**Note: We are republishing each of the 22 challenges from Catherine’s fiscal cliff article – one a week. Helps to digest them bit by bit!**
By Catherine Austin Fitts
There are trillions of dollars missing from federal accounts, as documented by the federal government itself.
The reports of significant money missing from the United States government over the years are many, including Kelly Patricia O’Meara’s series for Insight Magazine on money missing from the U.S. government and Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele’s investigative reporting published in Vanity Fair on monies missing in US operations in the Middle East. For a time, there were so many stories on monies disappearing from the US government that we kept track of them on a part of the Solari website dedicated to stories about money missing from the federal government: Solari: The Missing Money
Kelly O’Meara’s series on the missing money attracted significant attention in 2000 and 2001. Things seemed to be coming to a head on September 10, 2001, when Donald Rumsfeld conceded in a press conference that DOD was missing trillions. However, that fact was not to attract much attention given 9-11 events the following day. Rather, the tragedy was used to justify the loss of financial records at the Pentagon (we are apparently to presume that the Pentagon is incapable of making or keeping backups) and the inability of the Army to produce financial statements in 2001.
One Tennessee congressman on the House Budget and Defense Appropriations Subcommittee confirmed to me that these billions were missing, but said that he was helpless to do anything about it, despite being a member of the budget committee and defense appropriation subcommittee. (See Letter to Congressman Van Hilleary)
The missing money phenomenon was overwhelmed by the bailouts that began in the second Bush administration and continue through the Federal Reserve today (see QE3- Pay Attention if You Are in the Real Estate Market).
Perhaps, the military-industrial-intelligence complex saw the opportunity to bypass the complexity of using dummy corporations and criminal enterprises to steal trillions covertly in order to fund their black operations and insider perks, and decided to take advantage of the bubble in the mortgage markets where knowledge of the fraudulent securities positions and the derivatives piled on top could be used to blackmail the banksters – resulting in money flowing out the front door through bailouts and the deflection of Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s liabilities to the taxpayer. Or perhaps that is why the bubble was created in the first place – the military-industrial-intelligence complex needed the cash – and as always, the banking system was there to accommodate (for their cut of course).
I have always said, “crime that pays is crime that stays.” We need restoration of assets that have been stolen, whether by identifying them and reclaiming them or asserting liability of the parties involved and simply claiming ownership to their assets or asserting a common right of offset of any government or taxpayer liabilities to them.
Ultimately, the federal budget is like a milk bucket with a hole in the bottom of the bucket. The folks who milk the cows are tired of hearing that the bucket is empty and there is not enough milk. They do not want to put more milk in the bucket until they understand where the milk has been going and they are persuaded that the hole has been repaired.
Now do you appreciate why the federal government is increasingly interested in deploying drones domestically and promoting gun control as they contemplate the fiscal cliff?
