Catherine Austin Fitts exposes a hidden financial coup d'état, linking the Cyprus crisis to a $3 billion explosion and $4 trillion in unaccounted defense funds funding a breakaway civilization. She argues that central banks target nations like Venezuela and Iran to enforce a global virtual currency, eliminating individual control. Fitts contrasts this police-state trajectory with a decentralized future, urging listeners to detox from media, invest in the real economy, and assume personal responsibility to resist a leadership unwilling to trust the public's capacity for freedom. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Cyprus Financial War00:09:42
Hi, this is Dark Journalist.
I have a very special interview for you today with Catherine Austin Fitz, the founder of the Solari Report.
Catherine's background in finance at top Wall Street firm Dylan Reed Company, and in government as the assistant housing secretary under Bush I, give her a unique perspective into the hidden financial and political worlds that we rarely get to see.
Now, because of her financial expertise, you may expect to just hear an overview on the economy, but you'll also hear information on topics like.
The black budget, financial coup d'etat, corporate media manipulation, entrainment technology, and what Catherine calls the breakaway civilization.
Here it is, part one of my interview with the fascinating Catherine Austin Fitz.
Mind control is a process in which a person, group, or enterprise systematically uses unethical or illegal methods to persuade or force one or more people to conform to the wishes of the manipulators, often to the detriment of and without the conscious knowledge of the person being manipulated.
Now, Catherine, I'd like to start off with the recent economic crisis in Cyprus and what you think may be going on behind the scenes there.
Well, to me, Cyprus, it's a much longer story, but if you look at what's going on in Cyprus, you have a war going on that's being played out through financial means.
And so you have extraordinary gas deposits in the Mediterranean, and you have those deposits very important to Europe's.
Long term energy costs.
And we have the Russians who have almost a monopoly position on supplying oil and gas into the European Union.
And then we have the Americans very interested because, you know, of course, the dollar's on the oil standard and we control the trade in oil.
And so the Russians and the Americans have been battling for over control of the gas deposits.
And in fact, Cyprus's problem started not with running the offshore tax havens, Cyprus's real problem started.
When in 2011, the US Navy confiscated explosives that the Russians were shipping into Syria, they left them on the docks in Cyprus.
They, quote unquote, exploded in the sun.
It was too hot.
And that caused about $3 billion of damage.
And so the Russians made a loan to Cyprus and things went from there.
So, you know, to me, the most important story is the battle over the gas deposits and that sort of strategic position.
But the second thing is now that.
Cyprus has had the spiral down.
What I find to be fascinating, and we still don't have the explanation, why would the IMF and the European Commission go along with touching or abrogating the EU insurance for a $100,000 euro deposit?
I mean, I can't imagine them suggesting to do that in Cyprus because then every insured deposit throughout Italy, Spain, Portugal is going to ask the question are we next?
And of course, the offshore deposits have to ask that question.
And if you've got a rush of the offshore deposits out of Spain and Italy, then you're talking about the euro having extraordinary problems.
I think it's a pretty major event, what's happening in Cyprus.
I think, you know, I hate to put you on the spot as far as predictions go, but would you think that this is the kind of thing that's going to spread to some of those other troubled countries in the eurozone?
Well, I think the euro has a real problem, and that is, and it's a similar problem that the United States has, but the eurozone has it much worse.
And that is, you've got very strong economies and very weak economies, and you're trying to hold them together in the same currency, and they don't belong in the same currency.
If you want to understand what's happening in the European Union, you want to go back and read the book by Sir James Goldsmith, The Trap, or watch some of his interviews when he tried to stop the European Union, tried to stop the World Trade Organization, and he said, This is madness.
This will be.
This kind of centralization of control will be very destructive of the economy.
You see the same thing here in the United States.
So, we see parts of the country which are very strong because of technology or oil and gas.
And meantime, the currency is debasing.
Interestingly enough, we're probably debasing at about the same rate that Cyprus was proposing taxing their deposits.
And so, it's the same tax is happening here, but it's much more sneaky.
And so, if you look at that, the areas that are having a strong economy can afford to take the burn.
In other words, they're being debased, but their incomes are keeping up or better in general.
And then you have other parts of the country that are not.
It's not dissimilar to what's happening in Europe.
The big difference is the European Union is not the military leader of the world.
And so what we have here in the United States is a situation where I can go to China, and because I control the satellites, I control the sea lanes, I have the power of force to get people to take the dollar in exchange for.
Manufactured goods or cheap natural resources.
So I'm basically printing money, which is just coming off of a digital Xerox machine, and I'm getting valuable natural resources.
That's a very good trade.
The European Union doesn't have that kind of military cloud, and so doesn't have that kind of ability to print paper the way that we do.
And I think if you look at the nature of their currency arrangement and the problem of strong and weak economies, If they hold the euro together, which I think they can, it's going to be unbelievably destructive for the fundamental economy.
And that's the problem throughout the developed world.
The more you centralize control and the more lawless the centralization is, the more the trust breaks down, the weaker the economy gets.
So we're watching a process where we're centralizing wealth, but we're doing it in a way that's destroying wealth.
And the question is how do you get out of that downward spiral?
Because if you keep that downward spiral going, You know, you get to a very ugly place and there are ways out.
The question is, you know, it's my old favorite Tina Turner question.
We can do this nice or rough.
You know, and I think you and I would like to be nice, but, you know, so far we haven't, you know, the nice team hasn't won yet.
I wanted to ask you in relation to Cyprus that, you know, something happened with the IMF chief, Christine Lagarde, and her apartment was raided and they were trying to tie her to some.
Bribery allegations involving Sarkozy.
Is that related development, do you think?
Is there some association between these things?
I assume it is.
You know, it's too.
What has happened, and this is one of the challenges we have as a society, we've reached a point where our political battles and our battles over policy have become violent.
So whether it's, you know, accusing each other and using enforcement bureaucracies.
To accuse each other of criminal liabilities or literally assassinating each other, you're talking about a level of competition which has gotten very, very dangerous.
And the question is, how do you get people to stay in these positions, people of ability and talent?
Because at some point, it's just such a dangerous, destructive process, and you're not free to say no.
So if you're the head of the IMF and you're saying no to some constituent who wants.
For example, the Cyprus bailout to go a certain way is going to result in your entrapment or your criminal investigation and prosecution.
