Holistic Survival #18 – Interview with Catherine Austin Fitts

Jason Hartman talks with the former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner for George Bush I. Criminal activity in government and our financial system is exposed by the ever fascinating Catherine Austin Fitts who is president of Solari, Inc. on this episode of The Holistic Survival Show. Visit https://holisticsurvival.com/podcast-with-holistic-survival.php. As a former investment advisor, entrepreneur, White House official, investment banker and “permaculture” visionary; Catherine reveals a unique perspective on how to navigate the risks, opportunities and manipulations of the global financial system and political economy. Few people know more than Fitts regarding the money situation in Washington. Listen in and discover how complex financial schemes are constructed and cracked at the highest corporate and governmental levels.

Narrator: Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The Holistic Survival Show is your family’s insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently, how to understand threats, and how to create the ultimate action plan. Sudden change or worst case scenario, you’ll be ready. Welcome to Holistic Survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places, and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your host, Jason Hartman.

Jason Hartman: Good day, and welcome to another edition of the Holistic Survival Show where we talk about protecting the people, places, and profits you care about in these uncertain times. This is your host Jason Hartman and this is show number 18. Today what I’d like to do is play for you an interview that was previously recorded on one of my other shows a while back that I think is applicable and interesting, talking mainly about the profits or the financial side, just like we did recently with G. Edward Griffin, the author of The Creature From Jekyll Island which is about the Federal Reserve system and such. Well, on this show we’ll have a discussion with Katherine Autin Fitts. And you may or may not be familiar with Catherine Austin Fitts, but she runs a company called Solari and she has a very interesting background. She worked in the White House under the first George Bush. That would be number 41, Bush 41. And she was involved in housing and involved with the beginnings of the mortgage problem and could kind of see it happening back then. She has just a very, very interesting take on what is going on out there at all levels of government and finance, Wall Street, etcetera. And I just think that she’s really one to watch and one to notice. Because of any of the people that I listen to out there, she’s just got an interesting different kind of look at things. So why don’t we listen in to that show? And also, I’ve recently taped some other interviews for you that I think you’ll find very interesting where we’re gonna talk about televangelist crooks, that was interesting, also a show on how to disappear without changing your identity. There are reason that you may want to disappear from society for a short period of time. And I interviewed an author of a book teaching how to do that, kind of a crazy topic, but you may need it someday, who knows? And also, an interview talking about the underground economy, the grey market economy and the black market economy and what that’s all about. There’s a lot more to it than you might think. So we’ll have that coming up on future shows as well as more stuff about protecting the people and places, not just the profits that you care about in these uncertain times. Here is the interview with Catherine Austin Fitts.

Narrator: Welcome to Creating Wealth with Jason Hartman. During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven’t thought of before and a new slant on investing, fresh new approaches to America’s best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self-made multimillionaire who not only talks the talk but walks the walk. He’s been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it. And now here’s your host, Jason Hartman, with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Jason Hartman: This is Jason Hartman and welcome to Creating Wealth #96. I am here on my cell phone. I apologize for the poor quality. I am in Columbia, South Carolina. I spent several days in Charlotte and I’ve been looking at student housing opportunities here in Columbia today. We have some interesting opportunities coming up that we will tell you about in the future.

Before we get into the show, a couple of quick announcements. Be sure to visit www.BonusCommissions.com if you are in the business, a mortgage, real estate, or financial professional. Also, we have a couple of events coming up. The Investing with Your IRA seminar is on Tuesday. Then we have Creating Wealth coming up and I believe that is May 2. Go to www.JasonHartman.com/events for all the details about any of our events.

I just want to wish all of you a very happy Easter holiday and let’s go to our interview with Catherine Austin Fitts. I think you’ll find this interview to be quite fascinating. I used to stay up sometimes until 2:00 a.m. listening to her on Coast-to-Coast and I thought we have to get her as a guest on the Creating Wealth Show, and here she is. I think you’ll find the way she puts the pieces together very, very interesting when it comes to monetary policy, the Federal Reserve, Wall Street, and what you can do about it. This will be an interesting interview, so let’s listen in to Catherine Austin Fitts.

