By Catherine Austin Fitts
You are probably walking around the world wondering why industry after industry and government agency after government agency are behaving like they are not under adult supervision.
Plain and simple – we are facing a serious implosion in governance process.
In the late 1990’s, I was having dinner in the Congressional dining room with a Congressman who was on the appropriations committee. He jumped up when the bell rang to notify the members it was time to vote. Before he ran off, he turned to me as he threw down his napkin, saying, “Let’s face it honey, I’m just here to protect my sh*t.”
The reality is that the US federal budget governance reflects 60 years of the winning strategy of “just protecting my own sh*t.” It has succeeded to the extent that the US government and central bank can print currency and treasury securities and the US military and intelligence agencies can force central banks, governments, banks and private investors to take them. The absence of any financial accountability has let the train run on for decades.
Now that the financial coup d’etat is over and clean up of the fraudulent securities is nearing its end, it now makes sense for the leadership of private investment capital to contemplate the advantages of not allowing the fundamental infrastructure to collapse from many decades of promoting sycophants and hit men as opposed to promoting excellence in line management and the tasks at hand.
Indeed, as Mr. Snowden has pointed out – the exploding military-industrial-terrorist complex has a problem. There are few if any enemies to provide justification for their ever growing police state. In the meantime, serious problems threaten.
One issue is crosscutting to this governance problem in both the private and public sector and the economic integration of the two. If immediate return to shareholder is indifferent to total health of the whole and performance by any standard, ultimately the players with the ability to act above the law end up trashing the system.
So what are the solutions? First is an understanding of the need for private investors and public decision makers to have access to the analytics to look at our society and economy as a dynamic living system and be able to consider how to optimize the whole. When that happens, governance process can incentivize individual players to compete based on total contribution to the whole.
Indeed if the system started to self organize to a basic standard of not intentionally shrinking the whole, including stealing other people’s wealth by criminal or corrupt political means, there would be a lot more “sh*t” available for everyone.
This brings me back to Solari’s fundamental mission – evolving the investment model on planet earth.
Here is a piece I wrote in 2001 and republished on the blog to frame this issue. Given the world events, it’s time to be talking about real solutions.
The Solari Model – Total Economic Return
