Commercial Intelligence – Page 170 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/09/242011/10/17

Koko: Wall Street Occupation Continues, Ignored by Media

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Mobile, Policies, Threats

Occupy Wall Street Protest Being Systematically Ignored by Mainstream Media

Even a rather non-observant person would have noticed by now that the Occupy Wall Street protest is being ignored by the mainstream media, or at least not taken seriously. Corporate-owned media knows its masters well.

DJ Pangburn

Death & Taxes, 23 September 2011

Read full report.

Phi Beta Iota: The Wall Street Occupation, now going into its second week, with many additional demonstrations planned across the USA for 6 October 2011, is being ignored by the elite and their media sock-puppets. This is one reason most do not realize that the “Day of Rage” is about electoral reform and a non-violent repossession of the US and the US Government.

See Also:

2008 ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig

DefDog: PSYOP Reading List for Citizens

Journal: Third Party Desired by 58% in America + ReCap

Koko: Day of Rage 17 September–How Will it End?

John Robb: Anonymous on Wall Street Occuption

Paul Fernhout: Global Groundswell Mad as Hell

Review (Guest): Confidence Men – Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President

Review: Grand Illusion–The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

Review: Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

Review: Rebooting the American Dream–11 Ways to Rebuild Our Country

Review: Running on Empty–How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It (Paperback)

Review: The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown–Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash

Robert Steele: Day of Rage = Electoral Reform & Integrity Plus General RECAP on Purple Public & Third Party Rising

Steven Aftergood: Obama Ambivalent on Open Government

2011/09/222011/09/22

Richard Wright: DoD – A Strategic Hole – A Strategic Farce

Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence

A Strategic Hole – A Strategic Farce

The Public Intelligence Blog (Phi Beta Iota) has carried a number of recent articles all of which had the common theme that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) is wasting billions of dollars and can easily sustain major cuts in the DOD budget without threatening U.S. National Security. A sub theme of this series has been that DOD’s waste is caused by a deadly combination of corruption, incompetence, and ignorance. I would add a fourth culprit to this trio, the lack of a coherent National Security Strategy.

I would argue that DOD major cuts in its budget should be informed by a national security strategy that realistically assesses who or what DOD needs to defend against. Unfortunately as Pierre M. Sprey noted not too long go on this Blog, the U.S. does not have such a strategy. Currently the DOD and especially the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), in lieu of thinking about the sort of defense the U.S. really needs, continue to try and build a defense that can defend against everything with the result that it defends against nothing and is enormously expensive to build and maintain.

The JCS structure, if it were functional, would be the obvious choice to formulate a rational defense strategy that would then guide them on the type of force structures to build and how to equip it. Sadly the JCS is completely dysfunctional and is driven by the parochial interests of the military services that collectively can only scramble each year to see which service gets the largest share of congressional defense appropriations. Simultaneously, lacking an overall strategy, each individual service is attempting the impossible task of being prepared to provide military action for any contingency, however unlikely, that might arise. As a result the U.S. Military has sacrificed actual readiness in favor of a dubious ability to respond to any contingency.

Essentially, the individual services are working blind trying to buy small quantities of ever more expensive weapons and equipment to have on hand just in case the contingency for which they were designed arises. Thus the U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) was just forced to cancel an out of control program to design and build a new amphibious landing craft although the USMC has not had a real amphibious landing since the Korean War (1950-1953). The U.S. Air Force (USAF) has purchased over 200 F-22 Supersonic fighters to assure air control against what turned out to be a non-existent Soviet (now Russian) fighter. And as it turns out because of design flaws the F-22 is not really a safe aircraft (even though the USAF claims that it is now ok to fly).

Because there is no overall strategy, neither the JCS nor the DOD Civilian Bureaucracy really knows how to deal with threatened substantial cuts in the DOD budget. Indeed the only way to achieve savings so far that has been advanced by these lost souls has been to cut retirement benefits and reduce the cost of living benefits of the enlisted men and women who serve in the armed forces. This is criminal and in any case will achieve only minimal cost reduction. Surely the U.S. can do better than this.

