Case Studies in Plunder Capitalism

“We all live in the South Bronx because that neighborhood is the unavoidable proof that American civilization can stop….”
~ Michael Ventura

By Catherine Austin Fitts and Carolyn A. Betts, Esq.

I. Introduction

Plunder capitalism—or what some have called disaster capitalism—is warfare by economic means. This type of warfare can be waged on a country, municipality, or county, or on an individual or their company or asset.

Catherine experienced plunder capitalism as a child when her neighborhood in West Philadelphia was overrun by narcotics trafficking and related mortgage fraud. In 2001, observing the wave of privatization that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union, she realized that plunder capitalism had reached significant new levels. Her article titled “Financial Coup d’Etat”1 describes what she learned at a conference in London that same year:

“Other presenters at the conference included distinguished reporters covering privatization in Eastern Europe and Russia. As the portraits of British ancestors stared down upon us, we listened to story after story of global privatization throughout the 1990s in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

Slowly, as the pieces fit together, we shared a horrifying epiphany: the banks, corporations, and investors acting in each global region were the exact same players. They were a relatively small group that reappeared again and again in Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia accompanied by the same well-known accounting firms and law firms.

Clearly, there was a global financial coup d’état underway.

The magnitude of what was happening was overwhelming. In the 1990s, millions of people in Russia had woken up to find their bank accounts and pension funds simply gone— eradicated by a falling currency or stolen by mobsters who laundered money back into big New York Fed member banks for reinvestment to fuel the debt bubble.

Reports of politicians, government officials, academics, and intelligence agencies facilitating the racketeering and theft were compelling. One lawyer in Russia, living without electricity and growing food to prevent starvation, was quoted as saying, ‘We are being de-modernized.‘

Several years earlier, I listened to three peasant women describe the War on Drugs in their respective countries: Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. I asked them, ‘After they sweep you into camps, who gets your land and at what price?’ My question opened a magic door. They poured out how the real economics worked on the War on Drugs, including the stealing of land and government contracts to build housing for the people who are displaced.

At one point, suspicious of my understanding of how this game worked, one of the women said, ‘You say you have never been to our countries, yet you understand exactly how the money works. How is this so?’ I replied that I had served as Assistant Secretary of Housing at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the United States where I oversaw billions of government investment in U.S. communities. Apparently, it worked the same way in their countries as it worked in mine.”

II. The Rise of Hybrid Warfare

History provides many examples of conventional warfare—of one people attacking another people. Typically, the goal of conventional warfare has been conquest. If a king’s army conquers another country, ideally the booty won will be of greater value than the cost of fielding the army and maintaining the conquered land.

Since World War II, however, we have seen the rise of hybrid warfare, with hybrid strategies increasingly replacing more conventional warfare. Instead of invading armies, we have invisible weaponry—with surveillance, entrainment technology, entrapment, and covert operations fueling takeovers arranged by primarily legal and financial means. As John Perkins described in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,2 we have bankers and dealmakers who are backed up with assassins when bribes and sweet-talking do not work.

It is helpful to understand the tactics used in this new, more invisible form of warfare. You will find a wealth of information at the Solari Report regarding hybrid warfare and its techniques:

Invisible weaponry also can be used to wage weather warfare, triggering events that appear to be natural disasters. U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen said on April 28, 1997 at the Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy, “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.9

III. A Basic Model of Plunder Capitalism

When applied to a country or place, every example or case study of plunder capitalism is unique. Each country or place has its own distinctive characteristics. Moreover, the process of plundering a country or region is complex—involving many moving parts—and it is rare that we have complete intelligence on what happened or who did what. So, before we dive into seven case studies of plunder capitalism from recent decades, it may be helpful to review a framework that outlines common patterns—a model, so to speak, of how plunder capitalism targeted at a country or place typically works. Key components of the model include leadership, information systems and media, debt, organized crime, banking and financial liquidity, debt traps, disasters and false flags, and asset accessibility and acquisition.

Leadership

The first and most important step is to get local leaders in place who will assist the outside interests—whether represented by intelligence agencies, investors, banks, or corporations—in achieving their goals. A compromised local leadership is a must. If existing leaders are not willing to compromise the sovereignty of their country, they are likely to be targeted and replaced in the next election, or simply assassinated.

A perfect example of this was during Covid-19, when numerous African leaders were targeted and replaced. Tanzanian president John Magufuli died in March 2021 at age 61, ostensibly from a sudden heart problem, after he kicked the World Health Organization (WHO) out of his country and exposed the fraudulent PCR tests used to justify lockdowns and vaccines.10 The 56-year-old prime minister of Côte d’Ivoire had died suddenly one week earlier, following the abrupt deaths of the 55-year-old president of Burundi and the 52-year-old prime minister of Eswatini (Swaziland) in June and December 2020, respectively.11 In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Perkins describes how assassins are sent in when the deal-making and kickback efforts of the economic hit men are not successful.

Information Systems and Media

Superior intelligence—essential to plunder capitalism—accompanies excellence in surveillance, whether through telecommunications systems or satellites. The goal is to set up networks that provide the plunder capitalists and local leadership with excellent intelligence, while at the same time gaslighting and manipulating local citizens with official narratives to ensure that citizens get the opposite.

Debt

The next big step is to arrange for the local leadership to significantly accelerate spending and thereby increase debt sufficient to put the country in a debt trap. The spending could be for major infrastructure projects, which typically generate large construction or other contracts for the corporations and banks favored by the plunder capitalists. As another option, the increased spending could be for war, generating large weapons purchases for the weapons exporters and banks that the plunder capitalists favor.

In a scene from the movie The International,12 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 debt trap is typically designed to integrate the country or place into the U.S. dollar system. The need to service dollar-denominated debt gives power to the central bankers and bankers who can create dollars and maintain the dollar markets and the markets for related securities.

Organized Crime

Plunder capitalism is often combined with the introduction or encouragement of drug trafficking or other forms of organized crime, allowing the financing of plunder by high-margin businesses in local markets that can be used to compromise both local leaders and populations. This represents a form of “leveraged buyout,” in which you buy a country with money sourced through a high-margin business generated internally. For the plunder capitalists, organized crime has the additional advantage of generating significant problems for local leaders who are trying to protect sovereignty. This includes targeting their businesses and children and family members.

Banking and Financial Liquidity

Once a country or place is in a debt trap, it becomes possible to create a dependency on their international bankers—whether a private bank or an international organization such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or World Bank—by suddenly reducing their ability to borrow or transact. This can happen with a sudden removal of bank deposits or other maneuvers to trigger a bank run. It can also be the result of a drastic drop in revenues, which can be engineered by a change in policy by a large importer or by financial market interventions that cause significant swings in commodities prices. It can happen if loans and credit are not rolled over when existing loans mature, or access to international bond and money markets is denied. In the worst case, the very ability to transact dollars on international systems can be slowed down or interrupted.

These types of events have inspired the Asian and BRICS countries to build more financial resiliency and credit capability among themselves.

Debt Traps

Once a country is trapped between high debt obligations and the inability to access sufficient credit or income to comfortably meet its fiscal and financial obligations, country leadership can be squeezed to take actions that benefit the plunder capitalists. In addition, it can be made willing to take actions that ensure the prices most favorable to the entities looking to acquire assets.

Disasters and False Flags

The plunder model is often combined with disasters. The disasters may be natural, in which case the plunder is a response, or they may be induced—that is, the plunder as well as staged shock events referred to as “false flags” are preplanned. For an excellent history of false flags, see Richard Dolan’s False Flags documentary series at Gaia.13

Asset Accessibility and Acquisition

In some areas, the next step is to make it legal for foreign investors to purchase or own assets. Once that is accomplished, the acquisitions can begin. This sometimes requires that the government agree to privatize state-owned assets. However, the plunder process typically lowers the profitability and value of many private assets in the country or jurisdiction—where lower prices mean attractive investment opportunities. To give Solari Report subscribers a sense of how this process works, we did an interview in May 2024 with Professor Richard Werner on “The Profits of Economic Shock”; we strongly recommend it.14

Two books often cited on this topic are The Shock Doctrine15 by Naomi Klein and Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. While Shock Doctrine is an excellent source,16 we should note that there has been a marked deterioration in the reliability of Klein’s subsequent work. Perkins’ book does a good job of describing the economic hit man—a sort of hit man one-two punch—which makes it worth the read, but, as Catherine explained in “Will the Real Economic Hit Men Please Stand Up?,”17 the book is misleading when it comes to the bigger picture of the governance system. For an older and richer history, we recommend Stephen Mitford Goodson’s A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind.18

IV. Case Studies

Now that we understand the general model, let’s look at seven examples of plunder capitalism at work in recent decades, starting with Latin America.

Case Study #1: Latin America

In the Latin American examples, the IMF and World Bank got nations to sign secret documents agreeing to sell off the countries’ key assets and take devastating economic steps or be closed off from international (IMF+) borrowing.

Sources of Information for Case Study

  • Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007)
  • John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004)
  • Interview by Alex Jones with journalist Greg Palast about the IMF and World Bank, following Palast’s interview and debriefing with Joseph Stiglitz (a fired deputy chief economist for the World Bank) and Palast’s review of “inside” documents obtained from other unnamed sources (2002)19

Argentina and Enron

Argentina furnishes a clear example of how this plunder model played out. Already in the late 1980s, at the behest of the World Bank and IMF, Argentina had sold off valuable state assets, such as the Buenos Aires water system and a pipeline between Argentina and Chile. Argentina sold the pipeline for a song to Enron, which then transferred it to a dummy corporation. An Argentine senator and public works administrator related receiving a call from George W. Bush in 1988, who ordered the Argentine government to “give” the gas pipeline to Enron, which would pay one-fifth the market price for gas.

In the year 2000, in an agreement signed by James Wolfensohn (president of the World Bank from 1995–2005), Argentina agreed to cut unemployment benefits (20% of the population was unemployed at the time) and slash education funding and pension benefits so that the country could pay foreign banks interest on loans at rates of 21% to 70%. Reportedly, Argentine politicians were paid off to the tune of billions of dollars into Swiss bank accounts to sign transfer documents. Citibank gobbled up some half of Argentine banks. By December 2001, the unsustainable IMF- and World-Bank-led austerity had “spiralled out of control,”20 with the country cycling through five presidents in 10 days’ time and the people taking to the streets in mass demonstrations.21 On a positive note, Klein’s 2004 documentary The Take tells the story of how Buenos Aires auto plant workers reclaimed control of their closed plant and turned it into a worker cooperative.22

As the IMF and globalists squeezed people in Argentina and elsewhere, the ensuing “IMF riots” could scarcely have come as a surprise. In a book chapter about “The IMF as an instigator of riots and civil unrest” in the 1980s and 1990s, one group of authors commented in 2019, “While the IMF cannot be blamed for food shortage caused by harvest failure, the Fund can certainly be blamed for food riots caused by policies designed to achieve unnecessary ends or ends that can be achieved by other less painful means.”23

According to Palast’s 2002 remarks to Jones, the plan was that once other countries had been plundered to the benefit of corporations, the same would happen in the U.S.—and sure enough it did, with one memorable example being California energy deregulation, followed by inside deals with Enron to profit from huge mark-ups to customers. The relationships and potential conflicts of interest of Enron board members were notable. These included Herbert “Pug” Winokur, who also served on the Harvard Corporation and Harvard Endowment boards when the Endowment owned and was shorting Enron stock. This became the subject of a HarvardWatch study, which resulted in Winokur being “resigned” from the Harvard board.

Sachs in Bolivia

Bolivia provides another example of how plunder capitalism rolled out in Latin America. In 1985, Bolivia became a democracy after 21 years of autocratic rule. At the time, the interest on the country’s debt obligations exceeded the national budget; Reagan administration attacks on funding for cocoa farmers then cut off half of the country’s export revenues and caused the economic crisis to deepen. The official value of the peso was dropped by half, and the inflation rate was reported to be as high as 14,000%.

As recounted by Klein in Shock Doctrine, a 30-year-old Harvard professor of Keynesian economics, Jeffrey Sachs, who knew little of developing economies, was hired to advise the Bolivian government before the national election results were announced. Even though Keynesian economic theory would have it that a country’s severe economic recession be addressed through expenditures to stimulate the economy, the solution Sachs advocated in Bolivia was government austerity and price increases—a recipe for contraction and induced depression, not economic expansion, prosperity, and an end to hyperinflation. He proposed a tenfold increase in the price of oil and other price deregulation and budget cuts, predicting that this would reorient the economy from its “dead end of socialism,” mass corruption, and central planning and lead to a market economy.

After Sachs returned to the U.S., according to Klein, Víctor Paz Estenssoro—backed by wealthy American-educated and -influenced mine owner Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (known as “Goni”)—was appointed by Congress in a back-room deal to be the new Bolivian president. In an “about-face” from his socialist-leaning past as a prior three-time president of Bolivia, Paz Estenssoro appointed Goni to lead the emergency economic team charged with radically restructuring the economy. Catching union members and the poor off-guard, in what can be analogized to a surprise military attack on the people, Goni’s group quickly went far beyond Sachs’s proposed shock therapy with a proposal to eliminate food subsidies, cancel most price controls, increase the price of oil by 300%, freeze government wages, implement deep government spending cuts, downsize state companies, and open the country to unrestricted imports.

The 60-page plan was to be adopted in the first 100 days of the new government in the form of a single executive decree containing 220 separate laws covering virtually every aspect of Bolivian economic life—a plan finally revealed to the Bolivian cabinet as not open for debate and soon after to a shocked populace. The plan succeeded in bringing down inflation to 10% but at a cost borne by the poor of Bolivia—through increased unemployment, downsizing of the mines, a 40% to 70% drop in real wages, and overall degradation of daily life for many Bolivians—even as the wealth of the elites increased.

Latin America Then and Now

The story of CIA-led actions to bring down democratically-elected Latin American leaders—through assassinations and U.S.-supported coups and riots, if necessary, so as to install autocrats willing to facilitate economic plundering by American and international corporate interests—is a well-known pattern extending back for decades. History shows repeated instances of this pattern in Guatemala, Chile, Peru, Panama, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, albeit with varying degrees of success and sometimes with accompanying scandals back home (witness the “Iran-Contra” deals). Back in 1935, U.S. Marine Corp major general Smedley Butler wrote in his book, War is a Racket:

“I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909–1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.”24

It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same. In a July 15, 2024 interview with Peter McCormack (of What Bitcoin Did), titled “Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin on How Intelligence Agencies Capture Everything,”25 Webb and Goodwin reveal plans by a mafia- and intelligence-connected billionaire network to conduct “private sector coups” to monopolize trade in the Global South though a private World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Leaders-type social media organization called Endeavor. Through Zappo (an infrastructural pillar in the Bitcoin dollar system, with the likes of Larry Summers, Dee Hoff, and John Reid—leaders in 1990s banking deregulation—on its advisory board), Endeavor is establishing a petrodollar-type “Bitcoin dollar” bank, thus covertly establishing dollar dominance in Latin America through the use of a stablecoin. “You have to have dollars to buy Bitcoin,” Webb and Goodwin explain.

During the shocks in the 1980s, one positive reform emerged in Brazil: participatory budgeting,26 or the practice of citizens actively participating with municipal officials to develop and approve their local governmental budgets. Participatory budgeting offers great potential for many jurisdictions going forward.

Related Reading

For further reading about Harvard’s investments in Enron, see the following:

Case Study #2: Russia

Sources of Information for Case Study

  • Congressional testimony by Anne Williamson33
  • Facts revealed in the federal district court qui tam (federal False Claims Act) complaint against Harvard University and key members of the Harvard Institute of International Development “technical assistance” team34

The Importance of Private Property

In true disaster capitalism style, at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union and following the collapse of perestroika35 under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Harvard Institute of International Development dispatched a team led by Jeffrey Sachs to the fallen state. With funding from the CIA-connected U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the ostensible aim was to teach the Russians how to form a democracy characterized by American-style free market capitalism.

As explained by Anne Williamson in her 1999 testimony before the House Banking and Financial Services Committee, under communism, the people held national property in the form of “votchina system entitlement” whereby each individual has a claim on some part of the whole so long as each such part is actively used. This is what we might call non-transferable undivided interests in the national assets controlled by the government, with occupancy rights allocated among the citizenry by Communist Party officials and insiders. In the patronage-based system, those who were members of the party and those who held the party line and trafficked in access and favors enjoyed preferential treatment. Although local self-sustaining agriculture and Russian natural resources and manufacturing largely satisfied basic needs such as food, clothing, energy, and transportation, leaving little need for imports, as Williamson explained, the absence of private property closed off wealth-creating opportunities to the common man. Williamson concluded:

“The hackneyed idea that Russians have some special longing for tyranny is a pernicious myth. Rather, they share the common human need for predictable event [sic] undergirded by civil and state institutions, and their difficult history is the result of their struggle to achieve both in the absence of private property.”

The players in this Western “reform” dance were predictable: Harvard University, Bank of New York, the U.S. Treasury Department, the IMF, the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (the private lending arm of the World Bank), the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and officials of the Bush and then Clinton administrations and their friends. As usually happens, the members of the elite central banking cartel teamed up with corrupt holdovers from the communist system in Boris Yeltsin’s administration (the nomenklatura). Together, they devised ways to plunder the national assets to accommodate foreign investment by Wall Street insiders, achieve higher-than-market returns, create risk-free debt instruments (guaranteed by U.S. taxpayers through USAID), and distribute the people’s assets to Russian oligarchs and organized crime syndicates, favored Western corporate interests, and bankers.

A rejected alternative system, proposed by Larisa Piasheva (a free-market Russian economist who was appointed by the mayor of Moscow to design a program for the privatization of the city’s assets), would have involved the attraction of Western capital in the form of direct equity interests in productive pursuits, not debt for the purchase of unneeded imports (presumably produced by Western corporations).

In explaining the genesis of how “many billions in capital … fled Russia to Western shores,” Williamson revealed in her testimony that the first mistake was in Western trust that Boris Yeltsin’s anti-communist rhetoric would lead to a happily-ever-after conversion of public to private property that could be put to productive, profit-generating pursuits for the benefit of the common people. She then eloquently explained the next mistake:

“The second mistake lay in a profound misunderstanding of Russian culture and in the Harvard Institute of International Development advisers’ disregard for the very basis for their own country’s success; property rights. It was a very grave error. Private property is not only the most effective instrument of economic organization, it is also the organizational mechanism of an independent civil society. The protection of property, both of individuals’ and that of a nation, has justified the existence of and a population’s acceptance of the modern state and its public levies.”

The specific mechanisms by which the Harvard team devised the plunder of Russia are complex and beyond the scope of this analysis. In layman’s terms, however, it appears to have happened like this:

  • The U.S. government hired the Harvard Institute of International Development through USAID contracts to advise Russian decision-makers on how to “reform” the Soviet system and turn it into a Western-style civil society, and divide previously government-controlled assets among the people as private, transferable interests.
  • The Harvard team devised a system of “privatized vouchers,” awarded to the people, that were to be invested in giant funds formed to hold national assets.
  • In 1992, ordinary citizens who held Russian currency bank deposits were robbed of their savings when prices were suddenly freed in what was called a “monopolistic economy” and inflation hit 2,500%. The vanished savings represented the only capital with which citizens could have invested in a new free market.
  • Meanwhile, corrupt managers of the unregulated voucher funds sold off the assets in the voucher funds to insiders and oligarchs-to-be, and, in all likelihood, to members of the Russian mafia.

The Russian government issued bonds at whopping interest rates as high as 290% per quarter, guaranteed by the IMF (and, thus, American taxpayers), and sold them to insiders, including the Central Bank of Russia (through an offshore entity called FIMACO) and Harvard Management Corp. (presumably on behalf of the Harvard Endowment). The latter represented an obvious conflict of interest, given that the Russian government had hired the Harvard Institute for International Development to advise on the privatization of the Russian economy. Williamson testified that according to the Russian Interior Ministry’s Department of Organized Crime and other anecdotal evidence Williamson uncovered, other likely beneficiaries of the generous returns in this bond scheme included Western employees of Russian banks, Western bankers and consultants, Russian bankers, certain employees of the U.S. Treasury, the World Bank’s Moscow offices, the Ford Foundation’s Moscow office, and policy and program consultants acting through accounts established in their wives’ maiden names with non-U.S. reporting brokerages in Moscow.

From One Administration to the Next

The “Rape of Russia” scandal was not limited to the Bush administration. Under the Clinton administration, favored financial market Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee (DNC) supporters and donors were selected to receive guaranteed loans or other government-controlled funding from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, Export-Import Bank, International Finance Corporation, and Russian Enterprise Fund. Williamson appropriately observed that “the Russian bond market was the Arkansas Development Finance Authority gone international.”

Harvard’s misdeeds and conflicts of interest in connection with the Russian advisory contract led to a qui tam lawsuit filed by the United States on behalf of USAID in September 2000, naming Harvard College and four individuals (not including Jeffrey Sachs, their leader, who had “coincidentally” been called back to the U.S. for a professorial appointment at Columbia). The lawsuit accused them of fraud and breach of fiduciary duty—for misusing government-funded resources for their own benefit and for their wives, girlfriends, and business associates, and for abusing their position as high-level advisors on behalf of the U.S. to Russia. The advisors’ failure to provide impartial administration and oversight and their abuse and mismanagement of the resources entrusted to them resulted in termination of the project.

Russia Today

Currently, Russia as a nation is largely debt-free and more economically self-sufficient, even though Western sanctions have closed it out of most international bond markets. Russiamay be more dependent on trade with China and India, but it has significantly lowered the risk of disaster capitalism extraction by the West. To date, the plan to open Russia up to further extraction risks through the proxy war in Ukraine appears to have failed.

Related Reading

Case Study #3: Kenya

Sources of Information for Case Study

Memories of Hyperinflation

In a comment posted to Ask Catherine & the Solari Team in September 2023, a Solari Report subscriber described Kenya as she witnessed it growing up:

“In 1997, the region [Kenya and Democratic Republic of Congo] we lived in spiraled into civil chaos and war but, in the lead-up to that, there was a long run of inflation that morphed into hyperinflation that I still remember vividly. To pay the staff wages at the small hospital and school my parents were working with, it was necessary to bring a wheelbarrow to the bank to get sufficient bills. A wheelbarrow. For a week of wages.

Put that into perspective, you can put $10,000 in $100 bills in a regular letter-sized envelope. Eventually, when the local currency became so worthless it was considered fair to use it to wrap small snacks up in at street vendors, other currencies began to emerge for use in barter and trade. Eggs. Car parts. Goats. Medicine. These became the means of transacting. The markets became, more than they already were, barter centers for trade.

[Inasmuch] as physical goods became valid means of trading amongst people in value-for -value exchanges, other fiat currencies were also accepted. At that time the USD was a powerhouse (though pristine bills traded at a premium to damaged bills) that was universally accepted. Other currencies though were also traded and exchanged for goods.

Solari subscribers who wonder what it is like to live in a real inflationary environment—there are some of us here who already have. The good news is that life DOES continue. It just continues a little differently than before. Being prepared to engage in value-for-value exchanges, instead of fiat exchanges, is likely the best form of insurance.

Know your farmer. Know your bank manager. Know your doctor. Know your sheriff. Know what you and your neighborhood need for day-to-day living (I mean neighborhood, not community, because they are the ones who see your house every day) and know what your farmer, bank manager, doctor, and sheriff need in return. Do not assume that all your physical goods will be valuable to someone else, except maybe a thief, and be ready to adapt.”

Kenya’s Fiscal Crisis

According to the June 2024 New York Times article about Kenya’s current fiscal crisis, Kenya’s problems were precipitated by enormous borrowings following a period of expansion in the early 2000s to cover the costs of “infrastructure projects, including roads, railways, massive dams and rural electrification.” One can only speculate which multinational corporations were the beneficiaries of such projects.

Fast forward to 2021. According to Al Jazeera, Kenya entered into a 38-month loan program with the IMF, pursuant to which some $3.9 billion in funding (plus another $542 million in the form of “climate” funding) would be opened up in installments, conditioned upon periodic reviews by IMF to determine compliance with designated austerity measures: increased taxes, reduced subsidies, and the cutting of government waste.

Upon his inauguration in 2022—when external government debt amounted to $62 billion (67% of GDP)—Kenya’s President William Ruto immediately started implementing the austerity measures, but with mixed results. Following protests, for example, Ruto was forced in 2023 to reinstate fuel and fertilizer subsidies after having suspended them in 2022. Likewise, a June 2023 finance bill backed by the IMF—which proposed to raise $2.7 billion to fund budget deficits and development programs by means of a 2.5% housing tax for employed citizens and a doubling of the fuel VAT (from 8% to 16%)—was met with demonstrations; when the protests turned violent, police opened fire on demonstrators who entered the parliament building, prompting members of parliament to flee, and the bill was withdrawn.

In 2023, presumably based on the progress Kenya had made in attempting to satisfy IMF loan conditions and in light of the pressure to pay off a maturing $2 billion Eurobond, the IMF disbursed $941 million of the promised funding. According to Al Jazeera’s “diplomatic sources,” major IMF donors reportedly agreed to allow Kenya flexibility in meeting its loan targets. However, more austerity measures are set to be imposed to close the funding gap, with $1.39 billion cut from the new fiscal year’s budget and $1.31 billion in further borrowing with a probable new IMF “revenue plan.”

No Relief in Sight

Kenyan public debt has mounted to $80 billion, with no relief in sight following the abandonment of the ill-fated 2023 finance bill. Ironically, the World Bank reported an optimistic outlook in a June 2023 press release, and the New York Times reported this year that Kenya—despite being on the brink of “fiscal calamity” with debt service accounting for 27% of revenues—is “the fastest growing economy in Africa.” In a striking admission, the New York Times blamed Covid for exacerbating Kenya’s dire state of affairs:

“The deadly coronavirus pandemic shuttered already fragile economies. The sudden need to provide vaccines, medical care, protective clothing to hospital workers and subsidies to people unable to afford food or cooking oil further depleted government bank accounts.”

As is the case in many countries experiencing “unusual” climate- and weather-related phenomena, including the U.S., recent flooding in Kenya has dealt an additional blow to the East African nation’s infrastructure and agricultural sector, displacing thousands of people. The New York Times quotes the deputy chief economist of the World Bank as recently stating that 40% of developing countries “are vulnerable to a debt crisis.”

The circumstances are not exactly the same as what Greece experienced during the debt crisis that started in 2009 (see Case Study #4), but the failed international debt solutions and accompanying austerity measures surely rhyme.