Jason Hartman: It is my pleasure to welcome Catherine Austin Fitts to the show. I have been waiting a long time to have her on the show for you. She is probably the most fascinating person in the financial world. I have been a big fan of her work for many, many months now, since I discovered her listening to Coast-to-Coast. Catherine is an investment advisor. She is founder and managing director of Solari Investment Advisory Services, LLC. She’s an entrepreneur, President of Hamilton Securities Group, an investment bank and financial software developer. Now I assume that’s in the past.

Also, she has been a government official, so she’s seen it from the underbelly as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner to the first Bush presidency. And also, an investment banker, managing director and member of the board of Wall Street firm, Dillon, Read, and Company, Inc. So Catherine, give us a little bit of your insight on the financial coup d’état that is occurring and I guess has been occurring for a few years now.

Catherine Austin Fitts: A financial coup d’état is the word I give to what’s been happening financially, not just in this country, but around the world since the mid-90’s. We’ve watched a concerted, very organized, planned effort to centralize political and economic control, and do it through the manipulation of sort of financial markets and financial vehicles.

So for example, in 1997, I gave a presentation to a group of very large pension funds in the United States and I showed them how we could reinvest in communities and reengineer government investment, and do so in a way that would really improve small business in this country and reposition communities for the kind of changes we’re going through now.

The president of the largest pension fund looked at me and he said, “You don’t understand. It’s too late. They’ve given up on the country. They’re moving all the money out starting in the fall.” And that fall was the beginning of fiscal 1998.

And in 1998 and over the next five years, over $4 trillion literally went missing from the Federal government. We had the pump and dump in the stock markets of the Telecom stocks and Enron; tremendous fraud, tremendous monies moved out, and that coincided with a movement by institutional investors of all sorts to shift money abroad. And so we had an exodus legally and illegally of I estimate about $10 trillion of capital.

Now, that was possible, Jason, because at the same time, we bubbled the economy with tremendous amounts of consumer, state, and local government debt, and federal debt. And that huge bubble created by this debt really facilitated this capital movement.

I’ll never forget when – I mean there I am, the former assistant secretary of housing, and I know that jobs are being moved abroad and that most middle class people can anticipate a decline or a significant decline in income. And yet, everywhere in my life, I’m watching people take on fantastic amounts of debt, not realizing that they’re facing over time a decline in their income and they can’t possibly afford this debt. We knew that in Washington and on Wall Street during the ‘90s. It was a topic of great discussion how we’re going to help the middle class survive globalization.

So literally, what we watched was the fraudulent inducement of America through this debt bubble, and it covered up the kinds of changes we needed to make if we were going to be productive as a society. So rather than face the music and take the actions we needed to in our lives to make sure that our financial security continued, instead we had a big consumption party and basically spent our savings. But this was engineered and it was engineered in a way that dramatically increased wealth in the top, say, 5% of society, at the cost of just wiping everything out.

One of the things that happened during that process is we’ve watched around the world capital move into a society, change things in a way that is pretty vicious, centralizing and literally raping. A great example is the rape of Russia during the 1990’s and you literally see criminality on a very broad scale through the financial system. So people literally wake up one morning and their pension funds and their bank accounts are just gone.

Jason Hartman: I call Wall Street the modern version of organized crime. It’s so ridiculous what’s going on, and you know, Catherine, it’s been hard for me to come to that conclusion and to bash Wall Street because at heart, I’m a free market capitalist.

Catherine Austin Fitts: But this is not free market capitalism.

Jason Hartman: No, it’s not. It’s not at all. It’s a winner-take-all consolidation of wealth.

Catherine Austin Fitts: No, it’s not a winner-take-all. It’s economic warfare. It’s using government and dirty tricks to rig profits and there’s no market, anything, involved. These people do not believe in markets.

