CORRECTED by source as probably fraudulent (created by a Congressional staffer to make his Member look smart). Leaving this up to share the thought.
Babette E. Bensoussan “The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.” – Cicero – 55 BC Wonder if we will finally get it in 2011??
Phi Beta Iota: Babette is one of the top dozen commercial intelligence specialists in the English language.
People are more likely to lie, exaggerate and distort when they know they won’t be held accountable for what they said, and people like to say what their interlocutors want to hear, says Jordan Stancil.
Jordan Stancil is a lecturer in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs of the University of Ottawa.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the single best overview of how secrecy supports corruption. It is consistent with testimony to the Moynihan Commission on Secrecy and with Morton Halperin's findings in Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy in which one of the “rules of the game” was “Lie to the President if you can get away with it.” Today, the “rule of the game” is “Lie to the public if you can get away with it for at least one election cycle.” Newt Gingrich started the decline with his power and ambition, Dick Cheney peaked at 935 documented lies that Colin Powell allowed to stand unchallenged, and now Obama, with Bloomberg in the wings, are the anti-climax of secrecy as fraud Of, By, and For Wall Street. America has become a cheating culture, an unthinking culture, far removed from the essence of a Republic.
The more I think about the WikiLeaks episode, the less I know what to say about it. Unfortunately, too much commentary, right and left, has tried to inject certitude where ambivalence should be.
It is not clear whether the WikiLeaks disclosures will damage our national interest. During the few years I spent as a Foreign Service officer, in Jerusalem and Berlin, I produced and read a fair number of classified cables, and I understand the rather obvious point that diplomats might get more — and more sensitive — information when their contacts believe that what they say will remain secret. We have heard endless appeals to “common sense” about the need for secrecy on these grounds.
But common sense also tells us that people are more likely to lie, exaggerate and distort when they know they won’t be held accountable for what they said, and that people like to say what their interlocutors want to hear. The annals of diplomatic communication, indeed of all communication, are filled with evidence of this banal insight, which many people seem to have forgotten in their rush to defend government secrecy.
This is a permanent reference. Read the rest below the line, followed by links.
For years I have written about the Defense Power Games — front loading and political engineering — as they are practiced by the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex. My 1990 pamphlet on this subject was written to explain why the end of the Cold War would not result in a lasting peace dividend — a prediction that has come true to a degree that astonishes me.
As I explained in Section II of the pamphlet, “front loading is the practice of planting seed money for new programs while downplaying their future obligations. This game, which is a clever form of the old-fashioned “bait-and-switch,” makes it easier to sell high-cost programs to skeptics in the Pentagon and Congress. Political engineering is the strategy of spreading dollars, jobs, and profits to as many important congressional districts as possible. By making voters dependent on government money flows, the political engineers put the squeeze on Congress to support the front-loaded program once its true costs become apparent. Front loading and political engineering are about increasing the flow of money; the former starts the money flowing while the latter tries to lock the spigot open, and in American politics, control of the money spigot is power.”
My discussion focused on defense procurement programs, which are by far the most developed and ritualized form of the games , but the central ideas behind these power games — a bait and switch operation to set up an extortion operation — apply to all government taxing and spending programs. In fact front loading and political engineering are now ubiquitous practices that are openly celebrated by cynical political operatives — the fact that they are destroying the idea of using a system of checks and balances to hold the peoples representatives accountable in a democratic republic does not seem to matter. Their effects, for example, can be scene in the corruption federal accounting systems.
To those readers who think I am taking this idea too far, I recommend the attached article, which is a good statement of where the effects of the rug merchant politics shaped by front loading and political engineering power games take us.
Chuck Spinney
Published on Friday, December 3, 2010 by Think Progress
As debate rages in Washington over the Bush tax cuts, set to expire at the end of this year, the Bush administration officials who initiated the steep tax cuts are celebrating what they see as an apparent victory, since signs point to a temporary extension of all the cuts. The Daily Beast’s Howard Kurtz interviewed Dan Bartlett, Bush’s former communications director, and Andy Card, Bush’s former chief of staff, among others, and they were pleased at how the expiration debate has played out:
“We knew that, politically, once you get it into law, it becomes almost impossible to remove it,” says Dan Bartlett, Bush’s former communications director. “That’s not a bad legacy. The fact that we were able to lay the trap does feel pretty good, to tell you the truth.” […]
The first of two on IC failures….as if we didn't need any more proof. DefDog
Reports indicate China's fifth generation jet fighter rollout far ahead of U.S. intel projections
East-Asia-Intel.com, December 1, 2010
Chinese military Internet reports indicate that China may roll out its first fifth generation fighter as early as this month, far earlier than the Pentagon projected China would have the advance warplane.
