Catherine Austin Fitts has been shedding light in the dark world of global economic elites for over three decades. Her credentials are impressive. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and her MBA from the Wharton School of Economics. In 1982, she was the driving force to use Public Utilities Bonds to revitalize the New York Subway system. In 1986 she became the first woman to be appointed as the Managing Director of Dillion, Read & Company. From 1988-1990, she served as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Bush Administration. After a conflict with HUD Director Jack Kemp, she left government service and founded Hamilton Securities which was an employee owned brokerage house. In 1993, Hamilton Securities won a HUD contract to manage its $500 billion investment portfolio. It was Fitts who devised a software program called Community Wizard to manage that portfolio.
In 1997 HUD canceled the contract claiming accounting errors and launched an investigation. Catherine Fitts maintained that her software program had revealed that some federally guaranteed mortgage securities were being fraudulently issued. While perhaps not directly connected, it is important to remember that this time period paralleled the rise of the subprime mortgage spree that collapsed in 2008. The investigation was closed in 2002 by investigators stating they found no evidence of wrongdoing by Fitts and her company. That 5 year investigation cost Fitts her company and a sizable portion of her personal income.
Undaunted, Catherine Fitts founded Solari, an investment consulting firm, in 2002, and still runs it as of 2020.
In a 2004 article for World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues, Catherine Fitts wrote this: “evidence that a very large portion of the nation’s wealth is being illegally diverted since several decades into, secret, unaccountable channels and programmes with unspecified purposes, including covert operations and subversions abroad and clandestine military R&D at home. Public institutions have been infiltrated and taken over by shadowy groups in the service of powerful private and vested interests, often at the expense of the common good.” I don’t know about you, but Edward Snowden came to my mind when I read about this.
Along with Mark Skidmore, a Michigan State University economist, Fitts issued a report in 2017 that outlined $21 trillion in unauthorized spending by both HUD and the Department of Defense, over a span of 17 years. Let that amount sink in. Twenty-one trillion dollars from unsuspecting American citizens.
In a lengthy interview with mit deutshen Untertiteln on You Tube, Fitts provides a provocative look at the economics of a planetary lockdown that I think, given her credentials, deserves widespread consideration. The interview is in English.
In that interview, Fitts discusses that while the U.S. dollar is the reserve currency, Central Bankers and the International Monetary Fund want a new system that isn’t quite ready for prime time. To exterminate the old and bring in a new transaction system that is all digital, it would essentially require a health care crisis so large that it allows people to fear an invisible enemy. So much so, as to allow them to forgo their constitutional rights and turn to government for salvation. COVID- 19, she postulates, allows the transition from a democratic process to a technocrat totalitarianism. COVID-19 is allowing the consolidation of power to the top 1 percent that controls the wealth of the world.
Small businesses on the main streets of America are deemed unessential in this crisis by the government and are forced to close. Amazon and other corporations increase their market share exponentially as all those smaller businesses are dependent on credit systems to maintain their livelihoods that are no longer available.
In this economic war, Fitts maintains that tech billionaires have increased their wealth by 27 percent in the last year alone. She also points out that Amazon, owned by Jeff Bezos, wasn’t profitable until they shared their data mining operations with the government. For those of you who might not know, Bezos also owns The Washington Post, and is the nation’s 25th largest landowner. The largest owner of farmland in the United States is Bill Gates of Microsoft. It was Gates who penned an op-ed article in Business Insider in 2017 that defined how the world was unprepared for a worldwide pandemic. It was Gates who donated $100 million to China in early February of 2020. I am not making any accusations, I am only stating documented facts.
In the YouTube video, Fitts asserts there is a correlation between the social protests of last summer that destroyed large urban areas and the location of Fed Banks amid what is known as Opportunity Zones. The designation of these zones allow federal money to be allocated to investors to rebuild in economically challenged areas as well as lucrative tax breaks for the investors. Wealthy investors can now buy prime real estate at steeply discounted prices from bankrupt businesses, many of which were minority owners, prior to the pandemic lockdown. Catherine Austin Fitts has a strong reputation on urban renewal projects and I think her suggestions that this is another facet in the concentration of global wealth by a totalitarian elite is worth considering.
Totalitarianism can’t exist in a society that demands transparency from its government. My father slogged through Europe in World War II to defend what this republic stood for. I owe it to him, and all the others like him, to articulate what I see occurring now.
Stop the Steal is beginning to have a whole new meaning.
Valerie Maez writes from Lewis, Colo.