Jason Hartman: What I mean when I say that is that so many people that I know that are on the right side of the political spectrum, they’ll argue, “You know, if these executives can make $100 million a year, they deserve it because that’s capitalism.” And it’s sort of a shallow discussion, I think, because there’s a lot more to it than that. Washington has just been hijacked by Wall Street it seems nowadays.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Remember, for 500 years, we’ve lived in what I call the Central Banking Warfare Model, so the Central Banks print money, jam computers, or different kinds of digital hacking. If you look at our ability with sophisticated satellite systems and sophisticated invisible weaponry, to interfere with people’s commercial or financial transactions or operations, it’s extraordinary. And if you add to that the different sort of possibilities that some of the reports we have on weather control or earthquake creation, if any of that is true, I think it’s fair to say that behind the scenes, we have incredible capacity to force our will.

Jason Hartman: That is scary and amazing to hear. It really is. I thought it was more done through the economic hit man. You know John Perkins book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, where he talks about how they would go into countries and force the U.S.’s will upon them.

Catherine Austin Fitts: I’ve written a couple of articles with other people and that describe a whole portfolio of economic warfare tools from the various kind of hit man operations. Remember in Perkins’ book, he says if the hit men didn’t get what they wanted, then the jackals would come in. That’s individual assassination. One of the ones that’s always the most effective is basically control files. Generally, you don’t get above a certain point in America or a variety of places without somebody having a file. Remember Jagger who was in dirty pictures? Okay, well, that’s a control file, and essentially, the reality is if I have a control file on a Congressman, it’s a lot cheaper to get him to do what I want than to give him money and political contributions or try and persuade him or anything else. So the cheapest lobbying around is to have a control file on that guy.

Jason Hartman: It makes no sense, like when you look at that equation with China buying our debt, or at least they were buying our debt until last month. Why are they doing that? You just sort of wonder – why are these other countries giving Americans such a high standard of living, selling goods cheap, artificially suppressing their currencies potentially, so that they can export to us, and then we give them worthless paper? I wouldn’t do that deal.

Catherine Austin Fitts: What we’ve created because remember, this is an empire. We’ve created a global taxation system through the balance sheet. So you’re used to seeing taxes go through the income statement. But if I sell you paper that goes down in value in terms of purchasing power, 5% a year, then that’s a taxation system that works through the balance sheet.

Jason Hartman: The hidden inflation tax, the most insidious form of all.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Right. So I’ve created a tax that can operate globally. I don’t need a legislature to pass a law or rule, and what I can do is I can simply tax everyone through their balance sheet.

Jason Hartman: In other words, by devaluing what they get from us for their exports. Is that what you’re saying?

Catherine Austin Fitts: If I just simply have them buy treasuries and the value of that treasury goes down, they keep buying it, whether it’s creditworthy or not, and it keeps going down in value. That’s a tax.

Jason Hartman: On the financial coup d’état, do you know where that money went? We’re talking $10 trillion or so here.

Catherine Austin Fitts: If you look at the $10 trillion that went out during the ‘90s and early 2000 – so let’s say there’s $10 trillion. My guess is that some of that was financed with fraudulent securities and also to engineer that and to engineer sort of stability of things, we saw the markets manipulate more and more. So for example, we saw the precious metals markets manipulated. The bailout is now up to $10.7 trillion for the bank bailout. That doesn’t include the stimulus package, which is only about $789 billion. So I think the $10.7 trillion is basically dealing with the fraudulent securities that were used in the ‘90s and the derivative positions that were used in the ‘90s.
And so it’s cleaning up the old fraud because my estimate of the mortgage fraud that started many decades ago, but has been building for many years, and this is collateral fraud on the mortgage securities and in the government and agency mortgage market. What you’re watching is all that fraud for the last two decades, so you have a bigger and bigger collateral hole and you have the hole created by the $10 trillion, and then you have the hole created by the derivatives market. Some of that is definitely cleanup. You’re cleaning up the fraud you used to steal the money used to engineer the coup d’état.

