Saw some shit today I hadn't seen since I was young. Not a good sign when the police go rabid. What was it Sarah said? "I don't give a damn about financial records or postings." Of course not. Why would the reality of housing scandals, corrupt police, inner-city drugs, and financial take over be of any significance? As Matt Taibi so eloquently put it “we're officially, royally fucked .”

What had brought us to the brink of collapse in the first place was this relentless instinct for building ever-larger megacompanies, passing deregulatory measures to gradually feed all the little fish in the sea to an ever-shrinking pool of Bigger Fish.

The recent posts on prisons and drugs, combined with the housing meltdown and accompanying credit crunch (PDF), got me thinking of Catherine Austin Fitts, who's the only thinker I know who's integrating all of these seemingly disparate trends. On the tapeworm economy:

In a tapeworm economy a small group of insiders centralize political and economic power at the expense of people, living things and the environment, in a manner that destroys real wealth. A tapeworm economy is one in which it is considered acceptable to make money from our popsicle index going down. In investment terms, it is an economy with a negative return on investment. It is parasitic in nature.

The way an actual tapeworm operates is to inject its host with a chemical that makes the host crave what is good for the tapeworm and bad for the host. So the Tapeworm Economy is adept at using media and education and numerous financial incentives to get us acting against our own strategic interests and instead supporting and depending on the Tapeworm.

Sound familiar?

The symptoms of the Tapeworm are many - narcotics trafficking that targets our children, runaway exploitive and predatory corporate practices such as the patenting of life, terminator seed and the destruction of our topsoil and food supply, fraudulent inducement of debt to homeowners, students and consumers, suppression of knowledge and renewable energy technology, criminal mismanagement of government credit and resources, black budget operations and the manipulation of currency, financial and precious metal prices and markets. These practices introduce organized crime throughout all aspects of our lives... these transactions drain our families and neighborhoods on a daily basis – much like a tapeworm drains its host.

As we understand the history of these drains in our lives – who is doing them and how we are complicit – we begin to understand the power of the opportunity to transform them in a manner that is safe and profitable for ourselves and those we love.

As we begin to pull our resources out of the Tapeworm, and learn to invest our time and assets in building the world we want, by building real wealth and financial liquidity outside the Tapeworm, and by raising our popsicle index without putting others' at risk, the Tapeworm stronghold will weaken and the excellence of local living economies and diversified enterprises will prosper worldwide – one neighborhood, one enterprise and one investment at a time.

Hopefully.

We got a Google hit on this undeservedly obscure topic, so I thought I'd reinforce it. Here's the concept: