Gold9472
03-20-2005, 05:37 PM
WILL THE REAL ECONOMIC HIT MEN PLEASE STAND UP?
Meditations on 9/11 Truth
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/images/EconHitMen.jpg
by Catherine Austin Fitts
© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.
[Many people have asked me what I thought about the recently popularized book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and I have held my tongue because I just didn't have time to do the brilliant deconstruction of the book's "limited hangout" approach performed here by Catherine Austin Fitts. In this article the former Assistant Secretary of Housing and past managing director of Dillon Read brings us face to face with the horrors for which we all share a measure of responsibility. Those who would have us work through and affirm the current system don't want these horrors to be seen, because any recognition of them leads on to other realities that are darker still. Fitts also makes clear the point that I was making in Seattle which has been so widely misrepresented.
There are no real avenues left for 911 activism in the traditional sense of the word. The election is over. All three 9/11 suits (Hilton, Mariani and the Saudi case) have been dismissed or morphed as I said they would be. Congress has shown and will show no courage. The 9/11 Commission (totally compromised) has closed its doors. The Justice Department (part of the 9/11 plot) will do nothing. The courts are compromised and the mainstream media (also part of the crime) has moved on. NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer has yet to do anything with the 9/11 material he has received, remaining quiet in order to protect his bid for the NY state house.
But there are new channels of real accountability that can change the world, if 911 activists can persuade activist communities to understand the realities of economic warfare and to begin to promote marketplace strategies. Real headway can be made if we withdraw our deposits, purchases, investments and attention from media, banks, companies and investors complicit in 911 and war profiteering and cover up. These marketplace strategies can dovetail with other innovative tactics, building financial constituencies to support the rule of law. What would Elliot Spitzer do if millions of New Yorkers threatened to withdraw all of their money from the large New York Federal Reserve banks unless he moved forward with an investigation? What would happen if hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers cancelled their subscriptions to the New York Times in protest over the lies of 911?
There is still a great deal to learn from 9/11 that can proactively help individuals to read the real map of the world and make a difference in their own lives. This involves a fundamental change of approach: the old, futile course of action asks citizens to go hat in hand to government and corporate interests to make them change (an impossibility), while the new approach says that if the citizens themselves change enough within, that change can shift markets while there is still time to make some difference in the outcome for individual lives. In other words, one approach tries to convince us that the right path is to get someone else (with no interest in doing so) to save us and the other says that we must accept the responsibility for saving ourselves and gather and exercise the real power we have and have not yet used.
Which makes more sense to you? - MCR]
Economic Hit Men
A "limited hangout" is a partial confession, a mea culpa, if you will, that leaves the essence of a crime or covert reality hidden. Because it includes some small part of the truth, the limited hangout is irresistibly attractive to dissidents and political critics whose thirst for such truth makes them jump at the dangled scraps. Once the system's watchdogs are busy chewing on the limited hangout, the guilty players can go about their illegal business for a new round of unaccountable, semi-secret mayhem.1
If you want to see an excellent limited hang out at work, pick up a copy of the John Perkins' bestselling Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. In his limited hangout confession, Perkins describes his career from 1971 to 1981 as a highly paid professional who helped defraud Third World countries by helping syndicates make uneconomic loans as a means to facilitate the eventual takeover of those economies by elite and corporate interests.
Greg Palast, Anne Williamson and other first-rate investigative journalists have brilliantly documented instances of such economic warfare against sovereign governments and national economies - where nations are taken over with their own money, in much the same way as a corporate raider takes over a company through leveraged buy-out. I have documented a similar process in US communities and mortgage markets. In writing about this process, I use the concept of an "economic tapeworm" to explain the negative return on investment financial system that operates globally and relies on economic and military warfare to finance and subsidize itself.2
The phenomenon that Perkins writes about is well known. But his personal "how to" account of an economic hit pertains to an apparently cold case, far in the financial past. While this story is very instructive for those who have not yet dealt with professional fraudsters or been targeted by economic warfare3 (whether in the Third World or in the First World nations) it is even more instructive for its omissions - and for its timing as an apologia intended, we are led to believe, somehow to assuage guilt for harm done: it relates to events occurring twenty-five or thirty years ago, involving players who are, for the most part, dead or retired from the business of economic warfare and companies that have morphed into later incarnations.
