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
Interesting that I read through all sixty-some comments without seeing one reference to psychopaths, those who inhabit human bodies but lack any form of conscience. Figured I had better remedy that lack. Those who don’t understand the concept of psychopaths (no, not psychotics) would do well to do a web search for the word “ponerology”. It will all start to make sense.
Sometimes reality makes more sense if you reverse it.
Here is an example. Time goes past to future, right? How obvious is that! The very history of humanity is bound up in it.
Consider; If two atoms strike each other, they create an event. While these atoms go from past events to future ones, the event goes the other way. First it is in the future and then in the past.
So which is the real direction? Do we travel along this fourth dimension from the past into the future, or is time simply a consequence of motion, similar to temperature and each event is replaced by the next and fades into the past? Are we traveling this fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, or does tomorrow become yesterday because the earth rotates?
If time is simply a measure of motion, it would be meaningless to ascribe a dimensionless point to it, as that would be a cessation of motion, like a temperature of absolute zero. Temperature is an average of motion. Time is a unit of motion and fuzzy at that, since delineation can’t be instantaneous.
Now consider monotheism, the all-knowing absolute, as Pope John Paul II described it. This is a contradiction, as the absolute, the universal state, is neutral, lacking any definition or distinction, while knowledge is a feedback loop of distinction and judgement. The universal perspective monotheism implies is an oxymoron. It is subjectivity which creates perspective in the first place. Think in terms of one frame of film being re-exposed many times over. Quickly any and all details of any particular exposure are lost. The absolute is that blank slate. So a spiritual absolute wouldn’t be a intellectual or moral ideal from which we fell, but the raw essence of consciousness from which we rise. So any potential God, ie, universal perspective, could only be the raw awareness of which we as individuals, give personality. It doesn’t matter if you are an atheist or theist, since understanding consciousness is like staring into the abyss. There is no way to fathom how far down it goes, whether there is some material connection from which it originally formed, or whether it is actually the material reality which fades away first, or whether they both fade together. It should be noted that physics has spent millennia trying to comprehend the material basis of reality and only finds sub-levels of activity and connectivity. It’s more network than nodes. So the dynamic is upward and any top down structure, institution, complex being, etc. is just providing form until it too breaks down and is consumed.
These elites are simply the emergent top predators in a complex eco-system and top predators are especially vulnerable to a collapse of that eco-system.
The next step is from top predator in the collapsing planetary eco-system, to central nervous system of the emerging planetary organism. This will require a fundamental reassessment of many of our basic assumptions. One is to understand and accept the necessity of death as a function of life. You can’t have tomorrow until today is past. Life is a process of creation and consumption, as it bootstraps itself upward. Adults are the shell that forms as life hardens to protect the next generation and must be shed for the next generation to expand and have its day. It is that elemental being that shines through us all, Rich and poor. Top and bottom. The elites have developed ways to perpetuate themselves, but when they reach the point of being more burden than guide, they too get shed like an old shell.
Going back to the point about time, we as distinct individuals and the details of our lives fade away into the past, in order to push the essential consciousness forward and upward into the future.
Good and bad are not a dual between the forces of light and darkness, but are the binary code of biological calculation. Even the most basic life forms distinguish between beneficial and detrimental. Between light and dark are not just shades of grey, but all the colors of the spectrum.
P.S. For those advocating returning to a gold standard, read up on William Jennings Byron and his Cross of Gold speech. The problem with a gold standard, or any commodity based currency, is the “Golden Rule.” Those with the gold, rule. That’s the real advantage of a tax based currency. It really does work best when it’s understood to be the property of the taxpayers, just like a public road system.
If you want to get a good visual insight to these people google The Fabian Window, with its wolf in sheep clothing sheild and the picture of the planet being hammered into a new shape and the slogan Pray devoutly and hammer stoutly it says it all.
Thanks, Catherine, for your blog, which I only just discovered today (Feb. 7, 2009). The comments offered by all of you are also fascinating.
Certainly, the speed of the meltdown of the American AND global economy lends fuel to conspiratorial speculations. How can the U.S.–and the world’s–economy just fall apart so suddenly, and so catastrophically? Surely, SOMEone or some group is behind this, for if there’s no such group, then we truly in a random, utterly incomprehensible world.
My problem with conspiracy theories is a simple one: How do we verify it, if the conspiratorial group–those Masters of the Universe (MOTU)–is, by definition, so secretive that they cannot be uncovered? Several commentators here have asked Ms. Catherine to name these MOTU, but no names are forthcoming. Nor can they be, because if their identities are known, then it wouldn’t be a secret conspiracy…. Do you not see the conundrum?
And so, conspiracy theories are by their very nature unverifiable.
Perhaps there is another way to verify Catherine’s thesis, which is to act on her prescriptions — of withdrawing all our monies from the banking institutions, stock market, investment firms, etc. etc., so as to “deny the MOTU their lifeblood.” But the problem is this: won’t doing this immediately hurt us more than the MOTU because, surely, the MOTU have more fallback resources and plans than we pathetic little people? And how would doing this unmask the MOTU anyway? Do we expect all the MOTU to immediately fess up?
In the end, I’d like to ask Ms. Catherine a simple and direct question:
Please tell us what concrete steps YOU have taken, e.g., have YOU withdrawn all your money from our financial institutions? And if you have, what did you do to the money? Convert all your cash to gold or silver?
