It never ceases to amaze me when art is always one step ahead. Watch the much-overlooked Fred Donner movie Conspiracy Theory (1997). Mel Gibson is a brainwashed cab driver on the run from (of course) Patrick Stewart. In a key scene, Gibson tells Julia Roberts that: “CIA. FBI. IMF… they’re part of the same two opposing factions… One. Some of them are really, really wealthy families. Their thing is to maintain stability. That’s what they call it. The other is Eisenhower's industrial-military complex. And they want instability, so they say.” This thesis was confirmed in an eye-opening interview with a former British bank official, Simon Dixon,

By Emad Aysha
Dixon insists three international power complexes now often work at cross-purposes. The Fic, Mic and Tic – financial-industrial complex, military-industrial complex and increasingly the tech industrial complex.

FICTION TO FACT: A screenshot from 'Conspiracy Theory' with Patrick Stewart taking some off time from being the sci-fi good guy. Mel Gibson stops being the action hero here too.

Tic wants a unified world of nonstop surveillance, whereas Mic wants regional wars to fuel arms manufacturing, while Fic is all about asset-stripping industries and entire nations. Thankfully, as an unintended consequence, you can play them off against each other.

Witness China and its 100-year plan to reverse the century of humiliation by the West. Both TIC and MIC depend on China for rare earth minerals, through national ownership of raw materials and supply-chain dominance through infrastructure.

At the same time, the country’s investment and banking structures are completely insulated from FIC. China also wants dollar dominance to overprice American goods and keep their currency undervalued.

The Western populace is no luckier, facing what Dixon calls the ‘K-shaped’ economy. Share prices and corporate profits go up while people's overall wealth goes down, thanks to inflation and rising living costs.

The old Baby Boomer formula of work, save, and buy a house no longer works. (The Unabomber was barking up the wrong tree back in the 1950s, if you remember.)

A similarly paranoid movie from the 1970s captured all this: The Internecine Project (1974), starring James Coburn as a Senate economic advisor who is about to be promoted. (So the President can listen to him too.)

Coburn’s really a secret operative for the private sector. In a TV interview, he’s asked about the “constantly increasing spiral of wages and prices”.

He downplays it because while prices went up in the US, the “overall prosperity of the country increased just as dramatically.” That’s what we in economics laughably call ‘stagflation’.

As if it was something new or unprecedented. Paper money, of course, is backed by gold, but you can print as much as you like because the central bank will ‘guarantee’ depositors against default. In the meantime, the government finances itself (through the back door) with bonds; IOUs in reality.

The catch is you have to go abroad to strip assets from entire nations and their financial reserves. Through occupation, of course, but also indebtedness. (Elon Musk’s plans for Mars, apparently.)

DYSTOPIA TRANSPLANTED: Elon Musk is at the heart of the digital transformation taking over the world. But can he still get Wi-Fi on another planet, I wonder?

Coburn also admits that rising wage demands from unions help push capital abroad, which helps Third World countries develop. Of course, only after nationalist governments who want control of their resources get overthrown. He, of course, insists this is democratic ‘upheaval’.

In another scene you have an American oil executive talking about his ‘innocent’ encounter with a Communist general from China. (An early foretaste of playing the game.)

Dixon further explains that China is undercutting the US in the financial and energy markets because of the US's silly decision to go energy-independent through shale oil.

This pissed off the Gulf Arabs, who are now using their proceeds from oil sales to China to buy up stock in the US, not debt. And they don’t have to sell that oil in dollars anymore, too.

Dixon insists this repeats what happened to England in the Suez War, when its Navy was shown to no longer rule the seas. America is falling into the same trap in the Strait of Hormuz, moving us to a multipolar world, to cite another Dixon interview.

Capital no longer needed the British Empire, just as it once handed the mantle to Britain from Holland, along with Dutch gold. And it seems the American empire has outlived its usefulness too.

We’ll have to wait and see, but wars have been going on inside the administration from day one. Hence USAID and who controls people’s data, as Dixon explains.

One more conspiracy feature before going: the pilot episode of Chris Carter’s The Lone Gunmen (2001). A rogue faction in the Pentagon is trying to crash a passenger plane into the World Trade Centre.

CARTER'S HACKATHON: A screenshot from the too prophetic pilot episode of 'The Lone Gunmen'. Remember this was in the pre-social media world.

The whistleblower, an insider himself, explains:

The Cold War’s over… but with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms market's flat. But bring down a fully loaded 727 into the middle of New York City... and you'll find a dozen tin-pot dictators all over the world...  just clamouring to take responsibility... and begging to be smart-bombed.

Poor Saddam. This came out just 6 months before 9/11. And this (fictional) Pentagon plot started as a counter-terrorist war game scenario!

Worse still, this is done through remote control. An inserted circuit board hacks into the autopilot and nullifies its manual override. It also disables its radar and rapid-descent safeguards.

Luckily, the Lone Gunmen group, being hackers themselves, can decrypt the signal and block it with a little extra help from a stolen tech industry microprocessor that was designed to spy on the consumer.

As we’re told early on, it can secretly: “upload your files onto the Internet... and your credit history and your tax bracket and your Social Security number.”

How prophetic again, given the junk email we all get right after subscribing to a piece of software. Hence the data broker industry. (Don’t know how Chris Carter did it, but he did it!)

Still, the episode was emblematic of the double-edged sword that is technology control. The very optimistic note Simon Dixon ended his first interview on.

SUBLIMINAL CLUES: Assassination thriller 'The Day of the Jackal'
(1973), with Cyril Cusack, Edward Fox and John F. Kennedy. Explosive bullets are mentioned here, incidentally.

As long as you reskill yourself and don’t get swayed by social media, you can make a good living and have peace of mind. I’d add a cautionary note, however.

In Conspiracy Theory, Mel Gibson was ‘reprogrammed’ into being an assassin. (There are some risks paid assassins won't take.)

If social media brainwashing doesn’t work, there’s the old-fashioned kind!