Catherine Austin Fitts on BlogTalkRadio

I will be interviewing Catherine Austin Fitts at 2 pm CST tomorrow (Saturday, April 12) on BlogTalkRadio.  If you wish, you can call in at (646) 200-4945. If you miss the show, you can listen later to the archive. Catherine's site is Solari.com. Here is her bio.  See her Narco Dollars for Beginners.  See also,  Will the Real Economic Hitmen Please Stand Up.  And see, more recently, her Slow Burn. These will give you a pretty good idea of her clear eyed view of the world we have.

Catherine is the one who introduced me to Ponerology: The Study of Evil.  When we talk about a satirist or moral philosopher affecting a moral cure of those in power, it seems like a joke, doesn't it? But evil like any other disease spreads from those infected to those who who come into contact with the infected person. As the Sicilians say, "The fish rots from the head down," as John Ashcroft may have felt in discussing torture in the White House. Of course there is nothing we can do about it. We are complicit but innocent. No one can blame us, because we are like children, docile, unawares, trusting, and intimidated by those set above us. We are just glad that the big people do what they must to keep us safe, even as we fear for our own lives in a society increasingly stripped of civil liberties.  If Father is a tryrant who feeds us, protects us, and beats us, best to say nothing, lest we or those we love turn up dead.  The Unsaid in America is obtrusive.  Catherine breaks that terrible silence.

Catherine, a veteran of the first Bush administration, characterizes herself as a conservative. What she seeks to conserve are sustainable, morally healthy, economically vibrant local communities. As against that world she sees ranged the forces of centralizing power (on Wall Street and in DC), as well as the covert flows of money from criminal enterprises, and governmental agencies that operate without public oversight or accountability.  Her analysis of the ugly state of current affairs, a perversion, as she sees it, of true free market principles, is not so different from that of Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine. Both see our society and our market as having been captured by centralizing powers bent on creating their own Green Zones, a gated and armed paradise for the few,  amidst a society for the rest of us that runs rapidly to dissolution. Both see us as caught up in an economic war of the few against the rest, disguised as a free market, but requiring the increased use of surveillance, brute force and covert force to keep the many down, as the few collude in secret to their mutual advantage. Where Catherine differs from Naomi and most progressives is in believing that we can outwit those who have outwitted us. We can rebuild our country from the grassroots up. The tools, in Catherine's view, are those of markets set right, as well as religious faith.  Distributed networks like those of blogs and BlogTalkRadio allow us to come together, in a web without a head. Were there a head, it would rest uneasy on its neck.  But a distributed network proliferates uncontrollably and unpredictably in all directions, ever-evolving.

Catherine and I have talked face to face and via email and blogs with great intensity for several years. She has a mind unlike any I have encountered, a mind both deep and wide. She is highly analytical, but also intuitive. Her vision is panoramic. Her religious faith allows her to view the horrors of contemporary life without lose of hope or humor.  As a former insider,  she does not simply unmask perps in high places and their modus operandi. She rallies us to build our own alternative communities, on sound business and ethical principles, locally. She calls that vision of local investment of time, love, energy, attention and money a Solari.

Generally, I think it is fair to say, Catherine considers screened investments, social enterprises, double bottom line investments, and philanthropy as modes of adaption to the intolerable, as ways we console ourselves that we are good, even as we by our votes and investment choices and choice of employment, and through our silences, enable what we fear and despise.  She might say that all too often philanthropy is a cover for and enabler of abusive power.  I will be asking her more about how the Solari idea works in practice. I will also be challenging her to consider how generosity (caritas in the Christian tradition) and her own kind of local social investment might conspire to achieve the world we want. Might there be a joining of forces among progressives, conservatives, social investors, philanthropists, activists, secular idealists, and people of faith, to rebuild our communities and to restore our free society?

By the way, this coming BlogTalkRadio show came about when Catherine wrote to tell me that my interpretation of her work here is flawed and incomplete.  I asked if she would be willing to correct me on the show.  So, soon, she can speak for herself and set me straight.

Catherine is a truly remarkable person. If you are fee to call in, please do.

Comments

[JJ Commoner]

I won't be able to listen tomorrow, but may I presume it will be archived as a link to an mp3 ?

[JJ Commoner]

Oops .. I slid right past sentence #3.

Sorry for being a sloppy pest.

[Phil]

Ah, shoot, I was going to call you and see if you could listen in to ask a few questions. If you happen back this way before then, do you have a question you would like me to ask of Catherine on your behalf?

