Associated Press reports that the Senate Ethics Committee has cleared Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticutt (the state where many of the AIG and other Wall Street executives live) for his uniquely personal role in secretly assuring that bonuses for all these morally hazardous individuals would be protected in the two-party bail-out deal. His below market mortgage personally arranged by the leadership of Countrywide is “unrelated.”
Click on the photo to read the story on his admission that he personally added the bonus provision to the “stimulus” package.
Congressman speaks on martial law, auditing the Fed and running for president in 2012
Steve Watson Infowars.net
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Texas Congressman Ron Paul, founder of the advocacy group Campaign for Liberty, spoke on a number of issues yesterday including the growing opposition to socialized healthcare, the threat of martial law, his ongoing effort to audit the Federal Reserve and the prospect of running for president in 2012. Below are the highlights of the Congressman’s comments followed by video of the full interview.
Ron Paul on the future of the economy and false optimism:
“There is a limit to how long they can fool the people, if you’ve been out of work and you don’t have enough money to feed your kids, and you listen to this you just don’t buy into this stuff. I’ve always argued that the people are always ten to fifteen years ahead of Congress.”
“There will be a time when the psychology changes, when it turns into a rout, and that’s what they can’t control. But I don’t think there will be a bank holiday, that will help cause panic… they’re not going to close the banks, they’re going to keep the presses running. They don’t default by not paying the bills… if they can inflate by 50% they’ve just defaulted on half of the debt.”
Click on photo to see rest of summary in print and view video if desired.
The Obama administration needs to restructure how interagency information-sharing initiatives are funded and implemented to encourage compliance by agencies that currently place a higher priority on their own missions, government and industry experts told House lawmakers Thursday.
“Differing missions, overlapping turf conflicts, resource constraints, bureaucratic inertia and agency tunnel vision still exist and impede information sharing,” said Ambassador Thomas McNamara, program manager of the Information Sharing Environment, a post within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. ISE was created by Congress in 2004 to facilitate the sharing of terrorism information across all levels of government and the private sector.
. . . . . . .
The 2010 Intelligence Authorization Act, being debated in the House, includes a section that would move the ISE program manager position from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to the Executive Office of the President, though President Obama stated that “such legislation is premature and could create undue administrative and managerial burdens by creating a completely new category of information for agencies to manage.”
+++++++Phi Beta Iota Editorial Comment+++++++
The Director of National Intelligence (DNI) means well, but this entire challenge of information sharing, like the challenge of global coverage, is about mind-set and culture. The secret world does not have it and never will. They have to be instructed and mandated and ultimately forced to give up half of their bloated budget that produces, “at best,” four percent of what the President needs to know and next to nothing at all for all of the substantive Congressional jurisdictions and the Cabinet officers they oversee.
Tip of the hat to Dr. Webster Tarpley, gifted historian and speaker of truth to power, for picking this up. We leave it to the reader to speculate about what role, if any, the U.S. Government played, and what might play out in the future as the indigenous peoples of Saudi Arabia find that they are power that cannot be suppressed.
+++++++Begin Story Extract+++++++
PakistaniDefence.com, 2 August 2009
Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the kingdom's former ambassador to the United States, is reportedly under house arrest over a conspiracy against the monarch.
Saad al-Faqih, head of the opposition group Islamic Reform Movement, told Arab-language TV al-Alam that Prince Bandar has been disappeared and the media has published no word from the ex-diplomat's whereabouts since nearly three months ago.
“I mean, that's one of the things that's particularly troubling: This whole notion of radicalization of Americans,” Holder told ABC News during an interview in his SUV as his motorcade brought him from home to work. “Leaving this country and going to different parts of the world and then coming back, all, again, in aim of doing harm to the American people, is a great concern.”
Holder said the ever-changing threat of terror and the pressure to keep up with it weighs heavily on his mind as he tries to ensure that the government has done all it can to anticipate the moves of an unpredictable enemy.
“In some ways it's the most sobering part of the day,” Holder said of his morning intelligence briefing, in which he gets the latest report on the landscape of “the organizations, the people who are bound and determined to do harm to our nation.”
+++++++Phi Beta Iota Editorial Comment+++++++
NEWS FLASH FOR THE ATTORNEY GENERAL: There is a “Harvest of Rage” buidling up in America, and is is not from jihadists against the Nation, but rather normal, sober, average Americans full of common sense who are angry at the long list of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by a corrupt Congress and a White House that–regardless of occupant–represents Wall Street instead of Main Street.
The Watts riots by people of color will look like a kiss on the cheek if the white people of Middle America ever decide to march on New York and Washington. With all due respect to the good intentions of the Attorney General, he is out of touch with reality and with America. This is a Republic. The government is failing. It is time to fix it or abolish it. We favor the fix, and the fix is easy: the Electoral Reform Act of 2009.
American is going clinically insane because the federal government as a service of common concern to the United STATES of America is so busy transferring wealth from the individual taxpayer to the banks and special interests that it has failed to do its job: mind the public interest, nurture the public soul, and guard the public commonwealth.
