The Native Americans did get ripped off, as property owners. Problem is, no one knows how much. So it's just a guess. $455M was the judges guess. Oh well..maybe the tribes should declare war on the USA. Oh wait, they did, and they lost. But the judgment amount does seem low. so they will appeal.
In fiscal 1999, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), under the leadership of Secretary Andrew Cuomo, reported $17 billion missing from its opening balance and $59 billion of undocumentable adjustments to close its books and refused to produce audited financial statements as required by law. In fiscal 2000, HUD refused to disclose the amount of its undocumentable transactions. For a sense of the magnitude of even the reported discrepancies, it means that the amount of undocumentable transactions occurring at HUD in 1999 was $1.13 billion a week, $227 million each work day and $28 million an hour.
The contractors that ran HUD's auditing and payment systems also were large contractors at the Department of Defense (DOD) which reported $2.3 trillion of undocumentable transactions in fiscal 1999 and $1.1 trillion in fiscal 2000. DOD declined to report the number for fiscal 2001 and in all years subsequent to the legal requirement to do so, declined to produce audited financial statements as required by law, ensuring that the US Treasury could also not do so.
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Things seemed to be coming to a head on September 10, 2001, when Donald Rumsfeld conceded in a press conference that DOD was missing trillions. However, that fact was not to attract much attention given 9-11 events the following day. Rather, the tragedy was used to justify the loss of financial records at the Pentagon (we are apparently to presume that the Pentagon is incapable of making or keeping back ups) and the inability of the Army to produce financial statements in 2001.
So where did the money go? Indeed, $4 trillion is a lot of money for us to lose. Especially when you add it to the money that was pulled out of pension funds and investors' accounts with the pump and dump of the Internet and telecom stocks, the manipulation of the precious metals markets and movement of gold stores at below market prices and the bubbling of mortgage markets and other financial frauds. And, as beautifully described in Vanity Fair's recent piece by Barrett and Steele, "Billions Over Baghdad", money has continued to go missing from DOD at astonishing rates. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have created countless new opportunities for pork and pilfering.
Add it all up and my guess is more than $10 trillion of private and public funds has been pulled out of America by fraudulent means. That is an interesting number, given that it was an amount sufficient to pay off the direct national debt before the housing bill added Fannie`s and Freddie's debts to our burden.
In short, our problem is not that our national debt is out of control. Our problem is a financial coup d' etat. The reason we have debt is that the federal accounts have a private back door that is feeding an insatiable parasite. The money we need to address our financial, social and retirement obligations has disappeared and we need to get it back. The housing bill does not do this. Quite the contrary: it represents a step in the opposite direction. Instead of getting the money back, the housing bill ensures that our contingent liabilities increase astronomically and puts in place additional mechanisms for engineering more missing money and draining small business and communities as a result of further centralization of mortgage credit into Washington and Wall Street.
If you look at various estimates of what it would cost to end global poverty, ensure that all Americans had health care and no one lost their home to foreclosure or solve this problem or that problem, what you discover is this $10 trillion is more than enough to make significant inroads in solving most of the world's ills. It appears our problems may not be material. Instead they are political. Which means they are ultimately cultural and spiritual.
-Catherine Austin Fitts
Assistant Secretary of Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner
under the first Bush Administration
TS-guy