You know, what do you do?
So, we're in a position where government officials literally can't take a position.
They have to do what the party who's the most violent says.
So, to the extent you have a group of people running around the world who have the ability to kill with impunity, you know, they get their way.
And so, you know, we're kind of in a mob environment.
And I think.
What we're seeing is it's becoming much more and more apparent to the average person that, you know, whether you're president or head of the IMF, your hands are tied in a remarkable number of ways.
And the kind of, you know, the kind of lobbying you're dealing with is very forceful.
Yeah.
You know, it's interesting.
So, you know, instead of having physical warfare, we're playing war out through the financial world.
Global Mob Environment00:14:55
And legal systems in a way that's very draining.
You've heard me tell the story when I was in the Bush administration.
One of the assistant secretaries came in to me and he said, This is ridiculous.
You know, it's like we're out in the ocean in a life raft that's a rubber life raft and we're going at each other with razor blades.
Right.
Yeah.
Think of it.
Think of the United States government as a legacy system and we've pushed all the liabilities into the legacy system and then we've sucked all the assets out.
And so, if you're running the legacy system, you have $100 trillion of unfunded liabilities.
You don't have the assets you need to provide that.
If you tell people the truth, they'll get very upset with you and vote you out of office or shoot you.
And so, what can you do?
It's a very increasingly negative system.
And I'll give you a little example in numbers.
Three years ago, when Kickstarter started.
Yeah.
The National Endowments of Arts gave out, I think, $160 to $170 million.
In 2012, three years later, the National Endowment of Arts was down to $140 million plus, and Kickstarter handed out $120 million more.
Wow.
So 2.2 million donors donated, I think it's $267 million.
And so we now have, in three years, a startup handing out almost double.
The amount of grants to artists as the National Endowment of the Arts.
So we have the legacy system, which is dying on the vine and in a very ugly way.
And then we have this new thing that's starting, that's going very, very fast.
And you have this bifurcation in the economy.
Maybe there's hope after all.
It's kind of interesting that way.
Well, here's the there's certainly plenty of hope.
There's no reason economically for us to have poverty.
There's no fundamental economic reason for there to be any poverty in the world.
That's a political choice.
And so, you know, globalization, for hundreds of years, this country has been preaching democracy and financing our democracy by running around the world killing and stealing.
And with globalization means that model has to change.
So the question is, you know, are we going to keep killing and stealing from each other, or are we going to find a way to grow up?
And I think the leadership has decided look, you can't trust people to grow up.
So let's have, you know, a very highly centralized, top down control using very invasive technology.
You know, they don't want to run any risk, they want complete control.
And although I'm just guessing, you know, who knows what's in their minds, but they're saying, hey, you know, we can control very centrally.
So let's do it.
Now, I don't think that's going to work in the end.
You know, but to me, it's a very negative vision.
And it's a vision.
In which you have to do one of two things.
Well, to me, you have to do one of two things.
If you're going to change to a global model that's win win, you have to start, you have to do a radical re engineering of the economy and introduce new technology in a way that really ends poverty and gets us into alignment with our environment.
Conceptually, it's relatively easy to do, but people are ornery.
So culturally, it's an enormous change.
But if you want to control centrally, then you can't get the benefits of markets.
And freedom is very, very productive for the economy.
So if you're going to have a police state, you're going to lock down the small business and the little guy economy.
Then you're going to have to depopulate, whether you like it or not, whether you do it through warfare or a planned program.
But if you look at the math, that's how it comes out.
So I would rather not do the centralization depopulate, but that's the road that they're on.
You talk about this.
It seems like it, yeah.
You've mentioned before that there was this period in the 90s.
Where you said Newt Gingrich was running around saying, let's give a laptop to every American, and that they were actually, on some level, maybe that elite or government group were planning on investing in America, but somewhere along the line, the plan got changed and they just decided to move all the money out of the country.
Well, it was really funny because, you know, it was the one bright, shining moment where we all said when NAFTA got passed and they were planning on, you know, coming, they passed the Uruguay round, they were going to implement it.
And we thought, well, you know, we can jump the curve on this.
We can, you know, if you look at the domestic economy, the government investment is very negative.
So the way I say it is, government investment has a negative return on investment.
So we came up with this whole vision here's how we could re engineer the economy and dramatically improve the return on government investment.
We're going to re engineer a government investment and bring a new technology in a way that dramatically improves the learning metabolism of the society.
You know, whether business or civic or culture.
And, you know, we're going to do much more of what I would call a Singapore thing.
So we're going to get everybody highly literate.
We're going to, you know, really sort of jump the curve on technology and be able to compete globally.
And, but that vision was a very sort of democratic free market vision.
And I think the leadership said, no, to succeed globally, we need to have our largest corporations be global powerhouses.
So we need to centralize.
And organize government investment to make them the most powerful globally and win that way.
And the other thing is, during 1995, when we couldn't get a budget resolution, I don't know if you remember the 1995 budget squabbles, what I was told there was a decision, you know, that's it, we give up trying to get a financially reasonable budget basis because the political process that was working is to promise people more Medicare, promise them more Social Security.
Promise them more benefits and they'll vote for you.
And, you know, sort of the problem in Washington is all the different constituencies were really only interested in themselves and getting more for themselves and not taking responsibility for the whole.
So I think I once told the story of in 1997, I gave a presentation to a group of the top pension investors.
And we presented our plan for re engineering government investment in a way which would really.
Dramatically improve the equity in the economy in a way that the pension funds could make a lot of money.
And it basically came down to trading places.
So imagine for your neighborhood, you know, a venture fund or a mutual fund or a REIT.
So, you know, just pretend neighborhoods had their own little stock market.
So we were allowing the securitization of small business in a way that could flow capital to small business if it was competitive in the marketplace.
And anyway, so the pensions got very excited about it.
And the head of the largest pension fund in the country said to me, You don't understand.
It's too late.
They've given up on the country.
They've decided to move all the money out starting in the fall.
And that was the fall of fiscal, it was fall of 97.
So it was the beginning of fiscal 1998.
And that's when $4 trillion started to go missing from the federal government.
We pumped and dumped the stock market, and huge amounts of money got shifted.
So I think there was a shift.
When he said that to me, I thought he meant we're shifting the money that can be shifted legally.
And what I didn't understand is he, no, he meant something much bigger than that.
