Reply #6: Narco Dollars for Beginners by Catherine Austin Fitts. [View All]

[JohnyCanuck]

Dusty64 had a question:
I know our shadow government is involved in the drug trade, but what can really be gained from this and what is the money used for?

Take a look at a series of articles published at www.narconews.com . The articles are by Catherine Austing Fitts. According to the blurb on her at Narco News.

Catherine Austin Fitts is a former managing director and member of the board of directors of Dillon Read & Co, Inc, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing-Federal Housing Commissioner in the first Bush Administration, and the former President of The Hamilton Securities Group, Inc. She is the President of Solari, Inc, an investment advisory firm. Solari provides risk management services to investors through Sanders Research Associates in London.

Ms Fitts ran afoul of the drug trade while trying to do her job and improve housing and living conditions for ordinary Americans when she was Assistant Secretary of Housing. This led to her investigating the drug trade and the economic factors behind it, leading her to conclude that the drug war can't be won without major changes to our current economic system. (Her own web site is www.solari.com )

In the snips below you will see a reference to a "Solari Index." This is a concept Fitts came up with to measure the living conditions in a neighborhood. The higher the solari index, the safer the neighborhood. As the drug trade moves in the solari index drops. As she describes it:

When I was a child growing up in the 1950's at 48th and Larchwood in West Philadelphia, the Solari Index was 100 percent. It was unthinkable that a child was not safe running up to the stores on Spruce Street for a popsicle and some pin ball. The Dow Jones was about 500, the Solari Index was 100 percent and our debt per person was very low. Of course I did not think about it that way at the time. All I knew was that life on the street with my buddies was sweet.


Here's a snip from the first article "Narco Dollars for Beginners Part I."

In late June 1999, numerous news services, including Associated Press, reported that Richard Grasso, Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange flew to Colombia to meet with a spokesperson for Raul Reyes of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), the supposed "narco terrorists" with whom we are now at war.

The purpose of the trip was "to bring a message of cooperation from U.S. financial services" and to discuss foreign investment and the future role of U.S. businesses in Colombia.

Some reading in between the lines said to me that Grasso's mission related to the continued circulation of cocaine capital through the US financial system. FARC, the Colombian rebels, were circulating their profits back into local development without the assistance of the American banking and investment system. Worse yet for the outlook for the US stock market's strength from $500 billion - $1 trillion in annual money laundering - FARC was calling for the decriminalization of cocaine.

To understand the threat of decriminalization of the drug trade, just go back to your Sam and Dave estimate and recalculate the numbers given what decriminalization does to drive BIG PERCENT back to SLIM PERCENT and what that means to Wall Street and Washington's cash flows. No narco dollars, no reinvestment into the stock markets, no campaign contributions. (my emphasis /jc)


Narco Dollars for Beginners Part I


Here's a snip from Part II

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."

The people who own a corporation make money on the stock going up. So a company has investors, with the most powerful investors typically being large institutions who are typically represented on the board of the company. The board is the group of people who decides what goes. The senior management officials who run the company day to day are also on the board. Most of the money they make comes from stock options that they get to encourage them to get the stock to go up for the investors. That means that what everyone who runs the company wants is for the stock to go up. The way to do that is to increase net income or to increase the multiple at which the stock trades.

<snip>

So if I have a company that has a $100,000 of income and a stock trading at 20 times earnings, 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 a quick $2 million profit from putting a few teenagers to work driving the Solari Index down in their neighborhood. Bottom line, I can make a lot of quick money on the stock going up and the Solari Index going down

<snip>

Well, if the Department of Justice is correct about $500 billion-to-1 trillion of annual money laundering in the US, then about $20-40 billion should move annually through the Philadelphia Federal Reserve District.


Part II - The Narco Money Map

Part III - Drugs as Currency