In the process of providing a colorful account of a 1970s whodunit (complete with low tech strategies devoid of the dazzling technology toolkit that is now an essential part of the economic hit man's weaponry of economic warfare), Perkins delivers to readers the "big lie": he reveals the secret that there is no greater conspiracy. This is simply globalization run amok, he would have us believe. Somehow, this particular conspiracy theory seems charmingly credible as part of a "confession." Perkins admits to what is known and then uses the credibility created by his "limited hangout" to further obscure the reality of who's who in the real governance of global investment and risk management. We are to presume that the investment networks in and around the Harvard Corporation, the City of London, the Vatican and investment managers and bankers for the proceeds of transnational organized crime are simply good-hearted fellows who let things get out of hand.
Nowhere does Perkins introduce the notion that cartels in a "New World Order" (the phrase coined and promoted by George H. W. Bush) use covert manipulation of the global financial system to centralize and concentrate economic and political power. Assassinations by "jackals" aside, Perkins barely hints that for fifty years the US military-industrial complex has been developing and testing powerful black budget technology, satellite and other invisible weaponry and surveillance technology and insider-trading tools behind the veil of national security secrets. Indeed, it was the need for a means of financing black budget operations and weaponry outside the view and control of Congress and the appropriations process - rather than the mere pursuit of corporate profits - that provided the political air cover for Perkins to do what he did as his covert counterparts marketed drugs in American and Third World communities alike.
It's an old rule of economics. Sources and uses need to be in one integrated financial statement to understand an enterprise. In Perkins' world, we are never quite clear who got what cash and in what amounts when all was said and done. Which means someone gets to keep the money and remain socially acceptable - and we remain clueless as to who was really running things two decades ago.
Economic Warfare in the 21st Century
The power of Perkins' book as a limited hangout can be understood by observing the sales, support and kudos in mainstream media it has achieved while the leading books on 9/114, arguably the most significant economic hit in US history,5 have had a much harder time garnering attention. The message seems to be that economic warfare is something that the corporate mainstream will acknowledge, but only so long as it is low tech, long ago, and far away.
Understanding and facing the economic warfare responsible for slowly poisoning us and our families and wiping out our retirement savings is a complex and very scary undertaking in comparison to Perkins' concerned confessions. Perhaps we prefer to disassociate from our present circumstances, live in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance, and focus on the study of yesteryear.
Complex and scary as it may seem, the growing body of evidence makes a compelling case that officials of the US government, its contractors and the military abetted the 9/11 attacks. With the help and complicity of the US Congress and corporate media, they are engaged in the most profitable war and enforcement profiteering in history. This is a terrifying picture to contemplate.
Look how tough it has been for New Yorkers, the constituency most adversely affected by the 9/11 tragedy. A recent Zogby poll indicates that 49.3 percent of residents of New York City hold the opinion that officials "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act." Yet, despite this widespread conviction and the mounting evidence that sustains it, no serious support has developed for the November 2004 citizens' complaint requesting that Elliot Spitzer, the Attorney General of New York, finally open a criminal investigation into the tragedy.
Although fifteen NYC legislators have also called for such an inquiry, there has as yet been no effort locally to hold the New York Senate and Congressional delegations accountable for failing to hold the executive branch responsible for its failure to perform, or for its potential complicity. While the New York firemen booing Hillary Clinton off the stage at the 911 Concert was a start, the sentiment expressed has not translated into political action or market action. How many New Yorkers have cut off their subscriptions to, ads in or investments in the stock of the New York Times when the Times helped to facilitate the 9/11 cover-up by failing to ask probative questions or hold officials accountable?
The problem the average New Yorker has is the same that we all face - our complicity is deep. We have an entire economy and culture financially dependent upon too many things that harm people and the environment. This is not new. Only the possibility that the war machine is blowing up thousands of middle class Americans in American office buildings in broad daylight is new.
The fact that the Bushes and the Clintons are on the same team - and have been since their alleged Iran-Contra partnership in an airport operation in Mena, Arkansas involving the transshipment of cocaine destined for the streets of America - is not something that most Americans have yet incorporated into our political equation.
The fact that current financial and commodity markets "clear" not through the operation of changes in price generated by the legitimate free market expression of supply and demand but rather by blowing up American office buildings and the people and legal documents in them is not something that most Americans saving for retirement or financing a home have incorporated as risks in developing an investment strategy.
We cannot fathom that economic warfare is now conducted using high tech software weaponry to silently invade the privacy of our banking and purchasing relationships, our comings and goings, and the details of our work and home lives. Nor have we incorporated this realization into our decisions about who we share our lives with and what we say and do behind closed doors.
The illumination of the truth of 9/11, however, could change most Americans' paradigms and transactions in powerful ways. It could certainly fuel an increase in demand for precious metals, alternative energy and local self-sufficiency.
