Originally published at Freedom Scribe. Please leave any comments there.

I owe Mike Ruppert of From The Wilderness and Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari everything for my understanding of what follows.  Both are geniuses.  Many years ago, Fitts began to use something she called the Solari Index to measure the health of our society.  Put simply, the Solari Index is the percentage of ordinary people in our cities who actually believe that a child can walk from his/her home to the nearest place to buy a popsicle and come home alone, unharmed and unmolested.  When Fitts first started using the Solari Index, the Dow Jones was at about 500 and the Solari was 100.  Before this current economic crisis occurred, the Dow was at 14,000+ and the Solari was effectively zero.  They have an obvious inverse relationship.

If you think about it, this doesn’t really make sense.  Wouldn’t you expect that the more prosperous a society becomes, the lower the crime rate falls?   Shouldn’t the Dow Jones and the Solari Index be friends?  Indeed, yes!

We all know that it hasn’t happened that way, but most of us do not fully understand why.

We’ve read for years about the Central Intelligence Agency importing drugs into the United States, everything from heroin at the time of the Viet Nam war to cocaine, crack and meth in subsequent years.  Mike Ruppert has been telling us about this since the 1970s.  Most Americans do not believe the stories they have heard because they have - as I once did - a small problem with motive.  Profit is always a good motive, but when you are talking about a significant portion of a major governmental entity, most of us feel we need just a little more motive than straight profit.

How about misguided patriotism?  How about concern for the value of your 401K and those of millions of other Americans?  Is that motive enough?  Regardless of their actual motive, the CIA is importing illegal drugs into the United States of America - at least a portion of the Agency is - and there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind about that  today.

Let’s say you are a South American drug lord and you have $1 billion in drug money.  You earned this money in a fairly traditional way - by producing a scarce and dangerous commodity and selling it on the open market.  Of course, this commodity is only worth so much because it is illegal and the rest of the world is paying you a premium for the risks you took.  Now you need to look at another risk.  You can’t let anyone know you have this money.  You can’t just put it in a bank, not without the U.S. Army special forces using you for target practice and the U.S. Government seizing your funds.  If you try to hide the money, there is always the chance that it will be found - $1 billion in cash takes up a lot of space, too, so forget burying it in mason jars.  Besides, you need the funds - the liquidity - to keep operating your agricultural, processing and smuggling businesses.

Please make no mistake, no matter what you think of their morals, these drug lords are - first, last and always - very clever businessmen.  And as Mike Ruppert told us years ago - and proved beyond question if anyone was smart enough to check - 90 percent of the CIA leadership over the last 50 years has been drawn from Wall Street lawyers and bankers.  That is the final piece of the puzzle.

So if you are that drug lord, what you must do to gain access to your $1 billion is launder it.  In other words, you need to provide the rest of the world with an innocent explanation for how you acquired this money.  So what do you do?

You can do any one of countless things.  You can contact an auto manufacturer, order several thousand cars and open the newest answer to CarMax in Bogota.  You can contact a computer manufacturer and buy thousands of computers to open Lima’s newest answer to Comp USA.  And so on.  The profit that you earn on the sale of the products you purchase becomes clean money.  You can tell anyone where this money came from.  The same is true for a stock or a derivatives purchase that becomes profitable.  Once you have that innocent explanation to give the rest of the world, and it’s good enough to fly, you have access to your money and your murderous business can go on.  Murderous?  Yes, indeed!  If a street thug is willing to kill for the $20 bill in someone’s wallet, what will these men do to protect their billions?

Current estimates run anywhere from $500 billion to $1.5 trillion in drug money laundered through Wall Street each year.  I believe the larger estimate is the more accurate one, and it may be even larger.  Remember that the whole intent behind this enterprise is to keep the source of the money a secret.  There is no doubt at all that Wall Street, and our current banking system, are utterly addicted to drug profits.

Horrible?  Yes, it most certainly is.  Unfortunately, millions of 401K savings plans losing 3/4 of their value overnight is also a nightmare scenario, which is literally what would have happened if we had really decided to get serious about the drug trade and shut it down.

The result is where we have been sitting since the early 1980s and Reagan’s escalation of The Drug War.  Billions of dollars spent on drug enforcement through the DEA, and those few DEA agents who are good enough to figure out what is really happening find themselves investigating the CIA - and soon thereafter, they either find themselves dead, or ruined like Celerino Castillo.  Despite all of this money and sacrifice, the only things our streets have less of are safety and freedom.  Nobody, but nobody, wants to admit that the only way to take the cartels down once and for always is to legalize their product - which will also flush the life savings of millions of Americans.  After all, what is the real value of a few plants?  It certainly isn’t what the streets are paying for these products today!  That is the only way you can end the drug trade.  You never need to spend another dime on enforcement - just remove the profit from the transaction.  It is all about the money.  A few kids might still get stupid, but nobody will be pushing the stuff at your local Junior High.  Why would they do that if there were no real profit in it?

Now we come back to the basic problem.  Years ago, Catherine Austin Fitts asked an audience what they would do if there was a big red button, and pressing it would end the drug trade (and cause Wall Street to collapse).  She asked for anyone willing to press that button to raise their hands.  No one did.

We now have a golden opportunity.  Our financial system is already collapsing, and that nightmare 401K scenario I talked about earlier is already taking place.  The painful part has already happened, or most of it has.  This is a once in a lifetime priceless opportunity to rebuild our system in such a way that the Dow Jones and Solari indices can actually be friends.  We’re past the worst pain of breaking an addiction - now the only question is will we go back to the drug profits?  Or will we end those profits forever?

A few hundred points of recovery on the Dow at this point will only mean more of the same. You might get some of your retirement savings back in the short term, but it means we have learned nothing at all, and this stupidly criminal system will continue just as before.  The only change will be that the federal government will assist even more than before in laundering these drug funds because the government will own large chunks of the banks that do it.

Is that what you really want, America?