Government – Page 762 – Public Intelligence Blog

A New Declaration of Independence

Berkeley writer, retired Silicon Valley executive

The preamble of the United States Declaration of Independence declares: “…whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter and abolish it, and to institute new Government.” Occupy Wall Street is an assertion by 99 percent of Americans that our government denies us “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The movement should create a new Declaration of Independence.

In the eighteenth century, the momentum for the American Revolution was fueled by egregious British taxation policy. Initially, colonists were loyal to King George III and asked him to intervene with parliament on their behalf. When George instead declared them to be “in rebellion,” representatives of the original thirteen states adopted the Declaration of Independence.

Momentum for the current American Revolution, Occupy Wall Street, has been fueled by egregious fiscal policy that has worked for the benefit of the wealthiest 1 percent and to the detriment of everyone else. At the onset of Occupy Wall Street, the 99 percent remain loyal to America. They've asked Washington to intervene in their behalf. Some conservatives have declared them to be “in rebellion.” This sets the stage for a new Declaration of Independence.

The problem for Occupy Wall Street is focus. By the time the original Declaration of Independence was signed, American colonists had one objective: leave the British Empire and create a democracy. In contrast, Occupy Wall Street has a laundry list of demands ranging from job creation to abolishing the electoral college.

Nonetheless, Occupy Wall Street is driven by a unifying vision, the perception that the US system is broken. Unfair. That it works for the benefit of the 1 percent but not the other 99 percent. In this sense the current situation is like that in 1776 where our British overlords denied that, “all men are created equal…endowed…with certain unalienable rights…Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

The challenge for Occupy Wall Street is to channel widespread discontent into a focused set of objectives that restores democratic process and drastically reduces economic inequality. First there must be a succinct problem statement, such as The United States has shifted from democracy to plutocracy. Control of the government is no longer in the hands of the people, the 99 percent, but instead is in the hands of the rich, the 1 percent. Democracy must be resurrected.

Next, there has to be a concise set of objectives. Here are three suggestions.

Continue reading “John Steiner: Bob Burnett – New Declaration of Independence”

2011/11/062011/11/06

Worth a Look: Jeff Block for President for 100 Days

Blog Wisdom, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Worth A Look

“We the People…”
WHAT IF voters got to VOTE on a revolution?

I'm Jeff Block, a 56 year old husband, father, and grandfather.
I've also created my own “American Dream” business, JustPaperRoses.com

Serving YOU as President of the United States of America is not high on my list of things I want to do!

Bottom Line Summary: 3 Presidents (Office of the Presidents); 9 Cabinet Secretaries (see Discussion tab); 9 Supreme Court Judges; 150 elected-Senators; 151 citizen-Senators; 50 Governors

Visit Web Site

2011/11/052011/11/05

John Robb: Micro Drones Threaten US Citizens at Home

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Military

DRONES and US Internal Security

Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren't always known. The bulk of CIA's drone strikes are signature strikes. Wall Street Journal.

Drones are changing the dynamics of warfare in very scary ways. They make oppression much easier (and cost-effective).

To recap: Drones are extremely cost effective vs. ground/air assets (particularly in that with drones, operators aren't put at risk). They also enable extremely centralized command and control (as in: operations can be micro-manged in Washington, down to the decision to kill). In sum, a small number of people in Washington DC can control/operate a vast 24×7 killing field for very few $$.

Here's how they are changing warfare:

An Assassination List. Drones, in combination with other forms of electronic surveillance, make it easy to rapidly find and kill people (even in non-permissive areas). As a result, assassination of threats has become the easy solution to many problems. It has become so popular that the process has become bureaucratized and automated through the development of an assassination list. The US President has one, and he can put US citizens on it via a simple, non-judicial, bureaucratic process.
Signature Strikes. The current practice of the CIA in Pakistan is to kill groups of people that “look” like terrorists or guerrillas. Exactly what a group of people needs to do, wear, or be to trigger the signature of a terrorist/guerrilla group is unknown. The Pakistani authorities are only told about strikes that kill more than 20 people. While these strikes have generated some push-back from Pakistani press/politicians, it's relatively small given the number of people killed.
Borders melt. Nearly every country in the world, except a few key allies, can be penetrated with drones. In most cases, they don't know they've been penetrated. In others, there's nothing they can do to prevent it. The big barrier to cross border special ops or air force hits/strikes in the past was the chance that operators would be captured. That's not true anymore. So, in effect, anybody can be killed nearly anywhere at anytime by a flip of a switch.

What's Next?

It's a pretty slippery slope from here. The simple answer is that US practice we see at work in Pakistan will eventually become common place in Mexico, Central America, and Northern Africa. However, the more interesting answer is how it gets applied to US internal security when the US/global economy crumps into depression, the US government goes bankrupt, and the current system loses much of its remaining legitimacy. In that scenario:

any armed group would instantly fit the signature of terrorists/guerrillas (the further you are away from an urban zone, the easier a target you will be),
even a mildly radical post to a blog, Facebook or Twitter ( particularly if it could lead to a flashmob or an occupy style protest) would invite inclusion on the drone assassination list (in that case, the occasional flash of a car being blown up by a drone patrolling a highway and IDing a listed driver, will become common),
drone to citizen ratios will rise to 100:1 as new micro-drones cut cost and new software allows DHS control centers to manage large region wide “drone clouds.”

