Get ready for next year

ON THE GARDEN PATH

CAROLYN HERRIOT

Rake leaves and debris from your lawn. Check your tree ties; strong winds can uproot newly planted trees. Tie up cypress and cedar trees; heavy snow can break or damage them. Also, fasten climbing plants to supports to protect them against damage from high winds.

You can reduce the effects of wind and snow by a third by prun - ing hybrid tea and floribunda roses. Strip the leaves from remaining canes, but don’t compost them; they may harbour black spot, mildew or rust spores. Bury them in the garden instead. Remove dead, damaged, diseased and spindly growth first from your climbing and rambling roses. The aim is to maintain a vigorous frame - work of healthy canes. Ramblers tend to be more v i g o ro u s t h a n climbers, so more wo o d m ay b e removed. Prune side shoots back to three buds. To keep your rose bushes healthy, rake fallen rose leaves and mulch underneath to cover any spores.

Keep on mulching, especially newly planted trees, bushes and semihardy perennials. Tip: Avoid contact between mulch and stems to prevent rotting. Save leaves from large trees, such as maples, oaks and chestnuts. A covering of leaf mulch insulates roots, feeds the soil, helps retain moisture, improves soil structure and smothers weed seeds.

Protect container plants by mov - ing them closer to the house, under the eaves or deck, a sheltered corner, a cool greenhouse, or inside a brightly lit entranceway or garage.

When the last crops of raspberries have been harvested, cut the woody fruited canes down to soil level. This helps prevent pests and diseases from developing, and lets in light to pro - mote new cane growth. Prune out the fruited canes of blackberries and hybrid berries, such as boysenberry, tayberry and loganberry. Finally, tie the remaining canes onto their supports to prevent winter damage. Prune grape vines while they are dormant; leave one or two strong buds on each stem.

Young rosemary and bay trees – one or two years old – may not overwinter successfully, so keep them pro tected. Plant them out once the roots have fully developed.

When the fern-like asparagus foli - age yellows and dies, cut the aspara - gus down to an inch (2.5 cm) above ground, then mulch; asparagus is a heavy feeder and relishes aged manure, compost or what-have-you. Cut back stalks of Jerusalem arti - chokes. The tubers are sweeter after a few hard frosts and can be harvest - ed from the garden throughout the winter.

The best way to prevent disease is to remove disease. Go through all the plants in the greenhouse and remove any mouldy plant parts. Keep check - ing throughout the winter for infec - tions. The damp, confined environ - ment of a greenhouse is a perfect breeding ground for fungal spores and disease. Water greenhouse plants s p a r i n g l y a n d preferably in the morning so they don’t sit wet and cold at night. If you have a pond, remove any decaying plants and leaves to prevent methane and hydrogen sulfide gas build-up. These gases can be poison - ous to fish. Cut back dying, marginal plants and remove fallen leaves from the water, before they sink and break down, causing algae to bloom.

To protect fruit trees from dor - mant fungal diseases, spray all tree surfaces with a mixture of two table - spoons (30 ml) of wettable copper to a gallon of water. The wingless, female winter moth walks up fruit trees to lay her eggs on the branches; the resulting green caterpillars feed on spring foli - age. To keep winter moths off your fruit trees, tie grease bands around fruit tree trunks. Use one or two sixinch, removable wraps, such as bur lap sacking tied around the tree with twine, and coat them with a sticky product, such as Tanglefoot.

Remember that cold snaps leave birds vulnerable, so keep bird feed - ers filled with nuts, seeds, fatty scraps and fruit.

Pat yourself on the back. You have worked hard and performed miracles in your garden this past year. It’s time to look forward to a brand new gar - dening year, working in co-creation with Mother Nature. From A Year on the Garden Path: A 52-Week Organic Gardening Guide by Carolyn Herriot. $29.95, Earthfuture Publications, Victoria, BC. Available at Banyen Books, Duthie Books or at (www. earthfuture.com/gardenpath). Cold snaps leave birds vulnerable, so keep bird feeders filled with nuts, seeds, fatty scraps and fruit.

$W hile unloading my backpack from a float plane on Salt Spring Island, the pilot asks me why I’ve flown out on such a rainy, dismal day. I explain that I’m a writer and I’ve come to hear a talk from some - one by the name of Catherine Austin Fitts. “Oh, Catherine,” he says with a smile. As we enter the airline office, the pilot animatedly explains the rea - son for my trip to the staff. “Cathe - rine’s an amazing woman,” responds a woman at the desk. “I wish I could accomplish in my life half of what’s she’s done in hers.”

I’m only five minutes on Salt Spring, and the financial wiz Cath erine Austin Fitts, whose name gets 72,000 hits on Google, is already highly recommended. Her CV is impressive to be sure, and clearly she is someone who knows how money works. And that’s why she’s here: to share her smarts with the Salt Spring Monetary Fund, a group of residents who are rethinking how money works in their community.

