A new online computer game attempts to capitalize on the current strain of right-wing paranoia and activism, embodied by Glenn Beck's televised blustering and the Tea Party protests, by allowing players to inhabit a world of the near-future that represents a conservative nightmare. The game, called “2011: Obama Coup Fails,” is hosted by a website called The United States of Earth, and according to David Corn of Mother Jones, it was developed by “a small group of Ron Paul-loving libertarians living in Brooklyn.” See Huffington Post andPrisonPlanet.
The states of the Union are supposed to be laboratories of democracy, but this summer they have been looking more like toxic-waste dumps of futility. From coast to coast, from tundra to coral reef, state governments are in an awful fix. Their budget gaps are on track to add up to at least a third of a trillion dollars. In half the states, education funding is being cut, which means bigger classes, shoddier facilities, and fewer frills like music, art, languages, and library
books. States are closing parks, draining rainy-day funds, and shrinking services for children, the elderly, and the disabled. . . . . . . .
California, it turns out, is ungovernable. Its public schools, once the nation’s best, are now among the worst. Its transportation and water systems are deteriorating. Its prisons are so overcrowded that it has to turn tens of thousands of felons loose. And its legislature has spent most of the year in a farcical effort to pass the annual
budget, leaving little or no time for other matters, such as—well, schools, transportation, water, and prisons. This is “normal”: the same thing has happened in eighteen of the past twenty-two years. But the addition of economic disaster to legislative paralysis may have brought California to a tipping point.
Address On Iceland &The IMF, Debt Moratorium, And Tobin Tax
Webster Tarpley Infowars October 22, 2009
Delivered by Birgitta Jónsdóttir of The Movement in the Icelandic Parliament, October 5, 2009.
Madam President. Dear countrymen. We have a choice to make. We are never faced with just one way, one solution. To assert so is a testimony to incredible tunnel vision on the reality that we live in. We are far from being the first and only nation that has had to deal with crisis and economic collapse. Perhaps what makes our position unique is that we are in an economic war a war with nations that are using their positions of power to get what they want. Does that mean that all other avenues are closed? Are there perhaps other possibilities than chaining us with the burdens of foreign debt far into the future?
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We now need to make decisions based on hope, justice, and the resurrection of pride which comes from living in a country which many people believe is almost uninhabitable. We can and should seek all possible ways to find common solutions. Britain declared war on our nation when they labeled us as terrorists the British authorities have used economic terrorism against us by misusing the IMF, and using our EU membership application as leverage in order to extort from us what they want in the Icesave [1] debate. It is morally wrong to lay debts on the shoulders of the public which it had nothing to do with in the first place.
Phi Beta Iota: We salute the gentle lady from Iceland, who has a great deal more integrity and common sense than anyone we know now making bad policy in the absence of good public intelligence in the public interest. This speech is IMPORTANT–it is time to bring down the false economy of scaracity and secrecy, and implement Open Money and all other things Open (see our keytone, Open Everything.
During his talk, Jim suggested that snake oil purveyors in the supply risk market fall into a number of categories, including “existing vendors with incomplete or partial solutions (spun as the real-deal), market information packaged and resold as real-time intelligence (which it's not), dashboards from larger enterprise software providers (which leave it up to you to fill in the blanks or pay an army of consultants to populate)” and, my personal favorite, “the one hit wonder — any service provider deliverable that takes the form of a Microsoft Office document, spreadsheet or presentation”. Not only is Jim dead-on in this analysis — he's putting a stake in the ground that someone should have posited a long time ago. Namely, that a good many of the self-proclaimed supply risk emperors out there really have no clothes.
ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF DETECTION about Jules Kroll and corporate intelligence. In 1972, Jules Kroll launched J. Kroll Associates, which eventually became Kroll, Inc., the world’s preëminent detective agency, with three thousand employees, countless subcontractors, and offices in sixty cities in more than thirty-five countries. Last October, Kroll, aged sixty-eight, spoke to a crowd of students and faculty at Cornell, his alma mater. According to the history professor who introduced Kroll that day, Kroll, Inc., specializes in “pursuing crime, particularly financial crime, across international borders.” And so Kroll told stories about recovering the wealth plundered by dictators, among them Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein, and Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier. Kroll’s stories were nearly all morality tales. But breaking up extortion rings, nailing dictators—that’s the Marvel Comics version of Jules Kroll’s career. Kroll really made his living, and his name, on Wall Street.
Vodafone Americas Foundation Launches Second Annual Wireless Innovation Project
The Vodafone Americas Foundation has announced the launch of the second annual Vodafone Wireless Innovation Project, a competition to identify and reward the most promising advances in wireless related technologies that can be used to solve critical problems around the globe.
The Vodafone Americas Foundation will award a total of $600,000 to the first-, second-, and third-prize winners.
Complete competition information and application instructions are available at the project's Web site.
Phi Beta Iota: Bottom-Up Wireless (See Haggle) is part of the tri-fecta along with Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).
How Moody's sold its ratings – and sold out investors
Kevin G. Hall
McClatchy Newspapers
October 21, 2009
A McClatchy investigation has found that Moody's punished executives who questioned why the company was risking its reputation by putting its profits ahead of providing trustworthy ratings for investment offerings.
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“The story at Moody's doesn't start in 2007; it starts in 2000,” said Mark Froeba, a Harvard-educated lawyer and senior vice president who joined Moody's structured finance group in 1997.
