Book Review: Underground Empire by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman

By Catherine Austin Fitts

“Take the undersea and underground cables that tied the world’s communication systems together. According to an NSA estimate, by 2002 less than 1 percent of global Internet bandwidth passed between two regions of the world without passing through the United States. The global messaging system that allowed banks to talk with each other was based in Belgium—but its board was dominated by U.S. banks, and it was hostage to its data center in Northern Virginia.”

~ Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, “Introduction: All Roads Lead to Rome,” Underground Empire, page 9

If you want to understand how financial markets work, you want to understand how control works.

That’s difficult to do. Our governance system is secret—hidden behind layers of omissions, disinformation, and propaganda, and protected by invasive surveillance that guides an endless number of herding mechanisms, nudging us to adopt false narratives and false maps of our world and to adopt habits and a culture that keep us ignorant. Acquiring a working knowledge of what is really going on usually requires thinking for yourself, even living outside the herd.

The financial system is one of the systems that Mr. Global (my nickname for the mysterious top of the secret governance system) uses to manage and allocate resources. Stated another way, the financial system is organized to achieve the goals of the governance system. Tinkering with the financial system without aligning with the governance system can be frustrating and even dangerous. Tinkering with the financial system in alignment with the governance system typically ends up helping Mr. Global.

How many times in the last two decades have I been warned that the U.S. dollar is going to collapse? And then it does not. The collapse fanatics rarely investigate why they were wrong; they just go back to repeating that the dollar will collapse—the collapse was just “temporarily delayed.” And of course, it does not collapse. This brings us back to the question of control and why it might be useful to take the time to understand how it works. What is behind the dominance of the dollar? Why is the dollar “dangerous and dominant”?

There are many aspects to the infrastructure of control. We have a wealth of information at Solari to help you learn how control works (see the links below). One very important—and rarely discussed—aspect is explored in an important new book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman.

In Underground Empire, Farrell and Newman explore the aspects of control that arise from owning, controlling, and regulating the hardware and software that manage and transmit the digital data that direct a large part of the modern world. They take you into the plumbing of the Internet and digital communications, describing how the United States has built a great deal of the physical hardware that carries digital data and how that gives the U.S. intelligence and military agencies near-complete access to global communications and digital data transmissions. They describe how U.S. legislation has responded to assert U.S. legal jurisdiction over communications that run through United States infrastructure. Combine this with the fact that U.S. dollars, no matter where they are held in the world, are deemed to be in the U.S. and subject to U.S. legal jurisdiction, and you begin to appreciate how much global communications have been hijacked to serve U.S. political and economic interests.

The importance of this command of the digital infrastructure became progressively more apparent as the Patriot Act and post 9/11 surveillance gave U.S. military, intelligence, and enforcement agencies an ever richer flow of surveillance intelligence. This legal access to digital systems and their data was then the basis for the U.S. Treasury to develop financial sanctions that could interfere with the free transmission of financial transactions and freeze and seize assets. As Treasury official Juan C. Zarate warned, “The financial wars are coming.”

The Treasury’s financial sanctions regime, in alliance with other G7 members, has blossomed to the point that hundreds of billions in assets of a sovereign country—Russia—have been frozen, as has Russia’s access to global currency and securities markets.

Nations, businesses, and individuals across the world are now asking how they can avoid being subject to central control through U.S.-dominated hardware. The BRICS nations are exploring and implementing independent payment systems. Russia and Europe both have global satellite systems. China and Russia are learning how to cut undersea cables, too. And those who depend on the dollar are worried that by weaponizing the dollar, we will ultimately kill the goose that laid the golden egg. The greater the interference to assert political control, the less the dollar is valued as a means to trade.

Farrell and Newman explore these tensions without definitive conclusions. The value of their book is that it helps those who think of the global economy from the point of view of finance and economics to integrate an understanding of the physical plumbing and what it means to legal jurisdiction and political power and control.

Underground Empire will help you better understand the role of digital systems just as a new generation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is rolling into Washington with ambitious plans to use their skills to extend dollar dominance. The President’s DOGE initiative to reengineer government is led by the head of the largest U.S.-government-funded space defense contractor. He clearly understands the importance of hardware and its relationship to power and control. He’s the guy who wants to install a piece of hardware in the back of your head. The FDA has approved the ability of one of his companies to do so.

Reports from Washington indicate that the Republican Congress will address immigration and election fraud in early 2025. I suspect the real goal is to legislate and fund a digital ID system, including biometrics, under the guise of “fixing” open borders and rigged elections. This means that one way or another, the digital pipes will continue to invade our pocketbooks and homes. Underground Empire will help you understand the history of this machinery and what Nicholas Negroponte, former head of the MIT Media Lab, meant when he said many years ago, “In a digital age, data about money is worth more than money.”