The petrodollar didn't die. It was privatized. They called it the Board of Peace. It's the Mafia Industrial Complex.

Arn Menconi started in banking during the Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s — a real estate workout specialist for a Chicago-based S&L and project manager for the Resolution Trust Corporation, the federal agency Congress created to clean up the crisis. He watched captured regulators and self-dealing insiders loot the system while ordinary people held the bag. He managed 77 townhomes in Palm Beach Gardens that a bank had taken back from a developer, and later sold bank-owned properties in Beaver Creek for the Pritzker family’s bank — the same family that pioneered subprime mortgage securitization and whose member now chairs the Aspen Institute. He recognized the same architecture thirty-five years later because he’d seen the playbook before.

He managed a $100 million government budget as a two-term County Commissioner in Eagle County, Colorado. He holds an MBA from the University of Denver (1996). He founded SOS Outreach and led it for over two decades, building it from a local program into one of the largest outdoor youth development organizations in the country — 31 winter resorts across 8 states, over 100,000 young people served, with a board that included CEOs from America's largest ski resorts and outdoor industry companies, and deans from Harvard, NYU, and George Washington University. He's been trusted at the highest levels of academia and industry to build, lead, and deliver. One of his students, a first-generation Mexican-American from a trailer park in Eagle County whose family couldn't afford warm gloves, graduated Harvard and Stanford Medical School. That's why the financial architecture in this investigation is documented at litigation grade.

For seven years he attended the Aspen Ideas Festival and covered the Aspen Security Forum as credentialed press for The Aspen Times — sitting in the rooms where defense secretaries, CIA directors, and Wall Street executives frame the narrative. He completed the Aspen Leadership Seminar, mentored by James O'Toole, the man who wrote the original curriculum. He drove Larry Summers to the airport and quoted him on the record.

In 2001, he cast the lone vote on the Eagle County Board of Commissioners against giving George W. Bush unchecked war powers. The local VFW tried to recall him. Twenty-four years and $8 trillion later, he looked like a prophet.

In May 2015, he spent 10 days at Daniel Ellsberg's home and interviewed him for 40 hours. Ellsberg — the man Kissinger called “the most dangerous man in America,” who leaked the Pentagon Papers proving four presidents had lied about Vietnam — told him: the danger isn't the lie. It's the system that makes the lie unnecessary.

He lobbied for the Iran Nuclear Deal with the Friends Committee on National Legislation and CodePink. He ran for office seven times in Colorado, including a U.S. Senate race in 2016, and led three successful ballot initiative campaigns. He has been arrested seven times for anti-war, healthcare, and climate activism.

He has studied, lived, and traveled across four continents — studying in Salzburg, traveling to the Soviet Union on a political science delegation in 1979, living in Rome, and spending time across Latin America. He helped write the coursework for the History of Terrorism at the University of Salamanca, taught in 2024 by former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou. Most recently, he spent six months outside the United States, meeting people from around the world, gaining the outsider's perspective on the American empire that you can't get from inside it. Then he spent a month following the money. This investigation is what he found.