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
How do you ‘know’ that this Illuminati exists? Isn’t it possible that you are delusional? Without knowing their names and the exact details of what they did, it seems quite silly to assume such a group exists. To me, it sounds like you are first assuming there is this Illuminati and you are hunting and pecking for facts to support your previous bias… such as the wackos do with the 911 or JFK conspiracies. Of course there are wealthy people out there that want to have as much money and power as possible, but that is just normal. Research has shown, that is what people normally do. People always want a little more… that does not mean that this imaginary group is real.
get a life stop worrying about shit, in the time it took you to write your 50 page comments you could have spent that time with yor child or dying parents, or did somethin for yourself, stop being wory worts and just live
Check out Columbia U’s land grab in NYC>
Dear Catherine: I read your expose,”The Myth of the Rule of Law or How the Money Works: The Destruction of Hamilton Securities Group”. As a minority and man of color, all I can say is welcome to the real world. As you said, “As a white, Anglo-Saxon protestant I had been counting on the rule of law to protect meOne day I was a wealthy entrepreneur with a beautiful home, a successful business and money in the bank….The next day I was hunted…” You are simply experiencing what many poor whites, brown, yellow, black, red, minorities and people of color experience every single day of their lives; many until they die. Especially those born into poverty or without access to an edcuation. And while I can appreciate your hurt the experiences in your expose is nothing new to us. Don’t be surprised by my diatribe. Are you seeking condolences? Are you seeking pity? What does it mean to lose millions? What does it mean to lose pennies when that is all you have? What does it mean to be a poor person without hope? You had everything going for you and still you seek to get in. Some of us simply don’t care or form our own bonds of survival> We loan money to eachother, we worship together, we meet in coffeehouses, we visit the public libraries to use the few online computers, we share wine and cry together. So what you express is nothing new. Welcome to the real world.
It will be ok. Do you know why? Disasters like this have definite winners and losers, then some in between. The winners are the powerful. The losers are the generation near retirement. They will suffer for the next decade, crying as their dream of retirement dies along with them. In between will be the rest of us that are young enough to limp through it because we are young enough to keep working. The winners will need labor to keep enriching themselves. That is really all there is to it.
Greed is like any other vice of the mind. Something that has its own energy. We can call it Devil or whatever but in the end is just basic MIND games which went out of proportion. It all started as a game of ego and then it turned into something else as usual. A vice ends up being something not rational or logical. Thats why many people goes crazy and more usual in rich countries than in poor ones. Dealing with your own mind is the most complicated thing in the world thats why we are in this situation to begin with. And many times in history.
Man was given a tremendous paradise to live in. He is ending this with too much mind and ego thinking he is the best thing created!..EGO.
I want you to picture Mr Bush and all his fellow friends with Tons of green cash around them and surrounding them a colapsed destroyed world; ecologically and economically!.
I knew this when he said to all the world this 2 things:
“..I KNOW how the world works”, and “..we know on what side GOD IS..”
You just gave more importance to one green than to another more, much more important as when you think you have to work and work and forget about your own family…!
Is the old Story..man being materialistic and leaving the world of the spirit for material stuff. Thats all in the end and the game turned into a real bad game as it was taken too seriously (EGO). No fun, just chaos and problems as when people play something and start betting on it and end up killing each other..! of course!…how stupid!..it was only a game, a distraction of the MIND…but it was taken seriously and that changed everything.
Now this people (called what you want..illuminati etc) are just greedy , frightened and scared which turns them VERY DANGEROUS NOW..like an TERRIFIED animal!. You can imagine what they could be doing in the end when they realize that there is NO ESCAPE…As Yolanda asked…with what purpose? They no they cant escape they are just buying time as much as possible..just to try to escape from hell, hell they know they created. Hell, the have inside.
We all know what we have and have not done. We all KNOW. And that will be surely be our each and only HELL..or HEAVEN..
We must pray this time we learn another lesson and that humanity goes one step further from LIES to OURSELVES AND TO OTHERS to TRUTH INSIDE AND OUTSIDE. IS THE ONLY WAY.. Thats our only salvation the rest is nuances.. I think …anyway.
Be true, be a warrior of Truth and you will surely change this world.
THANKS! Catherine, for being one more WARRIOR to beleive in.
God bless you and others who are doing the same to really change INSIDE for future generations to live in a better world.
Maybe the illusive answer to who is behind this and why are they doing it is best pulled from Hollywood. After reading through this blog and the comments, I was reminded of The Devil’s Advocate movie from the 90’s, and found this in the IMDb review of it (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118971/) “….the fact that the Devil is never really pulling the strings by himself — he’s giving people their choice, their free will to decide — a demon whose world is our own, with all its mundane events. He appears in human form and presents human choices, and his greatest lure is what we have in common with him: our greed, ego, jealousy, competitiveness, lust, dishonesty…..Hell is here not a blackness, haunted by ghosts and monsters, but the rarified world of New York’s ultra-wealthy and privileged society.”
So yes, there are actual people behind the happenings…but the ultimate enemy is Satan, he wishes to destroy us and separate us from God for eternity. He is the only one that has an ultimate plan for humanity’s destruction, the people carrying out the financial manipulations in the world markets are merely his servants. Going after the people doing this would serve to only delay things, maybe. Someone new would be more than willing to step into their place.