Catherine Austin Fitts, Spirituality, Economic Reality And Our Progress

Recently I came across a five minute video of Catherine Austin Fitts talking about her experience of speaking at a spiritual conference to which she was invited. For those 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. (Access the video here.)

I found what she shared in the video (uploaded May 30, 2013) about her experience interacting with participants at the spiritual conference extremely compelling, enough to make it the focus of at least a couple of articles on my blog. Ms. Fitts stated,

“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 that 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 the neighbors’ kids on drugs? No way! It’s like saying we need to keep selling land mines otherwise our way of life and our economy will collapse, we need to sell more weapons. The truth is, selling land mines is extremely profitable for the manufacturer of land mines and those directly involved in land mine sales, but certainly not for the average Joe Public.

It is my hope that 13 years later, more and more people are acknowledging the lies, more and more people are realizing that the fears that were keeping them aligned to the old systems and the old ways of being are based on false assumptions, propaganda and downright lies.

And it’s not just the illegal drug industry that is full of lies, many other industries are as well: the pharmaceutical industry, the cancer industry, the defense industry, the energy industry, the processed food industry, among many, many others.

It is my assertion that “spirituality” is about becoming socially and spiritually aware, becoming conscious to the lies we bought into, and taking the steps necessary to fulfill our higher purpose. In fact, fulfilling our higher purpose is how we “turn the red button green.” Everything else is just fluff. (Find my latest article on fulfilling your higher purpose here.)

No matter what happens around you it is not the end of the world, it is just a transition and each one of us has a unique contribution to creating a world that works for everyone, a “Golden Age.” Getting that message out and sharing helpful real-life experiences and insights via my books and my blog has been my main focus for the last several years, and it seems to have made some difference. Thirteen years ago, when Ms. Fitts was speaking at that spiritual conference, the possibility of turning the red button green was not even in the conversation, not even on the radar, but now it is. And that is indeed progress.