Category: Government

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

03 Economy, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Threats
Robert David STEELE Vivas

I've been driving the 1964 MGB (my last remaining possession, it needs $5,000 of underbody work to survive the winter) around New England and am in New York now.  I've been following the US Day of Rage plans (they were also announced here) but have been surprised to find a number of normally intelligent middle-class men I have met along the way to be timid about the US Day of Rage movement.  They cannot get past the name and of course never get to the part about non-violent demands for electoral reform and integrity.

So here is my short brief on US Day of Rage, perhaps it can help get past these perceptual barriers.  I do recommend that US Day of Rage create an alternative web site, American for Electoral Integrity–kind of like the Silicon Valley Hackers Conference also calls itself the THINK Conference for the green eyeshade types without a clue.  I'll be attending this year, 4-6 November in San Francisco area.

MEMORANDUM

Subject:  US Day of Rage for the USA—Who, Why, What, When, Where, How

Date:  17 September 2011

IMPORTANCE:  Understanding the US Day of Rage is vital to understanding the deeper mood of the public.

1.  Who.  US Day of Rage is an informal, social network based movement that started as a protest against Wall Street with a planned occupation today, and rapidly morphed into a cross-country network of mini-demonstrations.  The “US Day of Rage” is being supported by internet groups who oppose corruption in the government such as Adbusters, Culture Jammers, and Anonymous. The original call to occupy Wall Street was put out by Adbusters, and the US Day of Rage and NYC General Assembly have since joined.

2.  Why.  Their capital demand is fair and free elections to overcome the special interest takeover of Congress and the Executive.  Please note that there is real convergence and resonance between the Day of Rage network and the Tea Party/Sarah Palin remonstrations against “crony capitalism.”

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

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Winslow Wheeler: Super Committee Crashing & Burning

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Corporations, Corruption, DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Winslow Wheeler

Not only is the Super Committee headed straight for failure, the “automatic” cuts that would happen in the Pentagon budget are not going to occur.  To “save” the Pentagon budget from further cuts, it's doomsday for budget restraint in the short term.  The only thing to be elevated for the longer term and foreseeable future is our political and governmental dysfunction.

Why Pentagon bloat will kill real deficit cutting

Congress has taken a hostage that no one wants to shoot

EXTRACT:

It is not going to happen that way.

First, the supercommittee is bound to fail; it will reach no meaningful budget agreement.

Second, when the committee fails, the defense cuts envisioned by the supposedly automatic trigger mechanism will not occur. That will be for the simple reason that almost no one wants that to happen. While they are quite mistaken about the consequences, almost everyone on Capitol Hill (and in the Pentagon) thinks that those defense reductions will be “devastating,” “disastrous,” “doomsday” and any other apocalyptic term you can think of.

In short, the debt deal took a hostage that no one wants to shoot.

. . . . .

That “frozen” 2011 level will be more than twice the combined defense budgets of China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Cuba and Somalia. It will be more than $80 billion more than we spent, on average, during the Cold War when we faced a threatening and heavily armed Soviet Union and a hostile, dogmatically communist China. In the absence of these two huge threats, we are now being told we need to spend more.

Read full article.

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David Isenberg: The Cost-Savings Fantasy (Corruption) of Using Private Military Contractors

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Military, Officers Call
David Isenberg

The Cost-Savings Fantasy

David Isenberg

Huffington Post, 9/15/2011

Sometimes it is difficult to decide what to write about in the world of private military and security contracting issues, as there are usually a few different stories in the news on any given day that are relevant.

Today, however, I don't have that problem as there is clearly only one story worth discussing. That is the report issued yesterday by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) comparing federal and private sector employee compensation.

Full disclosure alert: back in the eighties I worked a year at POGO's predecessor organization, the Project on Military Procurement, and earlier this year POGO published a report I co-wrote

To appreciate the importance of this report keep in mind that one of the biggest talking points of PMSC advocates is that the virtue of using them is that they are cheaper than using full time government employees and that private sector rates are cheaper than government salaries. That is because they can be hired just for the task/mission, don't have to be paid pensions and other benefits, et cetera. As talking points go it's a good one and seemingly difficult to dispute; although when it comes to using private military and security contractors in the field there has not yet been much in the way of methodologically sound, peer reviewed evidence to support it.

So POGO decided to fill the data gap, or lacuna, as an academic would say. It compared total annual compensation for federal and private sector employees with federal contractor billing rates in order to determine whether the current costs of federal service contracting serves the public interest.

