The Great Taking

By Steven Yates

October 24, 2023

Everything’s going according to plan….

[Author’s disclaimer: the author is not a financial advisor, and nothing in this article should be construed as financial advice. Consult a trained and trusted professional before pursing any of the suggestions in this article.]

Well (some of you might be thinking), that didn’t take long. My “silence” lasted less than a month. Intended to last until the end of the year, it was predicated on nothing major happening during the interval. Major things have happened. I’m not referring to the deadly Hamas-Israeli clash, though I’ll have a few words to say about that at the end here, and doubtless more later.

I’m referring to my encountering what I think will be the most important book of 2023.

A friend drew my attention to it: The Great Taking, by David Rogers Webb, whom I’d not previously heard of. The friend did not want to be identified, as she is one of many folks who are well-informed but keeping their heads down.

What is The Great Taking about? Let me hand Mr. Webb the mike:

It is about the taking of collateral (all of it), the end game of the current globally synchronous debt accumulation super cycle. This scheme is being executed by long-planned, intelligent design, the audacity and scope of which is difficult for the mind to encompass. Included are all financial assets and bank deposits, all stocks and bonds; and hence, all underlying property of all public corporations, including all inventories, plant and equipment; land, mineral deposits, inventions and intellectual property. Privately owned personal and real property financed with any amount of debt will likewise be taken, as will the assets of privately owned businesses which have been financed with debt. If even partially successful, this will be the greatest conquest and subjugation in world history….

Private, closely held control of ALL central banks, and hence of all money creation, has allowed a very few people to control all political parties and governments; the intelligence agencies and their myriad front organizations; the armed forces and the police; the major corporations and, of course, the media. These very few people are the prime movers. Their plans are executed over decades. Their control is opaque…. To be clear, it is these very few people, who are hidden from you, who are behind this scheme to confiscate all assets, who are waging a hybrid war against humanity (pp. 1-2).

How does this differ from what, e.g., G. Edward Griffin put forth in The Creature from Jekyll Island (1994)? It goes well beyond that. (1) The game plan is far more advanced now than when Griffin was writing, and we learn that those we’ve been naming as visible players, such as Klaus Schwab or George Soros or Bill Gates, are frontmen allowed visibility because they do what they’re told. (2) Griffin has suffered the fate of all outsiders, which has been to be branded a “conspiracy theorist” when not simply ignored. Webb was an insider, working on Wall Street where he rubbed noses with billionaires including Soros at one point. Coming out of a working class background, he taught himself a great deal of what he knows and became the successful manager of a hedge fund based in his home city of Cleveland. The Prologue of The Great Taking, at first glance lengthy and ponderous, builds credibility and demonstrates command of his subject matter, including what motivated him to research all this and then write about it: the desire to care for his family.

My friend aggregated the following (I’ve done some light editing):

LEGAL CODE NOW IN PLACE FOR FEDERAL RESERVE TO CONFISCATE ALL ASSETS

Investment advisor Doug Casey says of the Great Taking, “It’s a scheme of central bankers to subjugate humanity by taking all securities, bank deposits, and property financed with debt. David Webb, a former hedge manager and Wall Street insider, has blown the lid off a diabolical plan more than 50 years in the making in a shocking new book.”

The bond market froze over the last few weeks. The derivatives market [valuation: now well over a quadrillion; that’s 1,000 trillion, dollars, exceeding the world’s entire GDP several times over] is set to implode. When these global markets collapse they will cause cascading defaults. One bankruptcy will cause other businesses and individuals to go bankrupt like falling dominoes. In anticipation of the collapse, the Federal Reserve and other central banks have worked to pass laws that will ensure that the biggest banks end up owning all assets. We have all heard that these banks are “too big to fail,” but we did not realize that they were given a special “high priority” legal designation that allows them to confiscate property electronically and without going to court.

