The Real Deal: HUD Sec. Mel Martinez' Hotseat (II)

Where is the $59 Billion Missing from HUD & What Does that Have to do with Drug Running & Cuba?

In October of 2000, Kelly O'Meara published the first of her Pulitzer Prize deserving four year missing money series in Washington's Insight Magazine, “Why is $59 billion Missing from HUD?”

The Andrew Cuomo team at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) –and the Gore and Clinton campaigns -- who were helping their major donors feast on HUD piratizations -- no doubt failed to appreciate O'Meara' s investigative coup. However, the success of the Bush election recount team in Florida left it to the incoming Republican appointed HUD team lead by Mel Martinez to clean up the mess and get the money back.

Hence it was Mel Martinez' job to determine why HUD refused to conform to the laws requiring audited financial statements and reliable financial systems.

It was Mel Martinez' job to find out where $59 billion and additional missing moneys went.

It was Mel Martinez' job to fire the guilty HUD contractors and depositories responsible and seek the help of the Department of Justice to seize the monies paid and owed to such contractors.

It was Mel Martinez' job to take such other steps available under contract, financial fraud and forfeiture and seizure law to find the missing money and get it back.

In testimony before the Congress, HUD's Inspector General attributed $17 billion of undocumentable adjustments in fiscal 1998 and $59 billion of undocumentable adjustments in fiscal 1999 to the failure of computer systems installed, owned and operated by AMS for which HUD had paid approximately $206 million as of the time of O'Meara's first article. AMS was run during this period by Charles Rossotti who left AMS to serve as the IRS commissioner at Treasury where a special White House waiver allowed him to keep his AMS stock. He then joined George H. W. Bush and a cast of Iran Contra luminaries at The Carlyle Group.

Needless to say, Mel Martinez did nothing about this. AMS was not fired and no effort was made to get the missing money back, not to mention the continued engineering of a significant flow of back door piratizations in the trillion dollar Federal Housing Administration and Ginnie Mae portfolios at HUD.

Billions of annual flows of defaulted mortgages continued to be piratized with methods that had traditional recovery rates of more than half of what was feasible. HUD continued to promote policies that would liquidate the equity of communities as they struggled to meet annual overhead by increasing their debt that was then financed into their retirement funds – a double whammy of equity liquidation and theft.

Apparently thrilled with the latest round of HUD piratization booty for the Iran Contra syndicates, none other than Karl Rove asked Mel Martinez to run for Senate in Florida. This occurred in late 2003, right after the White House signed HUD legislation to offer grants to first time home buyers –- presumably minorities -- in the same numbers as those minorities cleansed off the Florida roles in 2004. The political scent is that African-American voters were cleansed from the roles and their tax dollars and credit will now be used to help Latin American immigrants buy homes for no money down.

Which brings us to the question as to whether or not $59 billion plus billions more in piratization profits flowing out the HUD black budget back door is helping to finance Mel Martinez's run for Senator in Florida in 2004 and the staging of the provisional government for the reacquisiton of political and financial control of Cuba and Haiti, and oil and drug running rich territory in Latin America.

Is Mel Martinez's run for Senator teeing up the age old dream of the Skull & Bones society to reclaim Cuba for the Russell Trust? If you understand that we are dealing with pirates, then you understand the importance of reclaiming Carribean Island havens to the drug and gun running descendents of the drug and gun runners of old. If you look at a map, the recent US invasion of Haiti augurs well for the desirability of electing our first Cuban born senator.

What that means is that Mel Martinez's rise to power and picking the plums of global booty are being financed by harvesting the equity in our homes. Mel Martinez's work at HUD has been to help manage the central spigot that fuels the pirates’ ships.

Mel Martinez is in the Hotseat

So how do we find our money and get it back? And how do we turn off the US Federal financial spigot of global empire for private pirate booty?

The first step is to identify the people responsible for managing our money and to hold them accountable – one by one. Individual responsibility is required to turn off the pirates' spigot in the US treasury and central bank.

Over the last five years, the members of the Solari Action Network have had remarkable success when we collaborate with networks of global Internet media to illuminate the players who are knee deep in piratization. While individual publishers may not have the investigative reporting capacity of corporate media, the aggregated network drawing on citizens and researchers all over the world has a much more powerful shared intelligence than any corporate capacity.

As Internet media draws readers and market share, the corporate media shifts to protect the legitimacy of their channel. As this happens, some interesting ground is gained. This is particularly powerful when combined with the power of prayer and meditation and the power of millions of citizens using their time, attention, purchases, deposits and investments as a “vote” in the marketplace.

We can “vote” in the marketplace in powerful ways when we can pierce the pirate fog around the names and faces behind the black budget veil --names at HUD like the New York Federal Reserve Bank, JP Morgan-Chase, Citibank, Lockheed Martin, AMS, DynCorp, Harvard Endowment, EDS, Carlyle Group, Arthur Anderson, Price Waterhouse, Capricorn Holdings, AIMCO, NHP and NHP Foundation, LISC, Enterprise, and Goldman Sachs and the kind of people who carry their water – like Mel Martinez, Andrew Cuomo, Jack Kemp, Pug Winokur, Stanley Sporkin, Jerry Hawke, Dick Ravitch, Rod Heller, Tom Craren, Scott Nordheimer, Gene Ford, Frank Keating, John Ervin and Dan Hawke, Jerry Hawke's son and one of John Ervin's many attorneys.

