Rule One of Philanthropy: "Don't Piss off The CIA"

Catherine Austin Fitts:

Several years ago, I went to California to do a speaking tour and to raise money to help me through the most difficult part of eleven years of litigation resulting from my efforts to prevent corruption in the federal finances. The speaking tour was successful. However, after spending many lunches and dinners entertaining numerous wealthy people, I came back empty handed. As one honest San Francisco Bay Area heiress said, “I would never give you money. I don’t want to piss off the CIA.”

Sound-bite explanations of who Catherine Fitts is, and what she is talking about would be inadequate. Suffice it to say that she was a Managing Director of Dillon Reid, and served as Assistant Head of HUD under Bush the Elder and also under Clinton. She became expert at tracing public, private and illegal cash flows in and out of urban neighborhoods, and in the process got close to information that would not shed a good light on our government - not the Republicans, not Democrats - but the structure they collectively manage, particularly the elements that are run with trillions of dollars that are outside any audit trail. Drug money comes into Catherine's account, as does financial fraud, as does high Wall Street finance, as do governmental goon squads. Catherine, as a move in a larger chess game, put it all on the net, on servers on foreign soil. If you have time and the stomach for it you can read all about it, laid out like a deposition. Of interest to me is that the funders Catherine describes above, going along to get along for fear of reprisal, are liberal or progressive.  Catherine is staunchly Christian and conservative, a defender not of what the free market has become, but what it was supposed to have been.  She is a conspiracy theorist in that she suggests that if you are not part of a conspiracy for the bad, you might as well start one for the good.  America is a free country, under the rule of law.  What am I leaving out?

If a true political return on investment would drive transparency in government finance, open government operations to public scrutiny, and hold politicians of both parties accountable to the law, and to the citizenry, I wonder where we would start? Who talks about these issues? Can anyone point me to a few good links?

Comments

[Gerry]

So the CIA is telling the wealthy who not to donate money to? That is alarming just on the face of it.

[Phil]

Not exactly. Follow the links and spend a little time.

[Gerry]

I have read some of the links, and it is still a bit confusing to me. Ok, maybe it wasn't directly communicated, but that is the message transmitted, no?

[Gerry]

You still think government is the proper location for public action? What are we to conclude from these stories?

[Phil]

As long as we don't know what we are talking about, as I don't, we can say whatever we please. Where it gets risky is when a person actually can trace a few of the overt and covert flows of money, wealth, power, and violence from the streets of the inner city, to Wall Street, to DC, overseas and back and around. I will admit that reading Catherine would chill a person's enthusiasm for government solutions. Sometimes I am glad to be out of the loop.

[Gerry]

It seems that her central point is unavoidable. Criminal enterprise gets high multiple returns and both crowds out legitimate enterprise, and also adds parasitic transaction costs all over the place. There is so much of this kind of money flowing around that the economy is distorted, and she puts it, is addicted to all this hot money.

I'm not sure that satirizing all of this could even be effective, the perpetrators of all this have wrapped themselves in legitimate cover. I'm not sure how even satire can be used as a lever against this.

[nicanor]

hi i need the assistance of cia philanthropist
who enough cash to assist me
link me back

[Phil]

Some say CIA Philanthropist has come and gone. Others say he will never come.

[bUM fREE]

I'm not sure that satirizing all of this could even be effective, the perpetrators of all this have wrapped themselves in legitimate cover. I'm not sure how even satire can be used as a lever against this.

I think all you are left with is the image of something tentacled and horrible dining on human organs. Though I'm certainly no expert at this.

[bUM fREE]

And neither is this guy, probably. But he made him a movie:

LordOfWar: For the next six months I stopped running guns. I went legitimate.

[on phone with a client] This is an untapped market. I am talking over XX million cubic meters of timber first year alone. Over XX exploitable species. Between you and me? Oil. XX thousand barrels a month...

CIA (monitoring his line): He must be lying. He is talking.

LordOfWar: Listen, gas reserves off Ivory Coast that OPEC doesn't know about...

CIA: Phone numbers are all checked out. It's all legal.

LordOfWar: No wonder the CIA was confused. Thank God, there are still legal ways to exploit developing countries.

But the only problem with an honest buck is that they are so hard to make. The margins are too low. Too many people doing it.

Still. I promised my wife.

[Phil]

By satirize I mean celebrate. We Fools have long celebrated Vice and Folly. We call that client loyalty or fealty. It is what our Leaders have come to expect. It is what they get 24/7. Why would we lever against the hand that will either feed or beat us? I may live in a Dumpster, but that's a whole lot better than a Dungeon where they lock you up without a trial and throw away the key. I have nothing bad to say about those in charge. Life is precious to me. As that Roman Emperor said about the toilet tax, "Pecunia non olet." Money has no smell, and I could sure use some.

[Michael Maranda]

Is the satire now a satire of the position in which we find ourselves?

[Phil]

It is a positive approach to what some would consider a negative situation. It is an Appreciative Inquiry into the intolerable.