Interview with Jeff J. Brown

on How to Dismantle an Empire, David Graeber, Ellen Brown, China & more!

A BIG thank you to Jeff Brown for this lively interview he conducted with me after reading my book, How to Dismantle an Empire! Jeff is the author of China Rising, 44 Days Backpacking in China, and BIG Red Book on China. His podcast is Radio China Sinoland where he offers a unique perspective on geopolitics. Not only did he prepare some well-informed questions but also did a great job producing and editing the transcript, which follows below. Thanks, Jeff!

Jeff J Brown (Host): Good evening, everybody. This is Jeff J Brown China Rising Radio Sinoland on the D-Day beaches of Normandy in France. And I’m going 9 hours earlier across the Atlantic, across the continent of North America to California. And I have a very special guest on the air tonight, Tereza Coraggio. How are you doing, Tereza?

Tereza Coraggio (Guest): I’m doing excellent. Happy to be here, Jeff.

Jeff: I’m happy to have you on. I don’t even know how we met. Maybe by email or Substack. I have no idea.

Tereza: Matt Ehret. We are both such fans of him and his wife, Cynthia Chung.

Jeff: That’s right. Anyway, I got Tereza’s book (shows it in the camera). I found out that she’s a writer. And I got this book called “How to Dismantle an Empire”. And I thought that’s what the world needs. And so, she did not give it to me. I paid for it. I got it from Amazon in France. And I’ve taken tons of notes. It’s a really cool book. It’s almost like a tutorial. She asks questions at the end of each chapter. She has thought-provoking ideas and themes. It really ought to be a textbook for some alternative economics classes in university or high school. We’re going to talk about this tonight because it is an incredibly fascinating book. And so, thanks for being on, Tereza.

Tereza: Thank you.

Jeff: Let me give you a quick bio. Tereza Coraggio is the author of How to Dismantle an Empire and the creator of Third Paradigm on YouTube. She’s very active on Substack. I subscribe. Topics include small-scale sovereignty, the great reset, geopolitics, global economics, propaganda, and censorship. A course in miracles, women, anthropology, socio-spirituality, education, power, and money. That is impressive. I can’t keep up with all of the work she’s sending out. She’s doing stuff all the time.

I’ve got her websites. I’ve got her book links. I have her email. She’s happy to have you contact her. And also, her Substack, which you can subscribe to for free, like me. And anyway, here we go. Questions: On the back of your book, I’ll show everybody the back of your book, you let people know that you have no credentials, which I thought was a trip. Why do you think it is important for your readers to know that you are a regular citizen?

Tereza: I am so happy that you asked that question because, as you know, one of my introductory quotes is from Johan Galtung, who is the founder of Peace and Conflict Studies. And what he says is that the only reason that he is able to think clearly about economics is that he’s not trained in it, and that the crazy kind of training you have to go through to be an economist prevents you from being able to see things because you have to unlearn everything first before you can start seeing things for how they are. And so, I almost put on there that I was a housewife because that’s what I am.

Jeff: But you did. You do say, I thought. No, no. I thought you said you are a housewife in your intro. But I remembered the housewife thing stuck in my mind as if to accentuate the fact that you’re just a regular Jane.

Tereza: Right. And also, there are only a few ways in which people can have the time to really dedicate themselves and raising kids is one. You need to be there when they need you but it does leave you other time. Or being a student if you don’t go through the university system and occupy yourself that way, or being retired or filthy rich. Those are the only four ways that you can be able to not have to be part of the rat race and can really take the time to apply your skills to analysis and understanding how to put all the pieces together.

Jeff: You’re going to help me explain some stuff that I’ve been wanting to know because I need you to explain it to me as a regular citizen. Next question: I read Robert Williams Jr’s excellent book, “Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization”. I’m going to leave the link for you all (https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Anxieties-Invention-Western-Civilization/dp/0230338763/), which starts out with ancient Greece, much like you do. His book is more sociological and geopolitical.

You zero in on the economics of imperial expansion and the resulting slave trade, and then you bring that economic model up to our modern-day situation. And I have read that the Roman Empire, which adopted the ancient Greek model, chewed through 250,000 slaves a year just to keep it functioning. So, what I’d like to ask you to do is tell about why this foundation of imperial expansion and slave economy is so relevant to the Western world today.

