In light of recent events, I am republishing.]
By Catherine Austin Fitts
In the fall of 2001 I attended a private investment conference in London to give a paper, The Myth of the Rule of Law or How the Money Works: The Destruction of Hamilton Securities Group.
The presentation documented my experience with a Washington-Wall Street partnership that had:
- Engineered a fraudulent housing and debt bubble;
- Illegally shifted vast amounts of capital out of the U.S.;
- Used “privitization” as a form of piracy – a pretext to move government assets to private investors at below-market prices and then shift private liabilities back to government at no cost to the private liability holder.
Other presenters at the conference included distinguished reporters covering privatization in Eastern Europe and Russia. As the portraits of British ancestors stared down upon us, we listened to story after story of global privatization throughout the 1990s in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.
Slowly, as the pieces fit together, we shared a horrifying epiphany: the banks, corporations and investors acting in each global region were the exact same players. They were a relatively small group that reappeared again and again in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia accompanied by the same well-known accounting firms and law firms.
Clearly, there was a global financial coup d’etat underway.
The magnitude of what was happening was overwhelming. In the 1990’s, millions of people in Russia had woken up to find their bank accounts and pension funds simply gone – eradicated by a falling currency or stolen by mobsters who laundered money back into big New York Fed member banks for reinvestment to fuel the debt bubble.
Reports of politicians, government officials, academics, and intelligence agencies facilitating the racketeering and theft were compelling. One lawyer in Russia, living without electricity and growing food to prevent starvation, was quoted as saying, “We are being de-modernized.”
Several years earlier, I listened to three peasant women describe the War on Drugs in their respective countries: Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. I asked them, “After they sweep you into camps, who gets your land and at what price?” My question opened a magic door. They poured out how the real economics worked on the War on Drugs, including the stealing of land and government contracts to build housing for the people who are displaced.
At one point, suspicious of my understanding of how this game worked, one of the women said, “You say you have never been to our countries, yet you understand exactly how the money works. How is this so?” I replied that I had served as Assistant Secretary of Housing at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the United States where I oversaw billions of government investment in US communities. Apparently, it worked the same way in their countries as it worked in mine.
I later found out that the government contractor leading the War on Drugs strategy for U.S. aid to Peru, Colombia and Bolivia was the same contractor in charge of knowledge management for HUD enforcement. This Washington-Wall Street game was a global game. The peasant women of Latin America were up against the same financial pirates and business model as the people in South Central Los Angeles, West Philadelphia, Baltimore and the South Bronx.
Later, courageous reporting by several independent investigative reporters confirmed in detail that the privatization and economic warfare model I discussed in London had deep roots in Latin America.
We were experiencing a global “heist”: capital was being sucked out of country after country. The presentation I gave in London revealed a piece of the puzzle that was difficult for the audience to fathom. This was not simply happening in the emerging markets. It was happening in America, too.
I described a meeting that had occurred in April 1997, more than four years before that day in London. I had given a presentation to a distinguished group of U.S. pension fund leaders on the extraordinary opportunity to re-engineer the U.S. federal budget. I presented our estimate that the prior year’s federal investment in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area had a negative return on investment.
We presented that it was possible to finance places with private equity and re-engineer the government investment to a positive return and, as a result, generate significant capital gains. Hence, it was possible to use U.S. pension funds to significantly increase retirees’ retirement security by successfully investing in American communities, small business and farms — all in a manner that would reduce debt, improve skills, and create jobs.
The response from the pension fund investors to this analysis was quite positive until the President of the CalPERS pension fund — the largest in the country — said, “You don’t understand. It’s too late. They have given up on the country. They are moving all the money out in the fall [of 1997]. They are moving it to Asia.”
Sure enough, that fall, significant amounts of moneys started leaving the US, including illegally. Over $4 trillion went missing from the US government. No one seemed to notice. Misled into thinking we were in a boom economy by a fraudulent debt bubble engineered with force and intention from the highest levels of the financial system, Americans were engaging in an orgy of consumption that was liquidating the real financial equity we needed urgently to reposition ourselves for the times ahead.
The mood that afternoon in London was quite sober. The question hung in the air, unspoken: once the bubble was over, was the time coming when we, too, would be “de-modernized?”
In 2009 — more than seven years later — this is a question that many of us are asking ourselves.
Part II: Rethinking Diversification
Related Reading:
Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Stock Profits
P.S.
Nodes(centralization) are bottlenecks of input and output from the larger context.
Catherine,
I think biology and computer sciences are currently leading the way in modeling a bottom up web based view of reality, as opposed to the traditional top down centralized view. I think it will take some time for this to really manifest itself as the dominant view. Besides the monotheistic religious assumptions and the political tendency toward centralization, I think even the physical sciences are biased toward this view. Consider the concept of three dimensional space. Essentially it is the coordinate system of the center point. Logically you could have any number of coordinate systems defining the same space. In a very real sense, that is the situation in Israel/Palestine. Two coordinate systems defining the same space, each with their own set of reference points. It is something of a dichotomy, as we function as individual points of reference, but since we are communities of individuals, we need to understand that en mass, this centralized view isn’t as effective as the distributed, web perspective. Nodes and network, not just nodes in a network. Neurobiology has come to understand the brain as more of a network than having any centralized source of consciousness, so these perspectives re-enforce each other at many levels.
