The Noble Lie

Catherine Austin Fitts, former investment banker, former Bush Sr. HUD Commissioner, the woman who discovered massive-scale S&L style scamming of the HUD market by insiders, author of the magnum opus "Dillon Reed & Co Inc., The Aristocracy of Stock Profits," writes insightfully and powerfully about how the banksters made a killing by killing our economy. To my knowledge, she coined the term "tapeworm economy." Her experiences with insiders scamming HUD, and the government's legal assault of her company Hamilton Securities, are a microcosm of the collapse of the US real estate market that started our current financial crisis.

• Catherine Austin Fitts - 2009: The Year of the Great Vampire Squid
• From the vault: Catherine Austin Fitts on the Jim Puplava show

I have followed Fitts and her work at Solari.com for a while. Her two essential economic questions are: "Who's your farmer? Who's your banker?" You can find the answer to the first question at your local farmer's market. The second question is one that people are increasingly asking themselves, and finding a better answer in local credit unions and smaller banks. I kissed my big bank goodbye years ago and have been much, much happier at our local credit union, who was not up to their eyeballs in phony baloney derivatives when the 2008 economic tsunami hit.

I cannot deny
All the evil traits and the filling of the crates
When you do come out
And you slither up to me in your pimpin majesty
But I cannot grow
Till you eat the last of me, oh when will I be free
And you, a parasite
Just find another host, just another stool to post

Cause you, my tapeworm tells me what to do
You, my tapeworm tells me where to go

Pull the tapeworm out of your ass

- System of a Down, "Needles"

Former Assistant Housing Secretary of HUD for George Bush Sr. speaks out about government drug running, enormous-scale financial fraud, S&L scandal, a HUD scandal, the "negative return on investment economy," (AKA the tapeworm economy or disaster capitalism) and foreshadows today's financial crisises.

Fitts is a very intelligent and economically-minded woman. Michael Ruppert of From the Wilderness credits this woman (who was a former investment fund manager before serving, and subsequently becoming a target of, the Bush I administration) as his mentor.

The lingo in here gets pretty thick, but plow through it and look up any terms that you don't understand. It is definitely worth it. You will start to understand the way our economy really works. She is also one of the VERY few people who have offered (or tried to offer) economic solutions to the crippling economic problems that we face. The problem is, her solutions are more complicated than many people would bother to try to comprehend, and would require large-scale, decentralized cooperation among people.

She also spells out a warning for today's time -- a great-depression like bust is the optimistic scenario for the US. The more likely scenario is that Wall Street and the investment class will be protected by sucking all the assets out of the middle class (directly or indirectly through inflation), protecting the big institutions, and quelling dissent with an internal police state. This is called corporate feudalism, and it is the United Nations Agenda 21 sanctioned model for the future -- where international corporations and NGOs replace the feudal lords and barons of the past. This is the scenario we're watching with the bailouts of the big banks and investment funds, and the liquidation of real estate companies by these same banks.

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