Tereza: Yes. Well, as you know my book takes 28 different paradigms, those things that are how we think before we think we’re thinking and it undoes them. And one of those that it starts with is the concept of democracy. We think democracy was this beautiful thing that made it possible for everyone to be self-governing. But in reality, democracy was brought in because people were revolting against the Archons. So, when we talk about hierarchy, that’s the inheritance order of the Archons. When we look at anarchy, that’s rule by rules without rulers. And that’s what the people wanted. And they were all getting together, the colonized, the slaves. I’m not sure about the women, but they were certainly not included in the oligarchy and the small landowners.

What Salon, who created democracy, did was create a hierarchy where you were competitive. If you were a small landowner and you didn’t want to fall into slavery, he made it where they were safe, but they could add to the military by sending their sons and training them and equipping them, then they could become part of the Archons. So rather than self-governance, it became representation by the wealthy landowners who controlled the military. And that’s still what we have today.

Jeff: Yeah, it’s incredible. I learned ancient Greece was the bedrock of democracy. But when you really read about it, it was just that the empire lasted about maybe 700 years, but they only had about two or three generations of direct democracy. I mean, I guess that would be not all of Greece. I mean, Greece went all the way from Spain to Crimea and Egypt. They were very, very expansionist all the way up into the Caucus. They were very, very expansionist. Basically, it was just a roller coaster ride of totalitarianism, anarchy, dictatorship, and a little bit of democracy going, falling back into anarchy and totalitarianism. Democracy was just a very, very, very little. Salon had the concept, but most of the people most of the time didn’t have democracy.

Tereza: I would agree with that except for adding anarchy in there. I’ve been loving Substack because I learn so much from my readers, I’m so impressed by them. One I’m so impressed by is Jack Sirius, who’s one of the most well-read people that I’ve known. And he said that in my book, he wanted to thank me for helping him recognize that democracy was a fig leaf for the empire, its purpose was to defend the empire, and that it was also the anathematization of anarchism, so that we now associate anarchy with chaos and violence rather than what it really was. So, it’s left us with no good words to talk about direct democracy or self-governance or what I call small-scale sovereignty.

Jeff: So, are you saying that anarchy was the equivalent of direct democracy?

Tereza: Absolutely, that’s what I say.

Jeff: Okay, okay. I know they had a few, two or three or four generations of it, which would maybe be about 100 years out of the total. And the problem is that if it gets up to a certain size, inevitably it segues into representational democracy. And that’s the end of the people, the people’s power, the people’s will, that’s for sure.

Tereza: Well, I don’t know that that’s true, because in David Graeber’s last book, the Dawn of Everything, he says we have this impression that after Dunbar’s number or whatever it is, you can’t really do direct democracy. But he shows that throughout millennia that has not been true. That’s one of the myths that we’ve accepted with Western civilization and that’s part of this idea of making anarchy anathema because the word anarchy means without an archon, which is the ruler. So, the word itself meant we rule and that has to rely on land redistribution. That’s land reform. That’s what the Greeks didn’t do. So, they provided the ideology and then the Roman Empire provided the military. And so that’s why it’s always important to consider that ideology really matters.

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. Jared Diamond in his book “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, he spent time with hill tribes and mountain tribes in Borneo in the Indonesian islands. And he wrote about how the group would get up to about 200. And at that, they all would always hive off and create another group, start a new group, because, of course, these are scavengers, hunter-gatherers, and not a modern society. But they decided over their many millennia of development and survival, that above about 200 people, they had to create a new group because inevitably there would be what they called a Big Man. A Big Man, basically, probably the psychopath that comes along or the megalomaniac who comes along. And if it got over 200, then that megalomaniac or psychopath could take over the group and destroy it. It may depend also on the culture and their development.

Tereza: David Graeber directly refutes Jared Diamond and shows, not only was that not true, but there were women who showed how society could be governed. How stable it was and non-militaristic correlated with the women in government. And I also have taken exception to Jared Diamond in some of my writing. So, his concept of “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is answering the question, why do we have all the stuff, and his answer is we did this horizontal migration and that gave us a lot more resources because we weren’t having to feed ourselves. And therefore, we developed steel into guns.

So again, the ideology that if people have abundance, what they’re going to do is use it to conquer and be lazy and subdue other people. I think that is a false ideology. And the ideology that conquest was done under was Christianity. The idea is that these are not real people, we are the only real people who were doing this for their own good. Without that justifying ideology, I believe that people inherently would not have engaged in these horrific actions and also because they were put into debt. So the economics and ideology of religion are the things that Jared Diamond does not talk about that.