Cheney and Rice equated informed patriotic objections to the elective war on Iraq at “treason”–General Tony Zinni in particular was tarred with that brush. Today the Obama Administration seems to equate opposition to its sophmoric efforts to do good while continuing to loot the Treasury for Goldman Sachs as “the radicalization of Americans.” Yes, America is being radicalized. The public intelligence question to be asked and answered is this: are We the People being radicalized by external or internal circumstances? Phi Beta Iota believes that our radicalization is caused by a government that has lost touch with the public it is meant to serve. Our good people trapped in a bad system have forgotten that their oath is to the Constitution, to defend America against all enemies, domestic as well as foreign, and that sometimes it is the integrity of the individual in the chain of command who remembers the Constitution, that prevents the abuse of power by political appointees who have been bought and paid for by Wall Street.
After spending a week traveling the frontline of the “war on terrorism” — from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ronald Reagan in the seas off Iran, to northern Iraq, to Afghanistan and into northwest Pakistan — I can comfortably report the following: The bad guys are losing.
Yes, the dominos you see falling in the Muslim world today are the extremist Islamist groups and governments. They have failed to persuade people by either their arguments or their performances in power that their puritanical versions of Islam are the answer. Having lost the argument, though, the radicals still hang on thanks to gun barrels and oil barrels — and they can for a while.
. . . . . . .
To the extent that the radical Islamists have any energy today, it comes not from the power of their ideas or examples of good governance, but by stoking sectarian feuds. In Afghanistan, the Taliban play on Pashtun nationalist grievances, and in Iraq, the Sunni jihadists draw energy from killing Shiites.
The only way to really dry up their support, though, is for the Arab and Muslim modernists to actually implement better ideas by producing less corrupt and more consensual governance, with better schools, more economic opportunities and a vision of Islam that is perceived as authentic yet embracing of modernity. That is where “our” allies in Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have so consistently failed. Until that happens, the Islamist radicals will be bankrupt, but not out of business.
+++++++Phi Beta Iota Editorial Comment+++++++
Most readers will focus on the beginning of Friedman's story and completely miss the ending. What Friedman does not state that needs stating over and over again is that the U.S. taxpayer is being cheated by a foreign policy that substitutes technology for thinking, military sales for strategy, and convenient dictators for democracy. Until we have an Undersecretary of State for Democracy with one Assistant Secretary for those dictators that agree to a five-year exit strategy, another for those that do not; and a counterpart Undersecretary of Defense for Peace who can move beyond the lip service that Defense continues to give to Operations Other Than War (OOTW), Stabilization & Reconstructions (S&R), Humanitarian Assistance (HA), and the mother of all military strategies, Irregular Warfare properly defined as Waging Peace by All Means Possible, we will continue to betray the public interest at home as well as abroad.
Click on NYT Logo Above for the Full Story Online.
Probably like most of you, I am engaged in a daily attempt to make up my mind about President Obama. I was an early supporter.
And as a former Washington “player,” I am aware how difficult is his position. I began to worry when he failed to grasp what I have seen to be the early window of opportunity for a new administration — the first three months — when the government is relatively fluid. As the months have flown by, I have seen that there are many positive things, mainly in his eloquent addresses on world problems, notably his speech at the University of Cairo on world pluralism, but also quite a few negative things. With sadness and alarm I find that my list of the negatives keeps on growing.
Among them are the following:
(1) The commitment to the war in “Af-Pak” which (I believe) will cost America upwards of $6 trillion but perhaps only a few hundred casualties since we are relying increasingly on drone bombing. Just the money costs could derail almost everything Obama's supporters hoped and thought his administration would do.
(2) the choice of personnel is (to me) baffling:
[BULK OF THIS WORK NOT BROUGHT FORWARD–CLICK ON COUNTERPUNCH LOGO TO READ IT ALL.]
I am waiting for the Obama we elected to show up. I hope this drama does not follow Samuel Beckett's script.
The essence of intelligence qua decision-support is “360 degree awareness” as well as historical and cultural depth, and a green-eye shade understanding of “true costs” not only in fiscal terms, but in moral, demogrpahic, environmental, and social terms.
It is our view that President Barack Obama isa good man trapped in a bad system, and that all he needs to do in order to restore America's integrity and fiscal as well as moral health is these two things:
1) Demand of Congress the Electoral Reforn Act of 2009, a copy of which can be seen by clicking on the Frog to the left; and
2) Demand of Congress the Smart Nation Act of 2009, a copy of which can be seen by clicking on the Frog in the middle.
There is nothing wrong with America, or the Earth, that cannot be fixed by restoring the Constitution and the Republic Of, By, and For We the People, the soverign people replete with common sense and public intelligence in the public interest.
There is nothing wrong with the Obama Administration professionally that cannot be fixed by the introduction of a Whole of Government strategic planning, programming, and budgeting process, as well as a transformation of national intelligence to provide all necessary decision support to the President AND everyone else. Click on the Frog to the left for that White Paper, forthcoming in the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence (Winter 2009-2010).
Electoral Reform
Electoral Reform is straight-forward. It restores free and open elections in place of the two-party tyranny, and it restores the right to vote across every district. This version does not contain a number of rightwous ideas from the Independent voters who now outnumber BOTH the Democratic and Republican voters.
The Smart Nation Act was devised the Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02), himself a professional intelligence officer and retired Army Colonel. It enables “school-house to White House” decision support against all threats across all policies.
Smart Nation
Finally, we have the urgent need to fix the inner workings of the White House and National Intelligence. Many Commissions have reported on this since 1947, most notably and presciently Jim Schlesinger's in the 1970's, and more recently Aspin-Brown (completely ignored by successive Administraitons). America is too complicated to be run by one cabal lacking in global knowledge.
