve as the database for much of this infrastructure once developed at scale via its ID4D initiative, it seems likely that the coming “SDG-aligned digital finance” and Digital ID system will also incorporate the World Bank’s aforementioned “climate wallet” functionality as developed through their D4C initiative. As noted earlier, this would enable large-scale engagement with tokenized carbon markets. One of Larry Fink’s reasons in calling for the “reimagining” of the World Bank was specifically to help “fund the [energy] transition in emerging markets,” which presumably involves facilitating carbon markets.

In previous years, Larry Fink was very vocal about ESG and pressuring the myriad of companies in which BlackRock is a significant shareholder to develop decarbonization policies. However, upon pushback – namely from the political “populist” right, Fink abandoned his faux-collectivist talking points to justify these policies and has since even dropped using the term ESG altogether. When this transition began, Fink argued that his push for ESG had been motivated by “the pursuit of long-term returns,” not by politics or ideology. He further described BlackRock’s approach to sustainability as being rooted in “stakeholder capitalism,” the economic system championed by the WEF’s Klaus Schwab and built on an interlocking, global network of public-private partnerships. In that same document, Fink called decarbonization, which includes voluntary carbon markets, “the greatest investment opportunity of our lifetime.” Fink has since altered his rhetoric around these agendas, moving from claims that they are necessary to avoid planetary doom, to claims that they are the key to unlocking next generational wealth.

Tokenized Dialectics

Last week, the “anarcho-capitalist” leader of Argentina, Javier Milei, met with Larry Fink to discuss new, potential investment opportunities for BlackRock in Argentina, with a focus on infrastructure. Milei came to power campaigning against the existing Argentine establishment and those that have depleted the once-rich nation and plunged it into near economic ruin. This makes his decision to meet with Fink all the more odd, given BlackRock’s critical role as one of the “vulture capitalist” entities that have sought to become the owners of Argentina’s resources and assets following its debt enslavement by the IMF and other financial institutions focused on “development.” Fink is not the first such figure to be courted by Milei following his electoral victory and he has stuffed his cabinet with establishment figures from the previous Macri administration, even placing the same former J.P. Morgan executive and central banker in charge of the economy, mining, agriculture, industry and much more. One of Milei’s top advisers, Dario Epstein, has a particularly cozy history with Fink and BlackRock and aided BlackRock’s taking a significant stake in Argentina’s de facto power monopoly, Pampa Energía.

According to reporting from Pagina 12, Fink expressed “his intention to purchase companies from the Argentine State” as Milei continues the privatization of state assets, including energy and communication infrastructure. BlackRock already has made inroads within Argentina, maintaining positions in “almost all the large firms in the country, national and international,” including Tenaris, Banco Galicia, Macro, Telecom, Pampa Energía, McDonalds, and Mercado Libre – the latter owned by Marcos Galperín, the richest man in Argentina. Moments before the May 2020 default, the ninth in Argentina’s history, BlackRock was noted by Bloomberg as being “one of the single biggest Argentine creditors,” holding nearly $1.7 billion in bonds at the time. This default came after Argentina missed an April 2020 payment and a group led by BlackRock initially rejected the country’s plan for debt restructuring. BlackRock, amongst Ashmore Group Plc., Fidelity Investments and T Rowe Price Group Inc, had rejected the restructuring, with a spokesman for Fink’s firm saying the plan sought “to place a disproportionate share of Argentina’s longer-term adjustment efforts on the shoulders of international bondholders.” This was the only counteroffer submitted to the South American country.

Despite Milei’s rhetoric, the Argentine president’s friendliness to establishment “market makers” appeared to have been part of the reason why he was invited to speak at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting last month. Milei, though seen as scolding the WEF establishment, was well received by the powerful people he was supposedly telling off. According to reporters who were present for Milei’s speech, WEF attendees – among whom were people Milei labeled the “heroes” of the capitalist world who had merely been led astray by neo-Marxists and their allies – enjoyed the ostensible tongue-lashing. One reporter, on Milei’s speech, wrote: “The Davos elite had been lectured about losing its way and had loved it.” One WEF attendee who was particularly bullish about Milei was Daniel Pinto, the number two at J.P. Morgan, who told the Financial Times that Milei (who has several JPM alumni in top roles in his administration) was “addressing all the right things in the economy.”

Milei’s speech – instead of “destroying Davos” as some have argued – seems to have instead urged that the Forum emphasize the private side of the public-private partnership model that the WEF has always promoted. Arguably, the WEF had leaned into rhetoric meant to appeal to those who favor the public sector, the Left, despite the fact that public-private partnerships are known to be one of the most effective models of corporate capture of regulatory and other government agencies. Will “market friendly” Milei help usher in an era of a new, “trustworthy” WEF that trades its “woke” rhetoric for “libertarian” talking points? Time will tell, but WEF trustee Larry Fink is already making that pivot.