Attorney Ellen Brown offers a more detailed legal study of David Webb’s evidence and concludes, “It sounds like a conspiracy theory but it is all laid out in the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), tested in precedent, and validated by court rulings.”

The Great Taking by David Webb is available for free.

It’s just 130 pages, and outlines how all assets will be confiscated and transferred to “high priority” or “too big to fail” banks. Everyone will be impacted, from factory workers, truck drivers, doctors and nurses and other professionals, naïve Congresspeople, even a lot of billionaires not all of whom are insiders after all. EVERYONE.

People will lose their homes, mortgages, pensions, and 401Ks.

The legal constructs needed to make wholesale confiscation possible have happened gradually and quietly. However, the first hint that our legal system had been transformed happened when Lehman Brothers went down in 2008. Investors were shocked to learn that they were “unsecured creditors.” Investors learned that the stock and bond assets they thought they owned had become Lehman’s collateral. Thus, upon Lehman’s bankruptcy, investor assets were electronically transferred to JP Morgan Chase, a “high priority creditor.” Federal laws and state UCC laws are now fully implemented that make any assets not in your personal possession (bank balance, stock shares, bonds) into assets owned by others (your bank, broker, and asset manager) in your name, and subject to being used to satisfy their debts upon their bankruptcy. Unfortunately, you are last in line when that happens. (This is similar to the set of changes that were made to bank deposits, but now apply to securities.)

David Webb is a former hedge fund manager who went down a legal wormhole trying to figure out the safest jurisdiction for his own assets. That journey allowed him to uncover the legal changes, in both states and nations, that have made confiscation possible without going to court. Webb talks about this here.

You’ll find a lengthier but still-accessible discussion of The Great Taking here.

Steven again. Some of the terminology in the book itself and in these videos may be intimidating. Even after reading The Great Taking twice I’d have trouble explaining fully why you might be an “unsecured creditor,” or what a “credit default obligation” is, or what “dematerialization” is — although this last has to do with the fact that once, long ago, if you bought a publicly traded company’s stock you were issued a physical certificate. I recall my dad having such certificates, which he kept in a safety deposit box at his bank. Everything is now digital — which means it can be easily transferred, or made to go poof, with the right mouse clicks by a central banker.

Rather like covid-19(84), this is global in scope, and is very far along: far more so than when Griffin wrote Creature.

Readers will want to know what to do, and I can’t blame them. As the tagline goes on many a horror flick, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

I don’t recommend giving into fear paralysis. First, download and read The Great Taking. It’s free, remember? Physical copies of the book are obtainable, and I’d get one of those even if it’s not free. Or just print the 130 page PDF to get a hardcopy. The point is, to have something that will survive should the Internet go poof for a time. Parts of it will be tough slogging if you’re not financially savvy. I’d tough it out. Read the book multiple times.

Note that when all is said and done, despite his having made a ton of money on Wall Street and then with his own hedge fund, David Webb remained one of us: basically a traditional guy, instinctively supporting the values of family and home he grew up with (and that money should be subordinated to those relationships), in protecting his employees, and in an economic system based on genuine freedoms, not control systems. He stumbled across all this trying to find ways of helping those he was close to. He learned, among other things, that the Federal Reserve had already pulled stunts like this early in the Great Depression, which saw bank closures (“holidays”) — after which only Fed-approved banks were allowed to reopen. People with deposits in banks that remained closed were out of luck! They lost everything!

Today, with the Everything Bubble, Webb argues, it’s about to happen all over again, and on a much larger scale! A debt-based “fiat” money political economy is inherently unstable and bound to collapse, but the collapse can be controlled. As he says of the economic-financial ruling class mindset, once they have done maximum damage both through massive inflation followed by massive deflation:

…The financial system must be restarted, so that we can provide credit to you again, create jobs and get the economy growing, whatever it takes!

This time, what it will take is all of your property, or what you thought was your property. Here is your Central Bank Digital Currency deposited on your smart phone, so that you can buy milk. Noblesse Oblige!

