35 The Real Game of Missing Money Several years earlier, I listened to three peasant women describe the War on Drugs in their respective countries: Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia. I asked them, “After they sweep you into camps, who gets your land and at what price?” My question opened a magic door. They poured out how the real economics worked on the War on Drugs, including the stealing of land and government contracts to build housing for the people who are displaced. At one point, suspicious of my understanding of how this game worked, one of the women said, “You say you have never been to our countries, yet you understand exactly how the money works. How is this so?” I replied that I had served as Assistant Secretary of Housing at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the United States where I oversaw billions of government investment in U.S. communities. Apparently, it worked the same way in their countries as it worked in mine. I later found out that the government contractor leading the War on Drugs strategy for U.S. aid to Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia was the same contractor in charge of knowledge management for HUD enforcement. This Washington-Wall Street game was a global game. The peasant women of Latin America were up against the same financial pirates and business model as the people in South Central Los Angeles, West Philadelphia, Baltimore, and the South Bronx. Later, courageous reporting by several independent investigative reporters confirmed in detail that the privatization and economic warfare model I discussed in London had deep roots in Latin America. This included Greg Palast’s coverage of IMF and World Bank policies in 2002. https://library.solari.com/greg-palast-secrets- from-imf-and-world-bank-in-latin-america/ We were experiencing a global “heist”: capital was being sucked out of country after country. The presentation I gave in London revealed a piece of the puzzle that was difficult for the audience to fathom. This was not simply happening in the emerging markets. It was happening in America, too (https://dillonreadandco.com/). I described a meeting that had occurred in April 1997, more than four years before that day in London. I had given a presentation to a distinguished group of U.S. pension fund leaders on the extraordinary opportunity to reengineer the U.S. federal budget. I presented our estimate that the prior year’s federal investment in the Phila- delphia, Pennsylvania area had a negative return on investment. We presented that it was possible to finance places with private equity and reengineer the government investment to a positive return and, as a result, generate significant capital gains. Hence, it was possible to use U.S. pension funds to significantly in- crease retirees’ retirement security by successfully investing in American communities, small business, and farms—all in a manner that would reduce debt, improve skills, and create jobs. The response from the pension fund investors to this analysis was quite positive until the President of the CalPERS pension fund—the largest in the country—said, “You