But I think there was a feeling, and part of it was if you look at the exchange stable, do you know what the exchange stabilization fund is?
No.
The exchange stabilization is the mother of all slush funds.
Okay.
It is a fund run by the New York Fed as agent for the Secretary of the Treasury.
So they don't report through the bureaucracy, they report directly to the Secretary.
It's controlled by the New York Fed and presumably implemented by the member banks.
So, you know, JP Morgan, Chase, Goldman Sachs.
And it has wide authority to intervene in the currency and financial markets.
Okay.
So if you read Christopher Simpson's book, Blowback, he talks about at the end of World War II, the money we had seized from the Nazis, that they had seized from the Holocaust victims, was seized and brought back into the Exchange Stabilization Fund and used to finance the sort of rigging of the Italian elections at the request of the Vatican.
Interesting.
So he describes Dull as sitting at.
Sullivan and Cromwell organizing all of this using the exchange stabilization fund.
So, what I believe is if you listen to people talking about putting on gold shorts to lower the gold price and manage the gold market, a lot of that activity, my bet, is coming through the exchange stabilization fund because you're talking about broad ability to intervene in the financial markets backed up by the federal, sort of an infinite amount of federal credit.
Anyway, so I think what happened was in the 1995.
Budget negotiations, Ruben, you know, to avoid hitting the debt limit, went into the exchange stabilization fund and started pulling on the reserves for government expenses.
And I think that scared the entire infrastructure, what I call the black budget infrastructure, to death.
So the whole covert side of the house said, oh my God, they're, you know, they're raiding our kitty.
We've got to get our money out.
So, yeah, that's my theory.
Very interesting.
What, you know, if you were trying to explain to an average person about this $4 trillion missing out of the federal budget between 1998 and 2001, I think, what's the.
2002.
2002.
So, where was the money missing from?
Was it missing from the Pentagon?
Is that the idea?
Well, we never did a comprehensive survey of all the audited financial statements.
Uh huh.
So let me just give you the backstory and come up to the Fortran.
Yeah.
In 1989, I went to Washington to become FHA commissioner.
Right.
And so I went in to the operation day one and I got a hold of the budget officer and I said, I want to see our financial statements.
And he said, we don't have any.
So I said, okay, well, we have a budget.
And he said, yes.
So I said, give me the budget with all the budget justifications.
The budget justification is all the detail.
And the budget justification for the FHA at that time, we were issuing about $50 to $100 billion a year mortgage insurance and had about $320 billion in force.
So, or at least it was on the books.
Right.
I should say that we had a lot more reports.
And the budget justifications went about halfway to the ceiling or two thirds of the way to the ceiling.
And I spent all weekend reading them and I called him back in the next day and I said, look, I've read these four times on the speed reader.
Nowhere in here does it say if we're generating a profit or a loss, which is important because according to the laws related to the scope of my authorities, I'm responsible to make sure that we are breaking even or generating a positive cash flow by law.
And he said, Well, that's not in the budget.
And I said, Well, where is that information?
He said, The accountants have it and they report to a different assistant sector.
You're not allowed to talk to them.
So I spent a great deal of money and time lobbying the White House and all the parties.
It took me two months.
My deputies were unbelievably helpful.
They've been big donors.
So we put full court press.
We got the accountants moved over to report to us so they could talk to us.
And the first thing we discovered was in the single family fund, we were losing $11 million a day.
Wow.
So I said to them, okay, we have 80 field offices in 10 regions.
Where are we losing the money?
They said, we don't know.
We don't have those numbers.
And I said, well, we mail checks.
So we have zip codes.
This is an emergency.
I want a cash flow estimation of sources and uses of cash by region and field office.
Well, it took another two months to get it.
And what we discovered was we were losing more than 100% in two regions and making a positive cash flow in the other regions.
So, the region with the biggest losses, this is 1989.
Can you guess who had the biggest losses?
They were in Texas.
Okay.
So, you had the biggest regions with losses.
This is 1989, Texas.
And then the region that had Colorado, well, Arkansas was in the Texas region.
So, you had the Bushes and the Clintons in the same region.
Oh, right, right, right.
Basically, you had huge Duran contra fraud.
This is all part of.
Okay.
I had one deal doer for the Office of Melanes.
Naval intelligence used to say that, you know, who was that?
Colonel North.
Ollie North used to say that HUD was the candy store of covert revenues.
He actually told the truth for once.
I called the head of the Texas region and I said, Sam, how much do you think you lost that last year?
And he said, Oh, I think we broke even.
I said, No, you lost over a billion dollars.
Wow.
Unbelievable.
And I said, I'm sending down the sources and uses of cash flow for you and your team to look at it.
And I flew down the next day, and the next day they'd gone off into a smoke filled room and figured out how to stop the bleed completely.
But they needed the numbers.
Okay, so then let me fast forward to the missing money.
Starting in fiscal 1998, as a result of those activities, I was part of a group of people who were instrumental in passing a law requiring audited financial statements for the government so that people like the head of Region 6 would know he was losing a billion dollars.
Right.
The Missing Trillions00:09:52
Anyway, A process began in 1995 whereby the government started to report why it wasn't compliant.
So, as far as I know to this day, they've never complied.
So, every year you give the government a statement that says, Here's how my money worked last year, it's your taxes.
The government refuses to give you back the same thing.
You cannot get a financial statement that is all the U.S. government.
So, in fiscal 1995, a process began where the government started to report that they couldn't comply and here's why.
And one of the things they started to do was talk about their undocumentable adjustments.
Now, two things happened.
You have to remember, we're looking at both credit and expenditures.
So they're spending money, but they're also issuing credit, whether it's FDIC, deposit insurance, or FHA guarantees, or GMA guarantees, or VA guarantees, or whatever.
So the first thing that happened to me was a mortgage banker came to see me and he said, You don't understand, there's a terrible, terrible mistake in these financials.
And I said, What do you mean?
And he said, My family's been in the mortgage banking business for three generations.
And our core competency is we keep record of all FHA mortgages issued and then how they become securities, whether it's Ginny May or Fannie Mae or Freddie or private mortgage securitization.
And we have a complete database.
And he pushed this huge stack of papers towards me and he said, Here, I brought you a copy of my database.
And he said, There's been a terrible mistake, he said, because if you look at the 1995 financials, if you look at the number of outstanding mortgage insurance enforced for FHA, Not only is it wrong, but the true number is many multiples of this.