So now that you’ve got control, you can pay yourself back for the fraud. So I think part of it is that. Part of it has to be going to shift investment to other markets. There are some researchers who think part of it is just going to pay for the ongoing costs of government around the country, where they don’t have a political authorization to do that spending. Part of it is getting stolen. And then, clearly, part of it is going for black budget operations and, really, the building of private armies.

Jason Hartman: What about the building of private armies? I’ve heard you talk about that before.

Catherine Austin Fitts: What we did in 1980 is there was an executive order created that allowed government contractors to handle highly sensitive, classified projects.

Jason Hartman: Like the Blackwater group?

Catherine Austin Fitts: Like the Blackwater group and what we’ve seen ever since then is the growth of really government agencies being run and operated by defense contractors, if you look at all the domestic agencies. When I became Assistant Secretary of Housing, Lockheed Martin had $150 million a year contract to run all the systems at HUD. As a practical matter, day to day, HUD was really run by Lockheed Martin and their big sub was DynCorp. DynCorp is the No. 1 contractor at the State Department. DynCorp was the one who was implicated in the sex slave trafficking in Eastern Europe and all sorts of goings on.

So you basically created a vehicle where enormous amounts of money could get poured into private companies that then started to build, in essence, armies. This became very controversial during the Iraq War because the Iraq War is really a corporate war. So we’ve really been funding a lot of stuff and I suspect some of this money went to fund the creation of the infrastructure that the political process was not going to approve.

So you have a combination of things and part of the problem is more and more and more of the tax-supported or tax-credit financed operations are really outside of any financial controls or outside of the Constitution. If you look at the numbers, basically in the mid-‘90s, we moved way outside of the Constitution and have been staying there ever since and the problem is that these kinds of expenditures are like a cancer.

Jason Hartman: They grow and grow.

Catherine Austin Fitts: When you give money to a big guy, who has a gun turned at your head, as soon as he spends it, he’s going to want more. And then he’s going to hire his friend and then he needs more, and he’s going to hire another friend, and the next thing you know, he’s just hiring more and more friends and he’s just growing and growing and growing, and every year, he needs more money.

Jason Hartman: Yeah. You talk about Black Box Ponzi Schemes running inside of companies and I think you really already alluded to that, but since we’ve seen, of course, the Bernie Madoff – and by the way, on Madoff, I just wanted to mention something. You had talked – I heard you talking once about Madoff, how he could not have pulled that off, something that large, $50 billion, without air cover from someone else. Are there any more thoughts on that, by the way? I found that very fascinating.

Catherine Austin Fitts: What happened is I started a company after I left the Bush Administration, and became very successful in Washington, and one of the things we were doing was we were making a software tool called Community Wizard that would allow anyone who wanted to – it was going to be through the internet – dial in and identify the sources and uses of federal government expenditures and their accounting in their community. And I assure you if such a tool was available, much of this fraud couldn’t happen because the lies couldn’t hold, but they wouldn’t hold in a way that everybody could see how they could make money stopping them.

So the best internal financial control is citizens with clear pictures of where all the money is going. Anyway, Community Wizard was basically stolen. Well, the Department of Justice ordered it and a judge ordered it into the courts under court control, and it took us five years to get it back. The most powerful, valuable pieces had all been stolen. So basically, the government stole our software. And the pretext that they used to do this was accusing us of financial fraud, and I ended up dealing with government, while, for many, many years, we were the target of an investigation accusing us of financial fraud. They were never able to find any evidence of any wrongdoing because there never was any.

But I became a real expert in the games of financial fraud investigation and accusation, blah, blah, blah. So I learned a lot about the powers that the enforcement bureaucracy has to torture you when they know you’re innocent.

