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
Sorry, Gumnann, your spin does not hold. If I want to control all the people and tangible assets in the world, I don’t care what the price is in paper dollars. Indeed, my control increases on the dumps. Yes, tons of people are laid off. They are only needed in the pumps. They are expendable in the dumps.
You should read the European Union lawsuit motions against RJR Nabisco in http://www.dunwalke.com
What financial Coup d’etat? Who hatched it and who benefited from it? You guys are all subscribing to a myth. There is no organized conspiracy going on. Who has reaped any rewards when wealth has been destroyed at an unprecedented scale? The reasons for the present malaise are pretty clear and well documented by now. There is plenty of blame to go around. We don’t have to look for any puppet master hiding behind the curtain.
If unfettered free market capitalism is left to its shenanigans, like it has been, we are bound to see excesses and busts. It is human nature and free market capitalism, without sensible oversight, mimics human nature. Money has gone global. It will travel to wherever it finds good returns with safety. International money quickly finds local partners who command political clout. If unfair advantages have been taken, it is because of the complicity of power and money. Both walk hand in hand.
In the present financial meltdown, the smartest financiers around the world have lost their shirts and the Ivy league graduates running things are loosing their jobs. The global crisis has spared no one. So, can somebody please tell me who are the ringleaders of the so-called Coup D’etat and where are they hiding their plunder?
Interesting, especially the references tot he Bilderberg group. Dutch papers have recently complained bitterly about the staff of the Dutch Queen – daughter of Prince Bernhard – running her relatives’ tax evading trusts. A further interesting point is that the Dutch Crown Prince is constructing a palace in Mozambique….. Any other hints that the end is nigh?
Very interesting analysis connecting the dots.. FDR once said “Nothing in politics ever happens by accident.”
As big/global as this problem is, the only people that continue to profit from the taxpayer bailouts are some but not all of the financials. The taxpayers are being herded into bigger government programs by ever growing debt.
Just as I upheld my Constitutional oath in Iraq, I am prepared to uphold it here at home. We loose this fight her, we have nowhere else to go. Let’s rock-n-roll!
I-feel-“de-moderized”-already!
But,I-LOVE-eating-grubs-and-earthworms,great-protein!
Don’t-you-even-THINK-’bout-takin’-my-worms,man,I-gots
me-a-shotgun,don’t-cha-know.
http://markinthepark.net/blog/?p=96
Ignotas Nulla Curatio Morbid – A Review of Political Ponerology by Andrzej M. Lobaczewski
Ignotas nulla curatio morbid – do not attempt to cure what you do not understand – is the opening theme in this study of evil. Political Ponerology is “a science on the nature of of evil adjusted for political purposes.” The author, Andrzej Lobaczewski, describes himself as a Polish psychologist who — with many other colleagues — found meaning living through Nazism and then Communism by studying how evil happens and triumphs in a wider political and economic system.
Lobaczewski’s hypothesis is that a small percentage of humans are born psychopaths. He describes the research to back up that data that was destroyed and supressed. Another minority percentage are of a nature to go along with psychopaths while the vast majority of people are essentially healthy. The majority who are healthy have a difficult time understanding that some people are not — they can not fathom being a psychopath or acting like one.
No one has worked harder in the last five years to understand the Tapeworm than Harry Blazer. It was Harry who discovered Political Ponerology and sent it to me. I found it chock full of deeply useful insights that can inform organizing to shift our situation. For example, Lobaczewski discovered that dealing with psychopathic systems made healthy people neurotic. However, they could heal very quickly when he gave them a scientific framework for understanding what had happened and why. With a sound framework, they could start to differentiate who was healthy and who was not and to devise strategies to deal effectively with psychopaths in power. Rather than having their relations with all humans destroyed, they were able to discriminate between healthy and unhealthy and increase their immunity to the drain of unhealthy culture and systems.
I strongly recommend this book for anyone who is managing human or financial risk in this environment or is looking to create healthy change. Traditionally, the Tapeworm’s greatest advantage is that healthy people can not fathom what they are up against and so keep inviting the Tapeworm back into their intimate spaces. This book helps you understand why that will not work. It helps you understand why conspiracies of the healthy and ‘coming clean’ are essential.
Political Ponerology is a book to read slowly. Lobaczewski uses a lot of academic and long words. The insights are deep and rich — they require focus and concentration. And the point comes home again and again:Â Ignotas nulla curatio morbid — do not attempt to cure what you do not understand.
Political Ponerology is available from:
Red Pill Press
http://www.redpillpress.com/
To Snowman:
In answer to your question re. Hitler, read THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT by Carroll Quigley. Hitler was, at least in part, pushed forward towards his conflict with Russia by the elite British Milner group and by powerful pro-Nazi elements of the British aristocracy.
They cleared the way at every step in his consolidation of power.
I’ve always been intrigued by the statement in Albert Speer’s biography that one day he saw Hitler emerge from behind the closed doors of his bedroom, white-faced, repeating distractedly to himself that his “voice had gone silent”. Then he he saw Speer, and abruptly changed the subject. Immediately following that incident he suffered his first catastrophic defeat in a massive tank battle in Russia, and the tide of war swung irreversibly against him. What “voice had gone silent”?
Was Hitler instructed and led by radio step by step, until his scornful generals came to deem him a military genius who seemed to never get it wrong? Until, that is, he was “instructed” to turn away from Moscow and set up for defeat before his radioed guidance went unexpectedly silent…?