[O Lucky Man]

"When were you last profoundly surprised? By what, or whom?"

[Phil]

Thanks, lucky man. Want to call in and ask it yourself?

[O Lucky Man]

Nah, better not. Been losing friends lately.

[Phil]

You might one or two. In your desperate straits what have you got to lose?

[O Lucky Man]

No can do, chief. Too weepy at the moment.

--

"What is the relationship between shame and mourning?

(It occurs to me that shame may entail a mourning for what one thought one was.)

Must we feel shame, a mourning of our fallen selves, before we can move on?

Can this ever be sponsored on a national level?"

[Phil]

Well, in that case, I understand.

[Phil]

There is also a chat function, if that it easier for one in mourning.

[Gerry]

Hey, I'm there and I can't figure out how to call in and get on the air with you and Catherine.

[Phil]

Sorry you couldn't figure it out. The call in number is always going to be (646) 200-4945. Were you able to access the audio?

[Gerry]

Yes, I called that number and it put me on a line with the show audio and nothing else. How do you know when calls come in? Who puts people through?

I'm interested in trying it out myself and am wondering what the experience is for someone creating a show. Did you just call in on a standard phone line?

[Gerry]

Were you watching the show chat during? I was trying to contact you that way too.

[Phil]

I should have been watching chat, but forgot to do it. If you got on the line, I should have seen that on the screen. I probably failed to do that. I did look at it, but maybe did not keep my eye on it all the time. When the call comes in, the phone number shows up on the host's "switchboard." The host then clicks on the call and it comes on.
There are about 5 lines that can be opened and closed. So, you could do a 5 way conference call, or panel.

[Gerry]

Interesting, so it is a webapp then? I am interested in trying out similar, and a colleague may be interested in doing extensions to the OS phone server (asterisk). The cool thing about going to digital channels is you can get higher voice quality almost for free. You need to find a way to make your voice louder on the line too.

[phil]

Yes, a webapp.

[Gerry]

What I remember wanting to ask is about whether/how transparency can work against the corruption. Or maybe not transparency on its own, I suppose it has to always be backed up by collective action. The current generation of tools, blogs, wikis and community sites and even the newer stuff makes that possible, but the tools start to get in the way as much as they help unless things are more coordinated (story ref: Tower of Babel).

I know we can do better, we can design tools and systems that give people the power to organize and coordinate action in any context. And of course the systems are only half of it, it is the use practices that actually constitute the site of group action.

We intend to design tools that are "person centric", that respect our sovereignty in choosing our participation (not only our specific actions, but also as related to data retained by the systems and how it is collected and exposed. Transparency does not mean there is no privacy, it is more about frictionless access to public data wherever it is.

[Phil]

Good goals, Gerry. The call for transparency seems to apply to us who have little of value to hide. Why would those who handle state secrets and corporate secrets be transparent? In fact, they are more likely to call for tighter and tighter controls. Some of this gets back to whistle blowers, inside sources for investigative reporters, wikileaks, etc. I don't see things trending towards that kind of unmasking, quite the contrary. In general it seems the lid is screwed down tighter than ever before.

[Gerry]

I'm not planning on forcing transparency on anyone, I'm not really much into force these days. Transparency is a commitment from organizations and institution who intend to build trust with their communities. It creates something that is extremely valuable. The more or us who start to work this way, to only choose to work with people, organizations and institutions who also choose to work this way, the more is apparent about the rest.

Whether or not they adopt transparency, their motives are transparent just the same.

[Phil]

Does government get transparent too? If so, we have a long way to go. Transparency is what we have learned to live with on the net. We are on record in unguarded moments. But money and power move effortlessly in the safe places outside of public scrutiny. There are two sets of rules, two sets of norms, and your acceptance or rejection of them makes no difference to those who call the shots. Your opinion was not asked, you have no favors to trade. You make no campaign contributions. You can't unmask them because you have access to no inside information. What does have leverage, I think, is when those who have mastered an insiders game, go transparent. I would put Matrullo, Catherine Austin Fitts, and my friend the Happy Tutor in that set. For such improprieties, the powers that be have decreed the Dumpster, neither inside nor outside their domain, but on the margins, and awaiting the impending Truck.

[Gerry]

What's different is that now it is possible for the dumpster dwellers to coordinate better. Transparency happens to everyone, even the insiders in the end.

You should check out Brunner's "Shockwave Rider". A fiction losely based on "Future Shock" and from around the same time. All the information pollution (the accumulated refuse of transparency and random losses of hard drives with sensitive data) sort of becomes alive by the end of it.