**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
Ultimately, we must each decide what kind of leader we choose to be and what leaders we choose to follow. Will leadership be defined by force – by those who have the ability to kill with impunity? Or will it be defined according to contribution to civilization and economy — that is, by standards of excellence in intention, performance, and ethical conduct? Ultimately, we must each decide who is the leader.
Lest you consider that this is all a problem created by our leadership, examine the following story.
In 1999, I was at a revival for Christian women. One of the presidential candidates made a guest appearance. A friend of mine, an Afro-American minister, who used to work for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), leapt to her feet to applaud him with tremendous enthusiasm. I was surprised at her response given that she understood his success in attracting narco dollars – not to mention his and his colleague’s silence on Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance reports and the subsequent CIA admission of drug dealing by the government.
She looked at me and said, “He is going to be the winner.” So I said, “You mean, I am a loser because I tried to stop the corruption and he is a winner because he profited from it and helped it grow. So you will clap for him and not for me.” She replied, “That’s right. You are a loser. He is a winner”
Catherine Austin Fitts, Narco Dollars for Beginners
There is no more important question than what leaders we each choose in our daily lives with our actions, transactions and votes to support.
One of the most important books I have ever read to inform solutions to our current dilemma was The Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod. It describes Axelrod’s research to determine whether or not it is possible to build an economic model in which cooperation is more profitable than other forms of competition. The book’s promotional description says:
“The Evolution of Cooperation provides valuable insights into the age-old question of whether unforced cooperation is ever possible. Widely praised and much discussed, this classic book explores how cooperation can emerge in a world of self-seeking egoists — whether superpowers, businesses, or individuals — when there is no central authority to police their actions. The problem of cooperation is central to many different fields. Robert Axelrod recounts the famous computer tournaments in which the ‘cooperative’ program Tit for Tat recorded its stunning victories, explains its application to a broad spectrum of subjects, and suggests how readers can both apply cooperative principles to their own lives and teach cooperative principles to others.”
In a series of computer simulations, Axelrod discovered that a player adopting a “Tit for Tat” strategy emerged the winner. In a “Tit for Tat” strategy, a player always cooperated unless aggressed upon, at which point he or she would counter aggressively. However, if given the option to cooperate, the player would return to cooperating. The reason that the “tit for tat” player won over time was that he or she attracted the highest quality players as potential partners.
A necessary condition to the success of this practice of cooperation was transparency. The general society or market had to be able to clearly identify the various players. They needed to be able to understand the historical record of the players – those who cooperated productively and those who did not. In other words, the market needed information to be able to sort the ethical, competent players from the pack.
Which brings me to the point of writing this article. If those who engineer fraudulent inducement of debt] can be socially acceptable given the source of their wealth, then there are no solutions. Whether moral or legal – crime pays and crime that pays is crime that stays.
If the dirty players are consistently presented to the market as ethical, competent players, as “winners,” then the market cannot choose.
Ultimately, the enforcement that counts in our society is who is honored, who is accepted and who is shunned. This is why transparency of government money, credit and regulations that impact the general economy is essential.
Facing that fact while learning what is happening to the young people of America is part of facing the intimacy of the evil with which we are all struggling — as neighbors, family and friends continue to believe that it is socially acceptable to create financial wealth for themselves by poisoning our food system, originating debt bubbles, destroying our ecosystems and building a global surveillance and war machine.
As a professional investment advisor, I find it challenging to invest in an economy in which so many powerful people are financially dependent upon human failure. Worst among them are those who are financially vested in the failure of our young people, for that is ultimately the failure of the future itself.
Catherine Austin Fitts, The Financial Hit Man of Student Loans