Related Reading

Case Study #4: Greece

Sources of Information for Case Study

Loss of Currency Sovereignty

A reasonable justification for bankruptcy relief laws and, in earlier times, debt jubilees, is that once a debtor’s opportunity to contribute as a productive economic unit is cut off by means of usurious interest rates and debt servitude, that debtor then becomes a drag on the economic system. Debtors may lose their enthusiasm for work that might benefit society and may altogether give up any attempt to return to solvency, whether through suicide, stress-induced disability, depression, welfare dependency, or by resorting to illegal solutions (such as theft, fraud, burglary, or even murder). By relieving the debtor of some or all of the debt or restructuring it in a manner that provides for future earning potential, the theory goes, the debtor can reengage in productive pursuits and in some cases pay off some portion of the debt. If denied the opportunity for debt restructuring or discharge, the economic unit—in this case study, the country of Greece—remains frozen in a state of poverty, instability, and economic inactivity, unable to attract investment capital and bereft of its sovereign rights as a nation-state. These are the conditions that make a country ripe for distressed asset and business sales.

This is the story of Greece during the 2010–2015 period. Greece joined the European Union’s (EU’s) unitary monetary system in 2001. That system has operated to the economic detriment of the weaker member countries—including Italy and Spain as well as Greece—leaving those countries in a more or less permanent state of subservience and debt peonage to central bankers, the IMF, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the European Commission.

Under the U.S. legal system, power and authority are vested in sovereign states, except as expressly otherwise provided in the Constitution (e.g., for matters of interstate commerce and treaties); at least nominally, the federal governing authorities (that is, Congress and the Executive Branch) are subject to the vote of the citizenry. In contrast, much of the power and authority in EU member nations is centralized—ceded to the unelected European Commission. The U.S. and countries like Brazil and Argentina can—and have—inflated their way out of some of their debt problems through devaluation and, in the case of the U.S., by borrowing from the Federal Reserve. Not so for countries in the EU that have joined the unitary monetary system with the euro; their leaders have no power over their currency, and EU formation documents expressly prohibit the EU from taking over member state debts.

The prospect of recovery from economic woes—whether temporary insolvency due largely to liquidity or other short-term problems or full-blown bankruptcy—worsens when IMF loans are added to the mix. This is because when a borrower country defaults on an IMF loan, the IMF generally imposes an austerity program as a condition for postponement of required debt service payments (referred to as “bailoutism” in the lexicon of Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis). Though IMF loans are billed as a means of “rescuing” faltering and uncreditworthy nation-states, in fact they bail out international bank creditors. The typical IMF lending program also involves draconian and unrealistic debt service and other oppressive terms; even at the start, a loan often will come with restrictions that require that the funds received be spent to purchase potentially overpriced and unneeded goods and services from multinational corporations with great dealmaking power within the medical-industrial-defense complex.

Greece’s IMF “Rescues”

In the case of Greece, in 2010 the country was bankrupt. To cover up the dire nature of Greece’s situation, the IMF “rescued” Greece with the then-largest loan in history in the amount of some 110 billion euros. As central bank expert Richard Werner explains, when Greece refused to hand over its state assets. . . enter the central banks.

Although EU member states all have their own national central banks, these banks are largely controlled by the ECB, which operates in tandem with the European Commission and IMF in what has come to be known as a negotiating “Troika” bent on enforcing austerity provisions on “profligate and lazy” member states. Ostensibly, the austerity provisions are a form of punishment intended to teach a lesson to other member states about what could happen to them should they step out of line, but their net effect is also to prevent the weaker states from becoming self-sufficient and independently productive.

Before Yanis Varoufakis became finance minister—as part of a new administration elected with a voter mandate to stand up to the Troika and get the country out of its no-win economic situation, whether through withdrawal from the EU, new issuance of its own currency (the drachma), or otherwise—Greece had entered into two different rescue plans. The first was in 2010; in the face of Greece’s threatened default on debts to French and German banks, the plan required various austerity measures, including tax increases and spending cuts. When these failed and Greece defaulted, one option would have been to work out terms under which some of the enormous debt could be written down (at a loss to Western private banks and central banks), allowing the Greek economy to recover by means of access to more of its own tax receipts (i.e., through temporary reduction in debt service) for expenditures to stimulate the economy and care for those unable to work. Instead, the entire original debt and interest were rolled up in full into a new 2012 bailout package, which postponed debt service payments only in the very short term, piled on more debt, and tightened the austerity provisions. And voilà! Troika members who knew the plan was doomed to failure nevertheless imposed an even more unsustainable set of circumstances.

In Adults in the Room, Varoufakis relates how the initial IMF “rescue” plan, officially formulated to cover debts to the ailing German and French banks, imposed terms certain to reduce Greece’s income and put most of the debt burden on the weakest Greeks—the bankers in Greece having ways of escaping the consequences and in fact profiting from inside deals. Although the Greek economy had a history of mismanagement, corruption, and trouble collecting taxes and, therefore, had limited income with which to manage its affairs, the rescue plan allowed the country to keep only a small percentage of its income and required dedication of the remainder to debt repayment. It also required the government to reduce already below-subsistence-level payments to pensioners and the poor. In a further one-two punch, the ECB subsequently lifted the waiver of a requirement that the Bank not extend loans to insolvent members (such a waiver having been granted earlier in order to make the loans comprising the ill-conceived 2010 rescue in the first place), so that no central bank lending was available to stave off dire consequences such as Greek bank failures and losses to depositors.

In early 2015, the government of the New Democracy party under Prime Minister Antonis Samaras was voted out as it became clear that the second rescue plan would fail, and the left-wing minority Syriza party led by Alexis Tsipras was elected. Tsipras appointed Varoufakis as finance minister to negotiate a more sustainable debt restructuring solution. The finance minister’s negotiating plan was to use the hammer of threatened withdrawal from the EU (which would be unacceptable to the Troika), with the back-up plan being to issue local currencies as leverage to refuse the Troika’s demands that Greece enter into a third doomed bailout agreement. The hope was to negotiate a write-down of debt to manageable levels, increase the portion of the nation’s income available to support its people, and restructure the tax system to give the finance minister control over the tax collection department (which the department did not then have!). With those measures in place, the finance minister would have been able to take enforcement action against the powerful interests that engaged in tax fraud and otherwise failed to pay taxes they owed, and could have taken control of the nation’s zombie banks—which were being propped up with government-backed IOUs.

The Syriza finance minister spent his full term of some six months in 2015 (before resigning in defeat) in meeting after meeting with Mario Draghi (ECB president), Christine Lagarde (managing director of the IMF), and the head of the European Commission and other members of the EU Eurogroup negotiating body, with key controlling roles played by Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble (chancellor and finance minister of Germany, respectively), Dutch Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem, Emmanuel Macron (as finance minister of France), and other elite globalist players who formed part of the network of control of the European banking system. Varoufakis’s proposals were thwarted at every turn, when members of his own team, including the head of government of Greece, undermined his efforts with side agreements and public statements that indicated a willingness to accede to the Troika’s seemingly self-defeating demands. Meanwhile, Troika negotiators reneged on their privately granted assurances, and central bankers caused a run on the Greek banks through intentionally alarmist statements to the press predicting a bank run.

