Author Archives: circleof13

Jeffrey Epstein used Rothschild banking empire to finance Israeli cyberweapons industry

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Following Barak’s retirement from office in 2013, he recruited Pavel Gurvich, a former operative of Israel’s secretive Unit 81, to identify promising cyber ventures.

Barak relied on Gurvich for guidance on investments in offensive cyber tools, including Tor network surveillance, NSO-style cellphone hacking software, and router exploitation technologies.

Gurvich supplied detailed maps of undersea transatlantic cables and network access points, illustrating the global reach of potential operations.

Epstein then facilitated connections between Barak, Gurvich, and the Rothschild dynasty, offering logistical support, guidance on tax and investment structures, and strategic advice.

Epstein’s involvement included a $25 million contract in October 2015 between his Southern Trust Company and Barak’s spyware-linked startup Reporty Homeland Security (now Carbyne).

The agreement covered “risk analysis and the application and use of certain algorithms.”

He also organized private meetings and dinners to foster collaboration, including a January 2014 gathering in Paris with Barak, the Rothschilds, and former French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Emails suggest Epstein coached Barak on managing the Rothschild relationship, advising him to provide “time, attention, stable, recurring, predictable” engagement to earn trust.

https://alethonews.com/2025/11/19/jeffrey-epstein-used-rothschild-banking-empire-to-finance-israeli-cyberweapons-industry/

The Case for Taxing AI

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First, many countries now tax human workers more heavily than their potential AI competitors in the labor market. In the case of the US, roughly 85% of federal revenue comes from taxing people and their work (through income and payroll taxes), while capital and corporate profits are taxed far less. Technologies like AI benefit from favorable treatment in the form of generous write-offs, low corporate rates, and carve-outs.

Second, economists expect AI to increase the financial returns to capital relative to labor, even if it doesn’t cause unemployment. The most extreme version of this would entail AI agents that can design, replicate, and manage themselves – meaning that capital would be performing its own labor. Under current tax policies, such a shift would widen inequality and shrink government revenue as a share of GDP.
An AI tax could help level the field between humans and machines. Earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI might eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10-20% within five years. Whether such forecasts are borne out may depend partly on policy. Taxing labor more heavily than capital tilts the scales toward automation that replaces, rather than augments, human workers. At the very least, we shouldn’t let our tax system help put people out of work.

Moreover, at a time when the fiscal outlook is darkening, an AI tax could protect public revenues from technology-induced shocks. If mass job losses or hiring slowdowns do occur, governments that rely on income and payroll taxes could face fiscal crises even if new AI-ready jobs emerge later.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ai-tax-needed-to-protect-workers-generate-revenues-by-kevin-o-neil-2025-11

Creating a New Debt Sink by Tokenizing the World

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Tokenization, as defined by strategy and management consulting firm McKinsey, “is the process of creating a digital representation of a real thing” on a blockchain network—with the underlying goal being to “make assets more accessible.” Blockchain enthusiasts are marketing the tokenization of real-world assets (RWAs)—from “art and collectibles to real estate, stocks, commodities, and even personal data”—as “one of the most compelling applications of blockchain technology, revolutionizing how we perceive and interact with various forms of value.”

In this presentation, Goodwin and Webb pull the curtain back on this agenda, explaining that RWAs, carbon credits, and Earth itself are being positioned to become the new dollar debt sink. Key pillars of the “tokenized play” include the land grab—which we described at length in our Plunder report—and the planetwide surveillance and inventorying of assets that makes plunder possible. By way of illustration, Goodwin and Webb discuss the O.N.E. Amazon initiative, which, as they have written, “seeks to turn the Amazon rainforest into a digital asset security to be chopped up, tokenized and sold off to investors around the world as a novel form of digital credit.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbJcWk8FAPw

Ed Dowd: It Has Begun — Housing, Credit and FCF Have Cracked … Stocks Are Next

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Ed explained that the math just isn’t mathing. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, needs something like $900 billion of annual subscription revenue at 25% margins just for a 10% ROI.

Nope, not going to happen.

And certainly not before their first waves of chips wear out and have to be replaced at enormous cost.

So, what happens when this bubble bursts? Ed believes that a serious market crash is in the cards. Of course, this means stocks will drop in price, but the main action is going to be in the credit markets.

Treasuries will continue to advance in price (fall in yield), making them an attractive option to ride out the storm, while other forms of lesser credit will implode, as is already happening across the subprime lender space (TriColor, PrimaLend, First Brands).

When will this happen? According to Ed, it already is.

https://www.activistpost.com/ed-dowd-it-has-begun-housing-credit-and-fcf-have-cracked-stocks-are-next/

Operation Gladio: The CIA’s Secret Army In Europe

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Throughout Operation Gladio, the CIA relied heavily on the Vatican. According to “The Declassified History of American Intelligence Operations in Europe,” the CIA used sources in the Vatican to gather information not only about Italy, but about countries behind the Iron Curtain as well, such as Poland or Ukraine. Under James Jesus Angleton, the CIA created a “Vatican desk,” which reviewed reports sent to the Holy See from papal diplomats behind the Iron Curtain. Cardinal Domenico Tardini, one of the top aides to Pope Pius XXII and the head of the Foreign Section of the Vatican’s Secretariat of State was “one of the CIA’s top sources.”

