By Catherine Austin Fitts
I am thinking tonight about the things that each one of us can do in our everyday lives that will make a small but concrete difference in transforming us to a civilization which enjoys free markets and personal freedom. Tonight I would like to write as a woman to the women…or if you are a guy, the women in your life if you care to pass this on. When I am still grappling with an issue, I need to just put out what I feel. I need to “swarm” on it and see where the swarm takes it. Please forgive me if I give offense. Our feelings always lead us into areas that are sensitive. So help me out and here goes.
Dan Russell’s new book Drug Wars is so wonderful it is hard to describe. It reconnected me emotionally with the importance of criminalization of essential hungers (drugs, sex, money) to increase profit margins and control for those who control the enforcement mechanisms within a society. It is a way to turn over control to the most evil; the most violent.
Every one of us has a dream. Every one of us wants or hungers for beauty, truth, attention, admiration, pleasure, knowledge, connection, and procreation. We have intentions, we have desires. We have myths in our head that speak to what gives us energy. Each of us is unique but we all enjoy having lots of energy. We just get it and give it in an endless variety of ways. That is why markets, democratic process and other swarm systems are so wonderful when they function with integrity….they let us move around in the dance. They offer us the freedom to take it or leave it or vote or not on thousands of questions a day.
In terms of a community or society’s management of resources there are two essential models. The first is based on the assumption that using open systems such as markets can optimize our meaning and our energy (whether our space, our knowledge, our money, our health, our time, etc) best by letting every man and woman pursue their dream, even help them get it. The other model assumes that other parties are evil, that the system can not work on a self organizing basis, and that I need to rig it for my team.
Let me say it another way using the Popsicle Index. The Popsicle Index is the % of people in a community who believe that a child can leave their home, go to the nearest place to get a popsicle and come home alone safely.
When I was five, the Popsicle Index in West Philadelphia was 100%. Ten years later after HUD moved in, the Popsicle Index was 50% and falling. There was and always is a direct correlation between the Popsicle Index and the value of the homes and real estate, small business and other assets in a community. So the homeowners got killed, but could get rich reversing it too. In essence a few guys get rich with drugs and mortgage fraud, but much less wealth was made on the liquidation of a healthy neighborhood and local economy than the wealth destroyed. That is what is powerful about reversing the process. Undoing the harm creates more wealth, more broadly distributed.
All enterprise-whether government or business-can be divided up between things that make the Popsicle Index rise and things that make the Popsicle Index go down. I think teachers and organic farmers help the Popsicle Index rise. I think drug dealing, mortgage fraud and media disinformation cause it to go down. I get my thrills out of making money or teaching other people how to make money making the Popsicle Index rise.
I also get thrills making money deleting the power of people who make the Popsicle Index go down. So the idea of a class action suit that holds government contractors responsible for money lost in the FHA Fund or stolen and/or laundered through HUD could get me pretty jazzed. The idea of winning legal settlements from a variety of parties over damages to me and my companies has me totally jazzed.
In my family, if you ask a Northern woman how to get anything done, she will dial into Amazon, get the books, and figure out how to build a nuclear reactor in the back yard. If you ask a Southern woman, she will simply figure out who knows a nuclear engineer and then she will figure out how to get him to want to build one in her back yard. She thinks in terms of incentives.
The issue of whether the Popsicle Index rises or falls in America is connected to incentives. What do I need to do to make sure I and my family are physically and financially safe and what do I have to do to get my dream? Increasingly, more and more people are incentivized to make the Popsicle Index go down. Let me give you an example.
Let’s say Time Magazine does not tell the truth. Do we buy it still? Yes. Which means that the Chairman gets a big bonus each year and has access to low cost stock market capital which means he can buy or sell the politicians and small business folks like me.
OK, if he gets the money, who gets the girls? Who wins the breeding rights? Cause that is what it is about. It is about human energy. Attention. Love. Energy. Warmth. Admiration. Sex. Heirs. Eternal Life through physical and mental genes.
Well, let’s say two honest hardworking cops or prosecutors or journalists who are trying to stop this stuff are walking down Fifth Avenue. Out comes a senior management type from a private prison and security companies who is making big big bucks and he gets into his turbo charge Porsche to drive to his summer estate in the Hamptons. Who is going to get the girls? For a date, for some good loving, for a wife?
OK, did the CIA make that decision? Nope. They simply hooked us women with our own inattention to incentive systems.
OK, so what would happen tomorrow if every man in America who makes the Popsicle Index go down were considered repulsive by all women? What would happen?
OK, so what does that have to do with criminalization? Well, it really has to do with why Puritanism is more dangerous than the drug dealers and why that knowledge can help us turn this thing around.
There are things that men and women need which are essential for their health and happiness. Security is one. Sex is one. I like to think that truth, beauty and joy are all up there. Because everyone needs pleasure and happiness and the things that go into that. If these things are perfectly natural and accessible they usually are not expensive in terms of time or energy to get. Everybody needs them, so the market whether though barter or social arrangement or consumer arrangement builds capacity to make sure we have what we need on a pretty reasonable basis.