Second report…..
Series of U.S. intelligence failures on North Korea highlighted by tour of enrichment facility
East-Asia-Intel.com, December 1, 2010
North Korea's recent disclosure of a new uranium enrichment facility with
a light water reactor and centrifuge cascade is seen as a serious U.S.
intelligence and policy failure that goes back over a decade.
Phi Beta Iota: We do not control what our various contributors post, while reserving the right to comment. These are both serious intelligence failures, both indicative of the inability of the US Intelligence Community to do its job across the board, from collection to processing to analysis. There are many other failures, for example with respect to China's new superiority in submarine stealth (able to sneak past an entire carrier battle group to pop up immediately astern the central carrier), and their overwhelming superiority in cyber-space, where they have mastered, among many other capabilities, the art of riding electrical power circuits into US military computers from Peterson AFB to Fort Meade MD. As troubling as these failures are, they are actually the least of our worries. Of greater importance to the over-all security of the US is the culture of corruption, not just at CIA but at all the agencies including DIA, the FBI, and the NRO, as well as within the service intelligence centers. Just as General Mike Flynn is on record as saying that US Intelligence is “irrelevant” in Afghanistan, so also can it be said that US intelligence is “irrelevant” across the board–it is not contributing anything warranting its $90 billion a year budget, with nothing to show at the strategic, operational, tactical, or technical (acquisition) levels. We need not be this incapacitated. We are choosing to be ineffective, and that is most troubling of all.
Professor and Director of Project on Information Technology and Political Islam
Posted: December 3, 2010 10:57 AM
EXTRACT:
But Mubarak's real enemy is no longer the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a complex, fractured umbrella group, and the practice of faith and opposition to Mubarak may not be enough to hold it together much longer. There is also the Kefaya movement, a loosely organized network of cosmopolitan Nasserites, Islamists, and leftists, that has organized some successful protests but has lost some momentum.
Mubarak's real opponents are tech-savvy activists and wired civic groups.
In the last few years, the internet has become the primary incubator of democratic political conversation. The state has never had this role, and the Muslim Brotherhood is no longer the exclusive provider. Instead, civil society in Egypt has moved online, using the information infrastructure of digital media as the place for difficult political conversations about regime change, gender and political life, and transnational Islamic identity.
This infrastructure is beyond the reach of the state.
Obama can't catch a break. His Republican opposition gained control of the House, seats in the Senate, and control of more statehouses. He lost big in the center, with both GOP moderates and Blue Dog Democrats dropping like flies. Even the Progressive wing is calling, if not for his hide, for his vertebrae.
How did it get that way? Perhaps there is a clue in one of the Obama administration's earliest decisions. The subject was not a big, profound issue like nuclear arms, health care, or tax policy. It was quite literally a tiny issue: the President's Blackberry.
There is a war underway. I'm not talking about Washington's bloody misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, but a war within our own borders. It's a war fought on the airwaves, on television and radio and over the Internet, a war of words and images, of half-truth, innuendo, and raging lies. I'm talking about a political war, pitting liberals against conservatives, Democrats against Republicans. I'm talking about a spending war, fueled by stealthy front groups and deep-pocketed anonymous donors. It's a war that's poised to topple what's left of American democracy.
Phi Beta Iota: A detailed and devastating article that recommends the book, Winner-Take-All Politics, and places the beginning of today's economic divide with President Jimmy Carter, not Ronald Reagan. We place it further back, in the 1920's, when Carnegie and Rockefeller structured the role school system and also oversaw the destruction of all public transportation systems they could buy and then liquidate. It provides details on the specific organizations and their leading lights unleashed by the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court, and decision that in our view should suggest the need to first fire Congress and then pass legislation overturning all Supreme Court decisions permitting corporate “personality” and its requisite privileges that could be reserved for individual citizens.
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