Jeff: I don’t think you said that in this book. It must maybe somewhere in one of your other writings. I don’t remember that. For me, the New Testament is okay. But the Old Testament, which is essentially the Jewish Torah, that’s genocidal, exterminating, raping, and plundering, rationalization to dehumanize everybody and go out and conquer the world.

Tereza: I’m thinking Jeff, you haven’t seen my episode on “Jesus is the original gangster PSYOPS”, where I look at “Caesar’s Messiah” by Joseph Atwill and look at how Christianity was actually again a myth perpetrated by the Empire: the story of Jesus was actually written by the Empire to trick people into worshipping Caesar who was then considered God.

Jeff: Okay, that’s really interesting. Well, you mentioned David Graeber and you’re a big fan of his. Sadly, he died a couple of years ago. And he wrote “Debt the First 5,000 years” and I’ll give the link (https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192/). Unfortunately, I read it as an e-book on my telephone and I think I would have been better served with it in print because it’s a really amazing book to refer back and forth because once you get into an e-book, you just keep going forward. You don’t refer back. It’s too complicated. So please tell us 2 to 3 key points of the book and how it relates to your dreams of dismantling global capitalism’s empire.

Tereza: Thank you. And yes, Debt. His book Debt was the cornerstone of my book. Debt changed everything that I thought about money because we’ve been told money is something that’s simplified barter. It was done for convenience. What David Graeber, who is an anthropologist, shows is that barter isn’t something that people ever did to people within their own villages. You would be ashamed if you were to trade someone, especially if it was someone who needed something. Even if you were doing something for someone, you would always position as a gift and give back a little bit less, a little bit more to keep that circle going.

He quotes the Inuit who say, up here we are human, we don’t let people starve. And so, what David Graeber talks about is that money and coinage were what created conquest and slavery on steroids. Because again, going back to democracy, you had all of these mercenary soldiers being produced because of this hierarchy, and because there were second and third sons who became them. But all the fiefdoms, the lords, they didn’t want to have to take their plunder and to pay them and they had to pay them in something that would then be good wherever they were going back to.

So what they did was that they took their metals and gave them a stamp as a fiat currency essentially and then taxed people in that same coin. So that meant that in order for people to not fall into slavery themselves, they had to supply the soldiers, who were the ones who had these coins, with whatever they needed: armor, shelter, food, sex... They needed to get these coins because they had to pay their own taxes. So it turned conquest into a self-perpetuating machine.

But there’s a third-century BCE text from India that says “The treasury is based on mining. The army is based on the treasury. He who has army and treasury can conquer the whole wide world.” Taxation, we think of this as, ‘oh of course, we want to help out other people.’ That’s not its purpose. We’re kind by nature. People help each other when they are in need. And so, what this did was put us all in a position of having to sell our souls in order to support our families.

So that’s one of the points that my book is really based on with David Graeber. Another important point he makes is that debt became the ultimate morality, that because of debt, things like selling your kids into slavery, torture, putting someone out and taking away their home, putting them in debtors’ prison, all of these things that would be self-evidently immoral suddenly became perfectly fine because of debt. Even though he is very controversial, there are some things Yuval Harari said that I agree with. And one is he talks about legal fictions, that money and nations are legal fictions. And I add that these fictions allow horribly immoral things to happen.

Jeff: Yeah, it goes way back because I read King Hammurabi’s code from Mesopotamia from two and one half, 3000 years ago, or maybe even before, and half of it is about property and debt, and settling debts. Very little of it is people-centered. It’s mainly about property and punishment and retribution and settling debts. And if you do this, then you owe this. And if you do this, you owe that. So, it goes way, way back.

Tereza: And I think in that women are put into the same category as cattle—essentially chattel and cattle.

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, let’s move on to another person we both like Ellen Brown. I just noticed, I haven’t had time to look at it, but I guess she was interviewed by Cynthia Chung, Matt Ehrets’s partner. And I interviewed Ellen a while back. She’s the chair of the Public Banking Institute in the US. Please share with us what you learned from reading her book, “Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free”. I know she has a second edition.

Especially, walk us through your explanation of how interest on national debt is created in the West, with the government first printing and minting money, then private banks somehow lend it back to the government for colossal profits. I call them the Western trillionaire dictators, the several hundred families who own the global capitalist world and therefore us. You present a long rap sheet of their rape and plunder of the world’s 99%. Tell us about Ellen Brown and the national debt.

