Catherine Austin Fitts on the DoD and the Central Banking-Warfare Model
A Guest Post on Sasha Latypova's Substack
Introduction
One of the reasons I am grateful for Sasha Latypova’s work and that of her colleague
Katherine Watt is their contribution to helping us understand the controlling role played by the Department of Defense (DOD) in Operation Warp Speed and the most recent round of poisoning and bankrupting Americans during the Covid-19 operation.
The latest Rasmussen poll from May 2024 indicates that nearly one out of five Americans surveyed know someone who was killed by the Covid shots.1 Various statistics and estimates of the rising number of Americans disabled by the shots or still working but made chronically ill indicate that the problem is far wider than just the death toll. Fertility and life expectancy statistics, too, indicate that what I describe as “the Great Poisoning” is accelerating.
People from all walks of life are pushing back against the steady technocratic centralization of control. One of the most powerful ways to push back is through the financial system, including the intertwined systems that govern taxation, banking, and investments. If the federal government is operating outside the law—and certainly poisoning and bankrupting American citizens counts as such—then we need to stop financing its criminal behavior and find ways to finance the movement of our institutions back into lawful governance and management. To do that, it is essential to understand how the money works at the institutions involved.
To that end, I thought I would provide some musings on the Department of Defense and its finances in the hopes that this may help identify effective ways to push to enforce the law as expressed by the Constitution—that is, as opposed to new “rules” invented under the pretense of an emergency (such as we experienced pursuant to DOD’s Operation Warp Speed) or surprise legislation pushed through using the pretext of a national security threat (such as the Patriot Act, which I sometimes refer to as the “Consolidation and Concentration of Cash Flow Act”). This requires mentioning a variety of events in which I have encountered the extensive activities of the Defense Department. These events may appear disparate—hence the title “Musings”—but bear with me while I connect the dots.
The Central Banking-Warfare Model
For approximately 500 years, the Western world has operated on an economic model sometimes referred to as the “central banking-warfare model.” In brief, the central banks create money, and the military and intelligence services make sure that the money is accepted in trade for labor and natural resources; military-intelligence players also help provide the necessary enforcement that supports liquidity of the money and related instruments such as bonds and stocks. (For a full description, see my discussion of the dollar system in my 2019 report, The State of Our Currencies: The End of Currencies.2)
Every 100 or so years, the reserve currency system seems to go through a reset. We are currently in the midst of such a reset. For centuries, dominance of trade routes, and particularly the sea lanes, helped to determine the reserve currency; the British Navy—and then the U.S. Navy—played an important role in this regard. As more and more information, transactions, surveillance, and even weaponry have been processed by or with the help of satellites, dominance of the satellite lanes also has grown in importance. Hence, we see the military creating the U.S. Space Force.
I remember a famous reporter who once was fired by a major network as they censored her story about sarin gas (a chemical nerve agent). Senior management and the network’s general counsel had already edited, approved, and cleared the story for publication. Nevertheless, it was canceled because DOD made it clear that the network, which was highly dependent on satellite operations, might find itself experiencing interference. In theory, that meant that the network might find its broadcasts running slower than those of its competitors, or might be subject to interruptions or even be shut down. At the Solari Report, we certainly have experienced these phenomena many times, particularly when we are covering highly sensitive topics. These forms of interference can be quite expensive and hard on team morale, as well as alienating and frustrating our subscribers. This is one of the reasons we now prerecord our shows.
All media operations and financial institutions depend on reliable high-speed communications. That means that DOD controls their hardware—whether cables under the ocean or satellites in the sky. That’s why, when you see a movie or a media story distributed in the Western world, you can appreciate that DOD let it happen. Not every movie or media story is allowed through.
Playing controller and traffic cop on both the sea and satellite lanes requires building an expensive global infrastructure that has very high maintenance costs. Although the U.S. central bank and its owners can create that money out of thin air, the labor and resources they trade for must carry the full expense of the infrastructure and generate a return. The growing costs—and the opportunities afforded by new digital technologies—mean that central bankers will find central control of infrastructure, surveillance, and enforcement inherently attractive.
