6 and mortgage bubble in our history. This was no accident. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and Secretary of Treasury Bob Rubin are very smart men – they knew exactly what they were doing. Trillions also started to go missing from the Department of Defense (DOD). Our pension funds, including CalPERS, traded our savings for increasingly fraudulent mortgage paper and US Treasuries – essentially IOUs for which we were liable as homeowners and taxpayers – whose value was steadily debased by aggressive monetary policy and bailouts. Our pension funds became a primary source of assets to be transferred as well as to finance the coup d’état. The moral of my personal story is that the President of the CalPERS understood what was happening. Nevertheless, CalPERS pro- ceeded to finance a fraudulent housing bubble and the transfer of trillions out of the US gov- ernment. This can only mean that CalPERS governance and management serve an agenda other than the one dictated by the law and eth- ics. This is evidence of a profound conflict of interest – a serious failure of integrity. Perhaps it is evidence that a deep state controls our pension funds as well as our government. Now CalPERS says that the pension funds it manages have funding shortfalls. Is that the case, or is something more complex, even sinis- ter, going on? These are questions I address in The State of Our Pension Funds. I wanted to write this piece to change the nar- rative. To control trillions of capital centrally, our financial leadership must first control the narrative that allows them to do so – even when there are clear indications that some- thing is wrong. Here is how I describe this issue in The State of Our Pension Funds: “There is a statue of A. Philip Randolph, the civil rights leader, in Union Station in Wash- ington DC with a message for those who pass by it in the Nation’s capital: ‘At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can’t take anything, 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 retire- ment 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 and data to spin, instills panic and blame. It says “Oh, God! We didn’t save enough. It’s our fault. We’re to blame. We haven’t been sufficiently disciplined, so now we’re just going to have to cut benefits. There is just not enough money.” Here is an alternative – and more accurate — narrative. “If $21 trillion can disappear from HUD and DOD, let’s get it back and fully fund our pension funds. If we can loan or gift $20+ trillion to the banks, what is the prob- lem? Let’s do the same for our pension funds!” Politics is first and foremost a negotiation over who gets what resources. If we want to stop the harvesting, the first step is to change the narrative. We don’t have a pension fund crisis; we have a political plan. That plan created the pension fund crisis. It’s time to change the plan.” This week one of our subscribers sent the pub- lic statement of Stephen Cassidy, the former Mayor of San Leandro California, speaking to the San Leandro City Council in a recent pub- lic session in which CalPERS gave a presenta- tion on pension costs. “Trillions also started to go missing from the Department of Defense). Our pension funds, traded our savings for increasingly fraudulent mortgage paper and US Treasuries – essentially IOUs for which we were liable as homeowners and taxpayers I. INTRODUCTION “Billions started to go missing from the De- partment of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as HUD, with the help of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, the NY Fed and Department of Justice”