This is where I fight to end war, poverty and oppression.— Robert Steele
A Big Idea
Almost all of America’s wealth runs through a handful of buildings a drone could reach. Decentralize it, and you take that target off the board — and stop the brokers robbing working people while you’re at it.
Before any of this makes sense, you have to accept one thing: war is about money. It has nothing to do with body counts. Make a country poor and it can’t afford to fight. Look at what Ukraine is doing to Russia — by going after the economy instead of trading bodies, they’ve gutted Russia’s ability to fund an army, let alone keep one in the field. Russia can’t even get anyone to buy its bonds anymore, and a country that can’t sell its bonds can’t afford to keep going to war.
The world used to run on gold and silver. It doesn’t anymore. It runs on fiat currency — money that’s worth exactly what we all agree it’s worth. A hundred-dollar bill isn’t sitting on a hundred dollars of gold in a vault. We agree it’s worth a hundred dollars because nobody is ever going to see the gold anyway, and we need a piece of paper to trade with so we can pay each other. That agreement is called perceived value. Change the perception, and the currency loses its buying power — no gold moved, no shot fired.
This is why we’re in trouble. It isn’t that Iran can kill a bigger army or out-fight us. It’s that we’re spending millions of dollars to shoot $50,000 drones out of the sky. You lose a war like that — not because you got beaten, but because you can’t afford to keep fighting. Killing people costs money, in the war and long after it. The country that remembers war is about money, and goes after the money instead of the body count, is the country that starts winning again.
That is the whole reason the market matters. If our wealth is the target, then the place we keep it is the front line. For the full breakdown — gun warfare, and how AI and drones are going to bring world peace — read Marines at Play: the Game at AmericasLove.org.
Right now most of America’s wealth runs through a handful of buildings. That is a national security problem, not just a Wall Street problem. All it takes is a couple of drone strikes — a few toy airplanes with some explosives strapped on their backs — to take out seven buildings and cripple our whole economy.
War used to mean going through the bodies to get to the money. It doesn’t anymore. Now you just hit the market. Money is only worth something because we all agree it is. Knock out the place where that agreement lives and the fiat cash in your pocket is worth nothing, and nobody had to fire a shot at a soldier to do it.
The market we’ve got is also a machine for quietly robbing regular people. If you have a job and a life, you can’t sit and stare at a screen all day waiting for the right second to trade. You do your research, you place your order, and a broker with a server sitting right next to the exchange sees it coming. They trade ahead of you, take the bump they already knew was coming off your order, and hand you the leftovers.
Being a broker means having inside information by default. They automate it with AI and micro-trades and skim billions off the public every day, and the SEC doesn’t have the manpower to even start policing it. Companies pay hundreds of millions to run fiber from Chicago to New York for a few milliseconds’ head start. That is not a fair market. It is a toll booth built to charge the working class for the crime of trying to invest.
So we decentralize it. Get rid of the auction floor. A company offers its shares for sale right on its own website, and the person selling sets their own price, the way you set the price on a used car. A buyer comes along, looks at the price, and decides — pay it, or offer something lower. The market still sets the price, because buyers and sellers still haggle over it.
What goes away is the middleman and the panic. Nobody’s life savings evaporate because a piece of convincing AI slop spooked a trading floor into a stampede. You’re selling to a person, at a price you both agree on, instead of throwing your money into a casino that a rumor can tip over.
Every sale gets recorded by the government in a read-only file, for a flat two-dollar fee. That fee pays to keep the record and back it up, and that is the whole cost. No broker, no percentage, no spread. Two dollars beats any broker who ever lived.
Because the file is read-only, it can’t be hacked in the way people mean when they say hacked. You can only add to it. You can never go back and change what’s already written. Every share is traceable to its owner, so if something ever goes wrong it can be untangled and made right — and companies finally know exactly who owns their stock.
Two threats disappear the day this goes live. You can’t collapse the economy by blowing up a few buildings anymore, because the market isn’t sitting in a few buildings. It’s spread across every company’s website and a government record with backups. And you can’t crash it with a lie, because there’s no herd of traders racing each other to act on a rumor before everyone else does.
Propaganda, a war scare, a computer hack, a deepfake convincing enough to move the floor — none of it can knock the bottom out of the whole market the way it can today. The price of a stock goes back to being about the company, not about who panicked first.
The bankers and the brokers will fight it to the death, because it takes away their cash and their control. Of course they will. They like being next to Wall Street. They like the AI sifting through your hard research to decide when to jump in and out for a microsecond, something you will never be able to do because you have an actual job that makes something real. They don’t want to give up the toll booth.
That’s fine. This was never about what they want. It’s a national security threat, and we don’t get to care how much they’d rather keep robbing people. We fix it, or a couple of drones fix it for us the hard way.
— Robert Steele