This is a story about a food fight at high levels of government and the private sector. The food fight has to do with who profits from knowledge and information that has been successfully kept from the American people so that a lucky few can manipulate well-intentioned statutes, regulations, codes of behavior, enforcement powers to their own benefit. It is called in the pejorative "gaming the system." It is about exactly how we get waste, fraud and abuse in our Congress, in our Executive Branch, in our Courts and how our banking system, our housing system, our national defense and intelligence establishment -- you name the sector, any sector -- operate for a powerful few. It is about the greed and lust for power on the part of this elite group, this "One-Percent," and its manipulation of the media and other learning systems to stop the decentralization that threatens to unleash tremendous increases in performance, productivity and health of the other ninety-nine percent. If the guys with the votes (i.e., you) cannot see our world whole, cannot see how the money works in our own individual neighborhoods, we can be hoodwinked into agreeing to anything. And what a scam it has been.
In old England, what amounted to real estate barons had fiefdoms in which serfs worked for the aggrandizement of their rich and powerful lords and lived in relative squalor. In America, we profess to operate a democracy, in which no elite group has an exclusive right to profit on national resources. Each adult citizen has a right to vote for individual decision makers who will represent his or her interests on matters affecting the society, and no one's vote is worth more than anyone else's is. The Constitution guarantees us certain basic rights, including the right to property interests and the right to freedom from servitude. Our elected representatives make laws for our benefit, our executive branch regulates how those laws are implemented and our courts settle disputes over application of the laws to individual cases based upon well-developed precedent. Taxes are levied, to a greater or lesser degree of fairness, based primarily upon income generated and property held, so that we can share fairly the costs of running our government. Free enterprise and free markets allow us all the opportunity to earn a living and be paid handsomely for high performance. Individual poverty can result only from a failure to perform, for whatever reason. Some government safety net exists to assist those of us who are prevented from contributing to our economic well being. This is the official reality. The official reality that can be maintained, supported and perpetuated only as long as those with the votes and those who are responsible for making the system work, cannot see how the system really does work.
The primary vehicle for keeping the American people ignorant is the centralization of decision-making together with the manipulation of disclosure in a manner that belies its true purpose to obfuscate reality and steal and misuse our national assets. A company started in Washington, DC in the early 90s intended to do what it could, profitably and ethically, to make knowledge about "how the money works" accessible in a way that supports win/win solutions to problems and steadfastly applying performance based standards to reengineering business and government. This company was an investment bank named "The Hamilton Securities Group, Inc." after Alexander Hamilton, who was responsible for creating the initial American monetary and financial system. Hamilton assembled a team whose members had, individually, learned the inner workings of both Wall Street and the federal government and immersed themselves in state-of-the-art technological tools that could cheaply and powerfully provide access to information and education to all Americans. A list of the endeavors Hamilton had embarked upon before its operations were ended by leak campaigns and "subpoena warfare"is:
- Creating an employee owned investment bank an broker dealer which used web and internet technology and open offices to create a new style was of doing investment banking in a more entrepreneurial and transparent manner, including teaching clients how to do their own investment banking with the help of software tools and on line systems.
- Learning how federal government money and credit drive the housing and mortgage finance system and figuring out ways to reengineering it with software, on line and artificial intelligences in connection with advising HUD with respect to its $400-500 billion portfolio of guarantees, mortgages and subsidy assets and liabilities;
- Prototyping a computer learning center and data servicing company in a residential community transitioning from a government investment model to a private "emerging market".
- Creating a databanking operation with an advisory board of members from the pension and investment community which tracked investments whose performance tracked their return to investors as well as their economic or other collateral impact.
- Modelling a "neighborhood equity and trust corporation" in Norfolk, Virginia to learn how profitable community equity investment could be in neighborhoods where residents and small businesspeople retained control of the majority of voting shares and financed with non-voting shares designed to attract investment both in and outside the community.
- Creating Geographic Information System mapping and other tools that illuminated details of public and private investment and income in the 63,000 in America and provided the core infrastruture for communities to create on line community databanks, to reengineer government basis on a place based basis and Hamilton and it’s network to trade and price primary and secondary market securities on a place based basis.
The tools Hamilton was building and sharing with the public, were too powerful. The programs it was advocating to a large government agency with a large purse and access to the 63,000 neighborhoods in America would expose financial fraud and teach agency personnel sophisticated financial restructuring so that housing programs could be run for the benefit of taxpayers. The tools it was developing would allow access to information about housing and investment related opportunities to everyone, thereby rendering the expertise developed by affordable housing industry advisors and constituents obsolete and exposing any financial fraud related to HUD supported properties.