Tereza: Right. I love Ellen Brown, who, by the way, wished me well on this interview. And on Cynthia’s interview, I posted that I was so happy to see two of the most brilliant minds connecting. Ellen changed everything I thought I knew. I first heard her maybe 20 years ago at a conference on 9/11 and the Deep State. Uniquely, she talked about banking and how money is created. Honestly, at first, I thought, no, this can’t possibly be true. If this were true, everyone would be up in arms about it. But it just changed the whole direction of my life and my course of study.

Because, of course, you and I know that it is true. And I’ll read a short quote in my book from Ellen, which is “Anyone with money has a right to lend it, of course, and any group with money can pool it and lend it. But the ability to create money as credit ex nihilo, out of nothing, backed by the full faith and credit of the government and the people is properly a public function and the proceeds should properly return to the public.” So, you mentioned that the government first prints and mints money, the printing part isn’t even legal since the Federal Reserve, which is a cartel of bankers, took over.

Jeff: Private bankers.

Tereza: Private bankers that, as Ellen says, “are no more federal than FedEx.” And the federal government cannot even audit them which was something that Ron Paul and others tried to do. So, they are a cartel of private bankers and what they have usurped is the ability to create money out of nothing. So, 96% of money today in the U.S. dollars is a digital currency. It never is printed. That money is created through mortgages. When you buy a house, let’s say you’re going to borrow half a million, $500,000. They don’t take that out of their pockets. They don’t take it out of other people’s accounts like the movie It’s a Wonderful Life.

What they do is double ledger accounting. They create it as a debt over here and a credit over here, and then they issue it. Now, the first problem is that means they own our houses for free and we work 30 years or 60 years with dual incomes in order to buy them from them. So our labor, if you have a roof over your head and it has a mortgage or rent, is working for the bankers no matter who else you believe you’re working for. And so, the other problem is that they are only creating the principle and not the interest. And with a 5.3% interest rate over 30 years, that doubles what you borrow.

Jeff: You borrow half a million, but you pay back a million.

Tereza: Exactly yes. But that other $500,000 doesn’t exist because they’ve pushed only the principle out into the economy, where then you work to get it back, but the other part doesn’t exist. So they have to keep raising the amount of money that is in circulation. And they do that by manipulating the prime rate. And every time they raise the prime rate, it means that for the same amount of repayment, say $1,000 a month for that same amount, you end up doubling, tripling, quadrupling how much money you can borrow. So, when people say a low-interest rate is a good thing, it’s not because it just means you can borrow more. And so you can’t come into more money or pay it off early because the value of what you’ve borrowed is huge.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah. It’s crazy now. It goes all the way back to the Rothschilds and how they got the Bank of England which was basically a bunch of private bankers just like the Federal Reserve fomenting wars and imperial expansion, getting the government to borrow money from them, paying interest on it. And it’s a heck of a deal.

Tereza: Exactly. Yes. Yes.

Jeff: It’s a heck of a deal.

Tereza: And that’s why I say that banking is governance. Whoever creates the money, which is the primary privilege and exclusive privilege of government, really is the government. So we have a bunch of puppets who are face cards, but they’re not the players. The actual government is the bankers.

Jeff: Yeah, luckily for at least communist and socialist countries like China, North Korea, and Cuba, their central banks print their own money. And so at least they cut out the private banks and can manage their money internally. And I guess the last major Western country that had that was Canada. I think in 1975, they finally got either probably bribed or extorted to abandon their public bank and started borrowing money from the Rothschilds and the Shiffs and the Rockefellers and the Carnegies just like everybody else. So, it was just too bad.

Tereza: Right. And right after that quote from Ellen, I have one from William Lyon Mackenzie King, the 1935 Prime Minister of Canada, who said, “Until the control of the issue of currency and credit is restored to government and recognized as its most conspicuous and sacred responsibility, all talk of the sovereignty of parliament and of democracy is idle and futile”.

Jeff: Was that in 1935?

Tereza: 1935 is when he said that.

Jeff: I thought they finally gave up printing their own money in 1975. But maybe I got that wrong. Maybe it’s 1935.

Tereza: And you were talking earlier about the “Axis of Evil”.

Jeff: Yeah.

Tereza: And so what I talk about is that in all of those countries the U.S. targets, there is one sin that they have committed, which is owning their own currency. Much of this really comes down to what I call the petropocalypse—the petrodollar gives the U.S. the ability to make money and everyone else makes things that money can buy. So we have had this ability which I think is disappearing fast.

