34 C. Austin Fitts: They are also being used to finance the war on us. Cynthia McKinney: That’s right, but I also wanted to mention that the legislation to finance the wars in 2007 passed with the exact number of votes required: – 218 in the House. Had I been there, I would have voted ‘no’ but I was targeted by Rahm Emanuel. My absence is what allowed us to move forward into this terrible predicament that we’re now in. Imagine the conversation if the Constitution were actually enforced and what kind of world it would be. I question it in my own way: had I been there in the Congress in 2007 and voted “No,” and the 218 went the other way, what would our conversation be now? C. Austin Fitts: Maybe the $27 trillion in bail- outs might not have happened, or they wouldn’t have happened in the way that they happened. Cynthia McKinney: If I would have been there, I would have at least sought a vote on the transparency and the audit-ability of those organizations that receive the funding. I think that merely one sentence would have changed the entire outcome. C. Austin Fitts: I totally agree. One thing I think we are trying to express is how much the war and violence question is connected to the money question. Cynthia McKinney: Yes. C. Austin Fitts: There was one other point that I wanted to bring up, and that is that I have allies who say, “Let’s all stop paying taxes.” If you do that, then you fail to finance the social safety net for a large number of people, and you hiccup cash flows for a large number of good businesses. Now that they’ve stolen $40 trillion, they’re in the catbird seat. If you implode the system, they get to pick up every- thing cheap. Cynthia McKinney: That is exactly what hap- pened in Russia. C. Austin Fitts: Exactly. They can harvest an implosion. Cynthia McKinney: Absolutely. C. Austin Fitts: What I’ve always said is, “No, we’re not going to have a tax revolt; we’re going to have a tax enforcement. We’re going to put our taxes in escrow, and we’re going to require enforcement of the financial management laws – we’ll use control of the cash to enforce the rule of law.” Cynthia McKinney: What happens when that 5-10% – the slugs – are in the Congress and in the executive branch and in the judicial branch? C. Austin Fitts: If you escrow the taxes, it depends on how you do that. The logical way is to do state and county escrows. For example, and this is just one way to do it, you put the money in the escrow. You send the check for the military and send the check for the debt. You say, “With respect to all the do- mestic expenditures, until you’re in compliance with the laws for financial management, we are sending you $100 million and you are sending us $100 million. So don’t send us the $100 million. We’ll take the $100 million here, and l do a common law ‘right of offset’, and we’ll take care of our own obligations here. Thank you very much.” Cynthia McKinney: We need some of these peace organizations to do that kind of analysis and to tell us what the amount is. I’m ready and I’m in. C. Austin Fitts: That’s why place-based finan- cial disclosure is so important. What you will see as soon as you study financial disclosure is that we are paying the government $150 an hour to do something that we can do for $25 an hour plus healthcare. If, instead of them collecting all the money and sending it back to us, we would do a ‘right of offset’ within the escrow, the opportunities are enormous. Now it’s going to take all of us to take responsibility. There can be no making money on helping them bring narcotics into our neighborhoods. That has to stop. Transpar- ency can address a lot of these issues. So I will write much about that, and all of us – you with #UNRIG and us with Solari and many other people – are going to start now. We’re having a conversation about ‘how.’ Cynthia McKinney: Yes.