TWO TAPEWORMS
A Five-Part Series that dives deep into Next Phase of the New World Order | Simon Dixon & Dave Collum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg13tat7bZo
TWO TAPEWORMS
Part 1 of 5: The Parasite and the Locust
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I watched a conversation this week between Simon Dixon and Professor Dave Collum on BTC Sessions that I think every American should hear. It is over two hours of two very sharp minds trying to make sense of what is happening in the world right now. I am going to link it at the bottom of this article. Watch it when you can. What I am about to write builds on what they said — and goes somewhere they did not go.
Dixon laid out a framework I had not heard anyone articulate quite so clearly. He said the conflict in the Middle East is not a war between nations. It is a negotiation between two power structures that most people do not know exist. He called them the military industrial complex and the financial industrial complex.
The military industrial complex is nationalistic. American. It depends on forever wars, strategic tension, and the petrodollar to justify its existence and its budget. It needs enemies. It manufactures them when necessary. It is represented by the defense contractors, the intelligence agencies, the neoconservative establishment, and Israel as a military asset.
The financial industrial complex is transnational. It has no nationality. It is represented by Blackrock, State Street, Vanguard, JP Morgan, the sovereign wealth funds, and the largest pools of capital on earth. It does not care whether America is the global hegemon. It does not care whether the dollar survives. It cares about returns. And it has concluded that the returns in America are diminishing.
Dixon argues that what we are watching right now is the financial industrial complex using the American military to rearrange the board one final time before it moves to the next game. Open up Iran. Weaken Israel. End the forever war. Build financial centers across a multipolar world. Let America decline into a regional power while transnational capital hedges globally.
Collum, for his part, kept asking the question that nobody on these podcasts ever answers.
What is real wealth?
He pointed out that the S&P 500 is 200% above its historical average valuation. That private credit is collapsing. That private equity is a cottage industry of 19,000 firms doing bad things behind closed doors and refusing to mark to market. That the unfunded liabilities of the United States are somewhere between 175 and 250 trillion dollars, depending on who you ask. That the boomers’ McMansions are sitting on a market with nobody left to buy them.
He called it the valley of death. And he said he does not think it can be avoided.
I agree with almost everything both men said. Dixon understands the geopolitical chess game at a level that is genuinely impressive. Collum understands the valuation mathematics at a level that should terrify anyone paying attention.
But I think they are both missing something. Not because they are wrong about what the machine does. They are describing it accurately. But because neither of them is looking at how the machine works at the transaction level. At the place where the extraction actually happens. Where your signature meets a ledger entry and something is created from nothing.
And when you look there, you do not find one tapeworm feeding on America.
You find two.
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The Intelligent Tapeworm
The Federal Reserve is a parasite. I do not say that as an insult. I say it as a description. A parasite is an organism that feeds on a host without providing a benefit proportional to what it takes. The Fed fits that definition precisely.
But the Fed is an intelligent parasite. It understands something that most parasites do not.
If you kill the host, you die too.
That is why the Fed calibrates its extraction. The 2% inflation target is not an economic principle handed down from some mountain of fiscal wisdom. It is a feeding rate. Two percent per year means your dollar loses half its purchasing power every 36 years. Slow enough that most people never notice. Fast enough to transfer enormous wealth from the people who earn dollars to the institution that creates them.
The frog does not jump out of the pot because the water warms slowly.
The dual mandate — stable prices and maximum employment — is not a public service. It is a pair of feeding parameters. Four percent unemployment means there is always a surplus of labor competing for jobs, which keeps wages from rising fast enough to outpace the extraction. Stable prices means the cost of goods does not spike so violently that people start asking who is doing this to them.
The boom-bust cycle is not a flaw in the system. It is the system. The Fed manages the cycle the way a rancher manages a herd. Let them graze. Let them fatten. Then thin the herd. The bust shakes out the weak. The strong buy their assets at a discount. Wealth consolidates upward. And then the next cycle begins.
This is a terrible system. It is extraction dressed up as management. But it is sustainable. The Fed has been doing it for over a hundred years precisely because it is smart enough to keep the host alive. Sick enough to need the parasite’s services. Healthy enough to keep producing the blood the parasite feeds on.
The Fed needs America. A dead host is a dead parasite.
Remember that. Because the second tapeworm does not share this concern.
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The Dumb Tapeworm
Blackrock, State Street, and Vanguard are not parasites. They are locusts.
A parasite feeds on a host and needs the host to survive. A locust consumes everything in a field and moves to the next one.
The distinction matters because it changes the survival calculation entirely.
Dixon described this without using my language, but he described it perfectly. Transnational capital is indifferent between America, Europe, Asia, the Gulf, and anywhere else. It has no nationality. It has no loyalty to the host. It has no reason to keep America alive because it has already built the infrastructure to leave.