Jeff: Yeah, Yeah, that’s for sure, especially this last year. All right. I call them the West’s trillionaire dictators, the several hundred families who own the global capitalist world and therefore us. It’s a great story. You present a long rap sheet of their rape and plunder of the world’s 99%. Tell us about two shining examples. Because I have friends from Detroit, Michigan, USA.

And then what I call the rape of the middle and poor classes: the home mortgage meltdown in 2008. And the latter one is very personal to my family. We went bankrupt as a result, starting our lives over again when we moved back to China in 2010. So, we lost everything with the 2008 rape of the middle class and the poor classes. So, tell us about Detroit, Michigan. I couldn’t believe it. It was just like this can’t be true. But it obviously is. And then the more well-known one, the Lehman brother meltdown, and the subprime loans and all that.

Tereza: Yes. Yes. So, my chapter on Detroit is called, “It Takes a Pillage”. And I have one subsection in there that’s, “Death by Derivatives”. This seems like a sort of unsexy thing, why should we really care about this? But interest derivatives are one of the most important concepts we can get. So, going back to what I had just been talking about with the interest rate. With homes, when you have a low-interest rate, you are able to borrow huge amounts. And the way that they trick us both as homeowners and as municipalities or states or any kind of school systems is that they have the same problem.

If a variable rate is low and the fixed rate is high, you can’t borrow the kind of money you need based on the fixed rate. And so, you have to go for the variable rate as you’re trying to get taxes passed in order to repay that. What the bankers offered to these municipalities like Detroit, which needed to redo their water system, is that they give them an interest swap derivative. It’s kind of like a bet where they say, okay, if the variable rate goes down so that you actually have more money then you’ll pay us that money in extra fees. But if it goes up, we’ll pay for that.

It’s like they’re making a bet and it seems perfectly reasonable, and they’re the same bankers that you’ve been dealing with who are offering you this. So that’s what Detroit’s mayor did. And then I don’t know if you remember the whole Libor scandal when the bankers were found to be manipulating the Libor rate so that it was reported higher than it actually was. And that seemed really odd to me because why would they be popping Dom Perignon? That didn’t make sense to me because, well, you’re getting less money but saying you’re getting more.

So that doesn’t make sense. Later, what Detroit found out is that it triggered the fact that they then had to pay all of these fees to the bankers. But their loan wasn’t based on Libor. It was based on the SIFMA, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. And so, the SIFMA had not gone down. So, they ended up not only having to pay the same debt repayment they were before, but they also had to pay all of these extra fees. And that’s what put them into what ended up being bankruptcy. But their bankruptcy wasn’t something they came to.

They talk about being city officials in exile because they were all displaced and instead, had a bankruptcy manager assigned to them who was getting huge amounts. And what he did was first pay off all the bankers, pledging their casino earnings and just gut the art the museums and sell them off for pennies on the dollar. And then he declared bankruptcy because what that meant is they no longer had to pay pensions. They didn’t have to pay government pensions.

So that gave the bankers the best of both worlds. And the reason that this is so critical is that every state, every municipality, and every school system has the same thing because you have to do that. And that’s how the bankers have ended up not just getting the money, which doesn’t matter as much to them because they’re creating the money after all. It’s the assets. The asset grab is what’s going on. And I call it ‘attack of the petrodactyls’ because it represents all this petrodollar wealth as these pterodactyls that are swooping down on anything that still has a drop of blood in it and lifting that off.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah. Just like the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, they create, they do crooked studies, they give a pie in sky projections for projects, and a lot of corruption along the way, knowing they’ll never be able to be paid back. Of course, the IMF and the World Bank are just another Federal Reserve of private bankers, robber barons, and they’re just waiting for Nigeria or they’re just waiting for Serbia, or they’re just waiting for Colombia to go into default so that then they can just swoop in as you said, and buy up all national forests and public property and public companies and any assets that they can strip out of the country. It’s the same damned model.

Tereza: Yeah. Haiti is probably the best example of that. Yes.

Jeff: Going back to 150 years.

Tereza: Multi-generational debt.

Jeff: Yeah. Tell us about 2008.

