'Why Banks Need Crack', Readings Against Fascism (RAF) #2 For one thing, how the NYSE President visited the FARC in Columbia with, he said, "a message of cooperation from U.S financial services."
Another Offering meant to be Resource for Us against Supranational Fascism in 2025.
Feb. 26, 2025
Why Banks Need Crack, featuring excerpts from the “ ‘9/11’ “ Facing Our Fascist State book of September 2002.
‘For education about ‘how the money works’ from the laundering of profits in illegal narcotics for Banks, Brokerages, Corporations, and Stock Exchanges--that is, how such laundering works for all of the most essential and pillar-like institutions of global capitalism--I’m especially indebted to Catherine Austin Fitts and her Narcodollars for Dummies and to Al Giordano and other contributors to his Narco News Bulletin.
Catherine Austin Fitts was an insider for more than 15 years among major movers of capital. Her biography states that she’s a former Managing Director and Member of the Board of Directors of Dillon Read & Co, Inc, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing and a Federal Housing Commissioner in the first Bush Administration, and the former President of The Hamilton Securities Group, Inc.
Dillon, Read is among the most old-line Wall Street investment-banking firms. In 1926 Clarence Dillon of this firm was the agent for partnering Prescott Bush, W. Averill Harriman and George Herbert Walker with Nazi funders Fritz Thyseen and Friedrich Flick in the German Steel Trust.
In the Department of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts worked under Secretary Jack Kemp. She writes that she then declined a position as one of the Governors of the Federal Reserve Bank to start the Hamilton Securities Group in 1991. She writes that by the mid 1990s ‘Hamilton was doing well and poised for significant financial growth’ due to its ‘leadership in digital technology, financial software and analytic tools.’
Catherine Austin Fitts then discovered patterns of waste and fraud and probable crime that she felt obliged to point out to her Government clients.
In her plain-speaking style she writes: ‘One of my software tool innovations, Community Wizard, helped communities access data about how all the money works in their place. Accessible through the World Wide Web, Community Wizard was illuminating an unusual pattern of defaults on HUD mortgages and other government and homeowner losses in areas in which the CIA had admitted to facilitating cocaine trafficking by Iran/Contra supporters.’
That is, Fitts and Hamilton Securities pointed out that the same Black and Brown people who were most afflicted by the 1980s’ invasion of Crack cocaine into their communities, an invasion that Gary Webb’s book Dark Alliance (first a San Jose Mercury News series) showed to be assisted or ignored by the CIA and FBI, were losing their homes to foreclosures administered by another arm of the U.S. Government, HUD.
Fitts was harassed after her revelations. The Internal Revenue Service audited Hamilton Securities 18 times. She spent more than $6 million in legal and administrative fees and had to abandon Hamilton. Relief from Federal pressures came only after Insight magazine published a profile/expose in 2001.
Fitts writes: ‘A follow-up article by Insight's Paul Rodriguez described the closed investigation as something that "many inside both HUD and the Department of Justice regarded as a political vendetta against Fitts." ’
Fitts hasn’t abandoned her fight to expose corruption and empower communities. She’s instead become more sweeping in her disclosures and condemnation. She notes that trillions (yes, trillions--one thousand times one billion) of dollars are unaccounted for in the Departments of Defense and HUD over the past three years.
She perceives that people in general are much less safe and at ease now than when she was a girl in West Philadelphia in the 1950s despite the New York Stock Exchange’s rise of more than 9500 points (or more than 2000%) during the past five decades. She wants to restore what she terms the Solari Index--an an Index that registers he security, ease and cohesion within a community --to a state of both prosperity and safety for people in general.
Fitts blames the use of profits from illegal drugs (‘our addiction ot narco-dollars’) for the transformation of the U.S. Government into a ‘criminal syndicate’ that’s grown rotten in all of its Branches.
She shows that illegal drugs’ profits themselves multiply 20 times through the power of “the pop” on Wall Street. She writes: ‘The power of narco dollars comes when you combine drug trafficking with the stock market.’