The central bankers began a new reset in 2019 called the Going Direct Reset. The Solari Report published John Titus’s brilliant review for subscribers,3 as well as a public summary.4 You can find them here:
The Going Direct Reset
Summary – Going Direct Reset
https://home.solari.com/summary-going-direct-reset/
The best way to understand DOD’s Operation Warp Speed (OWS) is in the context of the Going Direct Reset—OWS is one aspect of the implementation of this reset. By the very nature of the central banking-warfare model, the central bankers and military must act and pivot together.
Planet Debt
Debt is one of the key components of the central banking-warfare model. An indebted country, business, or person is controllable. If a foreign country borrows in dollars, they need to earn dollars to service and pay back their debt. When the U.S. Treasury issues its currency with debt instead of issuing greenbacks directly from the Treasury without debt, it finds itself highly leveraged and dependent on the central bank and the bond market.
Recent reports from around the world indicate that national heads of state and officials are going along with various pandemic and health restrictions that are not in the best interests of their people because their countries are in a debt trap; if they do not go along, their loans will not be renewed. There is an old saying: “All wars are bankers’ wars.” Debt is part of that game—interest is part of the tithe to the empire. In a scene from the movie The International, when a U.S. Assistant District Attorney asks an Italian arms manufacturer why a bank would be purchasing hundreds of millions of dollars of the company’s armaments, he explains:
“It’s about control…. [The bank’s] objective isn’t to control the conflict, it’s to control the debt that the conflict produces. You see, the real value of a conflict, the true value, is in the debt that it creates. You control the debt, you control everything…. [T]his is the very essence of the banking industry—to make us all, whether we be nations or individuals, slaves to debt.”
The International – banking scene
If countries need to earn dollars to carry their dollar debt, then essentially they need to earn them from the people who control the dollar system. This means they need to trade—typically across the trade routes that the empire controls—and they need to hold dollars. Ultimately, no matter where those dollars are in the world, they will be deemed to be under the jurisdiction of United States authority and law.
Recent reports on the erosion of the U.S. dollar’s petrodollar status often fail to consider the extent to which the petrodollar has been replaced by a global “debt dollar.”
DOD: A Big Annual Budget
The annual budget request by the Department of Defense for fiscal 2025 is $849.8 billion. That is a lot of money. In fact, when you break that budget down, by state and county, into spending, employment, and health and retirement benefits for all the branches and operations of DOD, its contractors, and the companies it purchases from or awards grants to, you will discover that military spending has a significant impact on every local economy in America.
In most counties in America, total federal spending, purchases, and retirement checks constitute more than 40% of the local GDP. In some counties, especially those with large military bases and installations, it is even more. America’s national security payrolls, contracts, and acquisitions buy a lot of Congressional, state, and local clout. It is fair to say that military policy is often organized around what generates stock market profits—and employment and revenues in Congressional districts—as opposed to what is needed to ensure a high-performance military. No doubt, as the military-intelligence establishment launches more satellites and implements more surveillance—allowing DOD and U.S. intelligence agencies to track and influence what each of us is saying and doing—it accumulates even more clout at the state and local levels, including by building control files5 on local officials and decision-makers.
In 1987, I was invited to a budget briefing by the Department of Defense. We had an impressive briefing from a very capable intelligence analyst from Defense Intelligence and then had dinner with Secretary Caspar Weinberger in his private dining room with approximately 15 captains of industry, two token female Wall Street executives (I was one), and one young tech entrepreneur. The goal of the dinner was to achieve lobbying support to pass the proposed DOD budget through Congress. It was clear how dependent numerous companies were on military purchases, the Detroit auto companies among them.