Tereza: Yes. Yes. That chapter, I think, is called, “Finance Is an Extractive Industry”. One of the books I quote in there is, “A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home”, by Laura Gottesdiener and Clarence Lusane (https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Foreclosed-America-Occupied-Pamphlet/dp/1884519210/). They look at Black America and how the idea that you could own a home has been taken from us. So, again, they talk about these as subprime mortgages, as if people were foolish and they went in for these loans that they knew they couldn’t afford, that wasn’t prudent.

But they were manipulated because, once again, you’re bidding against someone else—that’s how houses are priced. Houses are priced with as much debt as the market can bear; for anyone who wants that house, we bid against each other. So, if you make more, all that means if there’s more money in the economy, it just means that there’s more debt and that housing is more expensive. I have two homes—my childhood home in Cumberland, Maryland, in Appalachia, which is a very impoverished area, and here in Santa Cruz, which has one of the highest housing costs in the world—but they’re both essentially the same.

In both cases, people are working three jobs in order to pay their rent or mortgage, there because there isn’t money in circulation and here because money circulates too fast. So, in both of those cases, you ended up having people paying as much as the market will bear. With subprime loans, people were tricked, sometimes by their pastors—there were bribes to get people to sign on to loans even when they could have qualified for better ones. And after the banks did this, then they pulled the rug out, which is exactly what they’re doing right now with raising the interest rate.

I say that the word inflation should really be dilution because that’s what we’re really talking about. People think that it’s great that their houses are worth more. And what I tell them, is no, your money is worth less because it buys less in housing. And that means that all the goods and services that are local have to raise to that same level. So all they’ve done is leach the value out of your savings. You’re in good company having been caught in that because I know many people who ended up losing their homes during that time and all they’re doing is ramping up that cycle again for now.

Jeff: Yeah. Yes. You write with passion and persuasion that we should “go local” by having units of government much smaller than the states in the US or countries in Europe. Give us an overview of how this can be structured. For me, I think the biggest concern is how to keep those trillionaire dictators from absorbing these small governments because they truly are genocidal vampire squid. So how do we how do you keep them out of your small governments?

Tereza: Right. So, I think it is much easier for a vampire squid to take down a large government because all you have to do is pick off the people at the top, bribe the people at the top, and they have the power to surrender it all and then enforce it. They have the military and the police to then enforce whatever they’ve agreed to and make it seem as if it’s coming from within. The person I’d like to look to here is again Johan Galtung because, in peace and conflict studies, he was asked to negotiate with Afghanistan and he said that the first thing that he does is look at what’s another country that has the most similarity to it.

What he came up with was Switzerland. The reason that Afghanistan is called the graveyard of empires is that it is a mire, a quicksand of independent fiefdoms that the empires go in to conquer. First you conquer this little group. But over here, they’re not thinking that they’re very conquered. So, then you have to go over there and then these people start revolting again. So Switzerland is 8 million people divided into 26 cantons around, let’s see, 300,000 people each.

But then again, each of those is divided into 200 more communities that end up at a size of about 1,600 people. And the decisions that matter are really made by those 1,600 people, except for having military neutrality and federalism. So, it actually is more of a protection against being taken over by not having that enforcement mechanism. I say if you’re going to concentrate power at that level, you might as well tie it up with a red ribbon and hand it to the first totalitarian government that comes along, because somebody is going to do it and you’re not going to have anything to say about it.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe you can start something in Santa Cruz at the local level. You got to start somewhere, don’t you?

Tereza: Well, yeah. I think you need to go even more local than that, I’ll explain what I mean by that. I have one of my episodes on something called “The Greater Reset”, which is the idea of we should just go ahead and do the things that we think would be right. But knowing what I’ve just explained about the fact that the bankers own all the houses for free and we need to work for them in order to make that happen, you’d have to have an uber-wealthy person who buys up an entire neighborhood from the bankers in cash. And then says, okay, I’m going to let you live here, and all you have to do is work for each other and I’m going to create the credit for that.

And if you need to cash that credit that I’m giving you out for dollars, I’ll reimburse that too. It doesn’t make sense. It’s just not possible. Until you take away the power of, as Ellen says, creating money out of nothing from the bankers, they will always own your labor. And so there’s nothing you can do to change it. Where I say it needs to start is in your head, that you need to use this time to start imagining, “What would I do if I was creating policies and I was looking at how can this work for everybody.”