Now, what’s interesting is – and I did a long series of interviews on the Enron fraud, called “Enron: Anatomy of a Cover Up,” where I basically walked through sort of the ways that financial fraud is identified and investigated and the powers of the federal bureaucracy to do things about financial fraud. So to make a long story short, if you look at the Madoff situation and how large it was and how many years it went on, there’s no way that anything like that can occur without the involvement of a tremendous number of people in institutions.

Jason Hartman: Who’s doing his banking? How would they not know?

Catherine Austin Fitts: They would, and the reason they would is Wall Street is a full of a lot of very intelligent, ambitious, creative people, and they don’t let a dime go by. If there’s a dime going by and they’re not getting it, they’re after it. For example, I once was sitting with a webmaster of a website that had just put up a story about arms dealing illegally out of an Army base in Alabama, and basically, he was describing who was making money on this arms dealing. Well, I didn’t know if this story was true or not, but he put it up and I watched the web stats of who came in to the website in the first two hours, and it was the 20 top firms on Wall Street. They were just there.

Jason Hartman: Unbelievable.

Catherine Austin Fitts: They were even tracking this stuff. So if Bernie Madoff is doing what it is described that he did, there’s no way that his banks and different securities firms dealing with him don’t know. And there’s no way that he could do that without air cover from the intelligence agencies and a variety of regulatory people.

Jason Hartman: So why would they cooperate in all of that? Were they getting a cut in the deal? Were they just participating in the impoverishment of all the groups who invested in Madoff’s scheme?

Catherine Austin Fitts: There are many possibilities and I don’t know what the truth is. I really don’t. There are many, many possibilities. I suspect one of the problems is that you now have these shadow trading systems and that Madoff, his operations, were entwined in those, and the last thing Wall Street can afford is for anybody to look into any of that stuff.

Jason Hartman: Tell us about the shadow trading systems.

Catherine Austin Fitts: You have firms now trading and managing off exchange. You have bigger and bigger volumes that don’t go through mechanisms subject to the standard disclosure and regulatory practices, and it’s a black world, if you will, and I suspect Madoff’s operations were deeply entwined.

Now, it wouldn’t surprise me, and I think one of the important things to understand from the Madoff operation, is here you have people putting, they say, $50 billion into a box and they think their money is in something. They think it’s in certain kinds of securities, when, in fact, it’s not. For all we know, it was financing black budget operations and the intelligence agencies had just promised to pay a certain dollar X back. So in other words, intelligence agency A agrees they’re going to take the money and they promise you a certain kind of yield on it. So they have national security covering and blessing to do all of this. I mean I’m just making up a plot.

Now, the reality is if you look at every brokerage account in America, what you will usually find is that under the terms of that account, your broker is free to loan or use those securities without your permission. So you think the securities are there, but it’s not always clear to me that they are because we know of instances where we see tremendous naked short selling on securities and it’s been proved that 1,000 people think they each own a share, but it turns out there are 10,000 people who think they own a share, but there’s only a 1,000 shares.

Jason Hartman: Sounds like the mortgage pools when they sold off the loans ten different times, the same loan.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Right, so the reality is when a system is corrupt, it’s everything, it’s everybody. So if Madoff can happen, then I think it brings real questions about every aspect, including our brokerage accounts. For a long time, I researched whether or not we could get our own certificates and hold them, and I have many friends who have gotten their own certificates.

Jason Hartman: Their own stock certificates.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Their own stock certificates. Now, the law has been changed. You can’t get them.

Jason Hartman: So it’s all just electronic. It’s just like money. It’s all just fake.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Now we have a fiat stock market.

Jason Hartman: Unbelievable. I have something I do in all of my educational programs called the Ten Commandments of Successful Investing™ and number 3, which always seems to get the most interest and reaction, is thou shalt maintain control. And it just advises people, be a direct investor. If you’re going to invest in property, rather than doing it through a RIT or a tenant-in-common deal or some complex financial scheme…

Catherine Austin Fitts: Right, as long as you can protect yourself from the liability issues.

