Tonight on Flashpoints, Catherine Austin Fitts put forth some interesting ideas about the tactics of the Bush family and their affiliates. She frequently uses the analogy of a tapeworm to describe the condition which is afflicting America.
Miscellaneous comments made during the interview:
1) "Pump & dump". Their basic business and political strategy is fraud. Use private firms to garner resources to get into office, then use public contracts, subsidies, regulations, etc. to drive up stock price. Sell at a profit, but also sell short (i.e., sell stock you don't own at $80 but buy it at $1 to satisfy the sale that you've promised) -- hence making money on way up and on way down.
2) The lead investor & former chairman of the firm that runs PROMIS software for the intelligence community was Pug Winnokur who was also sitting on Enron's board. 19 former CIA agents were on Enron's payroll who had access to Echelon. To what extent did Enron use covert tactics to pump up their stock?
3) The board of Enron made over $1 B in selling stock, but no one is talking about prosecuting the board.
4)One team prosecuting Enron seems to be doing a serious investigation (Fastow etc) but there hasn't been any covert ops involved to help on it, and it is dragging on for years.. Where did the money go? Time for the trail to get cold..is that the point?
5) Harvard was one that made money shorting the stock of Enron. Pug Winnokur was a leader at Harvard at the time and was also sitting on board of Enron. Mentioned "harvardwatch.org" -- which also wrote about use of Harvard's academic resources being used to promote the positions that Enron was taking with government.
The real tinfoil time: Earlier in the interview she mentioned that coverup was a "core competency" for the Bush organized crime family. She closed with comments about why people don't speak up or how it stays secret -- here's my transcription:
..your introduction about covert operations is so important. If I'm a congressman, or let's use me: I was an honest government official, and I said, "No, fraudsters, you cannot piratize all these HUD assets, you can't steal this real estate." And so the way they got rid of me was they targeted me, they couldn't find anything. You know, I didn't have any dirty pictures, so they tried to invent some, they tried to falsify some; you know they just wrote articles in the paper and they lied. I go back to the film "Enemy of the State" -- it's the perfect example that if a guy is clean, you can set him up and even persuade his family he's dirty when he's not.
Now I've been through an 8 year process, it's cost me and my company $6 M in cash and 8 years of my life and got very, very dangerous. Why would a government official or an honest businessperson want to deal with that? They can't.
And so what happens is, that because these guys are so superb at their dirty tricks and dirty tactics, they've run over a lot of honest people and a lot of honest people are scared. I can't tell you how many government officials -- local government officials -- I've seen terrified of the Enrons of this world, the big corporations that come in and do privatization/piratization. They intuitively understand that these guys are doing surveillance, listening to their conversations, reading their email, with all these high-technology tools but they don't understand how the system works. So they are frozen, they don't know who they can trust. They've been worked over; they've seen other people worked over; they've seen people lose their lives. There was a tremendous number of people who lost their lives in the 90s, both federal and otherwise, who were assassinated or died under suspicious circumstances."The program can be found at
http://www.flashpoints.net/index.html (see January 20); the better stuff starts at around 28 minutes if I remember correctly.