Catherine, good read, thanks.
I like your answer in identifying the prime movers and your not feeding the tape worm comment.
I posted the following poem (below) earlier today at naked capitalism. I have been in the financial coup camp for a long while now;
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/a
Some cross linking might be beneficial I think …
Regards …..
Double Trouble – Coup Bubble
Credit leads money by a country mile,
Said the ruling elite with a knowing smile,
And they set their puppets to flooding the land,
Putting easy money in everyone’s hand …
Shop till you drop said the commander in thief,
As he instilled in the marks a false belief,
That Scamerica the beautiful could never fail,
That there was no end to the credit trail …
And Greenspan and Ben allayed the public fears,
With their soothing calmness they greased the gears,
That made their ruling elite’s coup bubble grow,
This was after all not their first rodeo …
They knew easy credit is just counterfeit money,
And so they opened the spigots and let it flow like honey,
As derivatives spread throughout the world’s financial halls,
They soon had the world by the credit balls …
The ruling elite now broadened their grin,
The marks were fooled and could not see their sin,
To consolidate power and eliminate the middle class,
Eliminate population and have all kiss their ass …
Tighten,
Relax,
Swing the ax …
Squeeze,
And release,
Remove some fleece …
Pump.
And dump,
Kill off a chump …
Inflate the bubble,
Exhaust it slow,
Billions of people,
Starve with no dough …
Bumbling idiots,
Or clever elite?
The marks never question,
The truth at their feet …
If you want to find,
The cause of the trouble,
You have to pop,
The deception bubble …
Deception is the strongest political force on the planet.
i on the ball patriot
Peter:
I did not say you should go to court, I said that you or I could not prove or disprove the top of the global governance structure to those evidentiary standards.
The need to create one common enemy or to oversimplify or to create certainty where there is none is a powerful urge that does not serve us well. Because I have functioned on the inside and have seen how these desires are manipulated, these are not mistakes that I tend to make.
To the extent I have been privy to global hierarchies, my personal experience is that goals are defined and boundaries are set. Within those constraints, there is great latitude for cartels and factions to compete and collude in very organic ways.
It is a big planet. Governing requires lots of cooperation in a highly centralized system — all the way from the bottom to the top.
My personal experience is that the folks at the top do not yet have “lock down.” However, they sure want it. Which is why we are enjoying this debate in the first place.
John and Ikonos:
Yes, we are witnessing the death of an old order. My prayers for the new is that it is truly decentralized and “out of control”
For anyone who is interested, you might want to watch the documentary Phoenix Lights and ponder what a faction that controlled that technology might be able to do.
Catherine
Hi Catherine,
I heard an interesting interview with Dylan Ratigan on Goldseek radio this weekend. Dylan spoke of the enormous insurance heist through credit default swaps as well as discussing SIV’s, CDO’s and CMO’s. He called for those responsible in congress and banking to be held accountable. We need to interrupt primetime television (heaven forbid) and play this over and over agin until Americans GET IT!! Only then will the economic and political rape of our country cease!
We are witnessing the death of the Old Order as people are beginning to realize the destruction of nations and their economies for the benefit of the few, and the enslavement of many.
The New World Order will not be the one envisioned by those engineering the collapse of human endeavour to enrich those paltry few that will benefit; it will awaken the masses who slumber in precarious safety to the perils brought before them by unbridled avarice.
The truths written here by Catherine and others like her are the tools that the debt-enslaved will use to throw off their chains of bondage they so willingly took up in service to their masters. They are the leaves of grass striking a mighty oak; one blow will not fell the massive tree, but a hundred million strikes by one just one blade will bring it to earth.
Until we realize that within our lifetimes resources we currently take for granted to sustain life will be used as weapons of warfare by those that would wish to diminish the human population so that the few may enjoy more for themselves, our future on this planet is in peril.
We, as a species, must evolve past the acquisition of limitless power by the few, to the detriment of the many, or we will fail as a race.
Catherine you are obviously an ordered and rational person who understands and respects chains of command, but there is a profoundly different reality on and in which that worldview exists. Is your mind in control of your body? Obviously yes. Has it always been and will it always be? Obviously no.
Yes there are people who are “in control.” Some of them visible and some not so visible. Some who genuinely have the greater good in mind and some who quite obviously do not. Is there some ultimate group controlling these elites, or is it a power play among them, with some rising and some falling? I think it safe to say the latter.
The interesting question is what will define those rising in the future. There are a number of power centers, politics, religious affiliations, sectors of the economy, especially those most likely to be enhanced by crisis. Organized crime can never be overlooked. What might also be worth considering are those sectors which have been riding high, but are now crumbling, leaving assets to be acquired by those who can more effectively use them. I think we will find the banking sector falls in this category and while government has been left holding the bag, it could be a blessing in disguise. The military usually benefits, but much of it currently is being wasted and this undermines its political effectiveness. Many of the currently wealthy are in freefall as it becomes increasingly obvious that the amount of paper wealth far exceeds the underlaying assets.
I think the future world, if it is functioning, is going to be structured much differently. Necessarily more communal and local. The power structures could be authoritarian, but they don’t have to be. It will be a matter of the philosophies by which people function. That’s what I think is important to focus on at this point.