102 The Solari Report / 2018 Annual Wrap Up / Part Two The potential for capital gains in the stock market made this process quite popular at the time, well beyond a handful of insiders: I walked into the Colony Club to a birthday celebration in New York in 1998. A rush of friends wanted to know what I thought of prison REITS. They were all in them, the brokers were pushing them, they were the “new hot thing” and they were anticipating delicious profits. I said get out, the pricings assumed incorrectly that piling people into prisons—the innocent and the guilty alike—was like warehousing people in HUD housing. Sure enough, the stocks were to later plummet. But not until the Wall Street Journal ran a story about decorators using prison equipment to do bathrooms and kitch- ens on Park Avenue and Esquire ran a fashion layout in front of a series of jail cells. Catherine Austin Fitts, Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. & the Aristocracy of Stock Profits The phenomenon of government money propping up fundamentally uneconomic activities is a theme that works throughout our economy today. Food stamps are another good example: In November [2012], the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that a record 47,102,780 individuals receive food stamps. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, that figure exceeds the combined populations of: Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Since January 2009, the number of individuals on food stamps has skyrocketed from 31.9 million to the current record high 47.1 million. By comparison, in 1969 just 2.8 million Americans received food stamps. By Wynton Hall In approximately 37 states, if you receive food stamps and you call in on the hotline, you are not connected to somebody in your state, or even in the United States; you are connected to somebody in India working for JP Morgan Chase. This means that the government is paying a significant number of people unemployment compensation while it is also paying somebody in India to do a job with a large government markup that many of the people drawing unemployment (and some of the people drawing welfare) could be doing. This means that the taxpayer is paying twice. This also means that government safety rules are shutting down a significant number of small farming operations at the same time that land goes fallow and people eat highly processed food shipped in at long distance, paid for by food stamps. In essence, the government is paying people to eat corporate food as opposed to allowing them to economically grow food for themselves and their neighbors. That is a control system—one that is fantastically expensive for taxpayers, not to mention costly in terms of the health expense of people not having access to local, fresh food. My story about Dillon Read begins with an old New Jersey street saying that, sadly, describes the U.S. economy today: “Make a law, make a business.”