At one point, the tech entrepreneur started suggesting ways that new technology could be used to dramatically improve military performance while slashing costs. You could have heard a pin drop. He clearly did not understand the cost-plus contracting model and the unmistakable goal to generate ever-growing revenues for a high-overhead defense infrastructure that employed and kept busy a majority of the scientists and engineers in the country, not to mention law firms and lobbyists, all of which financed a lot of campaign contributions.
Which is to say that wherever you are in America, if you follow the money, invariably it will lead back to a military or intelligence budget and related political leashes, most involving contracts, purchases, grants, and/or payrolls. It pays to track those leashes into your community, company, employer, and family and friend circles. Inevitably, those intimate connections are there.
My DOD Employment Offer
In 1988, I was sitting in my office at Dillon Read. I was a managing director and member of the board of this Wall Street investment bank. Our chairman had just agreed to serve as Secretary of the Treasury at the end of the Reagan Administration in anticipation of George H. W. Bush winning the presidential election. Out of the blue, I received a call from White House Personnel asking me if I would serve as an Assistant Secretary at DOD. I was shocked to be offered a position at the Pentagon—this was well outside of my area of expertise.
When I asked for a detailed description of the Pentagon position, I learned that it was something akin to a chief financial officer role, including managing the budget process. I concluded that the job basically would be to tell generals “no.” Because it seemed that a 38-year-old female investment banker with no military experience or training could easily get herself in hot water, I declined the position.
At the time, I could not exactly explain why I felt it was a dangerous position for an outsider. However, it turned out to be a good call. A year later, I ended up at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). There, I was instrumental in significantly upgrading their payment, information, and accounting systems, which is why I know that every excuse HUD has ever given regarding the $1 trillion documented as missing from HUD and their failure to produce audited financial statements in any year since 1998 is utter rubbish. Although I never worked at DOD, after more than 25 years of observing the same or worse patterns at DOD as at HUD, I am confident that DOD’s excuses regarding its refusal to respect or obey the financial management laws and regulations are entirely fictional as well, drawing on long-standing cover stories claiming that the problems are due to “complexity,” “incompetence,” and “antiquated systems” that do not talk to each other.
DOD: Missing $20 Trillion
Fiscal 1998 was when vast amounts of money started to go missing from DOD and HUD, with those two agencies consistently refusing to produce audited financial statements as required by law.
Secret money was not a new phenomenon in the U.S., however. Subsequent to the passage of the National Security Act in 1947 and the CIA Act in 1949, the growth of secret money at DOD and Treasury was noteworthy. For those interested in this history, see Dr. Joseph Farrell’s presentations on the hidden system of finance at the 20146,7 and 20158,9 Secret Space Program conferences, as well as my presentation on the black budget at the 2014 conference.10 An executive order during the Reagan Administration turbocharged this growth,11 permitting private corporations to undertake highly classified work as contractors; this created a gushing spigot of secret money contributing to stock market profit.
Secret Space Program Conferences
https://live.solari.com/w/p/eXNLAUxSiZMvHLtpm7ubYN
The problem is now much worse as a result of additional national security secrecy in federal accounting, appropriations, contracting, and related bond and stock disclosures governed by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This includes the adoption of classification rules,12 Director of National Intelligence waivers of SEC disclosure for banks and corporations doing business with the U.S. federal government,13,14 and the 2018 implementation of Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board Statement 5615 (described later in this article). For a full discussion, see the Legal Series on U.S. Monetary and Fiscal Operations and the “Caveat Emptor” article16 at Solari’s Missing Money website.17
The gusher of “undocumentable adjustments” and refusal to publish financial audits or to track down enormous and inexplicable discrepancies in the DOD and HUD financial records that began in fiscal 1998 were significant. They followed the process of globalization begun with the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 and the push to build a “unipolar” empire. Sir James Goldsmith described it beautifully in 1994 when he tried to stop the U.S. Congress from approving the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) that launched the WTO.18
Sir James Goldsmith’s 1994 Globalization Warning
https://home.solari.com/sir-james-goldsmiths-1994-warning/
According to agency financials, between fiscal 1998 and 2000, approximately $4.3 trillion went missing from DOD and HUD. These balances would have been managed and transacted with the help of payment and IT contractors at DOD and HUD and the U.S. Treasury and its depository, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The New York Fed is owned by its members, who typically provide many of the functions of the depository as agents for the New York Fed.