Blackrock has $12.5 trillion in assets under management. Twenty thousand board seats. Its software, Aladdin, runs the risk models for most central banks, most pension funds, and most major money managers on earth. It acquired ETF dominance during the 2008 financial crisis when it bought Barclays’ iShares division — the largest exchange-traded fund platform in the world. It has been the net winner of every financial crisis since.
Read that again. It wins when things break.
And right now, according to Dixon, it is using the American military to open up new markets in the Middle East, acquiring distressed assets across the Gulf, building financial rails into every emerging economy it can reach, and positioning itself to manage capital flows in a multipolar world where the dollar is no longer king.
It does not need America to survive. It needs access. And it is using America’s military, America’s crises, and America’s decline to buy that access at fire-sale prices.
That is not parasitism. That is strip-mining. The locusts do not care if the field dies. They have already spotted the next one from the air.
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The Fight You Cannot See
Here is what almost nobody is talking about. The two tapeworms are not on the same team. They are fighting each other. And you are the field they are fighting over.
The Fed needs the dollar to remain the world’s reserve currency. Without that status, the entire extraction mechanism collapses. The asset managers are actively moving capital out of dollar-denominated assets into foreign equities, gold, Bitcoin, and emerging markets. Every dollar that leaves weakens the Fed’s position.
The Fed raises interest rates to cool inflation and protect the system. The asset managers need cheap credit flowing to inflate the assets they are strip-mining. When the Fed tightens, the locusts’ feeding slows. When the Fed loosens, the locusts gorge.
The Fed tries to maintain orderly markets. The asset managers profit from chaos — because chaos creates the distressed prices they buy at. Every crisis is a clearance sale if you have enough cash. And Blackrock always has enough cash.
The intelligent tapeworm is trying to keep the patient on life support. The dumb tapeworm is harvesting the patient’s organs for sale on the black market while the intelligent tapeworm is still adjusting the IV drip.
And the patient? That is you. The American worker. The American taxpayer. The American family trying to buy a house, save for retirement, build something real in an economy where both parasites are feeding on you simultaneously and fighting each other over who gets the bigger bite.
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The Escape Pod Problem
Dixon and Collum see this. They describe it with extraordinary clarity and I am grateful for the conversation they had. But when you ask them what to do about it, the answers are individual.
Buy gold. Buy Bitcoin. Self-custody your wealth. Get your assets out of the system before the system collapses.
I do not disagree with any of that. If you can afford to buy gold and Bitcoin, you probably should. Collum is right that the valley of death is coming. Dixon is right that self-custody is the only way to guarantee you actually own what you think you own.
But those are escape pods. They save you. They do not save the country. They help you survive the crash. They do not fix the engine that is crashing.
And here is the thing about escape pods. If only the people who can afford gold and Bitcoin make it through, you have not solved the problem. You have just built a new version of the same pyramid with the same people at the top and a different brand name on the extraction mechanism.
Collum asked the most important question in that entire two-hour conversation. What is real wealth? And he answered it without realizing he had answered it. He said moving money around is not wealth creation. It is a tax.
He is right. The only real wealth is productive human labor. Everything else is abstraction. And both tapeworms feed on the abstraction while you provide the labor.
So the question is not how do I escape the system before it collapses. The question is whether the system itself can be rebuilt so that it serves the people whose labor makes it possible.
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The Question This Series Will Answer
I have been working on that question for seventeen years. Since 2008, when I lost my business and my home and discovered that the economy I thought I understood was built on a mechanism I had never been taught.
This series is going to take you inside that mechanism. Not at the geopolitical level — Dixon does that better than I can. Not at the valuation level — Collum does that better than I can. At the transaction level. Where your signature on a promissory note creates credit from nothing. Where the Federal Reserve buys Treasury bonds with money that did not exist until the moment of purchase. Where both tapeworms attach themselves to the host and begin to feed.
And then I am going to show you the tools that already exist to fix it. Tools that are built into the Constitution. Tools that do not require a revolution, a collapse, or an escape pod. Tools that a plumber from Missouri spent seventeen years assembling into a framework that neither tapeworm wants you to see.
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Beyond the Big Cycle: How Credit Enslaves Us — And the Amendment That Sets Us Free is my forthcoming book. It lays out three specific mechanisms — the Reverse CD Loan, the Population Principle, and the 28th Amendment — that together dismantle the extraction machine from the transaction level to the sovereign level. If you want to be notified when it drops, subscribe to this Substack.
Part 2 drops in two days: “The Tithe He Never Earned.” How the Federal Reserve inserts itself into the bond market with credit created from nothing, replaces real investors who lent real money, and collects interest paid by your labor. The intelligent tapeworm’s feeding mechanism, explained so an eighth grader can follow it.
Watch the Dixon/Collum conversation here:
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theplummer is a retired law enforcement officer and plumber who has spent seventeen years studying monetary policy. He is the author of the forthcoming book Beyond the Big Cycle: How Credit Enslaves Us — And the Amendment That Sets Us Free. Follow him on X: @theplummer