End Part I
Meditations on 9/11 Truth
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/images/EconHitMen.jpg
by Catherine Austin Fitts
© Copyright 2005, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. May be reprinted, distributed or posted on an Internet web site for non-profit purposes only.
[Many people have asked me what I thought about the recently popularized book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and I have held my tongue because I just didn't have time to do the brilliant deconstruction of the book's "limited hangout" approach performed here by Catherine Austin Fitts. In this article the former Assistant Secretary of Housing and past managing director of Dillon Read brings us face to face with the horrors for which we all share a measure of responsibility. Those who would have us work through and affirm the current system don't want these horrors to be seen, because any recognition of them leads on to other realities that are darker still. Fitts also makes clear the point that I was making in Seattle which has been so widely misrepresented.
There are no real avenues left for 911 activism in the traditional sense of the word. The election is over. All three 9/11 suits (Hilton, Mariani and the Saudi case) have been dismissed or morphed as I said they would be. Congress has shown and will show no courage. The 9/11 Commission (totally compromised) has closed its doors. The Justice Department (part of the 9/11 plot) will do nothing. The courts are compromised and the mainstream media (also part of the crime) has moved on. NY Attorney General Elliot Spitzer has yet to do anything with the 9/11 material he has received, remaining quiet in order to protect his bid for the NY state house.
But there are new channels of real accountability that can change the world, if 911 activists can persuade activist communities to understand the realities of economic warfare and to begin to promote marketplace strategies. Real headway can be made if we withdraw our deposits, purchases, investments and attention from media, banks, companies and investors complicit in 911 and war profiteering and cover up. These marketplace strategies can dovetail with other innovative tactics, building financial constituencies to support the rule of law. What would Elliot Spitzer do if millions of New Yorkers threatened to withdraw all of their money from the large New York Federal Reserve banks unless he moved forward with an investigation? What would happen if hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers cancelled their subscriptions to the New York Times in protest over the lies of 911?
There is still a great deal to learn from 9/11 that can proactively help individuals to read the real map of the world and make a difference in their own lives. This involves a fundamental change of approach: the old, futile course of action asks citizens to go hat in hand to government and corporate interests to make them change (an impossibility), while the new approach says that if the citizens themselves change enough within, that change can shift markets while there is still time to make some difference in the outcome for individual lives. In other words, one approach tries to convince us that the right path is to get someone else (with no interest in doing so) to save us and the other says that we must accept the responsibility for saving ourselves and gather and exercise the real power we have and have not yet used.
Which makes more sense to you? - MCR]
Economic Hit Men
A "limited hangout" is a partial confession, a mea culpa, if you will, that leaves the essence of a crime or covert reality hidden. Because it includes some small part of the truth, the limited hangout is irresistibly attractive to dissidents and political critics whose thirst for such truth makes them jump at the dangled scraps. Once the system's watchdogs are busy chewing on the limited hangout, the guilty players can go about their illegal business for a new round of unaccountable, semi-secret mayhem.1
If you want to see an excellent limited hang out at work, pick up a copy of the John Perkins' bestselling Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. In his limited hangout confession, Perkins describes his career from 1971 to 1981 as a highly paid professional who helped defraud Third World countries by helping syndicates make uneconomic loans as a means to facilitate the eventual takeover of those economies by elite and corporate interests.
Greg Palast, Anne Williamson and other first-rate investigative journalists have brilliantly documented instances of such economic warfare against sovereign governments and national economies - where nations are taken over with their own money, in much the same way as a corporate raider takes over a company through leveraged buy-out. I have documented a similar process in US communities and mortgage markets. In writing about this process, I use the concept of an "economic tapeworm" to explain the negative return on investment financial system that operates globally and relies on economic and military warfare to finance and subsidize itself.2
The phenomenon that Perkins writes about is well known. But his personal "how to" account of an economic hit pertains to an apparently cold case, far in the financial past. While this story is very instructive for those who have not yet dealt with professional fraudsters or been targeted by economic warfare3 (whether in the Third World or in the First World nations) it is even more instructive for its omissions - and for its timing as an apologia intended, we are led to believe, somehow to assuage guilt for harm done: it relates to events occurring twenty-five or thirty years ago, involving players who are, for the most part, dead or retired from the business of economic warfare and companies that have morphed into later incarnations.
