Madison's Nightmare: How Much Should We Spend for National Insecurity?
Chuck Spinney, FEB 3, 2011
The Atlantic (for James Fallows)
Brother Chuck makes three key points:
1. He quotes Madison, as we have, on the importance of public knowledge as the basis for the Republic keeping the government accountable and in check.
2. He points out that the defense budget has never been audited, cannot be audited, and is both totally “out of control” and irresponsibly chaotic and grotesquely excessive.
3. He proposes regular persistent cuts in the defense budget until such time as it can actually pass an audit.
Phi Beta Iota: The situation is much worse. Homeland Security, Prisons & Justice, and now Health Care are all in the industrial-congressional pork complex. At the same time, the people calling for deficit reductions are actually representing Wall Street–what America needs is Electoral Reform to restore the common sense of We the People to governance, and a government characterized by integrity in the holistic sense (with a strategic analytic model for Whole of Government decision-making) and an intelligence community able to produce shareable replicable Whole of Government decision-support. Some some time now we have been calling for four reforms: Electoral, Intelligence, Governance, and National Security. There is nothing in this mess that cannot be rapidly addressed by a team with integrity and intelligence committed to transparency and focused exclusively on the public interest.