Many of these institutions have complex operations. Many of the people who run the central spigot are more or less invisible in the corporate media. Hence the role of hotseating to illuminate individual players who help make the system work.

The successful strategies that have emerged have been aggregated into the idea of a hotseat – with the Mel Martinez Hotseat launching the first one for the Whereisthemoney.org website.

Like the town stocks of olden days, a hotseat is a way for numerous constituencies harmed to hold a person among them accountable. It works best when the person in the hotseat is looking for re-appointment or election – that is, a change of control is underway. It helps when there is significant competition for the business or government position – that is, high stakes poker is involved and squabbling is likely.

Finally, it depends on asking unanswered questions – holding the person in the hotseat who is paid to answer the questions and has the resources and the access to know the answers, responsible to answer the questions. One of the most successful pirate strategies is the tactic of making the citizens responsible to master complexity without pay and support and further to provide millions of dollars of documentation about what is happening.

The Mel Martinez Hotseat was designed to illuminate Mel Martinez's areas of responsibility and to provide the information that busy reporters, campaign staff, and campaign donors need to understand and assess his credentials to serve as a Senator.

· The hotseat is a tool that can be e-mailed to editors, radio talk show hosts and reporters covering the Florida campaign that can provide quick access to research when they have short time frames to write and edit articles and produce radio shows.

· The hotseat is a tool that can inform Florida citizens attending speeches and town hall meetings where they can ask questions directly of candidates and have the links, articles and pictures to back up the tough questions.

· The hotseat is a link that can be posted on blogs and the Internet that will help many people learn and understand how “piratization” of our resources and jobs work and can ensure that search engines provide ready access to the unanswered questions related to Mel Martinez's management of government resources.

· The hotseat is a tool that can educate Mel Martinez' law partners, clients, associates, neighbors, friends and colleagues –particularly those who understand they are losing money on piratization -- how Mel Martinez makes money and rises politically. Let Mel Martinez explain to members of his church congregation where the money went.

· The hotseat is a way for an individual like Mel Martinez to be held responsible in an open public forum for his stewardship of our resources.

· The hotseat is a way to warn the people of Cuba and Latin America about what may be coming and give them an opportunity to nip it in the bud.

· The hotseat is a tool to begin to reverse the piratization double standard.

IN PART III

The Piratization Double Standard – Heads We Win, Tails We Win

Relevance - There is no substitute for relevant information that provides value to a reader. Good research and links to background references are essential for launching the effective transparency effort. Relevant questions open up the mind and inspire thought. Our business and government leaders need to be asked the relevant questions so that they can think about the impact of their actions.

Location, Location, Location - Just as it is with real estate in the physical world, location is everything. When a fellow citizen goes about researching a candidate or a company on the Internet, it is important that they have access to a full range of information. When a fellow journalist works on a story, it is important that they quickly obtain access to relevant information and sources for comment.

Become Relevant - Start your own blog or website and create relevant webpages. Link from those pages to other pages that you find relevant. Be sure to use appropriate words in the text for the links. Free website & blog hosts: Geocities , Angelfire , Pitas , BlogSpot , Weblogger

Become Visable - Ask others with similar webpages or blogs to link to your webpages. Most websites have contact information. Send an email to the webmaster or blogger asking them to link to your page. Make comments on news sites that are covering relevant news. Visit Wiki sites and create links to your own site in relevant places on the Wiki. Lists of online news sites: IndyMedia , OnlineNewspapers , PaperBoy , Internet Public Library . Lists of Wiki sites: SwitchWiki , WikiDirectory . What is a Wiki? Wiki.Org

Start a List - Begin accumulating a list of fellow netizens that have similar interests. Send out messages to your list that provide links to your pages. Provide your email address on the messages and offer to add newcomers to your list. Ask readers to forward your message to 10 others who might have an interest in your work.

Metrics - Search for words on the major search engines to see how you are progressing. Learn to use the tracking tools (like "links: YOUR URL")to see who is linking to you, and who is linking to other relevant sites.

For all links for events described in this column, see links at the Mel Martinez Hotseat.

For all inquiries about the Mel Martinez Hotseat, e-mail friends@whereisthemoney.org or leave at the forum link provided at the Hotseat.

Catherine Austin Fitts is the President of Solari, Inc., a founding member of UnAnsweredQuestions.org, whereisthemoney.org? and member of the Advisory Board of Sanders Research Associates. Ms. Fitts is former Assistant Secretary of Housing-Federal Housing Commissioner in Bush I and a former managing director and member of the board of directors of Dillon Read & Co. Inc.

Henri Poole is a software activist and internet campaign strategist. He is the founder of Affero, CivicActions.com and WhereIsTheMoney.org? Henri is a member of the board of the Free Software Foundation.

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