A.M.ERICA: Assets Under Management
The Plutocratic Federation of Asset Managers
In what may be remembered as the formalization of resource-backed diplomacy, the recently signed “first of its kind” United States–Ukraine Reinvestment Fund represents more than a bilateral agreement—it signals the emergence of a new geopolitical logic, one managed not by states but by what should be called the Plutocratic Federation of Asset Managers (America First Investment Policy), or what might now be called A.M.ERICA. At its core, this deal is not about peace as a moral imperative, but peace as an access contract: U.S. military assistance is exchanged for privileged claims to Ukraine’s critical mineral reserves, securing rare earths, uranium, lithium, and graphite, as well as the already existing other assets being privately managed like food production, water, land, crops, and oil and gas.
I just have to ask, did Ukraine’s citizens really provide consent for the dismantling of their national resources by aligning itself to Nato and the U.S. backed coup?
Disguised in the language of equal partnership, this arrangement reflects a deepening shift from sovereignty grounded in territorial governance to sovereignty administered through liquidity, mineral collateral, and fiduciary proxy—where strategic peace becomes a fungible asset, and security is brokered by Asset Fund Managers in consultation with state officials. Under the flag of A.M.ERICA, this deal inaugurates a model of post-sovereign extraction and reinvestment: peace for commodity access, capitalized through future mineral flows and modulated by fund governance, risk assessment, and political pliability.
Sadly, there is nothing novel about hegemonic powers engineering chaos, sowing destabilization, and inflicting trauma—only to leave their victims burdened with the manufactured sense of indebtedness to their new neoliberal patrons. The pattern is well established.
If we ask how this is legal, well it all depends on whether we consider the litany of Trump’s Presidential Actions as legal. This country has been captured by Wall Street Asset Managers and we are watching a slow-motion coup in real time. When you consider the unilateral razing of the deep seabed mining and Washington’s active support of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. The world may clamor against genocide and ecocide, but until there is enforcement, this hegemony moves with impunity.
Assets Under Management
Can we call this colonialism 5.0? Colonialism by spreadsheet. The difference is that instead of direct rule through governors and armies, control is exercised through investment terms, debt structuring, and asset governance. Where empires once claimed territory in the name of crown and civilization, A.M.ERICA claims resources through joint funds and peace dividends, backed not by occupation but by portfolio rebalancing. It's extraction without presence, domination without borders—a colonization of the future, quantified and collateralized.
In A.M.ERICA, we are no longer citizens of a republic, but involuntary stakeholders in a securitized federation of capital, conscripted not through elections but within a prison of money through data flows, consumer behavior, debt obligations, and algorithmic profiling. Much like Marx’s critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where civil society is subordinated to the abstract universality of the state—flattened beneath the illusion of representation—we now find ourselves flattened beneath an abstract universality of liquidity, where the "state" is only as political as it is financial, where elections are allocated by campaign finance, not elected by merit. “Even the Middle Ages,” argues Marx, there was a “democracy of non-freedom.” (Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Cambridge, 1970. pp. 30-32)
The familial and communal bonds that once underpinned collective life have been reterritorialized as behavioral metrics, mined and traded as data derivatives. Our "rights" are repackaged as terms of service, and our participation in society is reduced to digital acquiescence: we click “agree,” not realizing we have ceded sovereignty. We do not consent to be governed; we are captured into governance by systems that render us legible only as risk profiles, credit scores, or engagement metrics.
This is the condition of consent in the age of transnational asset governance: not a civic contract, but a distributed compliance, our Black Mirror network administered through APIs and AIs. We no longer inhabit a nation but a Network State—A.M.ERICA—where allegiance is coded, and dissent is simply a form of misalignment in the algorithm.
The most incisive passage in Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right,’ that unmasks rights as nationalist or ideological abstractions—not grounded in lived material freedom—appears in his discussion of the illusory sovereignty of the people, particularly civil society under the guise of universal citizenship:
“In democracy the constitution itself appears only as a self-determination of the people. The constitution is not something that exists above and beyond the people. In constitutional monarchy, on the other hand, it is the monarch who is the state. The state has its own existence apart from the real life of the people... The abstract state does not recognize real man, but only the citizen, i.e., an abstraction of man stripped of all his real determinations.” (ibid, 1970. p.29)
This passage reveals what is presented as “freedom” or “rights” in the United States as abstractions that obscure our material unfreedoms—our phantom sovereignty. For Marx, the modern state offers rights to participate in one's own subjection: you are free, but only as an individual consumer; you are sovereign, but only as a juridical fiction divorced from material conditions.
So, the fantasy of nationalism—where one imagines oneself as a free, equal citizen of a nation—is a mystified form of alienation. It is not real participation but a spectral one, performed through the structures of civil society and mediated by the state. In this sense, the nation-state masks the capitalist structure that governs real relations—just as today, A.M.ERICA masks capital's sovereignty beneath the theatrical lights of democratic nationhood.
The Plutocratic Federation: How Wall Street Became a Nation Without Borders
The neoliberal era marked the moment when multinational corporations began to rival sovereign states in influence. Now, in the wake of capitalism’s spectral reawakening, a more insidious formation has emerged—one without land, people, or constitution, yet wielding a form of global power unmatched by any state or empire before it. This is not a geopolitical shift so much as a metamorphosis of sovereignty itself, one in which finance assumes the role once played by the nation-state. Let us call it the Plutocratic Federation of Asset Managers.
