In today’s enlightened digital age, your purchase is simply an entry at your broker’s computer, and you do not own what you think you own. Under laws in all 50 states, what you actually own is a “securities entitlement.” This is a new form of “property ownership” that is more like a contract between you and your broker. Progress.

But if the financial system were to totally collapse—think 2008, but much bigger—nearly every stock and bond that is in electronic form can be legally taken as collateral by the largest “too big to fail” financial institutions. Sure, it would crush many millions of individual investors. But it’s all for a good cause: saving the systemically important financial institutions. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, right?

This will happen without your knowledge and without any action or fault on your part—even if you are entirely debt free. If that sounds wrong, it’s because it is. It is also legalized fraud.

So, how did we get here? It is a fascinating story involving some of the most boring and dense state laws on the books. Hat tip to ZeroHedge for posting an article titled “Intentional Destruction: First COVID, Now Comes ‘The Great Taking’” by Matthew Smith that was in part based on the work of David Webb and his book The Great Taking. //

The Uniform Law Commission (ULC) was formed for the purpose of developing state-level laws that would change the patchwork quilt of state laws into a more uniform set of statutes. The most prominent uniform law is the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), and this issue centers around UCC Article 8. The ULC presented a model law revising Article 8 in 1994, and the law was passed by all 50 states over the next several years.

Sitting inside the new Article 8 language are several provisions that put the rights of individual investors at risk. The first significant change is the concept of “securities entitlement.” //

The individual investors have no role in the lending practices of their broker, why does the law allow the taking of their assets?

To answer that question, you need to know the fundamental objective of the Article 8 revisions. The driving motivation was systemic risk in the financial markets (if they were worried about systemic risk in 1994, what do they think about it now?). Importantly, the Article 8 revisions did not do anything to reduce the likelihood of systemic risk. In fact, the committee made it worse by removing risk and consequences for shady financial activity. Instead, what the changes actually do is protect the “too big to fail” banks if a systemic financial collapse occurs.

The UCC has turned the concept of property rights upside down, but the UCC is also a state law, and state legislators can, therefore, take steps to restore the rights of investors or, at the very least, require informed consent. //

any system that requires the people to sacrifice their property to support the financial institutions that built this mess in the first place is not a system worth saving. //

anon-cugn
14 hours ago
From The Two Towers:
Theoden: I will not risk open war!
Aragorn: Open war is upon you, whether you would risk it or not.
We have an enemy. We are at war.
1 Peter 5:6-11