How can we take responsibility for ourselves and our families? How can we give people responsibility for themselves at the smallest possible unit? That’s where I think we need to be thinking like adults rather than a political system that acts like there’s only a handful of adults in the country and the rest of us are children thinking, oh, well, I don’t know whether this works for me. That’s whining. That’s how a kid thinks. You need to be thinking about what’s a fair way for this to work that is then replicable. And that means giving people responsibility at the level of family, neighborhood, and community.

Jeff: Yeah. You tied this back to the slavery economic model—giving your labor to have a place to live is not much different than being a slave. And I guess that’s where we get the term wage slaves.

Tereza: I think of that more as being servants because slaves don’t have other slaves. Right now, we in the US are able to get the products of other people’s labor—which is the legal fiction money is—without giving them any of our own labor in return. And that’s the paradigm that I think is coming to an end quickly.

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. Well, my wife and I lived in China for 16 years. And as far as going local, I kind of want to look at the forest from the trees and play the devil’s advocate, China has done very well for itself and its people by having a strong central government, state planning, and a big chunk of the economy being people owned under state-owned enterprises. This actually goes back millennia, which is something I’ve written about in my books (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/06/30/praise-for-the-china-trilogy-the-votes-are-in-it-r-o-c-k-s-what-are-you-waiting-for/). Reading your book, it seems that China is like looking through the other end of a telescope where bigger is better. Communism-socialism realizes the dreams of the 99%. And in spite of all the West’s Big Lie Propaganda Machine brainwashing, the Chinese people really like their system and the way of life. So how do you see the square peg in a round hole as far as a success story like China?

Tereza: And I believe that I have no business criticizing anyone else’s form of governance. To me, my focus is really on the US. I was just listening to Matt Ehret’s article on Robert Malone spreading anti-China disinformation. And I know that you were involved with that critique, too. I’ve done a couple of episodes on “Who is Robert Malone, Really”, and another one on “Conspiracy Researchers and Robert Malone”. But I had been a big fan of Malone’s back in October when he published that Claire Lopez article you critiqued (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2023/01/18/matt-ehret-quan-le-and-jeff-j-brown-discuss-western-misconceptions-about-china-china-rising-radio-sinoland-230117/). I found my comments on it at the time and what I said then is, “I’m sorry, Dr. Malone, but this reads like pure propaganda.”

So, there is one form of criticism that is definitely spreading a form of hatred and distrust. And that, I think, is just ramping up the military and provoking in a way that’s really horrible. I look more at the ideology that I think that the larger something is, the more ability it has to have internal colonies. So, for instance, myself, coming from Appalachia, there are some excellent books about the rape of Appalachia, about how it wasn’t just an impoverished area, it was one that was made impoverished in order to strip the resources.

I don’t know that about China. But what I do know is that we in the U.S. have a trade imbalance. So, we’re getting a lot of stuff without the people who are making that stuff getting anything from us. And it seems to me logically that those people would be better off if they were producing for each other. There’s also the fact that China has been buying up US treasuries. This means that if there is this Petropocalypse of the petrodollar taking a dive, those are going to be kind of worthless except for one thing— buying up property and assets in the US.

My plan is one in which we as small communities have ownership of the land within our borders and the infrastructure and the buildings, and that we have the use of eminent domain to be able to buy those back. So no one can come in from the outside and buy them up. What I say is that our systems need to favor people working where they live and living where they work. So my system gives a 2-to-1 advantage to local consumers for things like housing, that are priced in what I call carets. You have to pay twice as much in an imperial currency like dollars or euros in order to get them.

And then I also give a 2-to-1 advantage to producers. So that if you’re buying something from your neighbor, you have the ability to buy it for less because there are no taxes on it. And that if you’re buying something from China that it has perhaps a 50% tax, so you do have protectionist systems. Protectionism has been made a dirty word, but you have protectionist systems that allow you to favor buying things locally.

Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. Well, we’ll have to see what happens. I think this is going to be a very, very, very, very special year in terms of what happens on our Pale Blue Dot because things are changing really fast, especially since last year with Ukraine. Going back to your thing, your idea, how about founding a society of its own? There have been many. I sent you a link to the list of American utopian communities and (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_utopian_communities) there have been many, especially going back to the 19th century, and some are still active the in the USA, and they are usually called Utopian. Could that work?

Tereza: I look at the limitations of that as what I was saying before: it has to start with some super wealthy person who is also magnanimous, and then you have to choose, okay, who do I save? Who do I let into my little utopia and who do I keep out? I think that the really fun thing that we could be doing right now, and I imagine this as an online game, is taking our own localities because everyone’s different, like I said, in Cumberland, money circulates too slowly, Santa Cruz, it circulates too fast. You can’t have one solution that fits all, but you can have the same objectives.

