Catherine Austin Fitts And Winning the War On Drugs

I came across a five minute video of Catherine Austin Fitts talking about how the U.S. public is complacent about drugs being marketed to children in our own neighborhoods and the perceptions we need to change in order to finally be able to win the war on drugs. If you’re not familiar with Catherine Fitts, she has served as managing director and member of the Board of Directors of a major Wall Street investment bank and as Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the first Bush Administration. Ms. Fitts has been extensively interviewed on KPFA radio, an alternative media outlet, and is currently the publisher of The Solari Report. (You can access the video here.)

I found what she shares in the video (dated May 30, 2013) about her experience talking about the illegal drug economy with participants at a spiritual conference extremely compelling, especially for parents of pre-teens and teenagers. Ms. Fitts says,

“I have been asked by a friend to speak to a group called Spiritual Frontiers Foundation. They have a conference once a year where they explore how they can help our society evolve spiritually. They’re very committed to a higher spiritual life. And I have been asked to give a speech called “How The Money Works In Organized Crime” which later became a very funny, a famous article, “Narco-Dollars for Beginners.”

So I’m in the middle of the speech talking about how the U.S. Congress had had hearings about allegations of narcotics trafficking by the intelligence agencies into South Central L.A. It’s called the so called “Dark Alliance Allegations.” At that time the Department of Justice had told a reporter who I was working with that the U.S. Economy launders five hundred billion to a trillion dollars a year in illegal money. That’s not just narcotics trafficking, it’s financial fraud, illegal gambling, everything. So I said to this wonderful group of spiritually evolved committed people, “What would happen if we stop being the global leader in money laundering?”

They said, “Well, you know, it would be a problem because that money would not go to the New York Stock Exchange. If we stopped, you know, the money would leave and go to Hong Kong or Zurich and we’d have trouble refinancing the government deficit.”

So I said, “Well, let’s pretend there’s a big red button up here on the lectern. And if you push that button, you can stop all hard narcotics trafficking in your county, your community, your neighborhood, your state, your country, tomorrow, thus offending the people who control not only a half a trillion to a trillion dollars a year of dirty money but the accumulated capital thereon. Who here will push the button?” And out of a hundred people dedicated to evolving our society spiritually only one would push the button.

I wouldn’t let him answer so I said to the other ninety-nine, “Why would you not push the button?” And they said, “We don’t want our IRA and 401(k) to go down in value. We don’t want our mutual funds to decline and we don’t want our government checks to stop because we don’t, you know, if you had trouble financing the government deficit, our government checks would stop or our taxes would go up.”

And so I said, “So you want the powers to continue to market drugs to your neighbor’s children to keep your taxes low and your 401(k) up.”

And they said, “Yes, that’s right.”

And what was interesting, the epiphany I had that day was that everyone was so afraid to face that, or talk about that, that we couldn’t get to a point where we could do what I call, “turn the red button green.” Because the right question is not, “How do we push the red button? The right question is how do we make money pushing the red button? How do we turn the red button green?” Because if you can make money pushing the red button, then you can push the red button. And no one feels safe enough or comfortable enough to talk about this.

It’s a little bit like…when you take methadone. Methadone or drugs makes your body weaker and weaker and weaker so it can’t possibly be profitable. It’s the same with an economy. The more the economy depends on criminal enterprise the more you’re making money at things that make you economically stupid. Okay? Because you’re doing, you’re getting good at criminal enterprise. You’re getting good at financial fraud instead of getting good at things that really are useful and have some real economic productivity to them. So you’re making your body politic weaker and weaker the more dependent you get on this money. So it can’t lead to anyplace good.

So there is a way to turn the red button green but it starts by being honest with each other. And one of the reasons I wrote the article “Coming Clean Beyond the Fiscal Cliff” is, we’ve got to face this. We’ve got to look at that if we’re going to turn the red button green. In that sense we have all been complicit because we’ve been letting the leadership draw us in a more and more perverted and criminal way and as we’ve done it we’ve made the body politic weaker and weaker and weaker because we’re all spending our time doing things that are making us stupider instead of spending our time making things that make us healthier and stronger.”

Ms. Fitts posed those questions to the audience in the spiritual conference during the Summer of 2000, and it is my hope that in the Summer of 2013 (13 years later and after 9/11) that there are more than just one in 100 “spiritually conscious” people who are not only willing to talk about how to “turn the red button green,” but are actively pursuing ways in which to do so.

Is it actually true that for our economy to prosper, we need to turn a blind eye to the illegal drug trade, we need to hook our kids and the neighbors’ kids on drugs? No way! It’s like saying we need to keep selling land mines to our neighbors otherwise our way of life and our economy will suffer. The truth is, selling land mines is extremely profitable for the manufacturer of land mines and those directly involved in land mine online zyloprim drugs sales, but certainly not for the average Joe Public who has land mines going off in his neighborhood.

It is my hope that 13 years later, more and more people are discovering the truth, more and more people are realizing that the fears that were keeping them tied to the old (dysfunctional) systems are based on false assumptions, propaganda and downright lies.

I do not have the answers to how to push the red button but I have an idea about how we turn the red button green. We turn the red button green by each one of us fulfilling our higher purpose, each one of us in our own way. There is not just one red button that can be pushed, rather each one of us has a red button sitting right in front of us that we can turn green by doing our part, by fulfilling the purpose we came here to this planet to fulfill. (I have touched on fulfilling your higher purpose in the free report you received when you signed up for this magazine.)

A large part of being “spiritual” is about becoming socially and spiritually aware, about becoming conscious to what’s been hidden, and taking the steps necessary to fulfill our higher purpose and make a difference in the lives of our family members and those around us. In fact, fulfilling our higher purpose is how we “turn the red button green.

Whether it’s becoming a more conscious parent or launching an educational program that will impact the kids in our own neighborhood each one of us has a unique contribution to creating a world that works for everyone. There is no way around this; we’re here on this planet to learn and grow, not just to coast by.

The good news though is that 13 years ago when Ms. Fitts was speaking at that spiritual conference the possibility of “turning the red button green” wasn’t even in the conversation, the audience did not even want to look at it, but I know that things look different now. And that is indeed progress.