See Also:

Journal: Reflections on Integrity

Journal: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both

2011/09/192011/09/19

Chuck Spinney: Economic Costs of Warmongering

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence

Below is a dynamite op-ed on the cost of the so-called war on terror by Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz. Without being critical, I think at least two additional aspects to these costs make the picture even worse than they say.

1. Some people in this [let them eat] cake walk became — and are still becoming — filthy rich spending other people's money and spilling other people's blood — the acknowledgement of which takes one into the murky question of what moral values are shaping this political-economic meltdown.

2. While not directly caused by the war on terror, the ramping up of defense expenditures magnified the the rate of distorting spillovers (the Melman* effects) that the MICC's politicization of R&D and manufacturing have on diminishing America's overall commercial manufacturing efficiency and industrial competitiveness. The costs may be incalculable, but that does not make them less real.

* Professor Seymour Melman of Columbia University documented these effects in his voluminous writings, two of his most important books being The Permanent War Economy and Profits Without Production.

Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2011

America's Costly War Machine

Fighting the war on terror compromises the economy now and threatens it in the future.

By Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz

Ten years into the war on terror, the U.S. has largely succeeded in its attempts to destabilize Al Qaeda and eliminate its leaders. But the cost has been enormous, and our decisions about how to finance it have profoundly damaged the U.S. economy.

Many of these costs were unnecessary. We chose to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan with a small, all-volunteer force, and we supplemented the military presence with a heavy reliance on civilian contractors. These decisions not only placed enormous strain on the troops but dramatically pushed up costs. Recent congressional investigations have shown that roughly 1 of every 4 dollars spent on wartime contracting was wasted or misspent.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: We judge defense to be 75% fraud, waste, and abuse (3 out of 4 dollars, not 1 out of four). The infantry is 4% of the force, suffers 80% of the casualties, and receives 1% of the budget. Our starting position is that 20% of the Pentagon budget can be justified in conference, everything else is on the table for draconian cuts toward a balanced budget. Agriculture, energy, and health are documented at 50% waste–the Pentagon is much less relevant to the society and the economy than those three, ergo we speculate that defense is half again as wasteful as these other core sectors.

2011/09/19

John Robb: Anonymous on Wall Street Occuption

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government

From Anonymous (original sponsor of Day of Rage):

This statement is ours, and for anyone who will get behind it. Representing ourselves, we bring this call for revolution.

We want freedom for all, without regards for identity, because we are all people, and because no other reason should be needed. However, this freedom has been largely taken from the people, and slowly made to trickle down, whenever we get angry.

Money, it has been said, has taken over politics. In truth, we say, money has always been part of the capitalist political system. A system based on the existence of have and have nots, where inequality is inherent to the system, will inevitably lead to a situation where the haves find a way to rule, whether by the sword or by the dollar.
We agree that we need to see election reform. However, the election reform proposed ignores the causes which allowed such a system to happen. Some will readily blame the federal reserve, but the political system has been beholden to political machinations of the wealthy well before its founding.

We need to address the core facts: these corporations, even if they were unable to compete in the electoral arena, would still remain control of society. They would retain economic control, which would allow them to retain political control. Term limits would, again, not solve this, as many in the political class already leave politics to find themselves as part of the corporate elites.

We need to retake the freedom that has been stolen from the people, altogether.

If you agree that freedom is the right to communicate, to live, to be, to go, to love, to do what you will without the impositions of others, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that a person is entitled to the sweat of their brows, that being talented at management should not entitle others to act like overseers and overlords, that all workers should have the right to engage in decisions, democratically, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that freedom for some is not the same as freedom for all, and that freedom for all is the only true freedom, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that power is not right, that life trumps property, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that state and corporation are merely two sides of the same oppressive power structure, if you realize how media distorts things to preserve it, how it pits the people against the people to remain in power, then you might be one of us.