Futile Resistance

In the end, the finance minister’s efforts to negotiate an economically rational deal that would have benefited both debtors and creditors failed. He ascribes some of the Troika’s behavior to its desire to use Greece as an example and whipping boy to prevent France from getting any big ideas that it could negotiate in good faith over its own economic problems. However, that explanation is incomplete. To the uninitiated, powerful private and international institutions appeared to be shooting themselves in the foot by repeatedly imposing contract provisions through extended, time-wasting, bad-faith negotiations that ended in greater losses than would have been sustained had they agreed to measures that any high school graduate would have understood as necessary to solve the problem. Yet, as Varoufakis emphasizes repeatedly, those in power and with authority to minimize the damage knew that the conditions they insisted upon would not end the Greek crisis nor result in the repayment of the indebtedness owed to the central banks, international creditors, and the IMF; in private, they admitted as much. It wasn’t about money—it was about power, control, and ending national sovereignty. Moreover, the more desperate Greece was, the more assets private investors could pick up for cheap.

Ultimately, Richard Werner tells us, what the Troika really wanted was for Greece to sign over valuable state assets to get out of debtor’s prison. When the Greeks resisted, the Troika threatened to shut down the banks. In fact, the banks and the stock exchange were shut down for a month, and after that, bank withdrawals of cash were restricted to 100 euros. This, of course, had dire results for the Greek people and their economic health.

Related Reading

Case Study #5: Cyprus

Sources of Information for Case Study

  • Article published in the Financial Times, “How did Cypriots respond to the 2013 banking crisis?”47

Bailout and Bail-in

In 2012 and 2013, the Republic of Cyprus suffered a banking crisis similar to that of Greece and partly as a result of its neighbor’s financial troubles. In 2012, to cover Cyprus’s budget deficit and outstanding debt, Russia had extended a 2.3 billion euro recapitalization loan at 4.5% interest, with favorable terms in the event that Cyprus’s economic circumstances were to prevent repayment at maturity four and a half years later. A year later, that funding proved insufficient because Cyprus’s financial sector also needed recapitalization, so a bailout within the EU was required.

As in the case of Greece, the Eurogroup and the Troika (European Commission, ECB, and IMF) imposed a bailout by extending a loan package contingent upon Cyprus’s agreement to close its second-largest bank, impose a one-time levy on all bank deposits, and seize almost half of the uninsured deposits in Cyprus’s largest commercial bank (Cypriot deposit insurance covered the first 100,000 euros of deposits). The banks were shut down for several days. Cyprus was a popular destination for funds from foreign investors, and in particular Russian billionaires, due to its favorable interest on deposits, easy access to the European banking sector, and relatively low corporate tax rates. Cyprus president Nicos Anastasiades rejected the Troika’s proposal to merge the two banks in a “good bank/bad bank” scenario. Meanwhile, the EU and IMF rejected an alternative proposal by the government of Cyprus to raise funds by nationalizing the state pension fund and issuing bonds backed by future revenues.

The Financial Times elaborated on the Cypriot bailout and bail-in as follows in a March 24, 2013 description:

“Cyprus is to become the first eurozone country ever to apply capital controls—with limits on credit card transactions, daily withdrawals, money transfers abroad and the cashing of cheques—intended to prevent a vast outflow of euros when its banks open on Thursday. Under drastic measures that some analysts say are incompatible with monetary union, depositors would be able to withdraw no more than €300 in cash each day, said people familiar with the move. Transfers of more than €5,000 would require permission from the central bank.”

Shrinking, Restructuring, Taxing

Also according to Financial Times, it was German representatives in particular who insisted on shrinking the Cypriot banking system to less than half its earlier size and restructuring the two largest banks. This is not surprising in light of Varoufakis’s description of Germany’s role in his account of the Greek bailout negotiations.

At one point in the negotiations, the engineers of the bailout circulated a proposal to tax insured deposits. While ultimately withdrawn, it created tremendous concern in both European and U.S. markets that governments might be exploring abrogation of deposit insurance.

Related Reading

Case Study #6: Nigeria

Sources of Information for Case Study

A CBDC Test Case

In 2023, Nigeria—an African country without a sophisticated banking and financial system—was to become the first test case for the introduction of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) called the “eNaira.” In an April 2024 interview with Jan M. Fijor for the Solari Report, titled “How a CBDC Created Chaos and Poverty in Nigeria,” Catherine and Jan discussed the reasons why the leaders of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) (the “central bank of central banks”) might have chosen Nigeria to be the first major country in which to conduct a dry run of the newly conceived CBDC, a programmable digital currency controlled by the country’s central bank for the alleged benefits of “financial inclusion” and enhancing foreign remittances and cross-border trade.

In point of fact, as Neal Kashkari, the president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, has indicated, a CBDC has little to offer that existing financial products such as Venmo cannot provide—other than the potential for centralized control afforded by the CBDC’s programmability.52

Seemingly militating against using Nigeria as a CBDC guinea pig is that fact that 60% of its population of over 230 million has no access to the Internet. However, Catherine suggests that Nigeria may have been an ideal location within which to determine what impediments might crop up in other countries. Alex Krainer, in an interview on Geopolitics & Empire [starting at 14:20],53 suggests that Nigeria might have been viewed as an ideal test market because its citizens were largely unbanked, and those who did use banks had “simple bank accounts.” Certainly, the citizens of Nigeria themselves were not eager to undergo such a traumatic financial transition—some 90% of voters cast a vote against the introduction of CBDCs in a referendum.

108 Days

Here is the timeline of the eNaira rollout:

  • October 25, 2022: The government issued a decree that the eNaira would be introduced.
  • December 22, 2022: The government launched a war on cash. The Central Bank of Nigeria announced that it would transition at inauguration (February 10, 2023) from physical cash (the naira) to the eNaira and that the new monetary regime would start by February. Many people did not even have bank accounts, and half the population was left with worthless bank notes (nine billion naira). Citizens, mostly middle class, delivered seven billion naira to the central bank for exchange, spending hours waiting in long lines. Shopping centers had no customers because no one had money to spend. Only a maximum of 23 eNaira could be withdrawn at a time (approximately USD $43). Use of black market currency was rampant.
  • February 16, 2023: Riots broke out after people became hungry and had no money with which to purchase necessities. Rumors surfaced that a new currency had been issued by the government for transitional use, but this transition currency became available to only 20% of the population after three and a half months—to be exchanged for votes in the then-upcoming election. Chaos ensued for a period of 108 days, during which the majority of people functioned—without savings or a new currency—through trade credit and barter. Importantly, tribal groups provided assistance.
  • May 29, 2023: The new president restored the “old” naira.
  • June 2023: An investigation of the central bank was initiated shortly after the restoration of the “old” naira, and the governor of the central bank was arrested and put in prison for five months.