Composed of entities like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and their institutional kin, this federation is not bound by flags or borders. Its architecture is not constitutional but actuarial, structured by assets under management (yes, that’s a real term) and governed not by public deliberation, but by the silent logic of fiduciary duty and capital optimization. Where the bourgeois state, as Marx observed in his critique of Hegel, masks class domination through the abstract ideal of the “citizen,” the Plutocratic Federation disguises financial domination through the language of stewardship and passive investment. Yet in both cases, the universal is precisely the Hegelian mystification that Marx critiqued—divorced from the real, material conditions of life, but now, with assets under management, behold the Network State.
Together, these asset managers control over $39 trillion in financial capital—more than the GDP of any country on earth. Under a single polity, they would constitute the largest economic force in the world. And yet, this is a federation without a people, without a labor force, without democratic accountability. They do not legislate in the classical sense, nor do they produce value in any traditional industrial sense. They allocate capital, configure risk, and discipline behavior through the flow of investment.
If one were to project this structure onto the framework of federal government, the resulting formation would resemble neither a republic nor a democracy, but rather a technocratic empire of liquidity. BlackRock and Elon Musk serving as the executive brain, its Aladdin platform functioning as a vast predictive infrastructure that observes the world not as a community of subjects, but as a field of systemic exposure. Vanguard plays the role of fiscal conservator, quietly managing trillions through passive index funds that embed its logic deep within the architecture of the global economy. State Street, acting as the federation’s judicial authority, executes its governance through proxy votes and shareholder oversight. Meanwhile, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan serve as ministers—managing specific industrial terrains such as health, energy, surveillance, and AI.
What unites them is not law, language, or ideology, but compound interest—a mode of continuity more binding than any civic oath. As Marx warned, “the call to abandon illusions about their condition is the call to abandon a condition which requires illusions,” the modern state does not overcome alienation; it merely reflects it in purified form. (ibid, 1970. p.131). This federation does not transcend capital—it perfects it, cloaks it in abstraction, untethers it from territory, and legitimizes it by numbers rather than needs.
In the absence of a legislature, decisions are made through indices and benchmarks. These decisions—opaque, technocratic, and transnational—operate as a form of financial legislation. To be included in an index is to be rewarded with capital; to be excluded is to face strategic starvation. ESG scoring has become a mechanism of pseudo-ethical valuation, transforming social and ecological concerns into financial variables. Rights and responsibilities are reduced to compliance metrics, and moral questions are answered by volatility models. In this world, participation does not mean voting—it means being measured.
The federation maintains no judicial system in the formal sense. Justice is not determined through courts but simulated through ratings agencies and compliance protocols. If a company violates its obligations, it is not prosecuted; it is downgraded. If a state becomes unstable or refuses to align with investor expectations, it is not sanctioned through war, but through the silent warfare of capital flight. This is not justice—it is a new form of juridical abstraction, where law is replaced by liquidity and adjudication by algorithm.
At the heart of this system lies BlackRock’s Aladdin, a treasury not of currency but of portfolios. This platform watches over more than $20 trillion in global assets and operates as a sovereign intelligence, modeling risks, reallocating flows, and anticipating collapse. Governance becomes predictive. Authority becomes statistical. The demos is erased in favor of the model.
In this new constitutional order, rights do not belong to people—they belong to capital. Capital is free to move without restriction. Its privacy is sacred, while the privacy of individuals is continually invaded, harvested, and monetized. Growth is presumed to be infinite, regardless of its ecological or social consequences. Disputes between capital and states are resolved through secret tribunals, while communities facing dispossession have no recourse. Extraction is normalized, not as a crime, but as an obligation—to shareholders, to market stability, to the federation itself.
There are no citizens in this world. There are only clients, subjects, and “non-performing assets.” Clients are institutional investors, pension funds, and sovereign wealth managers. Subjects are the global working class, ecosystems, and Indigenous communities—governed at a distance, without recognition or representation. Those who resist commodification are rendered invisible, or worse, irrational: obstacles to development, and inefficiencies in the model.
Labor is no longer a political category; it is a cost variable. Land is not a home or heritage—it is an asset class. Biodiversity is not sacred—it is collateral. The social fabric itself is shredded and repackaged as a series of behavioral patterns to be monetized.
Though this federation has no army, it leverages National Security, Washington’s only public resource in exchange for trillion-dollar loans as enforcement tools. A single credit downgrade can collapse a national economy. A speculative short can destroy a country’s future. The withdrawal of capital is more effective than any embargo and more devastating than most wars. This is not the violence of the sword, but the violence of liquidity—soft, silent, total.
So what becomes of democracy in a world where governance is privatized, law is replaced by portfolios, and the future is dictated not by visionaries or communities, but by risk analysts and quantitative models? What becomes of the people when the very category of “the people” has been abstracted away, and is replaced by flows of data, projections of growth, and predictive governance?
To challenge this federation is to confront not merely an economic system, but an ontological one—a system that determines what counts as value, what counts as risk, and who counts at all. To resist it, we must reclaim economic sovereignty not through nationalism, but through collective stewardship. We must articulate new accounting systems—that measure value not in abstraction, but in well-being, reciprocity, and ecological restoration. We must build currencies backed not by debt, but by resilience, and we must demand that data—especially environmental and community data—be governed by Free, Prior, and Informed Consent, not by opaque ratings and financial algorithms.
The polis will not return through policy alone. It must be reconstituted from the ground up—not as a platform, but as a place. Not as an abstraction, but as a community. Not in service to capital, but in service to life.