Six Trillion Dollars Worth of Fake U.S. Bonds Seized in Italy/Libertarianism and Networks of Power

Italian police working with U.S. agents arrested mafia with 6 trillion dollars of fake U.S. bonds payable from the Chicago Federal Reserve Bank. Authorities say the gang intended to exploit the worthless paper as collateral to attain loans. The audacity of the scheme is greater than the Wall Street techniques of the 2000s were-in some trading houses leveraged 5 billion in assets to buy 100 billion dollars of paper, CDOs and whatever looked good.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/17/us-usa-bonds-forgery-idUSTRE81G11620120217?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FtopNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Top+News%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Networks of power tend to eclipse theoretical democracy and individual liberty and displace with socially and empirically totalizing economic and social structures the hypothetical freedom and free enterprise facts of life that existed phenomenally in earlier historical times.

It may be argued reasonably that in the first 150 years of U.S. history the nation was a greedy man's dream world with plenty of land and opportunities to support a prevalently libertarian economy even as capital compiled radically after the industrial revolution. The founder's ideals functioned well when the citizens were not really challenged to construct a democracy with egalitarianism in a challenging and populous social environment as in the third millennium.

Some Americans believe in error that returning to the political philosophy of the founders suitable for the first 100 years in a Libertarian context without the abundant land and natural resource proportionally available to citizens in return the 18th century would return America to prosperity without debt. Actually a reform of capitalism capping citizen concentration of wealth would be the basic social adjustment needed to bring citizen and moderate size business free enterprise to a prominence that it had in the founder's day.

In the absence of reform concentrations of wealth and power enabled with instant global concentration establish hegemony over political, social and economic structures with a one-way advantage. The economy is simultaneously globalized and the national interests decline as the political philosophy of the founders is farther eclipsed and transformed into an excuse to serve the global concentrations of wealth and power, and networks of power.

A scientific study found that of 43,000 corporations a small core tightly controlled more than a third of the global economy (SN9-24-2011-page13). Networks may be controlled by minority elites and shape the real economic and social development of the time. In these essays perhaps I will capture a sense of the possibilities of the times, though for a philosophical generalist it is a process a little like firing at a moving target in the dark.