Sunday, September 8, 2024

CATHERINE AUSTIN FITTS: Americans have "moved the political process out of the power zone and into the entertainment zone."

"You have to decide, do I wanna be entertained? And in that entertainment space; do I wanna get online and fight and argue with people about, you know, who's gonna win the election? Or do I wanna jump in and get involved in the nuts and bolts of implementing real change? ... I'm interested in real power and real change...I find the entertainment space stupefying." --Catherine Austin Fitts

"We've moved the political process out of the power zone and into the entertainment zone...And if you need any solution or real change, you gotta move back into the power zone." Investment banker, former HUD official, and founder of the Solari Report () Catherine Austin Fitts describes for Ryan Cristián () how Americans have "moved the political process out of the power zone and into the entertainment zone." Fitts notes that "in the power zone, if I decide I don't like something, then I'm gonna go down to the county commission or I'm gonna go to the state legislature or I'm gonna go to Congress, and I'm gonna work to get it changed." The investment banker adds that we are so "overwhelmed with consumer choices," however, that "politics [has] slowly migrated to the entertainment space." "You have to decide: Do I wanna be entertained and in that entertainment space? Do I wanna get online and fight and argue with people about, you know, who's gonna win the election? Or do I wanna jump in and get involved in the nuts and bolts of implementing real change?" Partial transcription of clip: "We've moved the political process out of the power zone into the entertainment zone...And if you need any solution or real change, you gotta move back into the power zone. "In the power zone, if I decide I don't like something, then I'm gonna go down to the county commission or I'm gonna go to the state legislature or I'm gonna go to Congress, and I'm gonna work to get it changed in the real actual mechanism that determines how the money gets whacked up and the resources get whacked up and what the laws are. "So I'm either gonna do it as an individual or I'm gonna figure out the groups that are do you know, taking it the right way, and I'm gonna work with them and support them. It's, you know, there are many different ways to go about it. It depends on the issue. But I'm gonna there there is a mechanism by which power is organized and allocated. And, in the legislative process and the administrative process, there is a law and regulation mechanism, and then the real powerful mechanism is the budget. "So you whack up the credit and you whack up the appropriations, you whack up the taxes. So when I was in Washington, I had one of the biggest budget jobs because I was overseeing the mortgage markets and the federal credit in the mortgage markets and all of those assets. I stopped watching TV from 1984 and I had a decorator who insisted you can't work in the government without TV. So she bought me a TV.
I had one for a brief period of time, and I would watch the Sunday shows. And I knew because I was working with the budget, everything that was happening pretty much in the budget in my area, but in related areas in the general budget. And and on the, you know, the Sunday shows, here's what's going on in the budget, and here's what the shows are saying, and they're two parallel universes. "I'll never forget realizing this, when I watched in the nineties as people who used to have real political impact and choices literally migrated from a world where they had political power and had influence and their vote had influence to a world where their their entire desire for choice and impact was satisfied by consumer choices. They were overwhelmed with consumer choices, and politics was slowly migrated to an entertainment space. "You have to decide, do I wanna be entertained? And in that entertainment space; do I wanna get online and fight and argue with people about, you know, who's gonna win the election? Or do I wanna jump in and get involved in the nuts and bolts of implementing real change? ... I'm interested in real power and real change...I find the entertainment space stupefying." 

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