Now, what he was saying was that the U.S. government, so the Department of Justice, the U.S. Treasury, the New York Fed, the Federal Reserve, was engaged in massive securities fraud in the mortgage market.
Wow.
And this was 1995.
I thought the guy was nuts.
I was like, no, that's okay.
You keep your handcase.
Thank you very much.
Well, you know, it took many years for me to ascertain that it was absolutely correct that the extent of the securities fraud.
Was that, you know, was that great?
Anyway, but so that's story number one.
So we know that the credit that was being issued was significantly above the amount reported, and so trillions of dollars was going missing through the credit programs.
That's number one.
Number two, what started to happen in 1998 is when the federal government, as the federal government was reporting, why they couldn't come up with audited financial statements in what's called the 21 covered agencies.
You would get them reporting that the reason was that they had undocumentable adjustments.
Okay.
Okay.
Now, an undocumentable adjustment is let's say if you have $5,000 in your checking account and your bank sends you a statement and says, oh, you have $2,000.
And you say, well, I'm going to balance it by just writing $3,000, undocumentable adjustment, and dropping my balance.
Okay.
That's an undocumentable adjustment.
And who oversees that, do you think?
I mean, who would be the final?
The agency, it depends on the structure of the agency.
Essentially, you have a chief financial officer.
Right.
Now, what happened was in 1998, I'd have to go back and look at the numbers, in 1998 or 1999, HUD reported $59 billion of undocumentable adjustments, which was greater than the entire budget of the agency.
And it was, you know, we picked it up.
One of my attorneys picked it up, and I couldn't fathom.
It came out in testimony of the inspector general, and the inspector general said, as a result, we've given up trying to do an audit and we've yelled at them, and hopefully it won't happen again next year.
And of course, my attitude was, well, wait a minute, where's the $59 billion?
We need to get it back.
Forget the audit and financial statements.
We need to just go get the money.
Right.
Anyway, so over the next, between 1998 and 2002, what we noticed just from our very minimal research.
Was the Department of Defense announced in two of those years they had 1.1 and I think 2.2 or 2.3?
So they had 3.3 to 3.4 trillion in undocumentable adjustment.
So one year they had, you know, significantly more in undocumentable adjustment than the entire tax roll of the United States.
It's quite extraordinary.
HUD reported during that period about 149 billion.
In undocumentable adjustments, and then finally stopped, started refusing to report what their undocumentable adjustments were.
Fascinating.
And then NASA had $500 billion in one year of undocumentable adjustments.
And those were just what we ran into the reports of other agencies, but we never got in and sourced the government documents.
So you're looking at about $4 trillion that we know about easily.
Now, here's the thing to remember if I have a publicly traded company and I refuse to produce audited financial statements, I'm thrown off the exchanges.
My bankers shut me off.
So, we're talking about the largest issuer of securities in the world who can keep issuing securities even though they have no audited financial statements.
And money is clearly disappearing.
I mean, this was money that disappeared under the carpet.
During the bailouts, it's been disappearing above the carpet, particularly if you include all the backdoor loans through the Federal Reserve to a variety of banks.
The TARP inspector general estimating $27 trillion.
Yeah.
Which, you know, the $4 trillion in comparison.
Absolutely.
And that $27 trillion is mostly overt.
Right.
And so this.
That's why I call it a financial coup d'etat.
Can you connect the dots from what you do when you point out this thing that happened in 1995 and bring it up to the 2008 coup d'etat that you talk about?
Because it seems like it's one straight process.
All the way through that builds up and then comes to this big climax in 2008.
Well, I think the process was let's look at the process from Mr. Global's standpoint.
Right.
Mr. Global is my mythic character for the person responsible to oversee the planning and strategy for global allocation of resources.
Okay.
Okay, so and I used to work with this firm in London who had a little cartoon strip of Mr. Global.
His body was a planet and he had these little sticks.
Hands and feet with a head, and he flew around in a plane orchestrating and rigging these things.
That sounds about right.
Basically, what we said the developed world has a maturing population, and basically, we've gotten that maturing population to give us all their cash in pensions and retirements in exchange for promises.
So, what we're going to do before they start to call on those promises is we're going to pull the cash out, use it to sort of buy up the planet.
And become a global government or global investment syndicate, if you will.
And then we'll just fill their pension funds and their retirement savings full of their own IOUs.
So, we'll issue massive amounts of debt and mortgages and other things and sell them to their pension funds.
So, we'll pull the real money out.
And by the time the housing bubble and the debt bubble collapse, they'll just have a bunch of IOUs to themselves and they can fight out exactly how they're going to deal with 100 trillion unfunded liabilities.
Wow.
But we'll be out free and clear.
And we'll have bought up.
And so, we literally saw a process where we would tank an economy and then come in and buy the equity cheap.
So, we tanked East Asia in 97.
We sort of raped Russia so that we could pick up as much of the oil and gas deposits as possible before the, you know, after the wall came down.
Right.
You know, if you look at Greg Palacios stories in Latin America, same thing.
You know, we tank an economy and then come in and buy it cheap.
So, you know, we played this game of sort of buying up the monopoly board with this money.
And so now we're in the end game of, The developed populations are now maturing, and they've been putting every year they've been putting a dollar into Social Security or a dollar into their IRA, and now they're showing up and they're saying, Okay, I'm ready to get the dollar back.
And what they don't seem to understand is that's giving the guy on the other side a $2 problem because he needs that incremental dollar.
And the last thing he can do is afford to give a dollar back.
So when you ask for your money back, you're giving him a $2 problem, not a dollar problem, a $2 problem.
Hmm.
You see what I mean?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's funny because.
Even looking at it in terms of.
Have you ever watched the movie Siriana?
No, I have not seen that movie.
Okay.
Siriana, if you really want to understand the global investment model, Siriana is a great one because one of the things you see is.
Midianite Ownership Shifts00:05:35
You know, many people think that a sheikh in a country is powerful in the Middle East and he has billions in a fund, you know, or he's got a net worth of $5 billion.
But that $5 billion is up at wealth management at JPMorgan Chase financing the corporations that it's directed to.
Right.
And he's the name on the money, but he doesn't necessarily control that money or where it goes.
And so the overt ownership says one thing, but the covert ownership says another thing.