At a local theatre, Fitts appears with a blue-suited, casual, business look. She might be the good natured, middle-aged woman writing up your mortgage application, yet when this former insider from Washington and Wall Street talks about money, it’s like nothing you’ll ever read in Report on Business or hear on MSNBC.

Fitts’ first inkling of the darker side of the political economy came during her tenure in Washington, under the first Bush administration, when she was assigned by HUD’s then secretary Jack Kemp to clean up the agency’s books. When she arrived at her office, she asked the control ler to see audit figures. He responded they were only audited every couple of years. She learned that HUD didn’t have the habit of tracking its financial results on a location specific basis, so each field office had no clue how the money worked in its jurisdiction.

With the documentation she had access to, there was no way of know ing if each field office was making or losing money. Under the law, the agency was required to be self-sup porting, so who had that informa tion? The accounts department did, but Fitts was told that they reported to a different assistant secretary and weren’t allowed to talk to her. After some intradepartmental lobbying, two months later she discovered fig ures indicating the agency was losing $11 million a day. She later discovered that a major US defence contractor managed the systems and accounts at HUD. This was the beginning of her descent down the rabbit hole of the so-called “black budget” and the US covert economy.

Through the course of several administrations, including that of Bill Clinton, a massive amount of money has been siphoned out of public agencies in the US, Fitts says. “Four secretaries of the treasury refused to produce audited financial statements and reported a total of $4 trillion in undocumentable adjustments.”

The vast majority of government officials were completely in the dark on the mechanics behind this, and where the money was going, yet it appeared to be no simple matter of bureaucratic incompetence. “I can’t tell you how many able and compe tent people I’ve met in government,” she says.

Fired after 18 months in office, Fitts says she witnessed firsthand the rot at the core of Empire, far beyond the apple polishing games of partisan politics. For her, choosing Democrats over Republicans is simply flipping the coin of the realm to the other side.

“I happen to believe what’s going on is really spiritual in nature, and solutions have to start with a spiri tual foundation,” Fitts tells her audi ence. She harkens back to a talk she had given a few years earlier, before a “wonderful group of people” from something called the Spiritual Fron tiers Foundation. She gave her usual shtick, explaining how the entire economy and culture are financially dependent upon too many things that harm people and the environment. She told them the global economy is now inextricably bound to financial fraud, planet-plundering trade agree ments and laundered drug money.

“So I asked this wonderful group of spiritually evolved people what would happen if we stopped being the global leader in dirty money. Let’s pretend there’s a big button and if you push that button you can stop all narcotics trafficking in your town or city tomorrow. Who here would push the button? And out of 100 of these spiritual people, how many do you think would push the button?” The room is silent. “Only one.” The reason most people balk at such a thought experiment, Fitts learned, is that they don’t want their mutual funds to go down, and they don’t want their taxes to go up.

“In community after community, people are saying they’re so angry at George W. Bush, but what they don’t understand is that they’re financing all the things they hate. If 99 percent of the most spiritually evolved people in America do not want the red but ton pushed, if you’re George W. Bush, can you push the red button?” The question hangs in the air, unanswered. As a government official, one of the things Fitts constantly witnessed was how policies were engineered to pro mote higher stocks for corporations. “There was tremendous synergy between how policies are designed and what drove the New York Stock Exchange up,” she says.

As an illustration, Fitts cites a 1999 report by journalist Kelly O’Meara on the single common denominator found in cases of high school shoot ings in the US. O’Meara claims the shooters were on Ritalin or other pre scribed psychotropic drugs. Pointing to an overhead slide, Fitts shows a profit breakdown of the nine million American children on Ritalin, with the profit per child to the maker at an estimated $54 per annum.

“I have a close family member who was a teacher in the Tennessee school system who was constantly pressured by parents to sign something that said their kids need to be put on Ritalin, because if your kid was disabled you could get a social security cheque,” she adds.

To Fitts, this is a perfect example of how government and corporations cooperate to extract both financial and living capital from communities, through mechanisms that promote a wide range of unhealthy dependencies Community vs. corrupt commerce How money really works BY GEOFF OLSON

US native Catherine Austin Fitts graduated with an MBA from the Wharton School of Business in 1978, and spent a year in Hong Kong with the Yale in China Language Insti tute. She was managing director and member of the board of directors of Dillon Read and Co., a New York investment bank. From 1989 to 1990, she was assistant secretary for the federal housing commissioner with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), where she was responsible for the servicing of $320 billion of mort gage insurance, mortgages and properties, portfolio analysis and pricing for 63,000 com munities, and reengineering of organization of 7,000 employees in 80 offices nationwide. She was also the founder of Hamilton Securities Group, Inc., a broker-dealer/investment bank and software developer. We’ve got 100 percent of our money invested in one thing; it’s called the tapeworm and it’s completely dependent on warfare, organized crime and all these other things. And our money is safe as long as we bet the tapeworm is going to win.