Private interests who benefited from inside knowledge of how the HUD money really works and how the game is really played were not prepared to open up the system for competition, where they would have to perform just like everyone else. They also were not prepared for the inevitable "marking to market" of HUD supported real estate that would occur if competitive forces were reintroduced or for the adverse tax consequences of marking to market, because they had seen that happen in the private markets already with the savings and loan crisis and RTC liquidation of overvalued real estate portfolios.
So, what do you as a member of the "affordable housing" elite, or the organized crime establishment, do to stop this restructuring and the broad dissemination of information?
- Create a scandal within HUD implicating the Secretary and his reformers in headline-grabbing scandals
- Convince Congress that the taxpayer savings from the dismemberment and privatization of the HUD portfolio (i.e., loan sales) are illusory
- Eliminate from competition the Wall Street players that are preparing to compete with existing owners and to turn around HUD neighborhoods and had successfully bid for HUD loan portfolios and at the same time implicate HUD's primary loan sale advisory in scandal by leaking news of a bogus criminal investigation into bid rigging and insider trading in the loan sales
- Raise funds for the DOJ asset seizure fund by conducting a BCCI-type government asset seizure of billions of dollars in loan sale assets purchased by these "Wall Street" interests
- Restore control over the HUD portfolio to favored contractors and other "old system" patronage players who would see to it that the exclusive domains of existing stakeholders are protected from competition and illumination of financial fraud
- Debunk proponents of reform as haters of white men and new systems as fraught with opportunities for the very insider trading and bid-rigging that goes on every day under the status quo
- Convince the public that the poor neighborhoods in which HUD housing is located have become unsafe and undesirable as the result of criminal elements living within the housing and not of the gaming of ill-conceived HUD programs at enormous taxpayer expense.
- Convince the public that turning around bad neighborhoods can best be achieved through prohibitively expensive centralized enforcement programs and increased incarceration, thereby protecting old and creating new jobs and promotions in the public bureaucracy and justifying increased federal budget appropriations
- Deny public access to the powerful GIS and other software tools developed by Hamilton in a "PROMIS II" operation, so named (a) because of its similarity in both purpose and strategy to the illegal seizure by DOJ of software called PROMIS that, when adapted to financial markets by covert operatives, can provide the user access to global bank wire transfer information and (b) because the impact of the place-based financial disclosure in Hamilton software is potentially as powerful in destroying a rigged financial system as the PROMIS software was in illuminating money laundering and other secret and illegal money flows
- Provide GIS tools similar to Hamilton's to police and other enforcers so they can learn how to control a larger percentage of centrally controlled community policing grant dollars and increase their budgets through seizures of assets of ordinary citizens under the rubric of fighting the "War on Drugs"
- Create a government controlled entity [Unicorp] to apply Hamilton's job training methods to prisoners, thereby increasing the profits of government contracting elite and other private interests that train them and use their services at below-market wage rates
- Control flows of HUD funds into communities centrally, through not-for-profits and others whose objectivity and motives will not be suspect and who will perform under cost-plus, rather than performance-based contracts, and make the receipt of HUD largesse dependent upon support of the old status quo
- Put HUD's primary financial advisor in the restructuring out of business by (1) trumping up a reason to withhold payments for services rendered in the past, (2) canceling its advisory contract for the convenience of the government, thereby depriving it of one source of future income, (3) depriving the company of other future capital and income opportunities by leaking stories to the press to the effect that the company is part of a criminal investigation and implicated in contract fraud, and (4) causing it to use up its existing resources on legal expenses to comply with impossibly broad government subpoenae and otherwise protect it from attack
- Obtain control over Hamilton's proprietary products, including databases and digital tools, through the bankruptcy process
- If the bankruptcy ploy doesn't work, tie Hamilton's hands by suggesting to various federal, state and local agencies that investigations of other aspects of Hamilton's business are in order (this tactic is known as a "SWAT")
- Perpetuate the myth that all of the foregoing actions were in the spirit of protecting the American people from fraud and abuse and enforcing the law
Well, that is our story, in a nutshell. There is a lot we do not still understand about who did what and why. We could use your help in solving the mystery that remains.
If you would like a more detailed explanation of the facts surrounding the various legal actions included in this section of the website and what events gave rise to the particular actions, click here.<Go go longer introduction and background, which follows below