You know, in a certain sense, he's just a front.
Right.
Well, when they do something like the 2008 collapse, Do you think that they're afraid that the situation will get out of their control, out of their hands?
Or do they really plan for it to be exactly how it was and they plan to come in and sort of do a leverage buyout of these different countries?
It's a very organic process.
So you have a framework of where you want to go and plans of how you want it to go.
But it's a big planet and there's a lot of competition, there's a lot of factions.
Things are very organic and the human race is unpredictable.
Yeah.
You know, we keep trying to do things to make ourselves more predictable, but we're unpredictable.
So I think it is an extremely organic process.
And I think you saw in 2008 what I call the Midianite thing get out of hand.
Because you've created a very complex system which is built on secrets.
That makes it much harder to manage.
You know, I mean, I could have told you, given the black budget liabilities at AIG, there's no way you can let AIG go down.
Are you nuts?
And.
You know, and you kind of look at people who've forgotten that because they've been so busy, you know, in their little niche.
But I think you had in 2008 happen what I call the Midianite thing.
Have you ever heard me use that expression?
Yeah, it's a biblical story, right?
You know, so in the story of Gideon in the Old Testament, Gideon throws the Midianites out.
Gideon is asked by an angel of the Lord to throw the Midianites out.
And essentially, Gideon says, Look, I'm the last guy in the last tribe and the last family.
There's no way I can do this.
And the angel of the Lord says, Oh, we don't expect you to do it.
In fact, we've chosen you because everyone will know it had to be us because you could never do it.
But what happens was Gideon and his army come down the side of the mountains in the night.
With lanterns and pictures.
You know, it's basically light and vibration.
And the Midianites are sleeping in the desert and they jump up in the dark and they are so distrustful and suspicious of each other that they kill each other.
And what I see happening, and I saw it happen in 2008, is I think, you know, and I think this is part of Lagarde's being investigated.
You're watching the Midianite thing happen.
And now, when you look at the U.S. federal budget, you're having Congress have to turn to multiple.
Parties who have the ability to kill with impunity and say, Look, we have to cut you.
And so they're fighting with each other.
So we can literally see physical wars between defense contractors.
So I think the danger of the Midnight thing is very present.
And our big risk here to me is more than anything is war.
Because when you have very complex change that needs to occur, You need process to bring people into alignment and resolve differences.
And when you can't manage to keep those processes of communication and calculation and resolution working, that's when you get war.
Right.
It's very interesting.
I spent a long time studying how the Salem witch trials happened.
And basically, you had two different cultures competing for resources, and they literally lost the ability to communicate.
And they started fighting destructively.
So, you know, it's a perfect example of how that can happen.
And I think that's our real risk is war.
Where do you think the money that's missing is going?
I think it's going for the development of, or it's going into what I call a black budget.
So it's going into the development of space, which will ultimately be owned and managed on a private basis.
Yeah.
It's going into the development of, if you will, an endowment for a global government.
I mean, if you look at how much has been stolen, at a 4% yield, it's enough to fund an entire global government just from the endowment.
And I think so.
I think we're doing a lot in the space.
I think we're doing a lot, you know, to build up the endowment.
I think we're doing a tremendous amount on new technology and innovation, particularly weaponry.
And then I think we're, We're building, you know, we're moving out and financing in the emerging markets.
So it's part of globalization.
And if you look at all of that together, it's what I call the breakaway civilization.
We've literally been financing a civilization which is now fully funded and sees itself as completely independent and separate from us as a legal and financial matter.
Building a Global Endowment00:15:12
Can you outline the breakaway civilization a little bit for me?
Like, what would it consist of?
What are we talking about really?
Well, that's the $64,000 question.
Wouldn't I love to be able to answer that question?
Who are these guys?
Why are they behaving the way they're behaving?
Yeah.
You know, and somebody once said, you know, when I talk to you, it's like walking along a battlefield in the dark, and every couple of minutes a flare goes off, and you get a snapshot, and then it's dark again.
Oh, yeah.
And I said, well, I can only show you, you know, all I get are snippets, and I try and put them together.
So to me, the most important thing we need to know is who's really running this and why are they behaving the way they're behaving?
Right.
So again, I think it's a very organic, emergent process, but.
I think we need to answer that question because I've watched Daniel my entire life.
Many, many people who I love and care about waste enormous amounts of time on solutions that are never going to work.
And I always equate it to a doctor.
My father was a surgeon.
You know, you don't want your surgeon to operate on you until he has an accurate diagnosis.
Right.
And until we understand who's running things and why they're doing what they're doing.
You know, it's really easy to come up with solutions that make things worse, not better.
Sure.
Well, it seems like with a lot of your analysis, you're getting closer to figuring out who these groups are.
And I think people think that automatically that you know because you were inside at one point.
So they figure that you have better lay of the land.
Here's what I do know.
I mean, here's what I saw when I was inside.
If you've ever watched the TV series Captains and Kings.
Uh huh.
You know, there's a group of guys, they get together, whether it's at the Grove or the Bilderbergers, and they make decisions, and that's how it's going to go.
Right.
And that's, you know, that's my experience.
Okay.
And they think very differently than most people think.
And, you know, I think that Captains and Kings is a pretty good representation.
What I don't know is if you look at what they're dealing with in terms of what's going on in terms of space or space weather or what's going on in terms of geographic, you know, sort of.
The geology of use of the environment and these kinds of issues, I don't know what they're grappling with.
In other words, I don't know why they're scared.
I see.
Okay, because they have fears and they have risks.
And you need to look through them to the risks they're dealing with.
And I don't think we fully understand that.
And I think if you look through them to those risks, it's a much deeper and more complicated story.
Right.
You've gone back to space a couple of times, and I think that's interesting because there are so many sort of side reports that we hear about sort of covert space operations programs and things along this line.
Do you think then that maybe some of this budget that's being pulled out is being used to build a space infrastructure?
Yeah, I do.
I do.
I think.
I think opportunities in space and concerns about space and the viability of the planet in a variety of ways are very important to what's been happening.
And the problem is, when you try and understand those issues, you go down a rabbit hole of trying very hard to get good information and all sorts of different stories.
And trying to piece together an understanding is, you know, you come out murky at best.
I've always said, you know, my tool for understanding whether something's true or not is to map out the finances and the money.
Right.
