by Catherine Austin Fitts
YouTube | April 2015
Hubris is pridefulness to the point of cluelessness.
Of all the bubble’s we have managed over the last two decades, the hubris bubble is of greatest concern – both its size and what happens when it pops. Of the many risks facing American investors, there is none greater than the hubris of American leadership.
Normally, I don’t comment on this topic – it being one that our readers and subscribers already understand. Better to focus on avoiding the drain and danger leadership hubris presents in our everyday lives:
- Outwitting information systems and communications systems that have no privacy and little to no integrity;
- Complying with countless, complex tax and regulatory systems that eat up vast amounts of time and expense;
- Finding fresh food not laced with strange DNA-altering substances;
- Navigating a health care system corrupted by federal government intervention;
- Contemplating the destruction of our public educational system as a result of federal intervention;
- Funding an extreme divergence in cost of capital between small business and households vs. large banks and corporations;
- Overcoming the debasement of our savings and the shift of all productivity gains to investors with none to labor;
- Overcoming the entrapment and devastation of the pump and dump of the housing market;
- Navigating a student loan industry that profits from the students’ failure;
- Avoiding the illegal drugs and related violence pushed in our communities and grappling with addicted family members and friends.
I could go on, but you get the gist of the thing. Poor leadership that we are mandated to fund with our tax dollars has placed a growing demand on our time and resources.
We are, however, watching a new round of hubris which is so “over the top” that I am called to comment on it.
First Larry Summers, a man instrumental in engineering the financial coup d’etat at home and abroad and the bankruptcy of a large part of the middle class, just published the article Time US Leadership Woke Up to a New Economic Era calling for:
- Respect for our role as a global leader; as opposed to exploiting our position to pursue parochial interests.
- Respect for the needs of the domestic and global middle class.
I am sure there is a logical explanation for Summers’ state of amnesia. Let’s look at the options:
- He did not understand how the economy worked when he was Secretary of the Treasury and he still does not understand;
- As he is personally wealthy with a secure professorship, he has little knowledge of what life is like in America: New Evidence that Half Americans are Broke;
- He does not understand how the Harvard endowment (that pays his salary) and the hedge funds who hire him for speeches have made their money over the last twenty years. Moreover, he can not connect that to the reasons why they pay him richly to implement the specific policies he has promoted and implemented for the last twenty years – whether in government or with respect to the global empire overseen by the Harvard Corporation;
- He is mildly autistic – integrating the impact of his actions on human beings not in his immediate presence is challenging for him;
- He thinks that the world is sufficiently complex that you and I can’t connect the centralization of global power and wealth and the resulting harm to the global economy and ecosystem to Summer’s career and the rich profits he has made personally;
- He thinks you and I are stupid and/or irrelevant.
It is hard to imagine how Summers missed what was going on in the real economy when he worked at and ran Treasury – I was in Washington from 1989-1998. The information was widely known and understood:
But, let’s not dwell on Summers – he has major competition in the hubris bubble. Evidencing even greater hubris is Blackrock CEO Larry Fink bemoaning America’s short term thinking in Our Gambling Culture.
Has Larry Fink forgotten how he engineered his rise to the top of Wall Street? I worked with BlackRock in the 1990’s and I have not forgotten – the experience almost cost me my life. My personal impression was that the law and the long term were niceties that Larry Fink and his senior partners were not concerned with.
It sounds like Summers and Fink are positioning themselves for the new policy pivot underway for the 2016 Presidential campaign as they come into the G-7 and Bilderberger meetings in June (Germany and Austria) and the Bohemian Grove meeting in July (San Francisco Bay Area). There are people to be named as “top advisors,” ultimately in the running for cabinet positions. There is pork to be competed for, and media attention. There is another round of riches to be had.
Everyone wants to be look their best in the hubris bubble.
After all we have a Clinton and a Bush likely to run for President, prompting even The Economist to declare that America’s aristocracy is calcifying:
“When the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination line up on stage for their first debate in August, there may be three contenders whose fathers also ran for president. Whoever wins may face the wife of a former president next year. It is odd that a country founded on the principle of hostility to inherited status should be so tolerant of dynasties. Because America never had kings or lords, it sometimes seems less inclined to worry about signs that its elite is calcifying.”
“…Loosening the link between birth and success would make America richer—far too much talent is currently wasted. It might also make the nation more cohesive. If Americans suspect that the game is rigged, they may be tempted to vote for demagogues of the right or left—especially if the grown-up alternative is another Clinton or yet another Bush.”
The Economist can comment with the luxury of an ocean between them and the Bush and Clinton retinues. For those of us in the United States, we ponder whether the body-count is going to accelerate. One of the reasons the hubris bubble has gotten so big is that the American leadership is so good at killing:
- Arkansas Sudden Death Syndrome
- Clinton Still at Large
- Bush Clinton Deaths
- Meditations at the Crossroads
Summers, Fink and the coming elections are not the worst, however. The worst came this week from Singularity University – an example of progressives coming up with solutions to the symptoms that make the underlying problem far worse.
The basic idea is now that we have used digital systems, law and regulation applied with double standards, divergence in cost of capital and killing with impunity to consolidate the economy into oligarchs in a manner that shrinks the total economy, we are going to put the general population on minimal stipends so they are financially dependent with minimal income and assets and easy to control.
Who needs markets? Certainly not the oligarchs and the toadies who do their bidding. Or the machinery that does the invisible killing that makes the whole thing go and extracts the subsidy necessary to support the ever growing debt the system requires.
This is why transparency around the black budget is so essential to finding a pathway out of the hubris bubble — other than the loss or collapse of the US global position.
Catherine Austin Fitts at Secret Space Program Conference:
The US leadership has invested a great deal of time and money in persuading us that real change is hopeless and leading us towards a perverse culture and the loss of individual soveignty. However, things are far from hopeless.
Contemplate for a moment what America could be like if we instituted a process to create and maintain excellence in leadership.
To encourage you to do so, I offer this TED speech as inspiration, Eric Li: A Tale of Two Political Systems:
It is time to pop the hubris bubble. We are better than this.
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