“We do [these] things not because they are easy, but because they are hard” ~John F. Kennedy, Rice University, Sept. 12, 1962
By Catherine Austin Fitts
I am attracted to the essential—the critical building blocks of our economies and lives that are necessary to all of us. These are the things that we share and that unify us. We all want roads and bridges. Whether directly or indirectly, we all pay taxes. We all breathe the oxygen in the air. We all need food and water to survive. Ultimately, we are better off if we care for the living systems that give us life and if we share responsibility for leaving them in as good—if not better—shape than when we found them.
Taking on the major controversies involving the essential can be hard. It can involve a lot of legal and financial information that is complex. It can involve a lot of people and resources and can seem overwhelming if you have not been trained to integrate information across different places and industries to see the world whole. However, there are no solutions without getting down to, as the song says, the “real nitty gritty.”
The difference between our reality and official reality grows ever wider. That can happen as long as a significant portion of the funds we invest in government—whether as taxpayers, payers of fees and penalties, or investors—can be managed secretly and even stolen. The gap likewise grows wider when secrecy and organized crime govern the taxpayer-supported credit that backs fiat currency and the military that makes credit mechanisms go.
A nation that cannot enforce its laws will not remain a nation. That applies to a nation’s financial laws. In 2018, the Solari team made a significant investment in communicating the deterioration of the federal credit, how that relates to our financial laws, and what that means to our financial situation and credit.
We started off the year publishing our 2017 Annual Wrap Up, including The State of Our Pension Funds, which provided a deep look at the “real deal” on U.S. pension funds and the baby boomers’ retirement. Shortly after launching the final web presentation, the Solari Report website went down beyond repair. It took a month to get a new site launched for recent content. We continue to dedicate a significant portion of our team’s time to returning the historical content to a professional form.
As a result of the website going down, we made The State of Our Pension Funds public. There were advantages to doing so. I started to see comments across the independent media: “Don’t believe that story on pension funds. See the Solari Report piece by Fitts on the pension funds—it explains exactly what is going on.” Give financially savvy entrepreneurs the hard data and the facts—and the debate shifts in a positive direction.
The reverberations from our 2017 publication of Dr. Skidmore’s report on the $21 trillion missing from the Departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development (DOD and HUD) continued throughout the year. As I worked with commentators and reporters, however, it was clear they needed a grounding in the legal infrastructure of U.S. federal finances—both fiscal and monetary policies and operations. Consequently, we funded a series of seven briefing papers by attorneys Michele Ferri and Jonathan Lurie to outline federal financial laws, including the new accounting policy that took the government accounts dark in October 2018—FASAB 56. These briefing papers made it possible for serious reporters to dive into the latest developments in the federal finances within their practical time limits. Ferri and Lurie did an excellent job with this critical component of serious due diligence on the U.S. federal credit.
As we worked through the seven legal pieces, we also published our Quarterly Wrap Ups, which offered major looks at some of the most important related trends in the global economy. These were my choices for sectors whose growth reflects reinvestment of the missing money:
- 1st Quarter Wrap Up: Who’s Who and What’s Up in the Space-Based Economy
- 2nd Quarter Wrap Up: The Rise of the Asian Consumer
- 3rd Quarter Wrap Up: Megacities and the Growth of Global Real Estate Companies
Given the significance of the adoption of FASAB 56 in October, I felt it was necessary to do more to help citizens and investors form their own independent opinion, starting with the recognition that they needed to do so. Consequently, I asked Solari’s general counsel, attorney Carolyn Betts to co-author Caveat Emptor: Why Investors Need to Do Due Diligence on U.S. Treasury and Related Securities as well as a chronology of key dates related to the missing money story. She did a superb job.
Finally, I decided to change the topic of our 2018 Annual Wrap Up to the Missing Money. It became clear that we needed to create a summary hard copy about this issue. There has been a financial coup d’état of which the undocumentable adjustments at DOD and HUD are a significant piece—roughly equal in amount to the official number for outstanding U.S. debt. Given the “memory wipes” and censorship growing on the Internet, publication of a hard copy that aggregates the documentation at a summary level is advisable.
Changing the topic at the last minute put increased pressure on the Solari team—which they handled with grace and ability. It also meant that after publishing our web presentation in January, I took extra time to produce a longer-than-usual document. One reason was that I wanted to add a personal history. I have been warning people about money going missing in almost every year since 1989. At HUD, the numbers have gone from $5 billion missing in a year to $59 billion missing in a year to over $250 billion; the missing amounts at DOD have gone from $2.3 trillion missing in a year to $6.5 trillion in one year for 2015. It is challenging to express the full arc of what is happening without seeing it over time—I thought a personal history might help communicate the explosion of the secret side of our economy over the past several decades. In 2019, we will do a Solari Report on the tactics used to keep this story suppressed.
I would like to thank the many people and subscribers who have contributed to this effort. If you look at our list of people who have demonstrated enormous courage—the Missing Money A-Team—it is longer than you might expect, and I could have added many subscribers’ names as well. If you have contributed and would like your name added, let me know and I will do so.
When it comes to the missing money, there are a great number of people on the right side of history. That’s a good thing because, ultimately, the economic squeezes will come back to the issue of monies disappearing from our government through undocumentable adjustments, the bailouts, or various forms of financial shenanigans.
When the day comes when we must face these issues on a wider scale, let history record that these funds existed. We have a legal right to demand their return or to exercise the common law right of offset at the bargaining table and hold the responsible parties accountable.
Will it happen? What will happen is what we make happen. I am reminded of the quote on the statue of A. Philip Randolph in Union Station in the District of Columbia:
~ A. Philip Randolph
To organize and act, we need knowledge—we need a clear picture of what is going on and what it means to each one of us.
I hope the 2018 Annual Wrap Up—whether our section on the missing money or our excellent round-up of the News Trends & Stories and the Financial Markets—will help you get a clearer picture.
In closing, thank you again for your support in 2018 for our work—including the hard work on the missing money. We can do that which is essential because you support us in doing so. Your support is a rare blessing, and we are deeply grateful for it. May we continue to be worthy of it.
Here is to your free and inspired life in 2019!
~ Catherine Austin Fitts