In the early years, there was a significant effort by reporter Kelly Patricia O’Meara and Insight Magazine to cover the missing money story. You can find all of these articles and historical coverage at the Solari Missing Money website (under “News Coverage”).17 In fall 2001, I was helping Kelly produce a large cover story on the missing money, with charts and graphs demonstrating the cost to taxpayers by state, which Insight had scheduled to publish on September 15. It would have been distributed to all Congressional offices the following week. However, the course of subsequent events resulted in the story being delayed for weeks and then ultimately ignored after DOD received a sudden and enormous increase in appropriations.
On September 10, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that DOD was missing $2.3 trillion.19,20 This announcement was quickly buried by the events of the following day, September 11, when numerous offices filled with records and documents related to the accounting for DOD’s money and related Treasury and other securities were blown up in New York and Washington. This included offices of the Office of Naval Intelligence at the Pentagon, said to be investigating the trillions missing from DOD. Subsequently, the Army—led by a former Enron executive—claimed that as a result of records lost on September 11, it could not produce an audit, even though my understanding was that their accounting operations were run from Ohio.
$2.3 Trillion Missing Money – Here’s How “Fact Checking” Works
https://home.solari.com/heres-how-fact-checking-works/
Rep. Cynthia McKinney Grills Rumsfeld
The relationship between the missing money and the blowing up of financial records was so significant that James Corbett produced a marvelous video on the topic called 9/11 Trillions: Follow the Money.21
9/11 Trillions: Follow the Money
https://corbettreport.com/episode-308-911-trillions-follow-the-money/
The Department of Defense never explained why the U.S. Air Force ignored standing protocols regarding planes going off-course and effectively “stood down” three or four times on September 11, 2001. What we do know is that the result was not only the passage of the Patriot Act—with few in Congress having had time to read it—but also promotions all around, a $48 billion increase in appropriations for DOD in the first year, and explosive growth in the size and funding of the national security state as the U.S. military expanded both its domestic and foreign operations and wars. 22,23
List of American Military Installations (U.S. and Worldwide)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_military_installations
The Plan—according to U.S. General Wesley Clark (Ret.)
By fiscal 2015, the undocumentable adjustments at DOD totaled $20 trillion. The undocumentable adjustments at HUD, including the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Ginnie Mae with significant credit and responsibilities in the U.S. mortgage market, totaled almost $1 trillion.
The $20 trillion calculation of money missing from DOD from fiscal 1998 to 2015 resulted from a survey by Dr. Mark Skidmore and his graduate students in 2017. Dr. Skidmore is Professor of Economics and Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University, where he holds the Morris Chair in State and Local Government Finance and Policy. When we published this survey, the total outstanding Treasury debt of the U.S. government was $21 trillion. So, grossly oversimplified, the U.S. government had borrowed $21 trillion, and then something like that amount of money disappeared out the back door of DOD’s and HUD’s—or Treasury’s—bank accounts.
In theory, this makes DOD and the U.S. government’s bank depository—the New York Fed and the private banks that own it and implement many of its operations—the largest money laundering institutional team in the history of the world.
Note that the New York Fed became a shareholder of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in October 1994. The BIS is based in Basel, Switzerland and is the central bank of central banks, having 63 of the largest central banks in the world as its members. The BIS enjoys sovereign immunity and can hold assets without disclosure on its balance sheet. What role the BIS may have played in helping to facilitate New York Fed depository transactions, including those that resulted in the $21 trillion in undocumentable adjustments, is an important unanswered question.
