I don’t have many heroes, and I certainly didn’t have many growing up. My faith in the adults around me was shattered before I hit the age of reason. In the end, this was a good thing, because it allowed me to be critical of my early childhood programming, as well as my culture, in ways that most people are not.
For reasons unbeknownst to me, by my mid-teens I had become fascinated by the Global Financial System. I considered the study of money and markets to be pure psychology. Because I was outside the tribe, and therefore tribal thinking, I was able to go where the facts led me, not where the official story would have me go. In this way, and over decades, I pieced together a cohesive picture by watching the international flows of money, both legal and illegal. But I couldn’t speak about what I was finding, because people either got upset or told me I was crazy. And then I discovered the woman who would validate my research, although her background could not have been more different from mine…
Catherine Austin Fitts served as Assistant Secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the first Bush administration. She was also a partner at Dillon Read and Company, a Wall Street investment firm. She lived in a six million dollar mansion in Washington DC that overlooked the Potomac River. After years of watching the inefficiencies of government money flows, she created a software system called Community Wizard that tracked the money on a place-based case. What she didn’t know was that she had devised a system that would ferret out fraud simply by providing taxpayers with enough information on the sources and uses of funds in their counties and neighbourhoods. She had created a very powerful tool, but it was not met with cheers. She was taken to court by the Federal Government and dragged through six years of litigation. Her case was eventually dropped, but only after her personal wealth was exhausted and her health depleted. Thus did this Washington- Wall Street insider find herself out in the cold.
Catherine Austin Fitts knows better than anyone the nature of the Juggernaut that she is up against, and yet she remains undaunted. She has a website where she posts salient articles that connect the dots of the global financial ecosystem in ways that few others can or will. And she has a subscriber-only weekly broadcast called the Solari Report where she analyzes recent events in money and markets. In a world that operates on separation and compartmentalization, her brilliance lies in how she can discern connections between seemingly disparate events, be they political or financial.
The rarest commodities on the planet today are not Diamonds, Platinum or Palladium, but Courage, Honour and Integrity. Catherine possesses these in spades, which is why she is my greatest hero.