Interestingly, in April 2023, Cornell Business School published a commentary by a student apparently taken with the prospects of a crypto-type currency based upon blockchain and the particular open-source system selected for the eNaira. The observations of the young author, self-described as “passionate about finance and technology,” are consistent with financial freedom fighters’ opposition to CBDCs:

“Unfortunately, the anti-laundering measures built into the eNaira can be seen by users as a breach of privacy, with the government able to monitor all your money and potentially use that information for control. This brings us to the biggest problem with the eNaira: the centralization. While most blockchains and cryptocurrency networks are built around the tenet of openness and transparency bringing power back to the people, the eNaira seems to have been created to preserve as much government power as possible.”

Related Reading

Case Study #7: Ukraine and Gaza

We see signs of plunder capitalism in the developing war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza. In fact, one explanation for the U.S. support of a war effort against Russia, a war resulting in large part from the failure of Western countries and interests to respect promises entered into with Russia in 2014, is a plan to extract resources from Ukraine and clear it of a significant number of people, whether through death or migration to Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Reportedly, U.S. corporations have acquired a great deal of farmland in Ukraine and have established biowarfare and pharmaceutical laboratories there.

Similarly, a possible explanation for Western support of the genocide in Gaza is the desire to clear Gaza of its existing people to make room for Dubai-style development, control of the water aquifers, and extraction of oil and gas deposits located off the shore of Gaza. Among other things, this would provide increased resources for the artificial intelligence (AI), information technology (IT), and digital ID and currency developments for which Israel intends to be a global leader.

In both Ukraine and Gaza, operationalizing the plunder capitalism model depends on conventional warfare and slaughter rather than on hybrid warfare and austerity measures alone.

Related Reading

V. Conclusion

Although every case is different, it is important for U.S. state officials and legislators to understand that plunder models, techniques, and tactics are well underway in the United States. They have been applied to poorer neighborhoods for many decades, as Catherine described in her report on “The Myth of the Rule of Law”58 and in her online book, Dillon Read & Co. Inc. & the Aristocracy of Stock Profits.59 They also have been applied to companies in a manner that is accelerating in very concerning ways (see the recently published Solari Report series, “The Plunder of Private Equity Billionaires”60). Historically, we certainly have seen plunder models applied to the entire country—the Great Depression and the 2008–2012 financial crisis are two notable examples.

We expect progressive rounds of plunder capitalism in future years that could reach whole new levels of extraction if an all-digital financial transaction system is put in place that allows for central financial transaction control. If the plunder extraction has been bad historically, imagine what will be possible if the central bankers achieve complete financial control.