She continues: ‘The "pop" is a word I learned on Wall Street to describe the multiple of income at which a stock trades. So if a stock like PepsiCo trades at 20 times it's income, that means for every $100,000 of income it makes, it's stock goes up $2 million. The company may make $100,000, but its "pop" is $2 million. Folks make money in the stock market from the stock going up. On Wall Street, it's all about "pop." ’
This 20-times-more-from-Pop formula invites infusion of capital from illegal and untraceable sources. ‘So if I have a company that has a $100,000 of income and a stock trading at 20 times earnings,’ Fitts writes, ‘if I can find a way to run $100,000 of narcotics sales by a few teenagers in West Philadelphia through my financial statements, I can get my stock market value to go up from $2 million to $4 million. I can double my "pop." ’
That is, Banks and indeed any entity that trades on or through a Stock Market can make 20 times a dollar for every dollar sold of Crack, cocaine or heroin.
Fitts writes: ‘According to the Department of Justice, the US launders between $500 billion-$1 trillion annually. I have little idea what percentage of that is narco dollars, but it is probably safe to assume that at least $100-200 billion relates to US drug import-exports and retail trade.’
So: The simplest way to figure the value of illegal narcotics’ profits to the central institutions of U..S finance is to multiply Fitts’ estimate for laundering of narco dollars by 20. If we multiply the estimate of ‘$100-200 billion’ by 20, the result is two to four trillion dollars.
Two to four trillion dollars per year make an amount that’s 100% to 200% of the United States’ annual Federal budget in 2001 or 2002l
Let me repeat and emphasize: TWO TO FOUR TRILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR MAKE AN AMOUNT THAT’S 100% TO 200% OF THE UNITED STATES ANNUAL FEDERAL BUDGET
H’mm! H'mm!--H'mm!--H'mm!
The annual amount of “pop” lets us see now how much Banks need Crack.
We can appreciate more fully how large and cruel is capitalism’s own addiction.
Fitts goes on to make further connections. She writes: ‘Many of the members of our global leadership were trained in wartime narcotics trafficking in Asia during WW II. George H. W. Bush and his generation watched our ally Chang Kai Shek finance his army and covert operations with opium. I am told that the Flying Tigers were the model that taught Air America how to fly dope.’
She adds: ‘If you trace back the history of the family and family networks of America's leaders and numerous other leaders around the world, what you will find is that narcotics and arms trafficking are a multigenerational theme that has criss-crossed through Asia, North America, Europe, Latin America and Eurasia and back through the City of London and Wall Street to the great pools of financial capital. Many a great American and British fortune got going in the Chinese opium trade.’
Fitts and Michael Ruppert and other investigators mentioned in this book are admirable in their courage and acuity.
Fitts’ prime example of the value of narco-dollars to global finance is ‘ “the cold call” ‘ that Richard Grasso, President of the New York Stock Exchange, paid to Raul Reyes, one chief of Colombia’s largest guerrilla army, the F. A. R. C., in late June of 1999.
At that time the FARC was reputed to be taxing the traffic of billions of dollars of Andean coca each year. Richard Grasso, the President of the New York Stock Exchange flew over 2000 miles to Colombia and then to the FARC’s Switzerland-sized enclave to meet the Marxist guerrilla.
Richard Grasso then told the Associated Press: ‘The purpose of the trip was ‘ "to bring a message of cooperation from U.S. financial services." ’
The FARC, however, held to their position that a more comprehensive and cooperative solution to the problem of illegal narcotics and the far more profitable crimes (up to 20 times more profitable) that flourished from said criminality would be the decriminalization of coca and cocaine. Grasso made no sale.
The next year, 2000, the Clinton Administration and Congress approved ‘Plan Colombia’, throwing $1.3 billion U.S. dollars into Colombia for the stated purpose of wiping out the harvests of coca and opium there. The Bush Administration has since enlarged this Plan’s funding and given Colombia’s military freer rein to attack the FARC and Colombia’s second, Marxist/Gueveraist guerilla group, the E.L.N.
One result of Plan Colombia so far is a net gain in the output of cocaine and opium from South America, a gain partly due to increased output through the paramilitary group, the Autodefensas Unidades de Colombia (AUC) , that’s allied with Colombia’s military. Another result is more widespread and deadly mass-murder of noncombatants in Colombia’s civil war.’
Lagniappe—five pages from Jim Hoffman’s and my book Waking Up from Our Nightmare / The 9/11/01 Crimes in New York City
Thank you! Please share and Share and Re-Stack and all like that.
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