The Tapeworm

The tapeworm is a rather disgusting metaphor that Catherine Austin Fitts has employed in characterizing the prevailing economic racket of recent decades. As she defines "tapeworm economy," or "negative return on investment economy" in an interview for Karavans...

That's an economy with two classes of players, the insiders & the outsiders. The insiders are constantly subsidized at the expense of the outsiders, like a tapeworm, a parasite that eats through the body. The parasites engineer the economy to drain it for their benefit, consolidating wealth & economic power by liquidating wealth, people, environment, & economic productivity, all to fatten the Tapeworm.

Just as a tapeworm, lodged within the intestines, is able to produce and pump neurotransmitters through the blood-brain barrier that make its host crave the very nutrients that it requires at the expense of the host's nourishment, so does the economically parasitical "insider" utilize a broad variety of tools, anything from the mass media to high fructose corn syrup, for making "outsider" host consumers desire self-impoverishing things that concomitantly enrich the insider.

Dr. David Kessler, a former FDA commissioner, explains this dynamic as it applies to the fast-food industry, in an interview on the NewsHour:

The food industry has been able to figure out the bliss point, the optimal combinations of fat and salt, fat and sugar, fat, sugar and salt that you think tastes good, but when you look at the science, we now know that those ingredients stimulate, they activate the brain's circuitry. They stimulate our intake. They condition us. They drive us to want more. They affect the neural circuits. For decades, the food industry has said, "We're just giving consumers what they want." But, in fact, now we know that what they're doing is excessively activating the brains of millions of Americans.

Such a dynamic is thus a foil to the classic law of supply and demand where, on the one end of economic transaction, a population of consumers by their own interest desire a product, to which desire producers respond by supplying that product in quantities proportionate to the demand. With tapeworm economics, the producers can modulate the desire of consumers.

Such a foil is really nothing new however. Thorstein Veblen perhaps described it in the "wasteful expenditure" of a leisure class which adopts behaviors (such as in the near religious following of sport franchises, for instance) having little intrinsic economic value.

Veblen is most famous for the term "conspicuous consumption." But, some 90 years before Fitts, we find Veblen employing the tapeworm analogy in an entirely different context, though utilized somewhat in the same sense. In his Imperial Germany and The Industrial Revolution (1915), we read on page 169 (of the 1939 edition):

...the uses of the dynastic establishment are seen to be of the same nature as the uses of a tapeworm; and the tapeworm's relation to his host is something not easy to beautify in words, or even to authenticate in such convincing fashion as will insure his affectionate retention on grounds of decorous use and want.

As Veblen employs the term, however, the tapeworm operates upon a body politic. Thus, from the late XIXth through the early XXth century, Prussian dynastic militarism reinforces itself through pan-Germanic engagement of industrial infrastructure, vocation, and all human capitol rendered available for recruitment through familiar habits of allegiance.

The bias of solidarity...is a solidarity subservient to an extraneous initiative; an initiative not necessarily alien to the spontaneous consensus of the group, but also not necessarily coincident with or germane to the ends of life comprised in the consensus of the community... Where the popular consensus so comes to coincide with the line of the State's initiative and unfolding power, as in the Prussian case, it will commonly happen that this happy consummation is reached through the community's accepting the State's ends as its own, and also commonly without such knowledge of the State's ends in the case as would enable the community to take stock of them and appreciate what has been accepted or assented to... (Pg. 164/5)