I agree with Catherine that the ‘cabal’ is ideologically driven. This is clearly necessary to allow for an effective, cohesive, self-healing, and (long-term) goal oriented organization that is (quantitatively) largely composed of ‘servant’ (for lack of a better word) members.
I further agree that we need to critically understand the fundamental tenants of this ideological view point, in order to undermine organization cohesion, morale, and ultimately loyalty of the workers in this global cabal.
Sri Gandhi is the thought leader to follow. Please understand that his non-violence was also a strategic position. He understood that the cabal that he was facing (British Empire) was also ideologically driven. He understood that the officer class and soldiers believed in the moral cause of the enterprise that was the British Imperialism.
His brilliant and decisive strategy to counter the British Imperialist (System) was to attack the very thing that held the various members of that overall system together: their sense of moral superiority.
We shall triumph in the same exact manner.
(Now: Know that the masses have shown themselves to be thoughtless. Should global affairs be left to the whims of thoughtless? That’s a compelling argument to recruit intelligent workers into a global order …)
Catherine: You are one hell of a courageous, talented woman. Along with attorney Ellen Brown, you are two of my heroines. Too few women (I am a female) GET or delve into how the financial parasites captured control of our monetary/banking system.
I encourage everyone to read patriot extraordianaire’s Andrew Hitchcock’s compelling “Synagogue of Satan: The secret History of Jewish Domination” available for free here – http://www.iamthewitness.com/ and also his online radio interviews from Patriot Daryl Bradford Smith’s incredibly important website – NOTE: Please support our Patriots financially.
Folks,
Get a clue. The wealthy have always wanted it ALL, evil wants it ALL. Now, having worked for ‘The Wealthy’ before, they are far superior to ‘pedestrians’, they will make better use of YOUR resources, they will make this a better world for ‘all’, they know more than you, they have always used governments as tools, we, on the other hand, buy into the bullsh*t, you know…conspiracies and UFO’s and such, are painted as ‘jokes’ and we then laugh. (I used to think UFO’s were a joke, then I saw one, up close enough to know, the joke was on me. I started rethinking a lot of things.)
Now, lookup Georgia Guidestones, and you will see what the agenda is. ‘The Earth can support no more than 500 millions’….their agenda is a controlled DIE OFF. Leaving the best and brightest and whats left of the depleted oil and resources for THEIR PROGENY to rule and control. Is there one group that controls ALL? I doubt if China and Russia will go along with that plan, the Final War will most likely be the battle for supremacy of ALL by the control of OIL in the ME. Deal with it, since part of the plan must be a another War of proportions sufficient to cause people to submit to ‘denationalization’. The Bible gives the answer, extract yourself from ‘The System'(come out of her), hide(go into the wilderness), and wait it out by teaching and clinging to old fashioned concepts of good vs evil, because in the end, evil does lose.
This time was predicted long ago, and it is coming true now. I didn’t believe this, until I saw the light, literally a UFO, we must recognize that this time coming is tantamount to a Great Tribulation, a convergence of crises, a Global Modified Malthusian Event if you will. If you keep your money in the system, you’re dead. If you don’t have a farm, and woods to hide in, and a collective of folks who are decent, hard working and ready to face the future, you’re dead. The Great Tribulation will start with economics:
“…a measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny, and spare ye not the oil and the wine.” Rev 6:6…this speaks of the elimination of the middle class. Only two classes of people left, the very poor and the very rich. Next comes a ‘new money’, it is already in progress, its called Chip Credit. You receive a biochip, and your global credits are stored, so you can no longer ‘buy or sell without The Mark’. The Bible also gave the answer to all these financial problems, its called a JUBILEE. All debts are forgiven, global bankruptcy. Reset the economies and start over, the poor are made whole, but the rich are hurt, so it won’t happen. But there is a movement building for it, and they will be branded as Religious Nuts/Christian Economic Terrorists. The Future will end up being a dark scifi novel, those of us in the wilderness, will continue to watch with interest. I never believed any of this until I saw an article on the mark, the original Greek word in the Bible was ‘stakos’, to stake, or stick. The new bio chips, are injected, with….a hypodermic, you are are ‘stuck’. Hmmm….a 2000 year old prophecy, says that money will go away, and be replaced by something stuck in your palm or forehead? Then I read, where they are working on this new system of credit based on biochips, that will ONLY WORK IN YOUR PALM OR FOREHEAD(due to chip ‘migration’)!. Now how does some guy in a cave, 2000 years ago, see technological developments that are occurring, now? So if he was right about that, then things are going to get real bad, especially if your church or God is subsumed into their new one world religion (its gotta happen to have a one world government/’culture’). If you don’t believe, then, you’ll remain lost among the stars anyway. That is what LOST originally meant, we are lost in the Universe, and are trying to Return to the Source, God, from whence we came. But you must lighten yourself, and be free of dark energy in order to ascend. All religious doctrines are subsets of hyper dimensional truth, turn away from anger at those doing what they must do, and turn towards empathy for all, love your enemy as yourself, only then, will you be safe from the coming storm by hiding and rising above it. Likewise, the ‘infinite growth on a finite planet’ economic paradigm must end, but, they, are in control of this paradigm shift, for now.