The Real Deal About Enron (Part 7) – Interview
Mapping the Real Deal…
The Real Deal
About Enron
... an interview with Scoop Real Deal Columnist Catherine Austin Fitts
Part Seven Of Seven Parts
By Daniel Armstrong*
Originally Published By Sanders Research Associates
[*Daniel Armstrong is a writer and novelist based
in Eugene, Oregon. Mr. Armstrong is a graduate of Princeton
University and attended the University of Oregon School of
Journalism.] (Click Here for Part One
In
Part One, we introduced Catherine Austin Fitts and
described some of her experiences in taking on the criminal
powers who lie behind the modern U.S. Governmental
apparatus. The Interview transcript follows in CONTINUATION LINE: CAF: So what do we do?
Essentially, we have to reengineer our economy from a
negative return on investment to a positive return on
investment. At the heart of that is reengineering
government investment, credit and regulation by
place. If every neighborhood
in America took a look at the sources and uses of all
federal, state and local government resources and started to
reengineer those resources place by place, we could
leverage our current capital base by many multiples. During
the 1990's, I prototyped approximately $12 billion of
transactions that gave me the detailed pricing information
needed to build a conceptual framework of how to do this by
financing communities with equity in a way that makes money
for all the parties involved including business, investors,
and community. This was what Hamilton Securities prototyped
at Edgewood Terrace with our software Community Wizard.
This is my solari model, a winwin alignment between
people, environment and money. Such an alignment can unleash
astonishing amounts of new wealth. So now that a few have
used new technology to steal all of America's retirement
savings while the rest of us let it happen, it is time for
the natural leaders among us to use new technology to
reengineer our concrete economy and create new wealth to
reduce our addiction for more borrowing and debt and to
fulfill our financial obligations to each other. Two
months ago, I published a two part series with Sanders Research
Associates in London that describe what I learned from
the prototyping effort about where the opportunities
lie---''The Myth of the Rule of Law or How the Money Works:
The Destruction of Hamilton Securities Group''---and my
vision of how we are going to capture that value as
investors and entrepreneurs "Solari & the Rise of the Rule
of Law.'' For those who are interested in profitable
transformation that can make our neighborhoods safe again,
create new jobs or replace our retirement and pension
losses, you can link to both articles from my website at http://www.solari.com.
After many years and many billions of transactions and
investments, my childhood intuition has been affirmed. The
honest folks can make more money healing a community than
the powers that be made destroying it. As this was true for
West Philadelphia where I grew up, it's true for all of
America today. EPILOGUE [By Daniel Armstrong]:
It is important for all of us to understand the Enron
bankruptcy as well as we can. It affected a huge portion of
the nation. Thousands of jobs were lost. Enron employee 401K
plans were stripped. Many large investment portfolios,
nearly every state pension plan and all variety of special
retirement packages public and private were laced with the
failing Enron stock. Investment brokerages continued to tout
Enron even as they knew the tides had turned---and a sudden
insider sell off would drop a $90 stock to mere pennies.
Literally hundreds of thousands of Americans suffered
grave hits on nest eggs they'd put a life's work into,
sending, in some cases, retired folk back to the streets
looking for jobs. One of the world's largest accounting
services Arthur Andersen came tumbling down for its part in
the disaster. The entire California energy grid was
manipulated for vicious levels of profit. Lies were told
to the public and the government about the whys and
wherefores of rolling brownouts. It wasn't just greedy Enron
managers stealing money. It wasn't just stock market fraud.
It was the abuse of immense public trust and responsibility.
And for what we have seen in news reports, it resulted from
the collusion of Enron executives and board members,
lawyers, sever al influential banks, regulatory officers,
and an unknown quantity of political compliance. For all of
us, it demands an explanation. I spoke to Catherine
Austin Fitts for the expressed purpose of trying to find
this explanation. In the end, she told me more than I was
really prepared to accept. More than Enron, more than Arthur
Anderson, the entire US government was riddled with fraud,
incomplete balance sheets, and syndicated operations. It was
too much to comprehend. In the days after the interview,
however, I tried to sort it out. That is, put the entire
Enron fiasco in a perspective that fit with my worldview.
The following was my assessment: Superficially, the Enron
bankruptcy looks pretty much like a passing pumpanddump
scheme, orchestrated by a handful of inside managers. A
closer look, and we see the part played by outside
investors, stock brokerage hypes, accounting firms, and a
fair measure of bank compliance. Indeed, it's not such a far
stretch to say this little energy market con game was
manipulated from the outside through a handful of pasty
insiders, with Ken Lay at the top. While those Enron
managers and accountants take the rap, and perhaps lose
their illegal profits, the real money will be going to a
tight clique of enlightened investors, benefactors watching
from three or four shells deeper within the game, selling
really big numbers of stock at precisely the right time.