In “Operation Gladio,” Paul L. Williams also details the extent to which the CIA funneled money through the Istituto per le Opere di Religione (IOR), also known as the Vatican Bank. The Vatican Bank keeps no records or paper trail of any kind. And as a result, “millions can be deposited into the IOR on a continuous basis and channeled into numbered Swiss bank accounts without the possibility of detection,” which is exactly what the CIA did. The Truman Administration funneled over $350 million into the Vatican Bank, and in 1948, the CIA “dumped $65 million of its black money into the Vatican Bank.”

It’s impossible to know exactly how much money the CIA channeled through the Vatican Bank, but the Christian Democratic Party alone received “more than $20 million in annual aid from the CIA.”

https://www.grunge.com/717106/operation-gladio-the-cias-secret-army-in-europe/

The Mythology of Work — Eight Myths that Keep Your Eyes on the Clock and Your Nose to the Grindstone

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Capitalists and socialists have always taken it for granted that work produces value. Workers have to consider a different possibility—that working uses up value. That’s why the forests and polar ice caps are being consumed alongside the hours of our lives: the aches in our bodies when we come home from work parallel the damage taking place on a global scale.

https://crimethinc.com/2018/09/03/the-mythology-of-work-eight-myths-that-keep-your-eyes-on-the-clock-and-your-nose-to-the-grindstone

Democratic decline in the Maldives: will the world wake up?

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Civil resistance has been one means by which many Maldivians have waged a struggle to establish and defend basic political, civic, and human rights. In 2008 a mass movement culminating in free and fair elections successfully ended the authoritarian presidency of Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, who prior to his ouster had stayed in office for 30 years, long enough to become South Asia’s longest standing dictator. But this new period of democratic leadership was short-lived. In 2012 democratically elected president Mohamed Nasheed, was ousted in a coup so swift and bloodless that the international community could scarcely figure out what happened much less develop an appropriate response. Following the coup, lingering old regime influence over the nation’s judiciary allowed the dregs of the dictatorship to ‘legally’ affirm the transfer of power, and later to ensure that its presidential candidate, the former dictator’s younger brother Abdulla Yameen Gayoom, achieved victory in an irregular sequence of balloting that took place in November of last year.

The old/new regime’s raison d’être has been to ensure that a generous share of the hundreds of millions of dollars generated annually through tourism revenues are diverted to the pockets of the elite. This was almost surely the driving force behind the putsch against Nasheed in 2012, and is likely behind several new disturbing developments that have occurred since the second coming of the Gayoom group. To apply those resources to the needs of the people is the chief rallying cry of democratic forces, which continue to adhere to nonviolent action to challenge the stunting of justice and promote a more transparent government.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/civilresistance/democratic-decline-in-maldives-will-world-wake-up/

How Bankers Triggered World War II to Collect WWI Debts

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The textbooks tell a simple story about World War II — Hitler was evil, he invaded Poland, the Allies stopped him. But the records reveal something they don’t teach in school: American banks funded Hitler’s rise, profited from Nazi Germany’s rearmament, and treated World War II as a debt collection operation to recover unpaid World War I loans. From the Versailles Treaty of 1919 that created unpayable German debts, to American corporate investment in the Third Reich, to the Bretton Woods system that emerged from the war, this wasn’t a conflict about ideology — it was the world’s largest financial consolidation disguised as military combat.

From 1919 when Germany was burdened with 132 billion gold marks in reparations, to 1944 when American banks formalized global financial dominance at Bretton Woods, World War II followed the exact pattern of World War I: create debt crisis → fund both sides → collect through conquest → emerge more powerful. This video uses banking records, corporate documents, and government archives to reveal how World War II served the same function as World War I — transferring wealth from taxpayers to international creditors:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_0n6CvjDMk

Economic Update: Capitalism Equals Class Warfare

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The totality of today’s Economic Update is devoted to exploring (1) the multiple ways that capitalism imposes class warfare on its people, and (2) how class warfare shapes the capitalist system’s impact on employers and employees. Specific examples show (1) what kind of class struggle is involved in tariffs such as those imposed by Trump, (2) how inflation exemplifies class war, and (3) how unemployment reflects and includes class war. A question addressed throughout today’s program is “Why establish and maintain an economic system that produces and reproduces class war across its history?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZWBtEp7WMA

Trump Organization requested record number of foreign workers in 2025

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The Trump Organization requested 184 foreign workers to work across various company properties, a record number that has increased over the years.

The company sought to hire workers through H-2A and H-2B visas for temporary positions at Mar-a-Lago, two golf clubs and at Trump Vineyard Estates in Charlottesville, Va., according to data from the Department of Labor.

Over the course of Trump’s first term and the first nine months of his second term, the Trump Organization’s visa requests increased from 121 in 2021 to 184 in 2025, according to Forbes. Overall, the company has filed to hire 566 foreign laborers, primarily to work as servers, farm workers, kitchen staff, clerks and housekeepers.

https://thehill.com/business/5603478-trump-organization-foreign-workers-2025/