LETTER TO THE EDITOR
US NEWS & WORLD REPORT, December 2003
Ladies & Gentlemen:
Sam Smith of Progressive Review once said that corruption in Washington was a culture, not a conspiracy. US News & World Report — once again — proves Sam right.
Your investigative report, “Keeping Secrets – The Bush Administration is doing the public’s business out of the public eye. Here’s how — and why,” co-authored by Ed Pound is a breathtaking example of the zero accountability journalism practiced by the US corporate media.
Your readers deserve to know your much more meaningful role in protecting the Bush political and business interests from transparency.
As Assistant Secretary of Housing in the first Bush Administration, I discovered that more than 100% of our losses in the FHA single family mortgage insurance programs were in the Texas and Colorado federal regions. These tracked the Resolution Trust Corporation’s losses. My efforts to bring place based transparency to what now appear to be significant patterns of Iran Contra fraud by the Bush family and their business partners were cancelled the day after I was fired by Secretary Jack Kemp in August 1990.
Having discovered the power of place based disclosure of government taxation, spending and credit, I founded an investment bank and software developer in Washington, Hamilton Securities. Hamilton proceeded to develop a series of software tools and databases to provide citizens with access to federal finances through the Internet on an open and transparent basis. This included a software tool prototype called Community Wizard. These efforts meant that citizens could –for the first time— easily access through the Internet the federal budget, credit, contracts award and other financial information contiguous with the political jurisdictions used to elect political representatives. Such place based transparency is the very foundation of accountability.
In 1998, former CIA General Counsel, Judge Stanley Sporkin, ordered the digital records of Hamilton Securities seized in a process which successfully destroyed our business and digital systems, including Community Wizard. This seizure was the culmination of a smear campaign that got underway in the summer of 1996, lead by Ed Pound and a team of reporters from US News & World Report and fueled by the credibility they gave to baseless and frivolous allegations.
If Community Wizard and its developers had been protected by an honest media — instead of being targeted with the help of a four month onslaught by a well funded team from US News & World Report — it is unlikely that George W. Bush would be President today.
If you don’t like Bush secrecy, you have to look no further than your own mirror for one of the appropriate parties to hold responsible.
Sincerely Yours,
Catherine Austin Fitts
Solari
Former Assistant Secretary of Housing, Bush I