Again, Solari’s Missing Money website provides extensive documentation and analysis of the $21 trillion of undocumentable adjustments at DOD and HUD, as well as information about the laws and regulations related to federal financial management, Dr. Skidmore’s report and subsequent updates, and much more.17
Determining where this money went, holding parties responsible under the law, and achieving an offsetting return of assets is at the heart of any meaningful reform.
The Role of Defense Contractors
The U.S. government is not run by political appointees and the civil service; it is run by private corporate contractors and banks.24 The largest defense contractors also hold significant contracts at non-military agencies, allowing for significant integration with the military across government.
Top 100 Defense Contractors
https://people.defensenews.com/top-100/
The top contractor at DOD is Lockheed Martin. During the period from 1998–2015, as $21 trillion went missing, Lockheed was the lead information and payment systems contractor at DOD, as it certainly was at HUD. Lockheed spun a government IT division out to Leidos after the 2015 fiscal year in which the Army enjoyed $6.5 trillion of undocumentable adjustments.
When I was Assistant Secretary at HUD, and subsequently when my company was lead financial advisor at HUD, my staff would sometimes end up having wars with Lockheed Martin trying to get the accounting data we needed to do legally or contractually required tasks. I came to describe the data operations that Lockheed and its national security state colleagues were running as the “databeast.”
DOD, through its Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA)—and, until 2016, the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA)—plays a significant role in reviewing, approving, auditing, and disqualifying contractors across DOD and many federal agencies. To give a sense of the scope of the work, Wikipedia reports:
“As of 14 January 2019, DCMA had 11,641 civilians and 552 military assigned. Number of contractors and number of active contracts remained roughly constant. Total contracts serviced were valued at $5.2 trillion and authorized contractor payments per day was valued at $678 million.”25
The Big Tech firms and their hardware and software infrastructure and products are now also integrated into these contracting arrangements. For example, Amazon runs the cloud contract for the CIA, which provides an integrated cloud for all 17 intelligence agencies.26 Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Leidos (which includes the former Lockheed division) share responsibility for the big DOD and Navy cloud contracts.27
Investigative reporter Whitney Webb has written extensively on the integration of Silicon Valley and the national security state as well as on contracting aspects of Operation Warp Speed. For those interested in exploring this topic further, we strongly recommend her website, Unlimited Hangout.28
Privatization through U.S. federal government contracting has put many operations beyond the governance or control of the government itself. I once bet a retired top HUD civil servant that he would not be able to find a single government employee at HUD who understood how the budget or any of the finances worked. Our bet was for a dinner at Red Lobster in Jackson, Tennessee. Sure enough, that is where he took me after he had spent a year looking high and low throughout HUD in Washington and throughout the field system and was unable to find an employee who understood how the money worked. The operations were now entirely in the hands of corporate contractors and private banks. This also has put government operations beyond the reach of serious researchers, scholars, reporters, or citizens, as more and more information has become inaccessible through requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Between a handful of defense contractors, Big Tech firms, and New York Fed member banks, the U.S. government can be quickly and radically reengineered, especially in an all-digital financial system. Calls to reform government by getting rid of the civil service would make a radical reengineering that much easier to accomplish. This likely would mean moving governance of the U.S. under the jurisdiction of international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations (UN) and its various agencies, and the BIS, who would be free to use AI, financial surveillance and control, and robotics without any legal obligation to the U.S. Constitution; instead, these entities would enjoy the protection of sovereign immunity.
For those who wish to preserve U.S. sovereignty, the intelligent response to the corruption of the civil service is to reform the civil service and remove private parties from control positions that compromise the government’s informational, financial, and operational sovereignty. Please beware the destruction of sovereignty that is being engineered by a privatized corporate and banking infrastructure operating in secret that can accelerate dramatically if we move to an all-digital financial system.