Someone can always make money cutting off something we need and then controlling the franchise of providing it to us. So by criminalizing drugs for example we can raise the profits on a shipload of marijuana from say $1MM that needs to be reinvested back in the basic business to $30MM which is mostly available for new activities. Hence the street expression, “make a law, make a business.”
Now this cannot happen in America unless everybody buys into the myth that using drugs is wrong. That is a tough one given how much big pharma is making providing Ritalin like products to drug our kids. So a lot of branding goes into what is a good drug and what is a bad drug. But we have to go along with the deal. Heroin and cocaine are bad. We should not legalize.
We should police our ethics with government intervention. Which brings me to sex, which is where I want to go. There is no way you can control a society with money. Money can swing the swarm this way or that, but it cannot keep every body shut up on the kind of fraud that is now going on. You need other things. That is where physical intimidation and harm come in. But you have to be careful there because killing too many people blows the branding. Which is why sex has been so very useful to keeping this game going. Men with no access to great sex and admiration and praise and where prostitution is illegal can be slowly brought to hunger and deviant hunger through deprivation. Then they can get interested in lots of stuff, including increasingly deviant sex.
One of the most beautiful energy forces in the world has got to be the sexual hunger of men. How can we not love that joy and that power? Clearly, it is one of the all time energizer bunnies of the human race. Meantime, nothing is more depressing than seeing it bottled up, misused and turn in negative directions. Indeed, while patriarchy may be pretty wonderful for the most powerful of the men in a society, it is pretty hideous for the rest. All the guys have to go to war, play enforcement or clean up just to get limited access to sex and the self-esteem issues are pretty ugly. Meantime, puritanism is making sure that the pleasure that we each need is coming up short. It is part and parcel of the use of hierarchies to channel that beautiful energy force of men into fighting their way up the chain of limited prestige and related perks, many of them genetic and sexual.
Adam Jukes is a counselor of men who abuse woman. He has written two of the best books I have found so far on some of these issues. He estimates that 40% of men hit or abuse woman and that most of them are psychologically normal. That pretty much fits my personal experience and that of the women in my family, my schools, and my work places.
What that means is that we are socially sick. My guess is that many animals only get like this in zoos or labs.
I wish that tomorrow every woman woke up in America with the sudden idea in her head that she was going to snub any man who did anything that made the Popsicle Index go down and focus her energy on men who make the Popsicle Index rise. Indeed, institute a double standard. Puritanism for the guys who make it go down. Abundance of admiration and attention for those who make it rise. Forget class. Forget all those other dividing lines. Let’s talk pure performance. Guys who make the Popsicle Index go down are causing us to be not safe.
If women focus our energy on the men who make the Popsicle Index rise, stop pressuring men to make sure they provide financial security regardless of what that means in terms of supporting a rotten system or turning a blind eye, redefine prestige in terms of a man’s positive contribution to a healthy family and environment and take responsibility to provide an alternative brand of what it means to be a man, things can change a lot. Being a man has nothing to do with money and prestige on the Titanic. Noah’s wife and kids were the ones that did not drown.
I always think of the hero in the movie the Alamo. He made me feel safe; he could plant and get things to grow. And you know he was fabulous when the lights went out. All men who like women and get treated right by them end up that way. I doubt he had a dime to his name. Money is not worth much during survival time.
Deviancy is deviancy. I don’t want to breed with deviancy for any amount of money or fame. Ethel Velez once got mad at me and said with an edge “well, honey, you are white, and you do not run the risk of being lynched” Before I could think twice, I said “well, Ethel, at least you can relax when you get home. You don’t have to sleep with the lyncher or have his children.” Ethel backed off.
There are not that many deviant guys. But there are a lot of guys who are controlled by them because it’s the way they think they can provide for us or have access to us. We control the access gate. Not the shadow government. All we have to do is believe in abundance and ditch puritanism.
So here is my step #22 for women to stop CIA drug trafficking and Enron financial fraud and HUD government contractor corruption and mortgage fraud today.
Praise and pet every man you know who makes the Popsicle Index rise for the next week in the ways you might do it that gives you energy and is comfortable and appropriate for your relationship. For example, leave candy for the postman, giggle and wink at the guy who takes your bags at the airport, thank all the other good guys you know for their courage over so many years, tell your dad you love him if he is making the Popsicle Index rise, otherwise read him the riot act, cancel all your subscriptions to national media, turn off TV that lies or omits, and tell your mate how much you appreciate him.
Delete from your life the men who like making money from the Popsicle Index going down. Help those who would like to make money on it rising. See what happens and if something along these lines works for you, teach two woman how to do this in the following week and two more each week thereafter. Tell them to do the same.
Believe it or not, if we all invented this together, we could turn around the whole planet in a year or two. There is a lot of happiness to be gotten from seeing the good guys win, and blush and giggle and perk up.
Lord knows they deserve it.
