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
oh…by the way,
Its not about finding the missing money. All fiat currencies are worthless, and will be more so when “they” get finished with us.
Find the names of the shareholders of the central banks, and you will have the ringleaders.
Its not the money that’s important, its the heads of those that have had a satanic grip on this planet for many centuries. They are sick people…inbred. Our world is run by maniacs…as if you couldn’t tell. LOL.
you want to break them. here’s something everyone can do.
TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY OUT OF THE BANK
TAKE ALL YOUR MONEY OUT OF INVESTMENT FIRMS
DO NOT SHOP AT BIG-NAME, OR NATIONAL, STORES
DO NOT WATCH TV
DO NOT READ THE MAIN REGIONAL NEWSPAPER
DO NOT SUPPORT YOUR CRIMINAL GOVERNMENT AND ITS OFFICIAL
DO NOT BUY STUPID CRAP, BUT ONLY ESSENTIALS
SHOP AT LOCAL STORES THAT KEEP MONEY IN THE COMMUNITY
COORDINATE WITH LOCAL FARMERS FOR PROVIDING FRESH PRODUCE TO COMMUNITY MEMBERS
DO NOT SUPPORT WAR
DO NOT SUPPORT ISRAEL…EVER
THAT’S A START. GOOD LUCK!
Well Catherine…give us some names, companies and the like. Who are they? Let the world know so we can stop this. Why the hiding behind the curtain?
Or is it simply about writing books, redirecting peoples energies, busy work…
if you are an honest person, and truly committed to helping…please give us the information we need.
Thank you.
The right question is, of course, who is in charge. The answer is that I do not know.
My personal experience is that there is a handful of families — intergenerational wealth– who run things. Yes, the Rockefellers are the most prominent in the US, although outside of David it seems to be mostly outside the bloodline at this point. Yes, there are also coordinating bodies used for management — both bureaucracies like G8 or various secret societies or policy bodies like the Trilateral Commission and the CFR. For my story on the CFR, read http://www.dunwalke.com .
The question is what is driving the current behavior. Is it the power of technology that gives extraordinary ability to centralize and kill?Is it the belief that war is essential to ensure control and a sustainable economy? Is it the perversion in culture that the black budget and organized crime breads? Is it thousands of years of intergenerational mind control? Is it the prisoner’s dilemma caused by the economics in which humans are easy to manipulate (See my article Narco Dollars for Beginners.) Or is it the belief that the only way to achieve sustainability on planet earth is significant depopulation? Or are the stories of aliens really true? Or an out of the box event, such as a pole shift that is anticipated to make the planet uninhabitable.
I don’t know the answer. What I do know is that we are dealing with leadership who are behaving rationally according to the rationale in which they are operating. That is why it is very important to understand their point of view, how they view their risks and why they are so afraid.
Which leads me back to the same question I have been asking for many years…where is the money and how do we get it back?
Find the money and we find the logic of the behavior as well as who is pulling the strings.
Step one is that the rest of us withdraw our money. We stop financing criminal enterprises and shift to the most competent, ethical that we find. That shift will reveal a great deal about who is who and what is really going one.
If you have a “tapeworm” best to stop feeding it what makes it grow and you die.
good post.
excellent comments by John Merryman, Jason Mutch, Brian, trisha, etc…
humanity’s three biggest problems:
(1) fraudulant money, coupled with usury;
(2) patents; and
(3) copyrights
all three stem from the same abominable human vice – GREED
these in turn are rooted in the original sin – ARROGANCE
have you ever met a greedy bastard who wasn’t arrogant???
most recognize the first as the root source of our problems, so it’s easier to tackle than the second and third which many believe to be vanguards of human ingenuity
Bullshit.
patents and copyrights, like our fraudulent and parasitic money system, are simply two additional ways for greedy arrogant bastards to leach off the labor and lives of the humble masses
no system of servitude is more efficient than that which is self-administered…
“the end is near” or so the sign of the man on the street corner read 30 years ago. But we all we thinking this guy was talking about god’s return and the end of the world. But now we know what he meant. And it is now the end and it’s too late.
your god will not save you now
Tonk Y asked who these groups are….names and backgrounds of those companies and individuals are detailed in two well documented articles found on the web: 1) describes the Russian coup: Collateral Damage: U.S. Covert Operations and the Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001; 2) describes the US coup: Collateral Damage (Part 2): The Subprime Crisis and the Terrorist
Attacks on September 11, 2001.
very good comments,
one think that did click,
the mentioning of people hiding with there *stuff* in gated community’s with bodyguards.
added to the state of the engineered economy and the mercenary scum formally known as “police”.
it just made me think of the film “soylent green” with charlton heston.
celebrating a teaspoon of jam whilst the rich hide in buildings with concrete motes around them!