Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

False hope breeds crippling apathy – This is what I have to think to myself when I see the news media fervor over the second arrest of billionaire Jefferey Epstein, or similar events which in most cases end up fading into the background and forgotten. The public's favorite distraction has always been to watch high profile people kicked out of their castles in the clouds, but I would point out that even when the globalists sacrifice one of their own in the public eye it is usually only to satiate the masses and their hunger for justice for a very short time. The system is not designed to root out evil; it is designed to obscure and perpetuate evil.

Epstein is a perfect example of this. He was already prosecuted on pedophilia charges over 12 years ago and received a “sweetheart” plea deal which allowed him to serve a mere 13 month sentence. How many child rapists get that kind of treatment in our court system? And what about the vast array of people (including political leaders) that were close friends and associates with Epstein during his “Lolita Express” days? Are we really to believe they knew nothing about what was going on? That they visited his island and never saw any wrongdoing?

Why didn't they come forward immediately? Why did they wait until Epstein was already being prosecuted before they publicly admonished him? Is it because they were involved in the same activities? And if so, why have they not been prosecuted as well?

My point is, people should lower their expectations that justice will be served or that the "dominoes will fall" in the Epstein case. Also, keep in mind that James Comey's daughter, Maureen Comey, will be on the prosecution team in the case, AND , Donald Trump's Labor Secretary, Alexander Acosta, is the same man who brokered Epstein's immunity deal. Like strands of malignant cancer, these people are wrapped around every facet of government.

But this is not just about Epstein, and as much as I would also like to see the guy hang for his crimes, I have to admit that this latest event is probably nothing more than another piece of theater meant to give the public false hope that the system is changing and that elitist criminals will be treated the same as any other criminal. How often does this ever happen?

How about the Bernie Madoff scandal? Madoff runs a Ponzi scheme that devoured $65 billion in client funds and he is sentenced to 150 years in prison, but JP Morgan, the bank that HELPED Madoff move his stolen money, got nothing more than a fine.

In the wake of the 2008 credit crash and the exposure of the fraudulent derivatives market, many people thought banker heads were going to roll, yet in the US only one banker, a little known executive at Credit Suisse named Kareem Sarageldin, actually served jail time. After admitting to fraud and inflating bond prices associated with mortgage backed securities, Sarageldin was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

The Financial Times went on to publish an article in 2018 on this matter, claiming they would “dispel the myth that no one was held accountable for the derivatives crash”. They came up with a list of 47 names. The article went on to admit that the vast majority of bankers arrested were in Iceland (where the prisons are like country clubs). The rest came primarily from low level banks or were mid-level employees. The number of CEO's on the list is decidedly slim, and banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs, the biggest perpetrators of derivatives fraud, are decidedly absent.

The base argument for these types of articles is in itself a kind of fraud. I don't think that most people assume that “no one” was prosecuted over the fraud that helped create the crash of 2008, a crash the economy is still suffering from. I think that most people assume none of the elites at the top of the pyramid were prosecuted, and perhaps with the exception of former IMF managing director Rodrigo Rato in Spain who was only charged with credit card fraud, this assumption is a correct one.

The most egregious criminals are rarely ever touched by scandal or jail time because they stand in key positions within our system. You will never see central bankers in the Federal Reserve suffer punishment for consistently and deliberately fueling economic bubbles through artificially low interest rates and stimulus measures. You will never see them prosecuted for deliberately imploding these bubbles with perfectly timed liquidity tightening and interest rate hikes into economic weakness.

In fact, just this week Fed Chairman Jerome Powell told the Financial Services Committee that if Trump tried to fire him, he would simply ignore him and remain in his position for the full term. It is rather odd to me that almost no one in the alternative media covered his statement, perhaps because it runs contrary to the latest narrative that Powell is "afraid of Trump" and that Trump now has control of the Fed. This is nonsense. Even Trump's own acting Chief of Staff noted that Trump "knows he does not have the authority to fire Powell".

People who think the President chooses the Fed Chairman do not understand how the system actually works. The Fed board controls who the Chair is, and can simply vote to put whoever they wish in the position regardless of what the President does, according to Bill English, a former FOMC secretary and advisor to the Board. This means that Trump's "choice" of Fed Chair is merely ceremonial. Trump has no power whatsoever over the central bank.