In the process of providing a colorful account of a 1970s whodunit (complete with low tech strategies devoid of the dazzling technology toolkit that is now an essential part of the economic hit man's weaponry of economic warfare), Perkins delivers to readers the "big lie": he reveals the secret that there is no greater conspiracy. This is simply globalization run amok, he would have us believe. Somehow, this particular conspiracy theory seems charmingly credible as part of a "confession." Perkins admits to what is known and then uses the credibility created by his "limited hangout" to further obscure the reality of who's who in the real governance of global investment and risk management. We are to presume that the investment networks in and around the Harvard Corporation, the City of London, the Vatican and investment managers and bankers for the proceeds of transnational organized crime are simply good-hearted fellows who let things get out of hand.
Nowhere does Perkins introduce the notion that cartels in a "New World Order" (the phrase coined and promoted by George H. W. Bush) use covert manipulation of the global financial system to centralize and concentrate economic and political power. Assassinations by "jackals" aside, Perkins barely hints that for fifty years the US military-industrial complex has been developing and testing powerful black budget technology, satellite and other invisible weaponry and surveillance technology and insider-trading tools behind the veil of national security secrets. Indeed, it was the need for a means of financing black budget operations and weaponry outside the view and control of Congress and the appropriations process - rather than the mere pursuit of corporate profits - that provided the political air cover for Perkins to do what he did as his covert counterparts marketed drugs in American and Third World communities alike.
It's an old rule of economics. Sources and uses need to be in one integrated financial statement to understand an enterprise. In Perkins' world, we are never quite clear who got what cash and in what amounts when all was said and done. Which means someone gets to keep the money and remain socially acceptable - and we remain clueless as to who was really running things two decades ago.
Economic Warfare in the 21st Century
The power of Perkins' book as a limited hangout can be understood by observing the sales, support and kudos in mainstream media it has achieved while the leading books on 9/114, arguably the most significant economic hit in US history,5 have had a much harder time garnering attention. The message seems to be that economic warfare is something that the corporate mainstream will acknowledge, but only so long as it is low tech, long ago, and far away.
Understanding and facing the economic warfare responsible for slowly poisoning us and our families and wiping out our retirement savings is a complex and very scary undertaking in comparison to Perkins' concerned confessions. Perhaps we prefer to disassociate from our present circumstances, live in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance, and focus on the study of yesteryear.
Complex and scary as it may seem, the growing body of evidence makes a compelling case that officials of the US government, its contractors and the military abetted the 9/11 attacks. With the help and complicity of the US Congress and corporate media, they are engaged in the most profitable war and enforcement profiteering in history. This is a terrifying picture to contemplate.
Look how tough it has been for New Yorkers, the constituency most adversely affected by the 9/11 tragedy. A recent Zogby poll indicates that 49.3 percent of residents of New York City hold the opinion that officials "knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act." Yet, despite this widespread conviction and the mounting evidence that sustains it, no serious support has developed for the November 2004 citizens' complaint requesting that Elliot Spitzer, the Attorney General of New York, finally open a criminal investigation into the tragedy.
Although fifteen NYC legislators have also called for such an inquiry, there has as yet been no effort locally to hold the New York Senate and Congressional delegations accountable for failing to hold the executive branch responsible for its failure to perform, or for its potential complicity. While the New York firemen booing Hillary Clinton off the stage at the 911 Concert was a start, the sentiment expressed has not translated into political action or market action. How many New Yorkers have cut off their subscriptions to, ads in or investments in the stock of the New York Times when the Times helped to facilitate the 9/11 cover-up by failing to ask probative questions or hold officials accountable?
The problem the average New Yorker has is the same that we all face - our complicity is deep. We have an entire economy and culture financially dependent upon too many things that harm people and the environment. This is not new. Only the possibility that the war machine is blowing up thousands of middle class Americans in American office buildings in broad daylight is new.
The fact that the Bushes and the Clintons are on the same team - and have been since their alleged Iran-Contra partnership in an airport operation in Mena, Arkansas involving the transshipment of cocaine destined for the streets of America - is not something that most Americans have yet incorporated into our political equation.
The fact that current financial and commodity markets "clear" not through the operation of changes in price generated by the legitimate free market expression of supply and demand but rather by blowing up American office buildings and the people and legal documents in them is not something that most Americans saving for retirement or financing a home have incorporated as risks in developing an investment strategy.
We cannot fathom that economic warfare is now conducted using high tech software weaponry to silently invade the privacy of our banking and purchasing relationships, our comings and goings, and the details of our work and home lives. Nor have we incorporated this realization into our decisions about who we share our lives with and what we say and do behind closed doors.
The illumination of the truth of 9/11, however, could change most Americans' paradigms and transactions in powerful ways. It could certainly fuel an increase in demand for precious metals, alternative energy and local self-sufficiency.
End Part I