My Lunch Invitation from the U.S. Navy
My efforts to stop mortgage fraud as both Assistant Secretary of Housing and then as lead financial advisor to the FHA resulted in my getting fired in 1990 and my company being fired in 1997. After my company was fired as financial advisor in 1997 without advance notice (a rare event in government), and just as vast amounts of money started to disappear from DOD and HUD (much easier to do after they booted out the lead financial advisor and reversed the mechanisms we designed and helped put in place to stop money moving out of the back door of HUD), I was immediately approached by a small Washington think tank that did strategic planning for the U.S. Navy. In the process, an effort was made to persuade me that aliens exist and live among us. Among other things, I was offered the opportunity to have lunch with several aliens. For those interested in the details, I told the story during the closing panel at the 2015 Secret Space Program Conference.29
Secret Space Program Conference 2015 – Closing Panel
https://home.solari.com/blast-from-the-past-week-of-july-3-2023-invitation-to-lunch-with-aliens/
Declining to have lunch with aliens, I asked for and received a long list of the best books on the UFO and alien topic and proceeded to read approximately 25 of them. Since that time, I have occasionally watched various efforts to bring transparency to the UFO question as well as to related advanced technology, breakthrough energy, and invisible weaponry controlled by private corporations that play essential roles in the national security state.
Some of these efforts include something like the following spin: “We need all of these trillions of dollars that are going missing at the Department of Defense to deal with this phenomenon. It is so scary and dark that you do not want to know. Just trust us with the money.” In their defense, I remember watching the documentary The Phoenix Lights when it was first released. It showed footage of a large UFO that slowly flew through Phoenix to the edge of Tucson in March 1997. In the middle of searching for what was then $4 trillion missing from DOD, my first response was, “I’ll bet Lockheed Martin would build that for $4 trillion.”
Ben Rich (the retired CEO of Lockheed’s “Skunk Works” group) famously said in 1993, “We now have the technology to take ET home.” I came upon this quote, referencing the development of black budget technologies and invisible weaponry, when as an investment advisor I experienced insider trading a week before the Indonesia tsunami and started to research invisible weaponry. I became convinced that such weaponry was playing a significant role in the dominance of the U.S. dollar as reserve currency.
Indeed, in April 1997, U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen spoke about such weaponry at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy at the University of Georgia. The event was part of the Sam Nunn Policy Forum being hosted by the university. Secretary Cohen was joined by Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Richard G. Lugar. Cohen said: “Others are engaging even in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves.” He added: “It’s real, and that’s the reason why we have to intensify our efforts.”30 If the Defense Secretary says that the earth and the sky have been turned into weapons and are being used as such in the present, we should take this statement very seriously.
Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Board Statement 56
The DOD’s refusal, for 25-plus years, to produce audited financial statements and its increasing inability to account for $20 trillion of undocumentable adjustments resulted, in 2018, in a new administrative policy promulgated with the approval of a bipartisan Congress and the Trump White House: Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board Statement 56 (FASAB 56).15 This policy purports to authorize DOD and the other agencies of the U.S. government as well as scores of related federal governmental entities to keep what amount to secret books,31 in essence overriding the Constitution and financial management laws and regulations with an administrative policy.
FASAB Statement 56: Understanding New Government Financial Accounting Loopholes
Has the Government Legalized Secret Defense Spending?
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/secret-government-spending-779959/
In combination with other classification and national security laws, and national security waivers of SEC regulations applicable to public financial statements of private enterprises doing business with the government, the result is that the large banks and corporate contractors that do business with the federal government can also keep secret books.
The implications of this policy to the U.S. and global securities markets are profound, essentially rendering a significant portion of the disclosure in the U.S. securities markets meaningless.
I would encourage you to educate yourself about this policy. It is highly likely that the success of Operation Warp Speed and the Covid operation depended upon the adoption of FASAB 56 in October 2018.
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Excellent article explaining the Beast that is the Military Industrial Complex. Includes one of my favourite video clips, when General Clark described how the USA decided to attack Africa and the Middle East.
In bed with the pharma creeps
Some more unknown info .
https://open.substack.com/pub/livewithoutlimits/p/cancer-german-thoroughness-a-genocide-concept?r=1ikux7&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post