26 Comments

1. Catherine, you frequently address issues important for investors. What do you see as the highest priorities for tiny investors ($50,000 or less) who are trying to preserve and increase their capital in this corrupt and rigged environment? I love the Solari report!

2. Looking forward to Jo Kline Cebuhar, J.D. and repeat guest.

   Finding whatever it is that helps me SHOW UP for a friend or relative who is very sick or dying. Thanks for addressing that very difficult discussion. I even have trouble with early cancer discovert and treatment friends. I’m looking forward to learning.

3. Hello Catherine,

   I agree it is the model that with time substitutes so to say honest businesses with the one financed by dirty money and that way that same money becomes clean and part of the system. Actually I listened to “Narco Dollars for Beginners” the other day and that made me realize the logic. Thank you for all great input we get at Solari.

   Best regards,
   Tea

4. Tea:

   What you say makes sense to me. If you have not read Black Money by Michael Thomas, it has good examples of money laundering through retail businesses. Thomas uses a Pizza restaurant.

   One of the biggest problems is that you have a whole stream of economic activity that has a different economic model than market economics. So the honest folks get driven out because they can not compete – I talk about that a bit in “Narco Dollars for Beginners”.

   Catherine

5. Hello Catherin and Solari team,

   I would like to share with Solari and its subscribers some conclusions that I have come to after listening and reading different materials on Solari website, especially regarding money laundering and drugs, I started to look around myself here in Croatia. I became aware that in recent 10 years the big construction boom that had happened here, which went hand in hand with credit expansion and people and companies taking big mortgages in this apparent overall boom, probably was our way here to launder money coming from number of things like strange privatization to the drugs trade. Being on the drug root between Middle East and Europe (this has been so also during the times of Yugoslavia), after the creating of Kosovo state, it looks like nothing disturbed that same trade. Funnily enough it is often said that, during our recent war here in the region, only the criminals kept on collaborating with no problems, regardless of their nationality. So, this construction boom never seemed ok to me in the first place and I was aware that I will come crushing down at certain point, but now looking at it from other perspective, it made more sense. We do not have strong stock exchange here, so probably there had to be other routes to launder the money. In recent years here the crisis can be felt like everywhere in Europe and our recent unfortunate entering the EU only made it worse (as was to be expected). So, what I see now around me is that many stores are closing, especially in the centers of cities, due to high rents. If you consider that most of those spaces in center of capital Zagreb are owned by the city of Zagreb, whose holding is the biggest company in Croatia in turnover, you can imagine that they are having big losses. But at the same time what seems to be popping up are very nice coffee shops and bars. Now, we have very strong culture of coffee shops and bars here, people meet always over a cup of coffee or a glass of wine or beer, and it is also true that we have more and more tourists every year, but this still did not make sense to me. Of course, in the meantime the construction boom was over and many apartments and office buildings are empty since there was never even the need for all of them to begin with. Then today I was at the friends birthday party and they were talking about some owners of bars, coffee shops, night clubs, and as the story goes on it turns out that basically most of those places here in Zagreb, but also some on the coast, are financed by the same approx. 4 – 5 people. Now these people seem to be basically criminals and are not unknown to the drugs, as it was hinted during our conversation. So, it seems pretty logical that all those bars, coffee shops, night clubs are actually big laundry machines as substitution to the construction business, possibly in arrangement with the local authorities. Also another phenomenon keeps getting bigger and these are so called factoring companies (in part also banks do factoring) which basically arrange multiple financial offsets as receivables collection in case of companies that don’t pay their bills, for certain %. Since one of my friends opened such a company, I found out that his funding is coming from one of those guys that were mentioned in the context of the bars, which also has the biggest recycling business in the region, often another business that has a component of crime in it (south of Italy is a very good example of that as Roberto Saviano wrote in his book Gomorra and after that ended up living his life in the witness protection). Sure enough one recycling facility and some restaurants just burnt down for no apparent reason during this summer alone here in Zagreb… So, these are just some of examples how the money flows thru local community here and I guess it goes to say that really it is global problem and mechanism, just with local variants depending on the situation and country.

   Regards to all from Zagreb and wish you all the best, please keep up the excellent work!
   Tea

6. Hi CAF, I didn’t realize anybody in the western world existed like Anne Williamson, who could comment and be so credible about the whole Russia story. This was a very interesting interview. thank you.

7. Posting an e-mail I sent to a subscriber re: Ferguson last week:

   OK, rather than wait, I am sending you the e-mail I was drafting. Have to give up on doing something complete and perfect…

   First, let me get your permission to post this dialogue on the blog, as I think it would be very useful for the subscribers.

   Second, let me respond by telling you my take on things.

   1. We have no facts about what really happened.

   At this point, the only information about what happened that I would trust would be affidavits or testimony submitted in a court of law where all sides were free and funded to submit whatever they wanted to submit about the facts and circumstance of Brown’s death.

   From what I can see it is perfectly plausible that the officer acted well within the boundaries of appropriate response and it is perfectly plausible that he acted outside those boundaries for a one of several very logical reasons, most of which have nothing to do with race.

   When corporate media or personal family and friends are our only source of information and the police officer in question is not free to speak, nor the dead free to speak, there is no way to tell what happened, IMO until it is held to a process governed by civil and criminal procedures where there are serious penalties for not telling the truth.

   I have personally lived through or been involved with situations where what was said in the largest newspapers and TV were complete lies – total propaganda. I have also had to manage situations where mind control agents were involved and design financial transactions to overcome the application of covert operations and mind control to sabotage or steal.

   Bottom line – the media can turn plus into minus and minus into plus long before a legal process can force adults to take responsibility to put things on the record – even then lies make it in. I have spent a lot of time and money watching federal government investigators, lawyers and judges intentionally lie and try to falsify evidence and rig cases. The power of civil and criminal procedures is that if enough people are committed to getting to the truth, it is possible to get there.

   2. The Divide and Conquer “Frame”

   So I don’t buy the poor Michael Brown was an innocent victim story or the “good clean police officer was dealing with low class trash asked for what he got” story. Both stories are promoted and used by the people who market drugs and guns into poor neighborhoods and arrange for swat teams to round up kids and stuff them into slave labor camps.

   I know because I grew up in a poor neighborhood and I watched the game emerge bottom up. I lived in a neighborhood where an 8 years old got shot in the back by a policeman no one did anything because there was nothing anyone could do and and where policemen chauffeured children to their sex slave assignments at the local Navy base.

   I then went to Wall Street and Washington and lived in very different worlds, where I finally got to unpack how the illegal monies flowed throughout the economy.

   The reality is that one way or another, every one is complicit. We are all up to our eyeballs in this system – whether its the kids dealing drugs or who have no faith in a lawless system and behave lawlessly, or police trying hard to do a good job caught between a pincer movement of US agencies and financial institutions promoting and supporting criminal activity in their community and a general population who is angry and does not know who they can trust.

   If you have not read http://dunwalke.com, I think it would help. I also gave a speech recently that will go public in October that I strongly recommend that will help you look at things from a financial standpoint.

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