24 Cynthia McKinney: In 2007 I declared my independence from the national leadership that was trying to make me complicit in the war crimes and torture crimes against humanity and all of that. I said, “I’m out.” What I’m still grappling with is: How do I make that into an action item? How do I operationalize being out in every sense of the word? Probably at this point, the most import- ant sense – which is the most difficult sense – is that I’m out intellectually in my heart and my spirit and my soul, but I still have the financial entanglement. C. Austin Fitts: We’re going to talk about ‘how’ and that is the question we all have: How? For you to make enormous progress on the ‘how’ you need other people to be part of that. One thing to do is to sit down and read it. Read the Declaration of Independence, read the Bill of Rights, and read the Constitution. There are two things that I want to consider because they’ll come up in this discussion. One is the Appropriations Clause, “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular state- ment and account of the receipts and expen- ditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.” That means that you can’t spend money that Congress hasn’t appropriated, and you have to disclose. We know that they are in complete and utter violation of that. The second is the War Powers Clause, and that is from Article 1, “The Congress shall have the power to declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water.” So that means no wars unless Congress ap- proves. What you told me, which I didn’t real- ize, is that there is case law that says if Congress appropriates, that is deemed to be approval of the war powers. Cynthia McKinney: That’s right. That has been driven home time and time again through the courageous actions of Dennis Kucinich when he was in the Congress. C. Austin Fitts: Right, an amazing man. Cynthia McKinney: He went to court, I think against Iraq, and I know that he did it against Libya. The courts reaffirmed, when Congress ap- propriates the funds for the war, that can be construed as Congress’ authorization of a war. C. Austin Fitts: What that means is, if we have set up a structure between Congress and Treasury, that the Department of Defense can spend infinite amounts – because we know $11 trillion is missing. So if they appropriate, the war is approved. If they don’t appropriate, they just spend the money and do it anyway. Cynthia McKinney: And they don’t disclose. C. Austin Fitts: Right. Cynthia McKinney: It’s amazing to me. It’s outrageous that you don’t have 535 members of Congress jumping up and down because the Pentagon won’t reveal to whom it gave money in these ‘untrackable’ transactions. We know that as a transaction, somebody received some- thing. C. Austin Fitts: It is trackable. All the wires batch and go through the New York Fed and it’s trackable and there is a digital record. Cynthia McKinney: So it is trackable, and it’s not disclosed. So this is purposeful behavior to hide certain activities from the people of the US, in addition to the secret budget. For exam- ple the secret intelligence budget that is classi- fied, why should it be classified? The people of the US deserve to know what the government is doing. C. Austin Fitts: You have a machinery where a group of people in the deep state can basically print or borrow an infinite amount of money and spend it on a nondisclosed basis completely outside of the Constitution, and this allows them – literally – to run an entire planet by force. Cynthia McKinney: Absolutely, and to do anything else with the money. That is how you get whole pallets of US dollars sent to Iraq. It’s ridiculous. It’s outrageous, and I’ve been outraged for a very long time. C. Austin Fitts: What we’re saying is that the Appropriations Clause and the War Powers