Fitts: Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Prison Profits: Part I
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Our readers may remember Catherine Austin Fitts' 2001 series for Narco News, "Narco-Dollars for Beginners: How the Money
Works in the Illicit Drug Trade." Fitts, a former board member of Dillon, Read & Co. investment firm and Assistant Secretary of Housing under President George H.W. Bush, has a unique perspective on
both the financial world and the workings U.S. government agencies.
Today Narco News publishes part one of Fitts' new six-part series, "Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Prison Profits." She exposes, based on her own experience, a glimpse of a system of
money laundering, drug trafficking and rigging of the stock market that underlie Wall Street, Washington, and the
private contractors working for the U.S. government, especially in the prison industry.
Fitts writes in her introduction:
"There is a strongly held myth in America. The myth says that large corporations are efficient. They have big profits.
They have lots of capital to hire the best people, the best accountants and the best law firms. Everyone looks so
spiffy. Their technology is the latest. The best thing for the economy, sings the siren song, is for inefficient
government to defer to corporate leaders and corporate 'survival of the fittest.' Powerful corporations, the myth goes,
earned their power through performance in the marketplace by providing the best services and products.
"The real truth on the corporate model is far darker, however, and can be found by understanding our current central
banking-warfare economic model and the resulting total economic return of activities. That means not just looking at the
corporate profits and growth in stock price, but the true cost to people, the environment and government of a particular
corporate activity. This necessitates understanding the economy as an ecosystem that is a dynamic living system in
places. If corporate profits come from laundering narcotics trafficking used to destroy communities, and from government
contracts used to build expensive prisons crammed full of small time non-violent drug distributors and customers, then
they are part of a 'negative return on investment' economy. This is an economy where the real cost of things is hidden
behind secret black budgets, complex government finances, under-the-table deals, market manipulations and economic and
military warfare, until they finally show up in the most irrefutable ways: environmental destruction and the exhaustion
and death of communities."
Fitts calls her story of Dillon Read a case study in this. In part one, Fitts describes how a relationship with Bechtel
brought the firm into military and intelligence circles (including the Bush family), and correspondingly into the giant
profits to be made from government contracts. She also looks at how the firm gained through its business with R.J.
Reynolds as the tobacco company was involved in narco- trafficking and other criminal activities.
The series is an indictment of the elite class in the U.S. that sanctimoniously decries drugs and crime while profiting
off of them and insuring their continued existence. As the old New Jersey street saying that Fitts quotes at the
beginning of her series goes, "Make a law, make a business." Read the first installment here:
From somewhere in a country called América,
Dan Feder
Managing Editor
The Narco News Bulletin