And so, if each of us were to play this game where we say, okay, here are our tools with eminent domain, with taxation, with these carets, with ownership of our own property, what are our problems and how do we make it? How do we develop a system where you win if money changes more hands for services? You have more local production within a year without that getting extracted out? So, you have an actual measure of what it means and then you can give people extra points for stealing from somebody else or having somebody else steal your ideas.

The game promotes cooperation and fosters ideas. In the end, it’s not really like anyone needs to agree because these are all separate communities and your solution may not be the same as mine, but it would give us a way of imagining how things could be. I think we’re like that caged bird that has no idea what it would feel like to fly. We can’t even hope. And that’s why I think people are sometimes negative to a point of getting angry about it because they feel tricked if you make them hope. We have been so beaten down that our expectations are so tiny.

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. Well, listen, I know you’re very active on Substack and you’re very active on YouTube, but are you writing another book, or do you have any other journalistic pursuits that you’re seeking?

Tereza: Well, I am loving my Substack community. It’s a great platform for real conversations. I’ve said before that I would go to the ends of the earth for a real conversation and now I find that those are coming to me from the ends of the earth.

“How to Dismantle an Empire” is the first in a series called “A 2020 Vision, the Economics of Community.” And the next book would be “How to Build a Commonwealth”. I think that would be a really fun book. I’ve put some of those ideas into my YouTube channel and my Substack, but that would be the next thing. If we can get a community that wants to be talking about this, I would be so excited to be writing that book. I think that book honestly would write itself if there were people who were ready to read it.

Jeff: Well, with all that you’re doing on YouTube and Substack, it would be a good foundation to write a book like that. So, you’d have some good material to work with.

Tereza: Thank you.

Jeff: “China Rising”, my second book was essentially a synthesis of maybe 100 columns that I had written. And so, I just read a book by Ramin Mazaheri about Islamic socialism and Iran. And it essentially is his columns on Press TV over a couple of years. So, you save all that material and you can probably work and edit it into a book.

Tereza: Yeah, and that’s a great way to do it. Before I started this book, I had a radio show called Third Paradigm, which is also at www.ThirdParadigm.org, and it was on a pirate radio station that probably had more listeners globally than it did locally. But it gave me a way of getting response and having it be interactive, with that excitement of putting something out there and finding out what people think. When I stopped it in order to work on this book for the next eight years, it was very lonely because essentially, you’re talking to yourself for that amount of time. So I would love to have the next book develop organically the way that you describe.

Jeff: Yeah, cool. Well, listen, everybody. Thank you, Tereza. This is the book (shows in camera). I am a confirmed reader and buyer. And I really recommend you get this. Is it available in the e-book?

Tereza: No, it is only available in hard copy from Amazon.

Jeff: Yeah, well, I got it. Listen, I got it for €20, including postage and so it’s not that expensive. And what I always tell people is if you don’t have the money to buy the book, then go to your local library and ask them to buy it. How about your place of worship? How about your local college, your children’s high school, or the university? There are book clubs and book circles. There are all kinds of ways to get books like this without paying as I did. But the easiest is to go to your county library. They love people to come and recommend books. They love it.

Tereza: I have a personal thing where I just feel like we should be unplugging once in a while and reading a real book. And as you said and others have said, it is dense. I hope it is also very readable, but it packs so much information and is written where it has definitions of words because I feel like that’s really critical.

Jeff: You have a glossary at the end of each chapter.

Tereza: Absolutely. And that glossary is not your usual glossary. It’s saying these words have been stolen from us or they’ve been defined in a way that isn’t really what they mean. So, to have this be something that creates discussion, I have questions at the end of each chapter. That would be my dream to have this be a text for people to say, okay, how did we get here? And what are the tools that the master has used to build the house so that we can use those same tools to dismantle it?

Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. Well, listen, I’m going to give you a humble Buddhist bow after being in China for 16 years or Confucian or Daoist, they’re all the same. They’re all the same. I will get this up. I will have all these links, how to contact Tereza and her websites, and everything. And thank you so much for being on. We do stay in touch by email. Maybe someday we can meet each other. I hope it happens. Thank you again. And keep on with a good fight. We will be victorious.

Tereza: Thank you, Jeff. This is a delight.

Jeff: Thank you. Bye, bye.