So why does this delusion persist? Again, because people become addicted to false hope. The banking elites will never be punished by the system they control. They would have to be punished by other means.

You will never see IMF heads punished for loan sharking nations into oblivion. Hell, the Bank for International Settlements laundered money for the Nazis and yet they were never punished and still exist to this day! The president of the BIS at the time, Thomas McKittrick, never faced prosecution after the war, went on to work for Chase Manhattan bank, and received a pleasant eulogy from The New York Times after his death in 1970, even though the New York Times also reported on admissions from the BIS that they had helped the Nazis.

Some might argue that this trend of one law for the people and no law for the money elite will finally change under Donald Trump's presidency, but I find that sentiment to be highly naive. First and foremost, Trump is far too close the money elite to punish them, even if he wanted to. His extensive associations with Rothschild banking agent Wilber Ross, the man who bailed Trump out of his considerable debts in his Atlantic City casino project in the 1990s and who is now Commerce Secretary in Trump's cabinet, sets a tone for Trump's presidency that is NOT anti-banker or anti-globalist.

It should be clear to most people now that there will be no “draining of the swamp”, not even from the White House. Trump's promises to seek prosecution of the Clintons for their criminal activities, which include mishandling of classified data, fraud, and a host of other repulsive behaviors, have fallen flat. Trump's campaign position to hold the Federal Reserve accountable for the historic bubble they have inflated in stock markets through low interest rates and stimulus is gone. Now Trump takes credit for the bubble as if it is a good thing, and is demanding even more stimulus from the Fed.

And yet, there are still people out there that imagine this is all part of some elaborate ruse on Trump's part; that he is playing a game of “4D Chess” with the globalists. I believe this insane delusion stems from a singular psychological malfunction that is suffered by many people – the idea that the system, no matter how corrupt, can be fixed from the inside.

Leftists believe this. Many conservatives believe this. Despite all evidence to the contrary, people WANT to imagine a world in which evil can be defeated if only the right people are put in place within the system. If they vote the right way, if they support the right party, if they rally around the right investigation, if they protest peacefully on the steps of Congress or on Wall Street, then the system will be forced to expel the evil and serve the populace once again.

I usually equate our current governmental framework to the “One Ring” from Lord Of The Rings, and I still think there is no better analogy. The core problem is that the system is not only run by corrupt people, it has also been built by them. The system as it stands today is a corruption machine that manufactures evil. Adding good people to an evil machine is not going to stop it. And, as with the One Ring, the people who think they can use an evil machine for good purposes often end up corrupted themselves. You cannot change it, you cannot exploit it for good, you can only destroy it.

In other words, conservatives in the liberty movement in particular need to throw out their illusions that the globalists will be defeated using the very systems the globalists created to serve their interests. And if you cannot change a corrupt system from the inside, then it must be dismantled from the outside and rebuilt from scratch. A constitutional framework and the Bill Of Rights can help in this effort, but these are laws on paper that cannot defend themselves. Without fierce vigilance on the part of the citizenry, laws and rights can be erased.

You will not hear the mainstream media or even much of the alternative media talk about the real solutions to elitist criminality or government corruption. You won't hear about these solutions because they are hard; they require struggle and sacrifice. Voting is easy, which is why it does not work. Legislation is easy, which is why it does not work. And, protesting with signs on a street corner is easy, and it might spread the word on an issue, but ultimately it does not work. The corruption remains.

There are two options left; first, walk away peacefully from the system and build one that works on your own or with others of like-mind. If you are successful, then expect the corrupt system and the elites behind it to try and stop you. Second, when this happens, the only option left is to fight back and remove the threat. This is where we are inevitably headed, not because we want it, but because they will force the issue.

We can no longer deceive ourselves with notions of absorbing Washington D.C. or Wall Street and making them work for us. The hope that this is possible is poison, and the elites use that poison to weaken public resolve. While we sit around waiting for the system to police itself the Earth turns and they become more powerful. Without a dramatic change in our own strategy, without direct action on our part instead of action through political middlemen, I predict our situation will only become worse.

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