Out of necessity, organized resistance to the Trump administration's authoritarian and hyper-violent policy agenda is growing rapidly, both domestically and internationally. Within this context, it is important for those of us who engage in individual and collective acts of resistance -- based on our varying proximities to power structures -- to consider what and how we resist by taking into account larger structural considerations.

In the 21st century the ideology and directives of financialization rules over our lives, our societies and our planet. This autocratic system dictates a highly disciplined neoliberal landscape where state power structures and advanced technologies facilitate and protect the activities and interests of finance capitalism over all else. Financialization occurs via securitization, which, simply described, is a process where financial institutions bundle together (illiquid) financial assets -- primarily debt instruments -- and transform them into (liquid) tradable securities that can be expeditiously bought and sold in secondary financial markets.

Within this insulated global network, high-frequency trading of digital securities -- including "fictitious"trading, hedging and speculating in derivative markets -- generates "phantom wealth"; whereby the exchange of capital, money and currency is detached from material or labor value. In the twenty-first century, debt is the new global currency and is a primary source of (intangible) wealth accumulation.

In sum, as subjects of this global empire, seeking relief or justice (as a legal concept) within state institutions and civil society is largely futile. In the 21st century, civil, political and economic rights (as functions of state protections) are more than ever at odds with the long-standing and intersecting interests of capitalism and white supremacy. Governments either function as proxies for finance capitalism or face being subjugated by it. This ensures that nation states are more unresponsive than ever to the needs and demands of those who reside within their borders, borders that are non-existent for elite financial investors and increasingly punitive for dispossessed groups. In this landscape, banks and other global financial institutions are setting and enforcing the rules that govern social relations in societies across the globe, including relations between states and their citizens. States have effectively become subjects of bond markets and Central Banks.

These are the layers of power that operate above states and control what states can or cannot do. Essentially, the plutocrats of this global financial empire have no national loyalties, they possess no conscience, their domain knows no borders, their institutions have no center and their wealth has no real material value.

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