Money is an extremely efficient control system. People order themselves upon money incentives, and thus difficult, dangerous and energy intensive overt physical control need not be employed broadly (p. 2).

A lot of freedom believers don’t get this last. Zero free-market absolutists with an “economic point of view” seem to get it. They do not see society as larger than its economy, as containing markets as opposed to being just one big mass-consumption marketplace. A conservative in my sense sees economics as “downstream” from culture, and culture as “downstream” from worldview. The free-market absolutist thus focuses exclusively on government as the root of all evil (not that it generates much good; there is enough truth in the free-market absolutist stance to leave many observers confused). He or she doesn’t appear to realize that the Federal Reserve and other central banks, the Bank for International Settlements at the center of the global central banking octopus, are all private corporations. Who reaped the greatest windfalls from the covid fiasco? Private corporations. Big Pharma, Big Tech, a few others. There’s truth in the version of the Golden Rule which states that “those who have the gold make the rules.” Once the economic-financial ruling class has ordered all gold confiscated from the hands of the peasantry, of course (done during the Great Depression and able to be done again — at gunpoint if necessary!).

Government has the guns, but those who control money tell government where to point them. Government is just a political class and an army of servile bureaucrats and other underlings, after all. Most haven’t had an original thought in their lives. They’ll do what the private ruling class tells them to do, and they won’t ask questions.

(In this view, the most basic reason Donald Trump is hated has nothing to do with his personality or what he said on a tape years ago or how he treats women or the “real” value of his businesses or what he said on January 6, 2021. It has everything to do with the fact that the globe’s real would-be rulers can’t control him.)

Second, then, help expose this evil scheme, far and wide! Forward this article, or the link to The Great Taking, to all your contacts, everyone in your personal network. The more people who read the book — multiple times — the better!

Then what?

Third, work at extricating yourself from dependence on supply lines for food, etc., and thus on the money political economy. Start a garden and grow food (we’re learning to do this!). You can learn here. We need to be able to do more for ourselves, because if the ruling elites pull the plug on the Everything Bubble, supply-line ruptures are a given. Learning to defend yourself and your own might be a good idea as well. Get some weapons training if you are so inclined; it goes without saying, weapons are for defensive purposes only! (I’m not saying make a huge show of any of this. Don’t broadcast your plans; don’t carry weapons around visibly, or wear camouflage clothing, or do anything to attract attention. People get into trouble by making spectacles of themselves. Your best bet if you want to be a real survivalist is just to blend in while you educate yourself and your loved ones about what to do and then start taking actions quietly, quietly.)

Some are going so far as to obtain their own generators to power their homes off the official grid.

Fourth, establish community where you are. This may seem dicey in light of the third, but we need to surround ourselves with like-minded others, to share information and resources, trade for what we can’t supply ourselves, and otherwise divide our labors. You can’t do this in isolation. The “lone wolf survivalist” is a myth. People need to know their neighbors, but in a broader sense, to know who has their backs and who doesn’t. Very likely the majority of those in any community just won’t get it — or if they do, it will be too late. You need to find the few who do get it.

Miscellaneous: get out of debt if you can. Those who owe, will pay the most when things go to pieces. The banks will take your home or car, take what they say you owe (plus interest, “service” fees, etc.), and you might get the rest if you’re very lucky and they’re feeling generous.

Don’t look for shortcuts, and be wary of schemes including people trying to sell you gold or silver if they don’t supply the physical metal up front (I had a bad experience with one of those a number of years ago). When investing, avoid like the plague anything with very low risk and a very high rate of return. A lot of free-market absolutists and other freedom believers are promoting bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency. It seems to me that the supposed inventor of bitcoin (or, more exactly, the blockchain technology platform on which it operates), Satoshi Nakamato is supposedly his name, should have become a global hero, his face plastered everywhere, the year of bitcoin’s meteoric rise into the tens of thousands per coin. Instead, no one knows what he looks like, or if there even is such a person! The bottom line here: no one knows where this thing came from! Bitcoin is — again! — entirely digital, moreover. There are no physical “coins” you can hold in your hand, like gold and silver, just colorful “wallets” with identifying information.