What its report, Bad Business: Billions of Taxpayer Dollars Wasted on Hiring Contractors, found was:

Continue reading “David Isenberg: The Cost-Savings Fantasy (Corruption) of Using Private Military Contractors”

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Owl: Is “Fast & Furious” a Deliberate Destabilization of Mexico by the US Government? Are US Military Arms Shipments to Guatemala the Other Side of the COIN?

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Military, Officers Call
Who? Who?

This item is from a very astute libertarian writer (he has a fantastic web site!), Justin Raimondo, and this column offers the best explanation or theory I have seen as to why BATF has given gazillions of guns to a Mexican drug cartel.  And it’s not due to government incompetence. A brilliant analysis, and oddly, I have not seen any mention of it elsewhere, so it very much deserves to be more widely distributed! This article should be the basis for a “60 Minutes” investigation…

Fast and Furious:  Blowback from Mexico

by , August 31, 2011

While the US military is being sent overseas in search of monsters to destroy, ignoring the good advice of the Founders, closer to home another war is brewing – right on the US-Mexican border. Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry, killed on Dec. 21 near Rio Rico, Arizona, was murdered by drug cartel gunmen – using weapons smuggled across the US-Mexican border under the auspices of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF).

While the cartels shoot up half of Mexico, and terrorize the other half, it seems they’ve been getting a helping hand from those geniuses in Washington, whose “law enforcement” agencies knowingly allowed sophisticated firearms to be smuggled across the border, into Mexico. As BATF special agent John Dodson told the House Oversight Committee:

. . . . . .

With Mexico at the mercy of US-armed drug gangs, and the central government in Mexico City about to lose control, the introduction of US troops to “keep order” is entirely within the realm of possibility. In that case, the North American Union will become a reality, in fact if not in the formal sense – and the latter can be arranged quickly enough.

Read full analysis.

Commentary on DoD support to cartels below the line.

Continue reading “Owl: Is “Fast & Furious” a Deliberate Destabilization of Mexico by the US Government? Are US Military Arms Shipments to Guatemala the Other Side of the COIN?”

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

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Civil Society, Commerce, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, InfoOps (IO), Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Koko

Koko Signs:  Is anyone paying attention?  We gorillas consider this kind of thing extremely significant.

U.S. Day of Rage planned for Saturday — an Arab Spring in America?

Thousands of people from across the country are planning to converge on Wall Street this Saturday to protest America’s “corrupt democratic process” and the use of corporate moneyin American elections.

In a nod to the nomenclature of the Arab Spring, organizers are calling it the U.S. “Day of Rage.”

The day has already seen support from hactivist group Anti Sec, which wrote on Twitter Thursday: “Americans it is now our time. The Tunisians did it, then the Egyptians. It is OUR time. It is OUR America.” Anti-consumerist magazine AdBusters asked on its site: “Is American ripe for a Tahrir moment?”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  There isn't a single politician out there that “gets” this, with one possible exception we will identify if and when he makes reference to the connection between the USA Day of Rage, his campaign, and the need for Electoral Reform–there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed relatively quickly and simply via the restoration of the integrity of our electoral process and our government.

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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
Who? Mini-Me?

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”

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Tom Atlee: Gross National Happiness & Sacred Economics

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Tom Atlee

September 13, 2011

Remarkable videos and a remarkable book about remarkable economics

This is, for me, the most inspiring TED Talk I've ever seen.

Silver Donald Cameron – Bhutan: The Pursuit of Gross National Happiness

And here are a film and a book that expand and deepen the view that economics can and should be about generating good lives in a good society in a good world – in ways that speak to the cultures, realities and daily lives that most of us live in.

The film is the upcoming movie “Money and Life”  – see especially the “extended trailer”, clip #2 at the bottom of the page

The book is Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein, for me the most significant book I've read in a decade, about which I'll have more to say later but you can read a preview article here.

Finally, I offer a good closing poem.

Enjoy.

Coheartedly,
Tom

______________________________

Tom Atlee, The Co-Intelligence Institute, POB 493, Eugene, OR 97440
http://www.co-intelligence.org  /  http://tom-atlee.posterous.com
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Phi Beta Iota:  Tom Atlee and the Co-Intelligence Institute are the ONLY cause we endorse on a recurring basis.  Tom Atlee himself is a national asset of the most precious sort–the people, the knowledge, and the spirit that are embodied in the Co-Intelligence Institute represent the ideals of America–and of the great religions and philosophies–in active practice.
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