You know, but when you go off planet, my tool doesn't work.
Right.
So, I once told the story of a group from the US Navy trying to persuade me that aliens existed and lived among us.
It was the former head of the CIA and a think tank worked for the Navy.
And they tried to persuade me.
And I said to them, that has not been my experience.
My experience is mostly organized crime and greedy corruption.
And so I said to them, it was really funny because the guy around the think tank said to me, would you like to have lunch with some aliens?
And I have to tell you, for the first time in my life, I had a picture of checking out at the grocery store.
And the National Enquirer headline saying, Fitz thinks she's going to be lunching with aliens.
And I thought, oh, this is how they're finally going to get me.
Right, right.
And I said to the guy, I'm dealing with too much risk right now to be seen lunching with aliens.
I said, are there some books I can read?
Well, it would be the ultimate setup.
All right.
Yeah, I read, at the time, I read about 25 books, and I just couldn't make head nor hairs out of it.
You know, there was a lot of disinformation.
Sure.
Anyway, so, but I think that space is very, very important.
And to me, it's, I think it's even more important.
I think it's more important because, as Robert Dean once said, it is the destiny of our children and grandchildren to travel the stars.
Right.
And I want them to have that destiny.
And if we're going to grow up as a civilization, then we need to start, you know.
I think we need our younger people.
To be free to dream of traveling the stars as opposed to getting hits on their Facebook page.
Yeah.
You know, I think we need to elevate our ambitions a lot.
Absolutely.
And I think you do that by envisioning the opportunities that space could bring us if we can grow up as a civilization and handle that technology and take responsibility for that kind of technology.
Well, let's go into this a little bit more because, you know, the story about the English hacker.
Gary McKinnon, who said that he got into these NASA computers and he found an off world officers list, which listed them and their rank and all these other things.
And it was pretty extensive.
So I felt that maybe you could dismiss the story on one hand, except that they went after him with such voracious temper about it.
They really wanted him, it felt like.
So I assumed after that that maybe there was something to what he was saying.
But that would be interesting to think that we had that.
Right.
The two things that always make me wonder about all of those different stories one is that when a civilization suddenly gets new, much more advanced technology from another civilization that it's not set up to culturally handle, it hasn't emerged it itself.
Right.
You see this kind of caveman running around like you give a caveman a laser gun and you're going to get some dirty bad results.
Yeah.
And if you look at the globalization process over the last 20 years, that's what you saw.
You saw people suddenly having access to power that they couldn't handle in any kind of immature way, and you got very ugly stuff.
So, one is we're behaving like a culture that is assuming technological power that is way beyond our cultural and spiritual ability to handle.
So, that's number one, and that makes you wonder where's this technology really coming from then?
But, number two, If I could, you know, one of the most profoundly interesting books I've ever read is Nora Berglund's Rings of Saturn.
And let me tell you the context.
When you read the history of the black budget and you look at people who were going along with very ugly stuff like opening the U.S. markets to narcotics trafficking, what you heard from these people is look, it was the best of some bad options.
We needed secret money.
This was the way to get it.
The most responsible thing for everybody is that we got that secret money.
It was critical that we did.
And you think, why?
Would all these people think that this was a reasonable, okay thing to do?
If you study rings of Saturn, what Berglund said, he was an engineer at Lockheed and in the space programs, is that they, at one point, when the Voyager came back, or when the Voyager went out, they sent back pictures of, in the rings of Saturn, literally, 70 mile,
70,000 mile long living spaceships docking in the rings getting energy from it.
And so you're talking about little planets that can fly around like spaceships.
And that happened right at the time that the Iran Contra Fraud just went nuts.
Wow.
And so you wonder if to deal with these things you have just this enormous pressure.
To get money.
And I think one of the things that happened with 9 11 was an effort was made to take the black budget off budget and move it on budget because it had become so dysfunctional to try and raise that much money using fraud.
I mean, it just got ridiculously expensive and, you know, there was all sorts of dysfunction.
So, you know, to me, part of what we need to grow up as a civilization is we need to get transparent about what's really going on.
Yeah.
And I think we've reached a point where.
We have an entire financial system being run to deal with a whole world of things which are invisible to most people.
Now, the leadership clearly believes that that's the better way.
That's not what I believe.
I believe we need to grow up as a civilization, all of us, and we can't take responsibility for that which we don't understand.
So, you know, my vote would be for transparency because I think nobody is as smart as all of us, and we need all of us dealing with it.
So, my attitude is, it is what it is.
You know, let's deal with it.
What is it?
Right, right.
Well, they obviously are getting a tremendous advantage by keeping these things secret, I would assume.
And that's part of the problem, which is they're not going to very willingly come up and give us this kind of information.
It's going to have to be sort of forced out of them.
Okay, let me argue in defense of Mr. Global.
Yeah.
You know, and I'm sorry to keep going back to the Bible, but, you know, Bible stories.
Sure.
You know, everything.
The Bible or Hollywood, so there it is.
You know, the Romans knew it was very bad politics to crucify Jesus.
So, what did they do?
They invited the crowd, you know, they brought in a criminal and they invited the crowd to pick.
And the crowd picked Jesus.
Right.
Okay, now, if you're Mr. Global, the message of thousands of years is the crowd will always support the guy who hands out the most money, the crowd will support the criminal.
You cannot trust the crowd to take the most responsible choice.
They won't behave responsibly.
Now, I don't necessarily agree with that, and I think it's more complicated than that.
But it's not just that they want central control for selfish reasons.
They want central control because they don't see a way of getting bottom up responsibility taking.
And if they do, they figure it's not going to leave them in charge.
Right.
So they don't see a way of winning, protecting their families, protecting their fortunes, and getting to responsibility taking.
So I think the question for all of us is how do we start to build alignments?
How do we come up with a vision where we can all be winners?
Because, in fact, if you have a decentralized economic model, you can create many, many exponential amounts of wealth more than a centralized model.
So, a decentralized model is much more wealth building and can come into alignment with the environment very easily.
So, to me, a decentralized model has a much better chance of winning.
But I can argue to the cows come home that if I was in Mr. Global's shoes, I would say that.
The central control is the risk, is the one that has the less risk.
And, you know, the other one is just too hard to implement.
And that really comes down to do we want, you know, it's a spiritual question.
Do you want a world run by force or do you want a world run by divine intelligence?