2011/11/05

John Robb: Greece, MF Global, & Crony Capitalism

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

JOURNAL: Greece, MF Global and Crony Capitalism

The slow motion bankruptcy of MF global and Greece should prove we're still on the brink of an economic meltdown that will likely result in a global depression. Why? These events demonstate how the global economy, like the Communist system before it, is run by a small group of central planners (that allocate the world's collective capital). These planners:

Make lots of VERY bad decisions. Wall Street and EU planners routinely attempt to sink the entire economic and financial system with excessive leverage and risk. These systemic threats have become so commonplace now, it's nearly inevitable that one will cause a major collapse.
Become morally and ethically depraved. They operate on a continuous stream of fraud and lies. Too many instances to count. These planners are unencumbered by ethical or cultural norms. They actually believe these rules are below them. In reality, by doing so, these planners are eviscerating their own decision making (i.e. in terms of an OODA loop, they aren't orienting themselves to the deep/rich cultural experience these rules represent).
Completely arrogant and unapologetic. They are never wrong. Nobody could have foreseen it. It's a one in 10,000 year event.

Of course, this situation will persist until it doesn't. At that point, we'll be in for a long rebuilding process.

2011/11/05

Chuck Spinney: William Pfaff on USA Gone Awry

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Good summary of the American sickness.

One Nation, Gone Awry

William Pfaff – truthdig – 02/11/11

The theme of most political and social commentary is that things are more complicated than you think. For once, I wish to write that things are simpler than you think. This concerns two matters at the core of the present American political crisis.

The first is that control over the government has passed all but completely into the hands of business corporations. The country has become a plutocracy. This has occurred because corporations are the principal supplier of funds essential to the election of federal officials—the president and the members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, and through them, the members of the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary, all of whom are nominated and confirmed by the elected officials of the executive and legislative branches of the government.

. . . . . . .

I spoke of a second source of American crisis to which there is a simple solution, an intellectual solution, which to impose would require conversion of the hard hearts and biased minds of a sizable part of the international economic community (at least that part of it educated at the University of Chicago since the Second World War), as well as a near-revolutionary change in how the American government presently functions (see above). The crisis is easily described as the 1 percent problem. One percent of the American population receives income equivalent to the other 99 percent put together.

This is caused by the consensus decision of the economists and business schools to define profit as the sole criterion of corporation efficiency and public (and civic) worth. The automatic consequence of this has been the de-industrialization of the United States, the export of its manufacturing capacity, unemployment in the U.S. comparable to that of the Great Depression, poverty levels with no modern American precedent, and the moral corruption of American politics.

Read full article.

2011/11/04

Matt Taibbi: Bloomberg’s Marie Antoinette Moment

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth

Mike Bloomberg's Marie Antoinette Moment

Rolling Stone, November 3, 11:00 AM ET

Last year I had a chance to see New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg up close at the Huffington Post’s “Game Changers” even t. I was standing right behind the guy when he was introduced by Nora Ephron, and watched as the would-be third party powerhouse wowed the liberal crowd with one zinger after another.

Includes short video.

EXTRACT:

The whole game was based on one new innovation: the derivative instruments like CDOs that allowed them to take junk-rated home loans and turn them into AAA-rated instruments. It was not Barney Frank who made it possible for Goldman, Sachs to sell the home loan of an occasionally-employed janitor in Oakland or Detroit as something just as safe as, and more profitable than, a United States Treasury Bill. This was something they cooked up entirely by themselves and developed solely with the aim of making more money.

Read full skewering of Mike Bloomberg.

Matt Taibbi: The Real Housewives Of Wall Street–How Morgan Stanley Wives Christy Mack & Susan Karches Ripped Off Taxpayers In Geithner-Bernanke Bailout Scheme

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? + US Fraud RECAP

2011/11/042011/11/04

Mini-Me: Doug Naquin Lies to Associated Press + RECAP

Corruption, Government

Open Source Center created at suggestion of the 9/11 Commission? Really?

AP Exclusive: Who’s following you on Twitter or Facebook? Maybe CIA’s ‘vengeful librarians’

By Associated Press, Friday, November 4

Phi Beta Iota: Evidently AP does not do its homework and takes Doug Naquin's crap at face value. The Open Source Center was not created at the suggestion of the 9/11 Commission, which called for a new agency completely independent of CIA, and is in fact being considered by one Senator and OMB as this is written, but under diplomatic auspices. The Open Source Center (OSC) is a bastardized down-graded mis-directed and under-funded morphing of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), a once great service (in WWII) that was destroyed by nit-wits sent into exile from more productive parts of the CIA. Naquin cannot do citation analysis, manage multinational information-sharing, or even find gray literature in more than eleven languages. He is, in a word, incompetent. But then so is Associated Press, in this instance, so they deserve one another. Neither is making a difference.