The US increasingly displays characteristics that we have seen many times in middle-income “emerging markets” – new dimensions of vast inequality, forms of financial instability that benefit the best connected, and consistently easy credit for the privileged. But this raises the question: who exactly is going to dominate our economic and political landscape moving forward?
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But we are entering a new, more global era of state capture, and the US government (or, more precisely, its credit) was handed over – rather meekly – during the past 12 months.
The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.
The OSS Shield was originally developed for the Marine Corps Intelligence Center (Command) but the LtGen commanding the parent command both hated the center (despite it's being the Commandant's initiative) and had no sense of heraldry.
E Veritate Potens is the motto, “From Truth, Power,” with a tip of the hat for the correct translation to Winston Maiki of Australia (RIP), the one person outside of Singapore that “got it” when we made our world tour in 1994. The incorrect translation by Robert Steele, Ex Veritate Potens, was devised from a mix of the US Naval Academy motto (Ex Sciencia Tridens or loosely, From Science, Seapower) and the motto of the Central Intelligence Agency from John 8:32, Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.
MCIC was created because then Commandant of the Marine Corps Al Gray understood that the other services were both cheating on acquisitions–fabricating and exaggerating threats to get bigger, fancier, more complex and much more expensive systems than the Marine Corps needed or could afford–and also not at all interested in the real-world threat, which he accurately portrayed in “Global Intelligence Challenges of the 1990's” as published in the American Intelligence Journal (Winter 1989-1990). INTEGRITY. We are waiting for DIA to dig deep and find its integrity, or defense intelligence is going to go down the rabbit hole along with CIA, NSA, and the NRO. NGA can be saved.
It can now be shown that the energy reaching the Earth from the Sun is actually acting as information. Information and energy are interchangeable in much the same way that energy and matter are interchangeable, and formulas similar to those for matter and energy (E=mc2) can be used to express this interchangeability. Energy is expressing itself as information when it acts in an anti-entropic manner, thereby reducing the randomness in a system or increasing its information. This understanding of information as an anti-entropic activity makes it possible to objectively measure many qualities important to our lives which were formerly measurable only by the crude means of the dollar economy, sentimental attachment, or aesthetic tastes.
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Voices Lost are a fundamental source of innovation once heard–diversity matters at all levels. It merits comment that “status quo” bureaucracies are death-beds, antithetical to innovation. This is why there is a “spike” or “lifeboat” theory of change. OSS and EIN may one day be recognized as the lifeboat that saved US Intelligence from oblivion. We are not holding our breath, but the reality is that there is more innovation in intelligence outside the wire–not federal, not expensive, and most certainly not secret–but the White House is too busy to realize it is being fed expensive waste.
Bamford on Detail, Steele on Impact–Solid Five Stars
October 17, 2009
Phi Beta Iota: James Bamford is without peer in his understanding of the NSA. He supported it in its earlier books and turned against it in his most recent book, for the same reason we have turned against NSA: it does not provide a return on investment that is remotely tolerable by the taxpayer, who now has the added burden of warrantless wiretapping to deal with. NSA also ignored the Chinese threat that can now ride the electrical power lines into NSA's computers, and that is the real reason they want their own power generators (see our memorandum online, “Chinese Irregular Warfare“). In our judgement, the next President and the next Director of National Intelligence need to zero out the secret intelligence community, and start over, beginning with an Open Source Agency (see THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest) and a new Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as recommended by Charles Faddis in Beyond Repair: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
We know Matthew Aid, his book should be considered a follow-on to the work of James Bamford, but as Bamford himself observes, the book on NSA leadership's high crimes and misdemeanors has yet to be written–it will start with fraud, waste, and abuse, and end with warrantless wiretapping and gross dereliction of duty.