Right.
My attitude is, you know, I'm out here in the world of divine intelligence.
And if that means you're going to kill me, I would rather be dead than live in a world of force.
It's just, you know, this comes down to are we going to live free or slaves?
Yeah.
It's that simple.
Yeah, and how do you think this is developing though?
It seems to be developing that the control grid is sort of stepping up its game a little bit with things like you mentioned.
Oh, a lot.
A lot, yeah, that's more like it.
It's been stepping up its game for, you know, this has been going on for decades.
Yeah.
And it's been stepping up its game for decades.
I think it's a lot more overt now, you know, and it's a lot more obvious to many people, but it's certainly stepping up its game.
And remember, You've got a couple of countries that are outside the central banking model, you know, that are not obedient to the new world order.
So you have Venezuela, you've got Cuba, you have Libya, you have North Korea, you have Iran.
And, you know, we've been running around the world torturing each one of them.
You know, Chavez is dead now.
So hopefully those guys think they're going to get Venezuela and Cuba in.
You know, they're after Syria, they're after Iran, they're after North Korea.
You're trying to rope them all in.
As soon as you do, boom, you can go to a global virtual currency.
Yeah.
Or you're awful close.
And that's the real danger is one central global currency, do you think?
Because at that point, individual control by citizens becomes something of the past.
Well, if I know everything there is to know about your money and your time, and you don't have knowledge of mine or the general government pool, then I can basically debase and control you.
I can out trade you every time.
Protect Your Mind First00:06:14
And harvest you financially and economically.
So, knowing.
Yeah, absolutely.
Knowing that they have this control at this point, what do you think actually is a good approach in a sense?
Because, you know, I guess when you talk to some people about this, they'll say, well, if I believed that were true, you know, and that this control grid was getting put into place, then, you know, I wouldn't be very optimistic about the future.
And yet you seem to have a lot of optimism about some of the things that are going on.
So, What would you recommend in terms of people's attitude when they discover this information instead of being overwhelmed by it?
What's the kind of positive tool you can use to move next?
I go back to you know, we need a real economy that works.
Yeah.
So, my attitude, you know, our theme this year on the Solarium Report is coming clean.
Yeah.
So, what we each need to do is do two things.
One is stop financing the beast, stop giving Mr. Global your money, stop letting him drain you financially.
Or mentally or emotionally, you know, so build your immune system so that you don't get drained.
Right.
Okay.
That's number one.
Then number two, invest your time and money in things that start to build a real economy that give you energy.
It's all about improving your energy because you're being drained.
Yeah.
And you've got to reverse that.
So part of it is just getting, you know, get Mr. Global out of your mind, get him out of your heart, get him out of your life.
If you're married to him, divorce him, whatever.
Get separate, you know.
Before you can protect your money, you've got to protect your mind.
So just get out of the matrix if you can mentally.
So, you know, think of it it's like a body.
You know, if you're sick, you know that you need to do two things you need to detox and you need to build your immune systems.
And it's the same with your money and your interaction with the media and all these other things.
You know, you need to detox, get the tapeworm out of your body, and then you need to build your immune system.
And I think every person who does that, Is a shift towards a new, much more positive economy.
And so I think there are many things you can do, but it's got to be one by one.
And if a critical mass of people will change, you know, it's amazing.
The funny thing is about centralization, you know, it's what the British poet said we are many, they are few.
If you have enough people who just came clean and shifted, what's interesting is not only could you shift the whole thing, and not only would the Midianite thing get worse because they.
You know, we wouldn't be there giving positive energy, they'd kill each other, right?
But you have, as you come clean and shift, you want to invite them to say, Look, let's try some decentralized stuff, let's see if it couldn't work.
Come on over, in other words, you need to invite them and their capital in.
You know, let them be heroes.
Ronald Reagan used to say, You can get anything done in Washington if you're willing to get away the credit.
So, you know, have them come over.
You know, so we need to be willing to come back into alignment, yeah, yeah.
That sounds like excellent advice.
Right.
And this is going to have to be highly decentralized.
But it's going to start with each one of us.
How do we use our time?
How do we use our money?
Are we building a real economy?
I mean, the problem is not with Mr. Global.
The problem is there are millions of people in our economy working for companies that are introducing GMO and destroying the seed supply and poisoning people with pharmaceuticals or bad food.
We all know.
All we have to do is stop.
If the people on the line stopped and just said, you know, I'm not doing that.
What I did when I was in Washington, I said, I'm not doing that.
I'm not going to make money committing genocide.
I'm not doing it.
So I'll give you an example.
My company had a contract at HUD, and the people who were leading it were very worried that HUD was going to try and get us to do their budget.
It's a violation of contracting law.
And sure enough, HUD wanted us to do the budget.
And it's a violation of contract law.
But the reason they wanted to do it was they wanted OMB to go along with a budget that would not fund the transition from welfare reform.
So we had, that had buildings where you were going to cut the welfare of the people living in the building, and that was going to have dramatic ramifications.
And if you didn't provide subsidy, they were going to kick the people out who would be homeless.
Wow.
So they wanted us to put a budget in and tell OMB, oh, it's OK, because Hamilton did it.
And then OMB wouldn't check it very carefully.
And then it would make it possible for them to throw everybody out and make it homeless.
So, you know, we were going to be the seal of good housekeeping that would let them do this stealth thing.
So, the guy who was running that HUD budget came over to my house, or the HUD account came over to my house, and he said, Look, if you don't let us do this, they could fire us.
We could lose the contract.
So, I said to him, Carlton, how many children should go homeless so that we can keep our contract?
Wow.
And he said, Oh, don't like that.
You're so difficult.
I said, No, no, no, no.
Come back down to get grounded.
How many children should go homeless?
How many children should die?
In Chicago in the winter, so that we can keep our contract.
And it took about five times, and suddenly he looked at me and he said, Why am I doing this?
I said, I don't know.
It seems to me that there are always things to do.
You know, we lose the contract, we get another contract, we lose the business, we start another business.
We don't have to do this.
And he looked at me and he said, You're right, we don't.
Now, if every person in America would just say, You know something?
I'm not doing this.
It would change.
Yeah.
Taking Personal Responsibility00:04:48
Yeah, absolutely.
So if you look at all the bad things happening, we're implementing them.