But it's not until you put this scandal in the context of
other major scandals since the Reagan Presidency--- I
hesitate to venture any further back than that---do you see
something even larger maneuvering in the back ground,
influencing politicians, pulling legislative strings, like
the deregulation of the energy market, and producing glowing
business reports from Ivy League Colleges. As hard as it is
to believe, or maybe as much as we don't want to believe it,
the same corporate relationships appear over and over again
in various combinations through the S&L crisis, the HUD
robberies, the BCCI scandal, the Iran/Contra arms for drugs
heist, and this bankruptcy in Houston---and always with the
acquiescence of America's biggest banks. So, it's
military contractors. It's oil men/energy traders, and it's
the information technology industry, all roiled together
with a few staunch and formal pinstriped suits from Wall
Street and the banking industry. The United States Treasury
sits in the background like the Sphinx---a giant obscuring
financial slush fund---with a federal accounting system that
makes Enron/Andersen's books look as clear as crystal. Three
trillion missing government dollars at last count. How could
anyone think a system this loose could be honest? Now
let's take a step back from here. Let's take yet another
look at this thing, this network of bankers, defense
contractors, energytrading oilmen, and greased politicians
that Ms. Fitts describes. Dwight Eisenhower had a name for
it: the MilitaryIndustrial Complex. It almost sounds like a
joke it's so overused. But unfortunately, it's not a joke.
Ms. Fitts has drawn a picture of it for us, or at least in
broad strokes, one tentacle of the ever-changing creature.
A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires all
interlocked and sustaining the military weapons industry and
dictating foreign policy both overt through Congress - and
covert through operational fraud profits. I know, I fight
the cliché, but the truth is there is a network of
goodoldboy weapons makers and communications experts whose
contracts are the richest in the world. LockheedMartin,
DynCorp. RaytheonHughes, McDonnell DouglasBoeing. They go
through the biggest banks. Citigroup, MorganChase, the Bank
of New York. Their books are cooked by the biggest
accountants. Arthur Andersen, PriceWaterhouse. They are
assisted by the intelligence community. They own big pieces
of the media, and they build the world's most powerful
military. They represent the muscle end of the equation of
control of the planet, and especially since 9/11, they
exercise huge sway over the U.S. government. Like the
800pound gorilla, they do pretty much whatever they please.
The MilitaryIndustrial Complex or the Iron Triangle, as it
is also called, is real and it's powerful; and as evidenced
by the actions of this one tentacle---the Enron
bankruptcy---it is full of corruption and fraud. It might
more accurately be called a criminal syndicate than a
complex of common business interests. This is my opinion.
Of course, there are
some that would say this industrial syndicate is what makes
America strong. And it surely does that. Some would say that
is it simply good business, businessmen networking for
success. And there are some that would say this syndicate
protects the manifold freedoms of the United States. And
perhaps, in a strained way, it does. But there are others
who would say that this syndicate acts as a shadow
government, sucks up our taxes, sustains itself by making
war anywhere on the globe, and prevents the possibility of
worldwide peace and equality. We all must come to our own
conclusion whether the Military Industrial Complex is
friend or foe. In any case, Catherine Austin Fitts'
commentary reveals that, at the very least, the people
behind it are dangerous and criminally ambitious. The Enron
scandal suggests that the creature has also heavily
infiltrated the present presidential administration and that
the very highest powers in the United States are
orchestrating a cover-up because of that. Forty-five
years after Ike's first warning, it is clear the checks are
out of balance. If we really live in a democracy that's free
and run by the people for the people, it's time we hold our
leaders and ourselves accountable. It won't be easy.
Catherine Austin Fitts' story demonstrates what happens to
people who do. Though Catherine Austin Fitts has made it
through the gauntlet with her credibility stronger than ever
and a shot a recovering her fortune, most do not. Perhaps
the time has come to support the people who do and try
restructuring our world from the inside out. ©opyright Daniel
Armstrong, March
2003 If my years working
on the clean up of BCCI and the S&L crisis taught me one
thing that I would communicate today to the shareholders,
retirees and employees who have been harmed, it is this:
people like those on the board of Enron absolutely make
money from insider trading, bid rigging and fraud, and they
do so with help from the highest levels.
-- Catherine Austin Fitts.
IMAGE: Enron
- Click Through To Original
Article
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0304/S00031.htm
Click Here for Part Two
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0304/S00035.htm
Click
Here for Part Three
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0304/S00063.htm
Click
Here for Part Four
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0304/S00088.htm
Click
Here for Part Five
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0304/S00135.htm
Click
Here for Part Six
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0304/S00151.htm)
Part
Two , Part
Three , Part
Four , Part
Five and Part
Six
)
Catherine Austin Fitts is
the President of Solari, Inc. (
http://solari.com) and a former Assistant Secretary of
Housing – Federal Housing Commissioner in Bush I. She is
currently litigating with Ervin and Associates (acting on
behalf of the government ) and the Department of Housing and
Urban Development. If you would like to support her
litigation efforts, you can through Affero/ Venture
Collective:
http://www.solari.com/vote.php
If this “Mapping the
Real Deal” was useful for you, you can leave comments and
send a gift to Catherine Austin Fitts and Scoop Media
through Affer:
http://svcs.affero.net/rm.php?skid=sp0
and receive
future columns for free by e-mail - see... Free My Scoop to sign up.