36 Philip Corso, you can see how Silicon Valley and the aerospace and defense industries were created by technology laundered out of government own- ership into corporate ownership in arguably the greatest corporate windfalls in our history. This is my vote for the largest transfer of wealth. There are other things we could add – market manipulation related to the Exchange Stabiliza- tion Fund, insider trading, naked short selling, dark trading programs – the list and allegations go on. But pick a large number for financial market manipulation in stock, bond, currency, derivatives, precious metals and commodities and throw that into the pot. My guesstimate for the amount stolen or shift- ed illegally through these mechanisms is $50 trillion, although I can argue the number higher. But don’t accept my number. Feel free to go through the different frauds, drains, and illegal transfers, and then determine what you think the number might be. Just guess. Your sincere guess will work well for this exercise. Let’s leave social security out and assume on the $25 trillion of funded pension fund assets that the underfunding is $5 trillion. This does not include healthcare because healthcare is a more complex story. This sounds like a large amount of money, but is it really? It’s only 10% of $50 trillion. So what is the problem? If it’s not a problem for $21 trillion to go missing from DOD and HUD and it is possible to come up with more than $20+ trillion to give or loan to the banks when there is no legal obligation to do so and when we can transfer trillions of the most valuable technology in the world to private corporations at zero cost, I assure you that fixing whatever pension fund problem there is, is not difficult. However, the political will must exist and want to. That is the problem. If we can print money to give $20 trillion + to the banks and let $21 trillion go missing from the federal government, why is it a problem to print $5 trillion to fund the pension funds? Maybe the disparity is that the pension funds are the real money we are using to fund and finance these various shenanigans. You need a real source of money other than printing through the central banks to make the system go. Hence, pensions are a source of real assets. You cannot allow them to become a use of funds. In sum we do not have an underfunding crisis. We have a political decision made in the early 1990s to abrogate a significant amount of pen- sion fund obligations. Money was shifted out and replaced with IOUs from the beneficiaries in the form of securitized or government debt that pro- vided another flow of subsidy as interest rates fell. So when the day comes that the boomers want their dollars back, the dollars will not be on hand – they will be somewhere else. Definitely there will be trillions in IOUs from a government for which the boomers are liable as taxpayers. We don’t have a financial problem; we have a political problem: the leadership of the country engineered a financial coup d’état. Think of it this way: It’s not a crisis; it’s a plan. XI. WHAT CAN I DO? There are a number of important steps you can take to apply this knowledge to your unique situation. Change the Narrative There is a statue of A. Philip Randolph, the civil rights leader, in Union Station in Washington DC with a message for those who pass by it in the Nation’s capital: At the banquet table of nature, there are no re- served seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t take any- thing, you won’t get anything, and if you can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And you can’t take anything without organization. If we are going to change the future of retirement and pension benefits in a more positive direction, it is essential to organize. Step one is to change the narrative. The official narrative, which has abundant facts II. THE STATE OF OUR PENSION FUNDS