Don't tell me the housing bubble was the housing bubble was engineered from Washington and Wall Street, but the housing bubble was implemented by appraisers, home builders, mortgage bankers, municipal officials in every community in the country.
We bankrupted ourselves, and it was all of us.
We were all doing it.
So do you think in the final analysis, it's on us, really?
Because we went along with it?
Well, everything in my life is my responsibility.
I had a wonderful friend who became a Buddhist, and she came back, she looked stricken.
I said, What's the matter?
And she said, I'm responsible for world peace.
How am I supposed to take personal responsibility for world peace?
And so I believe we are responsible for world peace, but what we can do is pray and do what we can do.
So, the person, you know, to get power in a situation, the only way to get power is to take responsibility for it.
So, I think this comes down to me because I'm the only one that I can control or should control.
Yeah.
It's me.
And so, you know, I'm a very spiritual person.
So, my, you know, what I say is, okay, Lord, I take complete responsibility.
You know, what's next?
How do we.
Get something done here.
But yeah, you have to take personal responsibility because you're the only one who can take personal responsibility for you.
Right.
Well, you've shown a lot of courage in dealing with these things.
Even when you left, they didn't let you go very easily.
Well, I was like Jonah, I got spat out of the whale.
Right.
Well, it was funny because, you know, it's a funny story, and I'll tell it to you some other time because it's a long story.
But, you know, I was one of those people who just thought, well, a political Squabble, you just come up with a political fix.
You just talk to the right guy and you say, okay, well, you won and I lost.
So let's just, you know, you know, it's a political fight.
You just fix it.
And so I just kept trying to fix it.
And it was one of the, you know, the idea that you couldn't get a political fix and these guys basically wanted to see me die or in prison.
Wow.
You know, I just couldn't believe anybody would care.
And it was funny.
And I finally realized one day, oh, you know, this one is to the death.
Wow.
That's what this is.
This is to the death.
Yeah.
So, and I took a deep breath and I'll never forget, I went off, you know, and I really thought about it for a couple days.
I said, what?
You know, what am I going to do?
How am I going to do this?
And I had an offer to settle one of the lawsuits, and I just knew I couldn't, you know, if I settled it, it would have just cooked my goose in terms of my passion and what I wanted to accomplish in this life.
So I went off and I said, you know, can I do this?
Can I win?
And I realized I have the money, I have the commitment, I have the skills, I have the training to win.
What I don't know is.
If I do this by the time it's through, will I still have the capacity to love other humans?
And that's what took me a couple days.
Could I find a way to do this that when it was over, I had the capacity to love?
And that was the hardest part.
And the funny thing is, it completely reorganized how I went about doing it.
And my poor attorneys, they could never understand.
But my attitude is if I lose my capacity to love, there is no point in doing this.
So it was funny.
Very interesting.
Yeah, but it was one of those things that was to the death.
And my attitude was I'll never forget when somebody approached me once to join the Council of Foreign Relations.
Yeah.
And when I told him I wasn't going to join, he looked at me like, and he was really afraid for me.
He said, Oh, you don't understand.
You're going to be out forever.
You're going to be out, you know, out in the wilderness.
Yeah.
And, you know, it was really inconceivable to me that I could survive in the wilderness.
Uh huh.
And so when I made the decision, I figured, you know, I can win the litigation, but I will probably die in the wilderness.
I will not be able to make it.
And the only way that I made it was, you know, there was no way back.
Yeah.
You know, I was like the explorer who burnt the ships.
Robots and Unemployment00:04:04
Yeah.
We had one choice, but to head into the jungle.
Yeah, yeah, right, right.
So I would say the reason that I am where I am today was, you know, I got thrown out.
And thrown out in a sufficiently visible way that there was no way back.
So, you know, and it's funny, I remember sitting in our offices in 1988, and I realized that I was going to have to find a way to build a business where I interacted with individuals.
Because all my life, you know, I've done billion dollar deals.
Right.
Billion, you know.
And so the idea of working with one person on their savings was just.
You know, I was used to doing billion dollar deals.
So I turned to my attorney and I said, You know, we're going to have to find a way to support ourselves at retail.
And she said to me, She turned to me and she said, Good luck, honey.
But you did it.
I started journeys kind of traveling around America and saying, Okay, well, who can support themselves by helping people honestly?
You know, and I kind of made a little study and discovered lots of different people who were doing it in many different fields.
Yeah.
It just, you know, just takes a lot of hard work.
Yeah, I remember you talking a lot about the maker movement and things like this.
And you really feel like a lot of this person to person stuff is the future in a lot of ways.
You know, I wanted to ask you about you mentioned robotics and how they were sort of approving driverless cars and things like that in California.
And you said, you know, you found it fascinating because they have this high unemployment rate.
And the only thing you can see with that type of automation is that it's going to throw more people out of work.
So you were wondering what exactly their plan was.
And I wondered if you'd come to any conclusions on that.
No, I do think that robotics will dramatically increase productivity.
And that will have, yes, it will create unemployment, but it will also provide functions that couldn't be provided economically before.
There's a very cute movie, new movie.
It's called Robot and Frank or Frank and Robot about robots that take care of people with Alzheimer's.
It's very cute.
But I think there's going to be a loop back where.
The greater prosperity will also create more demand for jobs that will pick up some of that unemployment.
Okay.
But there's no doubt about it.
What you've got is you've got an economy which is demanding higher and higher skill levels.
Now, I think there are tremendous things undone in this country in terms of education, infrastructure, all sorts of civic activities.
And that technology will give us, you know, or help give us the wherewithal to finance those things.
So it gets back to.
You know, are you trying to introduce robotics to drive centralized corporate profits, or are you going to introduce it in a way that creates a robust small business, small farm economy?
You know, we see companies using robotics technology to do unbelievable things in making organic farming economic for small farmers.
Nice.
If that works, you know, so technology should advantage the little guy.
And that's a question again of the political process.
Are we willing to let the political and financial system work in a way that will build up?
You know, private equity bottom up.
That's my vision.
If you look at what the, you know, sort of the current powers of beer are promoting, they're basically promoting everything as a not for profit at the local level, which to me is, you know, that's feudalism.
Yeah.
So, yeah, absolutely.
Thank you for joining me for part one of my interview with Catherine Austin Fitz.
You can get more updates at darkjournalist.com or facebook.com forward slash dark journalist.