The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Stephen E. Arnold and ArnoldIT have consistently been a decade or more ahead of the curve. IntelTrax is one of his new offerings and is highly recommended. Information about advanced intelligence systems is the focus.
A few current items: Data Analytics by Academics .. Big Data vs. Big Legislation .. Low Cost Analytic Help Becoming Big Business .. Analytic Surveillance Proves Unsettling .. Microsoft and Others Ramp UP BI Activity ..
Just got fired from Wells Fargo. RE: the following email
So…here's what I wrote. It's missing a handy chart where it depicts the average Wells employee's hourly salary vs. the CEO's salary, but you get the gist.
Full disclosure, I had been working here for a few months and this was to be my last week. I wouldn't recommend anyone else do this, but I gotta admit, it felt damn good and maybe someone will step up and do something about it.
Good Morning All,
Last week a friend of mine was fired for sending an inappropriate email to pretty much the whole building. Despite the fact that it was harmless, accidental, and largely ignored message, she will now join the ranks of the unemployed. If she is your average unemployed Oregonian she will remain unemployed for at least 18 months and when/if she gets rehired somewhere it will be for less money than she was making here.
Now my friend was definitely in the wrong, and I’m not writing this email to argue her situation. However, in an attempt to hold our company to a similar standard consider the following:
We work for one of the largest financial institutions in the world, we are essential to its operations, yet economic security is completely at the mercy of its senior executives. They are squeezing our salaries, reducing our benefits, and lobbying our politicians to make it harder for us to improve our financial positions despite our contributions to Wells Fargo’s successes. It means more profits for them, but less choice, less freedom and more importantly, less money for us.
In 2010, our CEO, John G. Stumpf received $18,973,722 in total compensation. By comparison, the median worker made $33,190 in 2010. John G. Stumpf made 571 times the median worker's pay.
Tip of the Hat to George Donnelly at Facebook.
See Also:
Wells Fargo Standard Poverty Salaries
Phi Beta Iota: We note with interest that this executive is only 220th on the Forbes executive pay rankings. We hold the corporations blameless in one sense: they get to do this because the US Government has lost its integrity and has not been in the business of the public for decades, Grover Cleveland may have been the last truly honest holistic President. What that says about the American public is for reflection. At the same time, we point to William Greider's book Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country in which he discusses the documentations on how the financial industry (Mr. Stumpf's industry) inflated by 17 times base value while the “real” asset-based economy inflated by five times. This means that Mr. Stumpf and his colleagues cheated the US and global customers by 12 times….and for this, the government bails them out and nobody goes to jail. See also Matt Taibbi's Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America.
All personality….no substance?
Personalities over structure in the intelligence community?
Walter Pincus, 23 May 2011
Washington Post
Phi Beta Iota: There is a contest of personalities going on, in which Army officers and camp followers without integrity (Alexander, Burgess, Long) are winning out over Navy officers with integrity (McConnell, Blair, Mullen). The militarization of intelligence is Clapper's pathetically counter-productive technocratic dive over the cliff. What Obama has done is demonstrate that he is incapable of selecting subordinates who can deliver substance. He prefers unethical sychophants. His Administration lacks intelligence.
Global Guerrillas
Some fun thinking for Wednesday…
Here are some of the economic reforms that turned the horde of Genghis Kahn into a steamroller than flattened most of the world's kingdoms/empires.* He:
*of course, the first unsaid lesson is: attack the places with the most loot.
The economic strategy of Genghis Kahn works well against any corrupt, top-heavy system (loot rich targets that are defended by nobility + serfs). Sounds somewhat similar to today's global economic formula. Of course, it's also important to view this simple but effective strategy as something apart from the figure that used it. For example, a decent/moral decentralized system that replicates this merit based approach could reproduce some of the success Ghengis had against the feudal holdings and petty tyrannies of today's marketplace.
Phi Beta Iota: Brother John raises the spectre of honorable leadership with integrity….that means no rule by secrecy, no earmarks, no back office deals. Ronald Reagan (thank you Peggy Noonan) had it right: the US Congress [and Executive] is no better than the Soviet Politburo. ALL “top down” elite systems have failed for lack of integrity (holistic informed analysis). Populism failed as well–bottom up mobs are no better than corrupt elites for different reasons. The combination of open information and honest crowds is ripe with potential. The leaders that enable and empower the public, while revealing the “true cost” of predatory capitalism, virtual colonialism, and unilateral militarism, will go down in history as the Epoch B Founding Fathers.
How Egyptian Activists Kept Their Ushahidi Project Alive Under Mubarak
Patrick Meier | May 25, 2011
This is my second blog post on the U-Shahid project in Egypt. The first one analyzed 2,000+ reports mapped on the Ushahidi platform during the country's recent Parliamentary Elections. Egypt is one of my dissertation case studies and in this blog post I summarize some initial findings based on a series of interviews I had several Egyptian activists who were part of the U-Shahid project.
BRICS' open revolt against European grip on IMF
Narayan Lakshman
The Hindu, 26 May 2011
Paris: The International Monetary Fund's Executive Directors from the BRICS economies have openly revolted against the prospect of the Fund's Managing Director role reverting to a European, deepening the woes of an organisation that was recently rocked to its very core by the resignation of Dominique Strauss-Kahn as its chief following sexual assault allegations.
Phi Beta Iota: The BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa] are now powerful enough to route around the West, but have not yet created a coherent multinational information sharing and sense-making capability such that they can confront the West in real-time with every lie to the public. When that happens, and it will happen within five years, we anticipate a complete shift in power to the south and the east. A near term test could be the illegal military actions against the Libyan leader, government, and capital. The era of “because we say so is coming to an end.” The era of direct assaults on NATO soil of “rear-area” launching pads and support facilities is here now.
There’s a Secret Patriot Act, Senator Says
WIRED, May 25, 2011
You may think you understand how the Patriot Act allows the government to spy on its citizens. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) says it’s worse than you’ve heard.
Congress is set to reauthorize three controversial provisions of the surveillance law as early as Thursday. But Wyden says that what Congress will renew is a mere fig leaf for a far broader legal interpretation of the Patriot Act that the government keeps to itself — entirely in secret. Worse, there are hints that the government uses this secret interpretation to gather what one Patriot-watcher calls a “dragnet” for massive amounts of information on private citizens; the government portrays its data-collection efforts much differently.
Phi Beta Iota: Further to our comment on Part I, we strongly believe the time has come to discontinue funding for the US Intelligence Community as a whole, beginning with the National Security Agency (NSA), which is in our view the most mis-managed and corrupt (as well as grotesquely expensive for lack of any reasonable return) part of the US Government. The fact that they are abusive of the Constitution and devoid of any common sense at all is the other half of their crime against humanity. An honest President actually interested in the public interest would create an Open Source Agency, and then on the basis of sound decision-support shareable with the public and Congress, cut the secret world as well as the defense and homeland security worlds by 20% each year for each of five years, restoring 10% each year to new initiatives that pass all common sense tests for need, relevance, and affordability. All it takes is INTEGRITY.