And so we call on people to act

We call for protests to remain active in the cities. Those already there, to grow, to organize, to raise consciousnesses, for those cities where there are no protests, for protests to organize and disrupt the system.
We call for workers to not only strike, but seize their workplaces collectively, and to organize them democratically. We call for students and teachers to act together, to teach democracy, not merely the teachers to the students, but the students to the teachers. To seize the classrooms and free minds together.
We call for the unemployed to volunteer, to learn, to teach, to use what skills they have to support themselves as part of the revolting people as a community.
We call for the organization of people's assemblies in every city, every public square, every township.
We call for the seizure and use of abandoned buildings, of abandoned land, of every property seized and abandoned by speculators, for the people, for every group that will organize them.

We call for a revolution of the mind as well as the body politic.

2011/09/132011/10/17

Mini-Me: 57 Finance Ministers Creating New Financial System–Over 50,000 Bankers to Be Held Accountable

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government, IO Deeds of Peace, Key Players, Law Enforcement, Military, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

This begs to be noticed. Being passed around in gold recovery circles.

NEW FINANCIAL SYSTEM

by Benjamin Fulford

August 30, 2011

from Kauilapele Website

For the past week, a secret meeting of 57 finance ministers aimed at setting up a new international financial system took place in a large ship on international waters near Europe, according to White Dragon Society representatives who were there.

The meeting, hosted by Switzerland, deliberately excluded representatives from the U.S. Federal Reserve Board and its Washington D.C. subsidiary, France, Italy, the UK, Germany and Japan.

Countries like Russia, China and the Netherlands were among the 57 represented.

Representatives from the Pentagon and the U.S. agencies at the meeting promised to bypass the Federal Reserve board and use their access to codes for the international collateral accounts to finance the U.S. military industrial complex in conjunction with the new system.

The Swiss used their financial intelligence to refuse would-be participants who were in any way associated with either,

the Bilderberg Group

the Council on Foreign Relations

or the Trilateral Commission

Among those refused entry were Naoto Kan (still Prime Minister of Japan as of last week), IMF head Christine Lagarde and U.S. Senator J. Rockefeller.

Rockefeller was actually physically prevented from boarding the ship, according to two eye-witnesses.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: 57 Finance Ministers Creating New Financial System–Over 50,000 Bankers to Be Held Accountable”

2011/09/132011/10/17

Owl: Financial Terrorism in USA Against USA by Wall Street and 400 Specifically Named Most Wealthy

03 Economy, 04 Education, 05 Energy, 06 Family, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Book Lists, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, True Cost, Waste (materials, food, etc)

EXCLUSIVE: Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America: Over 1 Million Deaths Annually, 62 Million People With Zero Net Worth, As the Economic Elite Make Off With $46 Trillion

Editor’s Note: The following report includes adapted excerpts from David DeGraw’s book, “The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World War III.”

Release Date: 9.28.11

Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America
By David DeGraw, AmpedStatus Report

EXTRACTS

The following report is a statistical analysis of the systemic economic attacks against the American people.

Currently, at least 62 million Americans, 20% of US households, have zero or negative net worth.

Recently, the National Academy of Science released their latest findings, backing up my claim by revealing that 52,765,000 Americans, 17.3% of the population, lived in poverty in 2009.

In 2005, 25.7 million Americans needed food stamps, currently 45.8 million people rely on them.

…counting the total number people in need of employment, you get a current unemployment rate of 22.5%, which is an all-time record total of 34 million people currently in need of work.

Continue reading “Owl: Financial Terrorism in USA Against USA by Wall Street and 400 Specifically Named Most Wealthy”

2011/09/122011/09/12

Owl: Who Runs the World? New Network Analysis…

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Who Runs the World ? – Network Analysis Reveals ‘Super Entity’ of Global Corporate

Richard Ricciardi

Planet Save, August 28, 2011

In the first such analysis ever conducted, Swiss economic researchers have conducted a global network analysis of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs). Their results have revealed a core of 787 firms with control of 80% of this network, and a “super entity” comprised of 147 corporations that have a controlling interest in 40% of the network’s TNCs.