Me, I will stick with gold and silver — the physical metals — because with crypto, I suspect a trap. Its defenders will say I don’t understand the technology, that it can’t be inflated like the dollar, is designed to be decentralized and operate outside the central banking system, etc., etc. The response is that if the plug gets pulled, you’ll still have a paper “wallet” or two that won’t be usable for anything, and whatever you invested to obtain that “wallet” will be gone: poof!

Finally and perhaps most important of all: get your worldview right.

To make a long story short, unbridled materialism as a view of the universe, applied to more and more areas of human life, got us into this predicament. It won’t get us out.

This was once a Christian civilization. The idea that the universe is intelligible at all is Christian in its origins: a created order, not a place of randomness and chaos. This is one of the primary reasons science developed in the West and nowhere else (other peoples developed successful crafts, sometimes with great sophistication, but not explanations). Materialism replaced Christianity as the West’s guiding worldview, with a resulting focus on this world. So while our economies and our technologies got “better and better,” supplying more and more creature comforts, ethically and psychologically we were cast adrift, hurled into the abyss of Nietzsche’s “advent of nihilism.”

The idea of human beings created in God’s image supplies the best available foundation for the idea that we all have intrinsic value, from unborn babies to the most infirm of the elderly and everything in between: white, black, Hispanic, Jew, gentile; male and female; believer or unbeliever; etc.

The important thing to realize: absent such a worldview, power gets the last word, and as David Webb puts it, it can risk no pockets of resistance (p. 58).

What you can do, in that case, is recognize God’s sovereignty in His world, whatever He permits because of humanity’s sinful state. He allows nightmares such as this to unfold in order to work His will, that He be glorified, that we recognize our dependence on Him and come to Him. He never promised us trouble-free lives in a fallen world, but His Kingdom will triumph in the end. If you do not know Jesus Christ, I would advise you to discover Him in the Scriptures. Ephesians 6:10-20; Romans 3:23 and 6:23; John 14:6; Revelation 3:20; and elsewhere.

____________________

A slightly different version of this essay is on my Substack, which has been revamped and retitled as “Navigating the New Normal” which we are all having to do. Please consider subscribing. And if you approve of what I do, please consider becoming one of my Patrons.

____________________

On October 7, Hamas launched a deadly attack that killed approximately 1,400 Israelis and took almost 200 hostages. Why Hamas did something that on the surface looks so boneheaded: we don’t know. They had to know that the Israelis would retaliate in an equally deadly fashion, and they have. I therefore suspect hidden actors, and given the material we’ve just seen, I don’t think they’re the Iranians.

Among the things that advances the agenda of the economic-financial global ruling elites is creating as much chaos and instability in the world as possible, through a combination of terrorism, fomented wars, “color revolutions,” and forced migrations of helpless populations.

Life in Gaza City has gone from bad to catastrophic, Israel having ordered a logistically impossible evacuation amidst air bombardments, in preparation for a ground invasion that could come any day, its most likely purpose rooting out and destroying underground Hamas facilities.

Thousands of people have been killed on both sides. With Gaza cut off from shipments of clean water, food, and medical supplies, evacuees—common people like you and me, many of them injured, many of them children, a few pregnant women—are just trying to survive.

I felt called to do something, so I created a fundraiser this past Monday. It’s chancy, involving myself in this, and it received a hostile reaction on LinkedIn (of all places!), but I decided I cannot sit in the safety and relative seclusion of my apartment and do nothing.

In light of all this, please consider donating to help the struggling people trying to flee northeastern Gaza. Remember: not every Gazan is a member of Hamas! Again, they’re just trying to survive. So this is not about “taking sides.”

If you feel inclined to help out, here’s the link. Thank you in advance.

E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com