– fiscal, pharmaceutical, electronic and beyond. She calls this deeply pathological system “the economic tapeworm.”

In an article for New Zealand’s Scoop media, Fitts wrote that she hit upon the term one day when a natural healing practitioner explained the strategy used by a tapeworm to prosper. A tapeworm injects a chemical that triggers a craving by the host for what the tapeworm wishes for its dinner. “By managing its host’s desire, a tapeworm manipulated its host to set aside self-interest and please its parasite. And so the tapeworm proceeded to consume its host’s energy and health, with the host doing most of the work,” Fitts notes.

Her concept of an “economic tapeworm” is metaphorical shorthand to explain a financial system that relies on economic and military warfare to finance and subsidize itself. It gives a negative return on investment by centralizing wealth and power.

“The tapeworm, a parasite that over time eats its host, can more accurately describe the demonic patterns of stripping places of intellectual capital that come with American imperial conquest. The dumbing down so often complained about within America’s borders is a phenomenon that our military appears to be implementing globally. We seem intent on removing spiritual power and intellectual IQ as we depopulate globally, moving out the honest and competent and putting the corrupt and bureaucratic in charge,” Fitts explains.

One of the things that Fitts finds most disturbing about the tapeworm is that it has organized its leadership around private banks and defence contractors and its governance and intellectual air cover around think tanks and private universities and their tax-exempt endowments. According to Fitts, the tapeworm model has been about 500 years of central banking and warfare, but its invasive powers have been considerably amplified by shapeshifting powers of electronic capital, and surveillance/data-mining technologies.

The tapeworm is a crafty beast. In her talk on Salt Spring, Fitts provides the example of ethical investing, noting that today’s form of socially responsible investment, “… in the liquid part, is generally promoting large corporations.” Her aunt, a dyed-inthe-wool peace activist, invested in an ethical investment fund that caught Fitts’ attention. After going through screen after screen on her monitor, Fitts discovered a line for Halliburton, the US defence contractor formerly headed by vice president Dick Cheney. “My aunt calls me up And our money is safe as long as we bet the tapeworm is going to win. It’s crazy to make money from the stock market over here then go take that money and buy fresh water or healthy food over here.”

The audience is dead quiet at this point. But Fitts has hope. She doesn’t think the tapeworm is going to win. “If the history of mankind shows anything, it’s that highly centralized systems get really perverted and evil and they just don’t hang together.”And the former HUD official claims to have plenty of exposure to the system’s dark side.

New York Stock Exchange chairman Richard Grasso embracing a commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, the supposed “narco terrorists:” with whom the US is now at war) in 1999 “to bring a message of cooperation from US financial services” and to discuss foreign investment and the future role of US businesses in Colombia

and says I can’t possibly be invested in this company. And sure enough, she was in a state of shock, she was invested in Halliburton.

“We’ve got 100 percent of our money invested in one thing; it’s called the tapeworm and it’s completely dependent on warfare, organized crime and all these other things.

After her efforts to address highlevel corruption in Washington, she quickly fell off her colleagues’ speeddial, only to elicit a more disturbing kind of attention. In her interview on the nationwide radio show Coast to Coast, she asked George Noory if he had ever seen the movie Enemy of the State. “I played Will Smith for 10 years,” she told the host. She recalled a perpetual harassment campaign that included stalking and break-ins. “I went through extraordinary danger, and many, many times I was sure I was dead,” she tells her Salt Spring audience. (On Coast to Coast, she credited former LAPD police officer Mike Ruppert, founder of the peak oil website www.fromthewilderness.com, for saving her life.)

Her approach now to high-level corruption is summed up by one of the titles in her slide show: “Don’t worry if there’s a conspiracy; if you’re not in one, you need to start one.” Considering the “pro-centralization team” has a highly effective agenda, the “pro-decentralization team” needs one of its own.

The tapeworm itself is too big to take on, Fitts says. You cannot fight and win against something with as many resources and capital at its command, and so thoroughly integrated into the investment, corporate, political and intelligence infrastructure of North America. But there is one thing you can do, she insists. You can starve the tapeworm by rebuilding financial and human capital closer to home, investing wisely and locally as much as possible.

Much of the remainder of Fitts’ talk touched on equities, the bond market and other arcane financial mechanisms, before she got to her “Popsicle Index.” She defines this as the percentage of people in your community who can leave home, go to the nearest place to buy a Popsicle and come home safely.

Fitts explains the Popsicle Index is a subjective measurement for how people feel, particularly kids and their parents, about their community, adding, “It’s a rule of thumb, which expresses the human capital in its place.” Fitts recalls when she was a little girl growing up in Philadelphia, the Dow Jones index was 1,500, but the Popsicle Index for her neighbourhood was about a 100 percent. “It was continued on p.31

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