“She was a murderess, but on top of that she has also murdered herself. For one who commits such a crime destroys his own soul. The murder has already passed sentence on himself. If someone has committed a crime and is caught, he suffers judicial punishment. If he has done it secretly, without moral consciousness of it, and remains undiscovered, the punishment can nevertheless be visited upon him, as our case shows. It comes out in the end. Sometimes it seems as if even animals and plants “know” it.” ~ Carl Jung, “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”
“As long as I can get government subsidies, what do I care if people have education or jobs?” ~ Dick Ravitch, Chairman, AFL- CIO Housing Trust, Developer of HUD and Mitchell Lama Housing in New York City
By Catherine Austin Fitts
The G-7 establishment is uneasy about the lethal combination of flatlining productivity and populist anger. With the debt growth model slowing, governments can no longer subsidize our unproductive behavior, whether by corporations, governments, not-for-profits and foundations, universities, military or the general population.
We have known for many years this time was coming. The leadership shifted significant amounts of assets out of existing legal structures (the financial coup d’etat) in anticipation of this time. So the day of reckoning is here. We have to convert from the non-sustainable to the sustainable. The retirees whom the system owes are at risk from those who engineered the assets out of the system in the financial coup and related financial fraud and corruption.
We are seeing a growing number of pronouncements and proposed solutions from members of the establishment. Unfortunately, many of these are coming from the members of the establishment whose bank accounts are particularly ripe with the profits of corruption and financial coup d’etat. In addition to the possibility of the Clintons returning to the White House, recent examples just this past week include:
- Alan Greenspan: Fox Business: Greenspan: Western World Headed for a State of Disaster
- Robert Rubin: New York Times: How to Help Former Inmates Thrive
- Marie-Josee Kravis: WSJ: What’s Killing Jobs and Stalling the Economy
For those of you who do not understand the background on the government secrecy, corrupt privatizations and financial fraud, including the housing bubble, that filled the personal bank accounts of Mssrs. Greenspan and Rubin as well as the Kravis family, I recommend the following links:
- Dillon, Read & the Aristocracy of Stock Profits
- The Myth of the Rule of Law: How the Money Works – The Destruction of Hamilton Securities Group
- Financial Coup d’Etat
- Sir James Goldsmith 1994 Globalization Warning
- The Black Budget: What Does it Mean to the US Federal Budget, the Economy and You
One contribution to real solutions to our current predicament can be found in Robert Axelrod’s classic work The Evolution of Cooperation.
Axelrod describes the essential need for transparency in a healthy economy that supports peace and prosperity. With sufficient transparency, the business community and general population will provide essential enforcement. They will shun dirty players and seek out the ethical and competent. With sufficient transparency, the marketplace can protect fundamental productivity and seeks peaceful cooperation.
Unfortunately, G-7 governments did not bring enforcement to bear after the financial coup d’etat. Instead, they simply asked for their cut of the profits to fund more government regulations on the innocent. With insufficient transparency, including the circumstances described by Edward Snowden, the market has also not enforced. So what we are left with is a general population that has lost faith in the establishment, in the government and in the financial system, and a robber baron class dependent on ever-greater amounts of dirty money and force.
The economic consequence of that loss of faith has been papered over by more government contracts, purchases, grants and liquidity to keep the economy floating along, financed by sovereign government debt and debt purchases by central banks. However, the “debt growth model’ is reaching its limits. Which means we cannot buy each other off with more money. Instead, we have to return our lives to fundamental productivity. We have to change our behavior. For an entire society that has gone in the opposite direction for decades (whether stealing or getting paid off with subsidies) that is a tall order. We are going to have to change, we are going to have to do it together and we are going to have to do it just as new technology is unleashing unprecedented changes throughout the work place and society.
As a former member of the establishment, and since 1998 a member in good standing of the populist horde, I would like to make one suggestion to my former colleagues.
Crime that pays is crime that stays. We, the members of the general population, know this. We are not stupid. If you continue to run for President or rub our faces in the policy pronouncements of the people who got rich on the corruption and continue to enjoy their rich winnings, we will appreciate that you think us stupid. Indeed, some of you have admitted as much. George H. W. Bush was reported as saying the other day, “The American people can’t handle the truth.” This is called “adding insult to injury.”
OK, you got the money. OK, you have no intention of giving it back. OK, you are confident you got away with the crime and the statute of limitations has passed. Then have the good sense to shut up and go away. Do not pretend to offer solutions. Your bank account and immunity from prosecution is a reminder that our situation may be hopeless. Hopelessness is the basis of more deflation and depopulation. Some of us are beginning to wonder if that is your goal. Look at the hard, cold facts – life expectancy is falling in America.
Have the good sense to let the members of the establishment who did not engineer or profit richly from the corruption – yes, there are many highly competent members who fit this description – lead us in a manner that allows the coming explosive value creation to support a society of which we can all be proud.
So, to the editors of Fox, New York Times and the WSJ, please shift your editorial pages to the suggestions of leadership who can contribute to real solutions. Make way for people we can trust because they are, in fact, trustworthy. Stop asking us to listen to and admire people who got and stayed rich on financial fraud, unless, of course, that is the pathway you wish for all of us to embrace.
If the elitist message to us is that crime pays – that crime is the only way to survive in the American system – we know what to do. So if you think we are dealing with deflationary forces now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.