The phase shift in political rhetoric the WEF has started platforming and promoting, exemplified by Milei, should be noted. Does Klaus Schwab suddenly not care about digital identity and programmable money? Did Fink wake up recently and decide carbon credit scores and typical ESG narratives are no longer worthy of promotion, despite the innate control over the masses it gives to the infrastructure maintainers? Libertarianism, Anarchism and Capitalism have become meaningless, partisan buzzwords to guide the partially-aware Right towards promoting the corporate and corrupt capture of the public sector by the private. “Hooray for the free markets!” they cheer, as Milei places an ex-J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank executive in charge of his central bank and reaches out to outside financiers to further dollarize Argentina. “Down with Socialism!” they cheer, as private sector companies spread the Treasury ponzi across the global south with stablecoins while tokenizing their land and natural resources.

You will allow BlackRock to build the panopticon of Tokenized EarthTM with Americans’ retirement money under the dialectic pretext of owning the liberals, unknowingly connecting all aspects of ownership to centralized databases, walled identity gardens, and fractionalized reserve assets transmitted and issued on the private blockchains of Wall Street banks. The warring factions within the Davos socialites squabble over the spoils, but never against the plan. Fulfilling Agenda 2030 requires complicit cooperation as much as compromised corporations. Do not confuse free market capitalism with cronyism or cartelism, which is the “capitalist” model embodied by Fink and his fellow Wall Street ilk.

The new tokenized economy must be created under the guise of free markets leading to new found prosperity for individuals, and not a digital serfdom paved with misunderstood user agreements, biometric credentials and faux collectivist talking points. Take a selfie and submit your social security number, alongside your date of birth, to unlock the now-tokenized old growth forest in your backyard. The new face of “economic freedom” is your face, alongside select credentials, sent to a privately-owned database: One ledger to rule them all. Your existence reduced to a JSON string, and your worldly possessions regulated and demarcated by a CUSIP – but at least you got a few half shares of BlackRock’s latest Moss-On-A-Rock ETF. The “for the greater good” narrative of the post-Occupy liberal economic backlash has lost its usefulness and is being replaced in real time with tokenized, private capital “libertarianism.” This is corporate capture down to the molecule: a ledger entry for the protons in the new and improved fractionalized atom – courtesy of Larry Fink and his Tokenized, Inc.

Tokenized, Inc: BlackRock’s Plan To Own The Fractionalized World.

War Mode #161.

In this episode, Whitney is joined by UH assistant and podcast producer Star to discuss key aspects of the AI “revolution” including its short and long term effects and if it is possible to use AI without succumbing to its negative impacts.

Show notes
Originally published 02/01/24.

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Podcast available now on all Podcast apps. Clips on Podverse.fm

The Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Whitney joined Syriana Analysis to discuss the hidden mechanisms behind information control. Available on Rumble and YouTube.

CLIP – MSM lies, CLIP – Cyberattacks and CBDCs, CLIP – October 7

Syriana Analysis.

Whitney joined Chris Martenson to discuss AI and how the narrative surrounding it might impact society at large or explore specific strategies for individuals and organizations to navigate this shift. Available on YouTube and Peak Prosperity.

Peak Prosperity.

Whitney joined AM Wake Up to discuss CBDC rollout in the US. Available on Rokfin and Rumble.

AM Wake Up.

Whitney joined Russell Brand to discuss Epstein, the rise of populism and whether figures like Donald Trump and Javier Milei are really “anti-establishment” and how to respond to the global, concerted push towards a centralized, authoritarian state.

Available on Rumble.

Links discussed:

• Larry Page Missing as Google Founder Faces Jeffrey Epstein lawsuit
• Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance
• The Rise of Jamie Dimon
• Crowning the King of Wall Street
• The age of AI : and our human future : Kissinger, Henry, 1923- author : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
• Fink Sees Tokenization of Financial Assets as Next Step – Bloomberg

Russell Brand.

Whitney joined Redacted to discuss how CBDCs are likely to implemented in the United States and how Sam Bankman-Fried had tried to help create the coming digital dollar before the implosion of FTX.

Full show available on YouTube and Rumble. Segment starts at 1:38:15. Whitney’s segment only available here.

Redacted.

Whitney joined TLAV to discuss the Epstein documents, CBDCs and the Digital Dollar and the threat of cyber false flags in 2024. Available on Rumble, Rokfin, and Odysee. TLAV show page here.

TLAV.