Feb. 8—“Private appetite is the measure of good and evil…. Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter…. I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceases only in death.”
The above reads like Jeffrey Epstein’s credo, equally applicable to the hundreds and thousands of oh-so-respectable members of the trans-Atlantic establishment who grace the millions of pages of the recently released Epstein files. But the above quote is taken from Thomas Hobbes’s infamous Leviathan of 1651—one of the foundational essays of modern liberal society, and its economy dedicated to the untrammeled pursuit of speculative profit, greed, and pleasures of the flesh.
Epstein, you see, was not original.
Today, the Western financial system, and its $2.4 quadrillion of unpayable speculative financial instruments, is the predictable consequence of a society guided by this philosophical outlook of hedonism, where man is viewed as just another animal who survives by bottom-feeding on others. As a result, we have a cryptocurrency bubble that soared to $4.35 trillion global market capitalization last October, after President Donald Trump announced he would make America the crypto-capital of the world, and has since collapsed to half that amount—wiping out over $2 trillion in Monopoly money “wealth.” We have the market in U.S. Treasuries being eaten alive by hedge fund speculators. And we have a riptide of “reverse carry trade” flows sucking funds out of the Global South, back to financial institutions in Japan and the United States, threatening a new wave of bankruptcies.
The City of London and Wall Street are responding to the double existential threat they are facing—their own bankruptcy, coupled with the emergence of an alternative economic approach centered in the BRICS and China’s Belt and Road Initiative—with the same approach they took in the 1930s: Schachtian economics. Named after the London-imposed head of German Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s central bank, Hjalmar Schacht, the logic is simple: vastly increase arms spending, and use the expanded military to wage war and loot nations to the bone, to try to prop up the speculative bubble. This is the process we already see underway in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Germany, and in President Trump’s announcement that he plans to increase the U.S. military budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion per year.
And now, with the demise of New START, the floodgates have been opened to enormous new U.S. military expenditures on nuclear weapons, the Golden Dome, and so on, with the attendant danger of thermonuclear war. This is the madness currently surrounding the Presidency of Donald Trump.
In this issue of EIR, we feature an exposé of some of the worst elements in and around the Trump administration—from vulture fund speculator Paul Singer, to tech-synarchist billionaires, to anti-communist crusader U.S. Secretary of State-National Security Advisor Marco Rubio. Despite Trump’s repeated statements and promises to distance himself from the failed policies of his predecessors, the President has ultimately been pulled back into some of their worst inclinations. As you will read below, we try to explain at least some where this comes from, as well as the proper approach needed to get out of it.