Catherine Austin Fitts: “The goal is to reduce the population and control the rest”

“Wars are fought over shipping routes and resources, not to liberate any oppressed population group.”

Just a few weeks ago, Catherine Austin Fitts gave a monumental interview to journalist Michael Yon, explaining what the Iran war is really about.

Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of State for Housing and Urban Development during the first Bush administration, who now runs her own financial consulting firm, lives in Tennessee but spends more than half the year in the Netherlands. She is deeply sceptical of where the Trump administration is leading America – with its focus on wars abroad and the construction of a digital surveillance network at home.

The interview with Michael Yon on February 17th took place two weeks before US and Israel launched the attack on Iran, but Fitts knew months earlier that an attack was coming and could no longer be stopped, even if Trump had wanted to. He is simply too much under the control of his financial backers, who now own the White House and Congress.

For this reason, the negotiations with Iran were a complete farce. They never consisted of a serious attempt to resolve the differences between the two countries. Trump simply had his two New York real estate agents, posing as diplomats – Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner – hand the Iranians a list of demands and say: Take them or leave them, knowing full well that no sovereign state could accept such demands.

The true reason for the attack on Iran and the attempt to overthrow its regime has nothing to do with liberating the Iranian people or freeing the world from a dictatorship. Nor does it have anything to do with fighting Islam, as many conservatives mistakenly believe. This war is being fought over who gains control of vital shipping lanes and resources (oil). Iran is located in a region of the world crucial for both, and the struggle for control of the emerging new digital economy precludes an Iranian regime operating outside the Western global financial system, selling oil to China and India, and supplying drones to Russia – three countries that the US views as rising competitors to its global hegemony.

“Wars are always about routes and resources,” Fitts said. “The Netherlands occupies a strategic position on the North Sea at the mouth of the Rhine, with Germany right next door. They are trying to develop the Tri-State City on the German-Dutch border, a huge smart city (prison city).”

After a short pause, she came up with a better word to describe what Trump is doing in America and what the Europeans are doing in the EU.

“It is a digital concentration camp,” she said. “Physically and digitally designed for surveillance and control. What is going on in the Netherlands is very similar to what is going on in the US and North America. It is the implementation of a digital control grid.”

She said there are twelve steps to total control.

“An enclosure is being built around us. They’ve already built three sides of this enclosure, so it still feels free. But when a number of things come together – digital money, programmable money, and AI – then the fourth gate snaps shut, and suddenly you wake up in a state of total control.”

“Many people don’t see it coming because it consists of many different parts,” she added.

According to her, the decisive factor for this fourth component to click into place is a biometric digital identity that is “very precise and of high quality and therefore interoperable and globally recognized”.

Two further components are a digital surveillance and tracking system, “which basically aims to identify every person – what they do, where they go, their behaviour, including their spending habits.”

Across America, massive resistance is now beginning as the previously invisible parts of this control grid become increasingly visible. Trump’s AI data centres, currently being planned and built, are sparking protests in communities nationwide as people realize these centres will lead to sharply rising water and electricity prices while simultaneously strengthening the surveillance state.

“They are building the infrastructure at a very rapid pace and it is becoming visible. Most of it was invisible, but now there are visible aspects that people can see,” Fitts explained.

“They want many more telecommunications masts for 6G. Then there are the AI data centres. These are very important because they provide the enormous amount of data needed for this control grid. And we are seeing increasing local resistance because the environmental impact from energy, water, and land consumption is enormous. And thirdly, there are cameras and drones to monitor movements from the air.”

Most people didn’t notice how this grid came into being, but now – with drones, towers, and data centres – they can see it with their own eyes. It has become physical and tangible, and that’s why the first signs of public resistance are emerging.

Fitts described what she considers the “coup de grâce”, the next step of the digital control grid: tokenized “money” that is not only digitized but also programmable.

In Europe, this will take the form of a central bank digital currency. In the US, it will be Trump’s privatized, government-approved cryptocurrency. Both are fundamentally the same, as they are programmable and based on blockchain accounting. “They are different, but serve the same purpose,” she said.