Jason Hartman: That’s what insurance and various asset protection vehicles are for. But the point is maintain control. If you’re going to invest in precious metals, take possession. It’s more expensive, but at least you know you really have it.

Catherine Austin Fitts: There are also some exceptions. There are different kinds of enterprises where I think it’s very important that a certain kind of person have strategic control and I don’t want to have it. For example, if I’m an investor in independent media, I can say, look, I can’t influence editorial policy. I have non-voting shares.

Jason Hartman: Sure, but at least you want to know that the accountants aren’t skimming all the money off the top and the board of directors and the CEO isn’t doing that.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Well, that’s why I think the reality is this comes down to not what it is, but who it is. If you do business with criminals, you’re going to get burned.

Jason Hartman: And you have to assume that pretty much everybody on Wall Street, to some degree or other, has a price at which they will sell out.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Well, I would say it this way. You need to assume in the world of jurisprudence, people are supposed to be innocent until they’re proven guilty. In the world of investment, someone is guilty until proven innocent. So unless you know that someone is on the up and up, and/or someone you really trust knows that they’re on the up and up, you have to assume that they’re not. And as a working premise, if it’s a large corporation or bank, I start off with the premise that they’re guilty because if you look at their business model, it’s profitable for them to engage in crime and they won’t be held accountable in most instances.

So as a practical, risk-reward, mathematical function, their model is designed so that crime pays, and that means I don’t want to do business with any of them on any condition. I have to make exceptions, but if it’s big, I try to stay as far away from it as I can.

Jason Hartman: I couldn’t agree more. You talk about permaculture and you talk about investing in your own community, and I just love this sustainability mantra. I think it is very, very fitting. The SEC and the various laws when it relates to securities and investing in the business next door that your neighbor owns, they make it very tough so the money’s all really channeled up to the big guys on Wall Street, right?

Catherine Austin Fitts: Well, think about this. Where did you grow up?

Jason Hartman: West Los Angeles.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Okay. So a long time ago, let’s take a county about 50 miles out of where you grew up, let’s say you had 100 little businesses in this county. Let’s say, just to make it simple, they had $1 million of revenues each, $100 million of revenue, and their net income on that $100 million of revenues would be what? Make a guess.

Jason Hartman: Let’s say their income is $20 million.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Okay, so they have $20 million in net income.

Jason Hartman: 20%.

Catherine Austin Fitts: On these 100 little businesses, what’s their financial equity worth?

Jason Hartman: Say they’re worth $100 million.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Okay, so they’re worth $100 million. So they’re trading at a multiple of five times their earnings. Okay, so I’m Wal-Mart and let’s say…I don’t know what Wal-Mart is trading at today, but let’s say I’m trading at a multiple of 20 times and if I get that $20 million of net income running through my income statement, then I can multiply it into $400 million.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, because of trading ratio, sure.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Because I have a liquid stock and I’ve channeled all the capital in your community and it has to go into a 401k and buy liquid stocks, right?

Jason Hartman: Uh huh, right.

Catherine Austin Fitts: So I can afford to spend an incredible amount of money to buy away your market share, right?

Jason Hartman: And that’s what Wal-Mart does. They go in and they lobby the city.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Right, and basically, what you’ve been watching in America is a war between the people who have a subsidized cost of capital. We have these large entities. They have a much lower cost of capital than the rest of us and we are getting slaughtered by them.

Now, what’s interesting is if you look at that model where we had 100 little businesses making $20 million, that $100 million of equity went to us because it was people who lived and worked in our community. And so our community was wealthy because when we shopped at each other’s stores, our equity went up.

Now we shop at Wal-Mart and that $400 million, with very rare exception, is not in the community. Right, and they’re very much related because remember a lot of the purchases running through a community and the fees running through a community are government. So you’ll come into a county, so let’s go back to this county of 100 little businesses. What’s happening is all the capital, all these small businesses are funding our 401ks or IRAs directly or indirectly for their employees, who then put that money in Wal-Mart, who then uses it to destroy the businesses.

