On May 4, the Obama administration announced a plan to crack down on offshore tax havens, which it said are costing the United States tens of billions of dollars each year. The President's proposals were primarily aimed at finding ways to increase revenue from wealthy companies and investors who use loopholes in the law and offshore subsidiaries to reduce their US taxes. But the administration is largely missing a far more devastating problem related to offshore finance: money gained from criminal and other illicit sources. With the use of tax havens and other elements of an increasingly complex ‘shadow' financial network, vast sums of illegal money are being shifted throughout the global economy virtually undetected.
Phi Beta Iota: The illicit global economy is at least two trillion dollars a year against a seven trillion dollar a year legitimate economy, and the latter is both full of legal crime and legal tax avoidance, as well as focused on the one billion rich rathyer than the five billion poor. One of the many dirty not-so-little secrets about Wall Street is that it relies heavily on laundered drug money for its liquidity; another is that the banking community has been all too happy to manage the funds of dictators and war lords and others. Below are just three of the many books we recommend in this area.
Phi Beta Iota: Blessed commons sense from a Captain and intelligence professional in the U.S. Army. When we first entered Iraq we were told to avoid the immams and tribal chiefs, and this wasted at least four years of key leader engagement. Neither the secret world nor the military “Human Terrain Team” program have gotten a grip on cultural intelligence or a coherent holistic matrix for strategic, operational, and tactical exploitation of political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic Essential Elements of Information (EEI). We still have not integrated provincial team civil reporting with military tactical reporting, and still have both hugh gaps and costly overlaps. This monograph, this captain, are the tip of the spear not just in leadership engagement, but in reconcilation–there is a reason why “truth” is included “Truth & Reconciliation Commission.” BRAVO ZULU.
Phi Beta Iota: Ethics equals effectiveness. This is the core message of this brillaint monograph by three authors deeply steeped in both ethics and the profession of arms. Put in other words, the truth at any cost and integrity above all else.
The Afghan debacle is becoming a case study of how political debate in Versailles drips in a naturally self-organizing way to protect the dysfunctional status quo.
As I indicated yesterday and in September, the fundamental flaw that set the stage for the current policy making fiasco was the unexamined analytical hole in General McChrystal's escalation strategy — namely, its dependence of the rapid expansion of the corrupt and ineffective Afghan national security forces. McChrystal did not analyze this corruption/ineffectiveness issue, but that crucial omission was ignored the hoorah accompanying the immediate leaking of report by his allies buried somewhere in the Versailles apparat.
In the opening lines of the oldest treatise on the conduct of war, Sun Tzu said that the question of war is vital to the state, and therefore, it is imperative to study it. This timeless advice has been been ignored repeatedly by the United States since the end of WWII. The inevitable result has been an insensible rise of war mongering, fueled by arrogance and ignorance, culminating in the chaotic spectacle now enveloping the Afghan War Question in Washington.
The intellectual content of the debate over whether or how much to escalate our forces in Afghanistan has degenerated into formless ranting by all sides.
This extraordinary resource is the personal initiative of Jeffrey S Harley,SMDC/ARSTRAT G39, Deputy, Information Operations. As received, each new newsletter is posted to the Archives at the above permanent URL:
Though it may seem an unlikely location to happen upon a conference on astrobiology, the Vatican recently held a “study week” of over 30 astronomers, biologists, geologists and religious leaders to discuss the question of the existence of extraterrestrials. This follows the statement made last year by the Pope's chief astronomer, Father Gabriel Funes, that the existence of extraterrestrials does not preclude a belief in God, and that it's a question to be explored by the Catholic Church. The event, put on by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, took place at the Casina Pio IV on the Vatican grounds from November 6-11. . . . . . . .
“Just like there is an abundance of creatures on earth, there could also be other beings, even intelligent ones, that were created by God. That doesn't contradict our faith, because we cannot put boundaries to God's creative freedom. As saint Francis would say, when we consider the earthly creatures to be our “brothers and sisters”, why couldn't we also talk about a “extraterrestrial brother”? He would still be part of creation.”