“The fourth gate of the enclosure closes when they can not only control your movements through tracking, but also turn your money on or off. And at a very granular level,” Fitts said. “That takes control of fiscal policy away from parliaments and hands it over to the bankers.”

Augustine Carstens, the Director General of the Bank for International Settlements, explained in a speech at the International Monetary Fund on October 19, 2020, how and why central bank digital currencies are seen as key to their totalitarian agenda. Everything they say about greater inclusion, security, and convenience is merely a facade to get people to support their own captivity.

Carstens said the crucial difference between digital money and cash is that “the central bank will have absolute control over the rules and regulations that determine how this money is used. And we will also have the technology to enforce that. These two points are extremely important. And that makes a huge difference compared to cash.”

What Carstens was saying is that bankers can set taxes and decide how you use your money – so they can control where you go and what you are allowed to buy.

“We’re talking about extraordinarily granular control over 100 percent of your assets,” Fitts said. “You’ll have the ability to control all your energy transactions and all your financial transactions. We’re in a pandemic: your money stops working when you leave your house. Your electric car stops working when you leave your house.”

The twelve-day war last June began with the assassination of ten of Iran’s twelve most important government officials. It was no coincidence that they were tracked down and killed on the very day the assassinations were planned.

“They are not just targeting the leadership, but the 92 million (Iranian citizens). You have to identify everyone if you want to identify the leaders. If they can do it in Iran, they can certainly do it in Europe and the United States,” Fitts said.

She has a special word for this grid of control. It’s a “panopticon” – a type of circular prison where everyone can be seen, but no one can see who the guard is watching them. In other words, no one watches the watchers.

Part of this system is that we have particles in our bodies through food, sprays, injections, and pharmaceuticals that make it much easier to identify us.

She predicted that AI-powered mass surveillance would soon reach people’s minds – via some biological carrier, be it the food chain, vaccinations, or some other transmission mechanism – “to influence how we think. AI will soon reach your consciousness; your thoughts will no longer be private.”

“This surveillance system is therefore very invasive, and when combined with programmable money, it becomes a slave system. Parliaments lose all their power to the bankers. The bankers have complete control. They believe that with invisible technology – somewhere between surveillance and coercion – they can enforce centralized control. When this system is fully installed, we are essentially talking about a dictatorship of the super-rich.”

Fitts said the European version of the digital control grid appears less invasive and is more strongly controlled by sovereign governments, whereas the American control system is operated by corporate elites from the technology and financial sectors who work with the government.

“What the US is doing is insisting on having this machinery run by private corporations. It’s much more of a plundering model of the economy than a model in which a sovereign government has sovereign control. You could see it this way: North America is moving towards a warlord system, while Europe is moving towards dictatorship.”

She says people need to act now and decide how much they want to be ensnared by the algorithms of tyranny.

“When you look at surveillance, coercion, digital identity, and programmable money, most people in the G7 countries can’t imagine where it’s all leading,” Fitts said. “I’ve been trying to explain where it’s leading for many decades. I left the Bush administration in 1991 and said, ‘The top brass are going to get their hands on this technology and kill us all’.”

The ultimate goal, Fitts believes, is a surveillance mechanism “under the skin” – a warning alternative media has been issuing since the covid era, when digital health passes were imposed on people wanting to attend large events. Back then, around 2020 and 2021, futurists like the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari predicted that the elites’ objective was to bring the surveillance created during covid “under the skin.”

That would be the “next step,” Harari predicted, and there was no reason to believe that they do not want that anymore.

“Chips under the skin, whether injected or sprayed, are the goal,” Fitts said. “To create an internet of bodies – for surveillance, coercion, and programmable money or financial control. When you tell people this, it’s so hard for them to imagine that someone would do such a thing. But the system, the infrastructure, is coming together and marching step by step into position.”

More and more people are waking up and seeing the changes in the banking system and identity systems.

“And the general public is now beginning to understand what this agenda is about, and they realize it’s a very dark agenda,” Fitts said. “Part of the population is definitely in a trance. Our leaders, however, have lost their credibility. Nobody believes the government like they used to.”

The ultimate goal, according to Fitts, “is to reduce the population and control the remaining remainder.”

 

yogaesoteric
March 31, 2026