Category: Government

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Penguin: Russia Zeros Out Petrodollar

05 Energy, 06 Russia, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Government
Who, Me?
Who, Me?

Russia turns its back on the petrodollar

The Russians are actually making a move against the petrodollar. It appears that they are quite serious about their de-dollarization strategy. The largest natural gas producer on the planet, Gazprom, has signed agreements with some of their biggest customers to switch payments for natural gas from U.S. dollars to euros. And Gazprom would have never done this without the full approval of the Russian government, because the Russian government holds a majority stake in Gazprom. There hasn't been a word about this from the big mainstream news networks in the United States, but this is huge. When you are talking about Gazprom, you are talking about a company that is absolutely massive. It is one of the largest companies in the entire world and it makes up 8 percent of Russian GDP all by itself. It holds 18 percent of the natural gas reserves of the entire planet, and it is also a very large oil producer. So for Gazprom to make a move like this is extremely significant.

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Eagle: The Purchase of the Republic — Extraordinary Graphics, Griftopia in One Article

Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement
300 Million Talons...
300 Million Talons…

The Purchase of Our Republic

A Democracy in Name Only

The massive consolidation of wealth, combined with the removal of any limits on money in campaigns, has allowed for the purchase of our government.

Y. Falkson

Americans know that something is wrong, deeply wrong. They see signs of the problem everywhere: income inequality, growing concentration and power of mega corporations, political donations/corruption, the absence of jobs with decent salaries, the explosion of the US prison population, healthcare costs, student loan debt, homelessness, etc. etc. However, the true causes and benefactors behind these problems are purposely hidden from view. What Americans see is Kabuki Theater of a functioning form of capitalism and democracy, but beyond this veneer our country has devolved into the exact opposite.

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Steve Aftergood: CIA Gets Population of Syria Way Wrong

Government, Ineptitude, IO Impotency
Steven Aftergood
Steven Aftergood

CIA UNDERESTIMATES THE POPULATION OF SYRIA

The population of Syria is 17,951,639, according to the CIA World Factbook.

That figure (oddly identified as a “July 2014” estimate) is wrong, according to everyone else.

The discrepancy was noted yesterday in the intelligence newsletter Nightwatch.

“NightWatch consulted six separate sources for the total population of Syria. They agreed that it is between 22 and 23 million people, not 17.9 million as indicated in the CIA World Factbook. There are about 7 million Syrians under voting age of 18 and more than 15 million registered voters,” the newsletter said.

“NightWatch relies on the CIA World Factbook as a standard reference for unclassified factual, baseline information, as does the Intelligence Community. On three occasions since 2006, NightWatch has found errors in the Factbook,” the newsletter added. “This was the third occasion.”

A Congressional Research Service report last month also cites a total Syrian population of “more than 22 million.”

Errors, of course, are to be expected– even, and especially, in intelligence publications. One great virtue of the CIA World Factbook is that it is a public document. This makes it possible for readers to identify such errors, to draw attention to them, and to promote their correction.

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SchwartzReport: Privatization Eliminates Government As Intentional Ladder of Opportunity — Wages Drop, Benefits Vanish

03 Economy, Civil Society, Ethics, Government
Stephan A. Schwartz
Stephan A. Schwartz

Privatization is the curse laid upon society by vampire capitalism. As this article shows it only benefits the rich, and it degrades the lives of ordinary Americans.

One Percent’s Twisted New Heist: What’s Really Behind Privatization
ELIAS ISQUITH – Salon

As most experts and layman enthusiasts will tell you, there’s no one, single explanation for the past 30-plus years of growing economic inequality. Its drivers are multiple and separating one from the other is often quite complicated. Low taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations, the gutting of labor unions, the increased mobility of capital, technological gains, overly protective intellectual property law; the list goes on.

In fact, here’s another one to add to the list: privatization. According to ‘Race to the Bottom: How Outsourcing Public Services Rewards Corporations and Punishes the Middle Class,” a new study from In the Public Interest, a think tank focused on how privatization affects the economy, the routine practice of outsourcing government functions is another important reason why the middle class is shrinking as those at the very top reap more and more of the fruits of our economy. To explain how that is – and why it’s important that people committed to economic justice push back against the practice – Salon recently spoke with ITPI research and policy director Shar Habibi. Our conversation is below and has been edited for length and clarity.

Read full article.

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Berto Jongman: DHS Intelligence – Additional Actions Needed

Government, Ineptitude, Law Enforcement
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

DHS Intelligence Analysis:

Additional Actions Needed to Address Analytic Priorities and Workforce Challenges

GAO-14-397: Published: Jun 4, 2014. Publicly Released: Jun 4, 2014.

What GAO Found

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has established mechanisms—including an intelligence framework and an analytic planning process—to better integrate analysis activities throughout the department, but the mechanisms are not functioning as intended.

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Matt Taibi: The Divide – American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap — Legal Immunity for the 1%, Criminalization of Everything for the 99%

01 Poverty, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement
Amazon Pagae
Amazon Page

A scathing portrait of an urgent new American crisis
 
Over the last two decades, America has been falling deeper and deeper into a statistical mystery:

Poverty goes up. Crime goes down. The prison population doubles.

Fraud by the rich wipes out 40 percent of the world’s wealth. The rich get massively richer. No one goes to jail.

In search of a solution, journalist Matt Taibbi discovered the Divide, the seam in American life where our two most troubling trends—growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration—come together, driven by a dramatic shift in American citizenship: Our basic rights are now determined by our wealth or poverty. The Divide is what allows massively destructive fraud by the hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into a crime—but it’s impossible to see until you look at these two alarming trends side by side.

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