Investment advisor and former Assistant Secretary of Housing Catherine Austin Fitts says it looks like a “global recession is coming.”

Is that going to cause the debt reset we’ve been hearing about for years? Fitts says, “Make no mistake about it, there is no reason for the federal government to default or monkey with any debt because they can literally print the currency…"

"The question is how do they make sure whatever they are printing really holds any kind of store of value. I think the reason you are seeing them reengineer the federal bureaucracy and financial transactions infrastructure is because they want much greater and tighter control to do whatever they do, and that includes to continue to debase the currency. They could do this (reset) entirely by debasing the currency…

What we are watching . . . is essentially a coup. We had a financial coup, and now we are watching a legal coup to consolidate that financial coup. I would keep my eye on the fundamental governance structure of the U.S. The important thing is not what they do. The important thing is who controls no matter what they do. Now, we have created a mechanism for them to control entirely in secret and create policies entirely in secret, including around the back of a U.S. President… It’s pirating by the ‘just do it’ method. I said to someone the other day, what is it about secret money for secret private armies that you don ‘t understand?”

$21 trillion in “missing money” at the DOD and HUD that was discovered by Dr. Mark Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts in 2017 has now become a national security issue.

The federal government is not talking or answering questions, even though the DOD recently failed its first ever audit. Fitts says, “This is basically an open running bailout…"

"Under this structure, you can transfer assets out of the federal government into private ownership, and nobody will know and nobody can stop it. There is no oversight whatsoever. You can’t even know who is doing it. I’m telling you they just took the United States government, they just changed the governance model by accounting policy to a fascist government. If you are an investor, you don’t know who owns those assets, and there is no evidence that you do…

If the law says you have to produce audited financial statements and you refuse to do so for 20 years, and then when somebody calls you on it, you proceed to change the accounting laws that say you can now run secret books for all the agencies and over 100 related entities.”

In closing, Fitts says, “We cannot sit around and passively depend on a guy we elected President…"

"The President cannot fix this. We need to fix this…

This is Main Street versus Wall Street. This is honest books versus dirty books. If you want the United States in 10 years to resemble anything what it looked like 20 years ago, you are going to have to do it, and there is no one else who can do it. You have to first get the intelligence to know what is happening.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-13/secret-money-private-armies-austin-fitts-exposes-americas-open-running-bailout

Thousands of Los Angeles teachers plan to strike Monday — raising the possibility of a new wave of “educator spring” activity resurrected in the blue state of California.

The labor unrest in LA is reminiscent of statewide teacher walkouts last year in the red states of West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Arizona that had teachers standing up to their state legislatures and governors — even though the battle in Los Angeles features a more traditional labor fight that pits the United Teachers Los Angeles union against district leaders.

The fight is being watched closely in California and elsewhere to see if it is a harbinger of similar teacher labor action in the rest of the state or the nation and whether it could help prod California lawmakers to dedicate more funds for K-12 schools. Newly inaugurated Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters earlier this month that the magnitude of the issues in LA was “profound” — particularly given the size of the Los Angeles Unified School District — and that “the stresses that our teachers are facing are real.”

“There are pension pressures on our school districts, there are fixed costs on health care that are real,” Newsom said. “Even with the increase in per-pupil spending it’s just simply not enough to reduce these class sizes, and we’re going to have to do more.”

As in most other states where strikes have arisen, California has struggled to bring per-pupil spending back to pre-Great Recession levels, according to an analysis from the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Former Obama administration Education Secretary Arne Duncan has weighed in on behalf of the district. And Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is siding with teachers.

A teacher walkout in Los Angeles — home to the nation’s second-largest school district — would be the city’s first since 1989, and sure to disrupt a city where 80 percent of school kids qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Joseph Zeccola, a high school English teacher at a Los Angeles magnet school, said even though going on strike is a scary prospect, he's ready. He said watching other teachers walk off the job last year across the country helped give him “hope and confidence because the public is so behind teachers.”

Los Angeles Superintendent Austin Beutner said he agrees with the union about the need for more school staff, but said district leaders have a fiscal responsibility to keep the district solvent. Nearly all of the district’s funding comes from the state, he said.

"We want the same set of things. We’d like to have smaller class sizes. We’d like to have more nurses, counselors, librarians in our schools. So we want the same set of things," Beutner said. "But we have budget issues, very real budget issues.”

Beutner said a new budget proposal from Newsom, if approved by the state legislature, would improve the district's proposal to teachers. The district is ready to hire an additional 200 educators beyond the nearly 1,000 proposed earlier last week to bring down class sizes, as well as hire more nurses, librarians and counselors.

On Friday, he asked Newsom to get involved in the dispute.

“We need his help to resolve this. We do not want a strike. We ask for his help now to resolve this so that we can keep our schools open. We can keep kids safe and learning in school.”

More:

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/13/los-angeles-teacher-strike-1080970