Endnotes

  1. Catherine Austin Fitts. Financial Coup d’Etat. The Solari Report, February 2009 (republished August 2011). https://home.solari.com/financial-coup-detat/
  2. John Perkins. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: The shocking inside story of how America REALLY took over the world. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004.
  3. Blast from the Past: Week of July 31, 2023: Deep State Tactics 101 (Parts I-X). The Solari Report, July 30, 2023. https://home.solari.com/blast-from-the-past-week-of-july-31-2023-deep-state-tactics-101-parts-i-x/
  4. Catherine Austin Fitts. The Many Faces of Mind Control. The Solari Report, February 24, 2024. https://home.solari.com/the-many-faces-of-mind-control/
  5. Catherine Austin Fitts. Navigating Psychological and Neurological Warfare with Dr. David A. Hughes. The Solari Report, June 4, 2024. https://home.solari.com/navigating-psychological-and-neurological-warfare-with-dr-david-a-hughes/
  6. Catherine Austin Fitts. Control & Freedom Happen One Person at a Time with Catherine & Ulrike Granögger. The Solari Report, February 11, 2022. https://home.solari.com/control-freedom-happen-one-person-at-a-time-with-ulrike-granogger/
  7. Catherine Austin Fitts. The Economy of the Energy Body with Ulrike Granögger. The Solari Report, February 14, 2023. https://home.solari.com/the-economy-of-the-energy-body-with-ulrike-granogger/
  8. Solari Documentary of the Year 2017: Richard Dolan’s False Flags. The Solari Report, January 9, 2018. https://home.solari.com/solari-documentary-of-the-year-richard-dolans-false-flags/
  9. William S. Cohen. Wikiquote. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_S._Cohen
  10. Celia Farber. John Magufuli: Death of an African Freedom Fighter. The Solari Report, March 22, 2021. https://home.solari.com/john-magufuli-death-of-an-african-freedom-fighter/
  11. 4 African Leaders: Is Opposing WHO a Leading Cause of Heart Failure? The Solari Report, April 5, 2021. https://home.solari.com/4-african-leaders-is-opposing-who-a-leading-cause-of-heart-failure/
  12. The International – banking scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFqx2sROwsE
  13. Richard Dolan. False Flags. Gaia. https://www.gaia.com/series/false-flags
  14. Catherine Austin Fitts. The Profits of Economic Shock: Case Studies with Professor Richard A. Werner. The Solari Report, May 28, 2024. https://home.solari.com/the-profits-of-economic-shock-case-studies-with-richard-werner/
  15. Naomi Klein. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Knopf Canada, 2007.
  16. Catherine Austin Fitts. Book Review: Shock Doctrine. The Solari Report, June 20, 2008. https://library.solari.com/shock-doctrine-2/
  17. Catherine Austin Fitts. Will the Real Economic Hit Men Please Stand Up? The Solari Report, n.d. https://library.solari.com/will-the-real-economic-hit-men-please-stand-up/
  18. Stephen Mitford Goodson. A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind. Black House Publishing Limited, 2014. https://archive.org/details/stephen-goodson-a-history-of-central-banking-and-the-enslavement-of-mankind.org/page/n1/mode/2up
  19. How the IMF & World Bank Play the Game: Transcript of Interview of Greg Palast, Journalist for BBC and Observer, London, by Alex Jones. March 4, 2002. https://library.solari.com/transcript-of-interview-of-greg-palast-journalist-for-bbc-and-observer-london-by-alex-jones/
  20. Jerome Roos. Argentina’s IMF Bailout Rekindles Painful Memories of Past Crises. Al Jazeera, Sep. 9, 2018. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2018/9/9/argentinas-imf-bailout-rekindles-painful-memories-of-past-crises
  21. How Argentina Had Five Presidents in 12 Days in December 2001. Historyville, Dec. 22, 2022 (updated Dec. 21, 2023). https://www.thehistoryville.com/argentina-presidents/
  22. The Take (2004 film). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Take_(2004_film)
  23. Imad A. Moosa and Nisreen Moosa. The IMF as an instigator of riots and civil unrest. In: Eliminating the IMF. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham., 2019.
  24. Smedley D/ Butler. War Is a Racket. Chump Change, 1935. https://archive.org/details/warisaracketelectronicresourcetheantiwarclassicbyam/
  25. Peter McCormack. Whitney Webb & Mark Goodwin on How Intelligence Agencies Capture Everything. What Bitcoin Did, July 15, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcg7MiHpKgo
  26. Participatory budgeting. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_budgeting
  27. Catherine Austin Fitts. Organizations in this story. Dillon Read & Co. Inc. & the Aristocracy of Stock Profits. https://dillonreadandco.com/site-resources/organizations/
  28. Trading Truth: A Report on Harvard’s Enron Entanglements. A HarvardWatch Report, January 31, 2002. https://dillonreadandco.com/resources/documents/ArticleScans/Sized/Harvard_Watch-Trading_Truths.pdf
  29. Donald Macleod. Harvard could face inquiry into Enron links. Guardian Unlimited (UK), February 4, 2002. https://dillonreadandco.com/resources/documents/ArticleScans/Sized/HarvWat-Harvard_Could_Face_Inquiry_Into_Enron_Links.pdf
  30. Neela Banerjee and Reed Abelson. Watchdog group wants investigation on Harvard official. The New York Times, February 1, 2002. https://dillonreadandco.com/resources/documents/ArticleScans/Sized/HarvWat-Watchdog_Group_Wants_Investigation_on_Harvard_Official.pdf
  31. Beth Healy and David Abel. Harvard students say school may have profited by fund’s short selling of Enron. The Boston Globe, February 1, 2002. https://dillonreadandco.com/resources/documents/ArticleScans/Sized/HarvWat-Students_Say_School_Profited_Enron.pdf
  32. Justin Pope. Harvard activists group call for Harvard to investigate Enron ties. AP Business Writer, January 31, 2002. https://dillonreadandco.com/resources/documents/ArticleScans/Sized/HarvWwat-Harvard_Activists_Call_For_Enron_Investigation.pdf
  33. Anne Williamson Testimony. The Solari Report, September 1, 2006. https://home.solari.com/anne-williamson-testimony/
  34. United States of America v. Harvard. https://dillonreadandco.com/resources/documents/US-complaint.pdf
  35. Perestroika. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perestroika
  36. Catherine Austin Fitts. Book Review: Genocide: Russia and the New World Order by Sergei Glazyev. The Solari Report, July 8, 2024. https://home.solari.com/book-review-genocide-russia-and-the-new-world-order-by-sergei-glazyev/
  37. Robert I. Friedman. Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America. Little, Brown and Co., 2000. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/red-mafiya-how-russian-mob-has-invaded-america
  38. Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Two Hundred Years Together. 2002. https://archive.org/details/200YearsTogether
  39. Russia and the Ukraine Backstory with Anne Williamson. The Solari Report, September 4, 2014. https://home.solari.com/russia-and-the-ukraine-backstory-with-anne-williamson/
  40. Anne Williamson on the Ukraine: Europe’s Expansion East. The Solari Report, April 16, 2015. https://library.solari.com/williamson-ukraine-europe-expands-east/
  41. Patricia Cohen and Keith Bradsher. Behind the Deadly Unrest in Kenya, a Staggering and Painful National Debt. The New York Times, June 26, 2024. https://web.archive.org/web/20240715034935/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/26/business/kenya-tax-protests-debt.html
  42. Shola Lawal. What Do the IMF and Foreign Debt Have to Do with Kenya’s Current Crisis? Al Jazeera, July 7, 2024. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/7/why-are-kenyans-angry-with-the-imf
  43. Evelyne Musambi. Kenya’s President Warns of Huge Consequences after His Effort to Address an $80 Billion Debt Fails. AP, July 10, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/kenya-finance-bill-protests-debt-economy-d1e083b61352fc2c168e71dc257cbb33
  44. Kenya’s Economy Is Recovering from the Polycrisis, but Challenges Remain. World Bank Press Release, June 7, 2023. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2023/06/07/kenya-afe-economy-is-recovering-from-the-polycrisis-but-challenges-remain
  45. Yanis Varoufakis. Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. https://archive.org/details/adultsinroommyba0000varo
  46. Greek government-debt crisis. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis
  47. “How did Cypriots respond to the 2013 banking crisis?” Financial Times, March 20, 2018. https://www.ft.com/content/6c337371-0c34-38f4-9330-2ac88c0b7ce2
  48. 2012–2013 Cypriot financial crisis. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012%E2%80%932013_Cypriot_financial_crisis
  49. Liz Alderman. Rejection of Deposit Tax Scuttles Deal on Bailout for Cyprus. The New York Times, March 19, 2013. https://web.archive.org/web/20240412164154/https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/business/global/cyprus-rejects-tax-on-bank-deposits.html
  50. Matthew O’Brien. Everything You Need to Know about the Cyprus Bank Disaster. The Atlantic, March 18, 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-cyprus-bank-disaster/274096/
  51. Catherine Austin Fitts. How a CBDC Created Chaos and Poverty in Nigeria with Jan M. Fijor. The Solari Report, April 30, 2024. https://home.solari.com/how-a-cbdc-created-chaos-and-poverty-in-nigeria-with-jan-m-fijor/
  52. Catherine Austin Fitts. The Threat of Financial Transaction Control. The Solari Report, February 24, 2024. https://home.solari.com/the-threat-of-financial-transaction-control/
  53. Alex Krainer: Forget CBDCs, Greatest Threat Now Is Move Toward WW3. Geopolitics & Empire, June 14, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoA0zvrlSwQ
  54. Pratham Rawat. Nigeria’s eNaira CBDC: What Went Wrong? Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, April 28, 2023. https://business.cornell.edu/hub/2023/04/28/nigerias-enaira-cbdc-what-went-wrong/
  55. Stephen M. Lepore. Jared Kushner praises “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront properties” – as Trump’s son-in-law suggests Israel ought to “move people out and then clean it up.” Daily Mail, March 19, 2024 (updated March 20, 2024). https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13216651/Jared-Kushner-Israel-Gaza-waterfront-property.html
  56. Assaf Gilead. Saudis Commit $2b to Kushner’s Israel Investment Fund – Report. Globes, May 7, 2022. https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-saudis-commit-2b-to-kushners-israel-investment-fund-report-1001411154
  57. Charlotte Dennett. Israel, Gaza, and the Struggle for Oil. Counterpunch, December 11, 2023. https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/11/israel-gaza-and-the-struggle-for-oil/
  58. Catherine Austin Fitts. The Myth of the Rule of Law or How the Money Works: the Destruction of Hamilton Securities Group. The Solari Report, 2001. https://home.solari.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/myth_of_the_rule_of_law.pdf
  59. Catherine Austin Fitts. Dillon Read & Co. Inc. & the Aristocracy of Stock Profits. https://dillonreadandco.com/
  60. Catherine Austin Fitts. The Plunder of Private Equity Billionaires. The Solari Report, July 23, 2024. https://home.solari.com/the-plunder-of-private-equity-billionaires/