So our capital is being shipped off to the big corporations. Then we pay our taxes and government, instead of spending that money with us, spends it for these big corporations. Because if you look at sort of the history of the last 20 years in the financial coup d’état, a lot of this is government rigging things for the big guys. So you look at our communities and, in fact, we’re getting drained. Drain No. 1 is our capital is headed to Wall Street and it’s not coming back or it’s going down in value.

Jason Hartman: Before you leave Drain No. 1, I just want to ask you a question about that.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Okay.

Jason Hartman: What do you say to those who would argue that the people living in the community get everything at a much lower price because of the efficiency of the large business model of say Wal-Mart?

Catherine Austin Fitts: I think in some instances that that is true, but if you look at technology as it should be integrated, technology should make the little guy smarter and better up against the big guy.

Jason Hartman: And it does.

Catherine Austin Fitts: And if you look at the history of the big guys winning in communities, in fact, it’s a history of dirty tricks. The reason the small guys’ cost of capital is so high is that every time somebody puts together a vehicle to arbitrage the different costs of capital, they’re shut down with dirty tricks. When I was shut down, when my company was targeted by the Feds, we were developing venture funds that would allow communities to do the equivalent of a mutual fund for the small business in that place in a way that it could ultimately be liquefied, so that in a 401k, just like I can buy a municipal bond mutual fund for bonds issued in my state, I could buy a fund that was issued to finance small business in my county or my state. Why hasn’t that happened? It hasn’t happened because of dirty tricks.

Jason Hartman: None of the big guys want to have it happen. They don’t want to see a vested interest in them.

Catherine Austin Fitts: There are extraordinary dirty tricks to stop people from doing that. So we’ve dirty-tricked that capital one side of the balance sheet. If you look at what goes on in the markets whenever small guys start to eat away at the big guys, there are all sorts of dirty tricks to stop them and take them over. Sometimes it’s done to buy them up. Sometimes they’re arranged to have all sorts of different kinds of problems. It’s a long laundry list.

But we’re seeing economic warfare between the big guys and the little guys, and unfortunately, what it means is the winner is not the economically productive guy. The winner is the guy who has guns.

Jason Hartman: Give out your website again and tell us about some of the resources that you offer. I know you have educational products and so forth.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Sure. My website is www.solari.com. We have a blog where we follow the financial markets and current events that relate to people’s money and financial risks on the blog. I publish something called the Solari Report, which is a bridge call we do privately with subscribers three times a month, and we post the forward schedule and there’s all sorts of descriptions there. We have several audio seminars, one called “Positioning Your Assets for Growth in Uncertain Times,” which gives an overview of our vision on where the opportunities are going to be and how to use those opportunities to protect yourself from a variety of different kinds of scenarios that I think more and more people are nervous about these days.

So it’s www.solari.com. You can sign up for updates where we keep you posted, and we try to do radio shows in state networks with lots of wonderful people, and you can find them and link to them through the blog.

Jason Hartman: Excellent. Well, Catherine Austin Fitts, thank you so much for joining us today and keep up all your good work. This is just so fascinating and we look forward to hearing from you again soon.

Catherine Austin Fitts: Okay.

Narrator: Thank you for joining us today for the Holistic Survival Show, protecting the people, places, and profits you care about in uncertain times. Be sure to listen to our Creating Wealth show which focuses on exploiting the financial and wealth creation opportunities in today’s economy. Learn more at www.JasonHartman.com or search Jason Hartman on ITunes. This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company, offering very general guidelines and information. Opinions of guests are their own and none of the content should be considered individual advice. If you require personalized advice, please consult an appropriate professional, information deemed reliable, but not guaranteed. (Top image: Flickr | DUCKofD3ATH)

The Holistic Survival Team

Transcribed by Ralph