| I just finished listening to an interview of a woman who should be known to every American - Catherine Austin Fitts. Fitts suffered through 18 audits and investigations, and 12 pieces of litigation over 13 years, and came through clean as whistle.
Her sin was trying to facilitate the discovery of national fraud and mismanagement of Federal Government dollars. She had started a company which made software, called Community Wizard, which would connect to the internet, and download information which would show sources and used of Federal dollars in your (or any) community. This software made the tremendous waste of tax dollars stick out like a sore thumb. Most federal funding is discussed in terms of function, not locality.
E.g., in 1996, when running the Distressed Assets program for HUD, she found communities where HUD would spend $200,000 to $250,000 per apartment to rehab or build public housing, while $50,000 would have allowed the purchase and rehab of a foreclosed or distressed property in the same neighborhood.
Her reward for her economic patriotism was, besides the audits, investigations, and litigation already mentioned, to have the Department of Justice seize her company and to "essentially" steal her software.
Fitts claims that widespread adoption of her software would have made the housing bubble impossible. The principle, here, is that "following the money" by local citizens is the ultimate form of financial control - superior, in fact, to laws and regulation (which, she explains, have been perverted to prosecute honest people; and that's in the less reprehensible cases; in the more reprehensible cases, sex scandals were conjured up to "get the honest people out of government")
Fitts doesn't think much of any bailout, much less a bailout with no oversight. She is basically for the real economy, under as much local control as possible. Centralizing economic forces like Wall Street help suck money out of local communities, and even help put pressure on local jobs by funding expatriation of businesses. See her website, solari.com, for more information on what she calls "the tapeworm economy".
Another economic patriot every American should know about is Walter Burien, who discovered and made public the Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports - essentially a legally required, second set of books kept by all levels of government, but discussed in no newspaper, of even, AFAIK, any "alternative" media such as Mother Jones.
When you see how much money is involved in CAFR assets - in the multi trillions of dollars - you may be thankful that the $700 billions rape bailout is so public. The CAFR's and HUD-level of fraud and mismanagement is an old and continuing story, that gets zero publicity in the case of the former, and very little (that I know of, anyway) in the case of the latter.
N.B.: See Fitts comments re Jack Kemp, to see how high the corruption goes. |
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