Communities of Practice – Page 690 – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/02/28

SchwartzReport: Fortune 500 Companies Receive $63 Billion in Subsidies (Not Counting Hundreds of Billions in Tax Avoidance)

We have 17 million kids who aren't getting proper nutrition, because we have no money to feed them — so we are told — but we have enough money to give the richest most profitable corporations in the country $63 billion in subsidies. Our Congress is immoral down to its roots. This story should outrage you.

Fortune 500 Companies Receive $63 Billion in Subsidies
DAVID SIROTA – Pandodaily

Remember when President Obama was lambasted for saying ‘you didn’t build that”? Turns out he was right, at least when it comes to lots of stuff built by world’s wealthiest corporate behemoths. That’s the takeaway from a new study of 25,000 major taxpayer subsidy deals over the last two decades.

Entitled ‘Subsidizing the Corporate One Percent,” the report from the taxpayer watchdog group Good Jobs First shows that the largest corporations in the world aren’t models of self-sufficiency and unbridled capitalism. To the contrary, they continue to receive tens of billions of dollars in government handouts. Such subsidies might be a bit more defensible if they were being doled out in a way that promoted upstart entrepreneurialism. But as the study also shows, a full ‘three-quarters of all the economic development dollars awarded and disclosed by state and local governments have gone to just 965 large corporations” – not to the small businesses and startups that politicians so often pretend to care about.

2014/02/272014/02/27

SchwartzReport: The Private Prison Racket

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement

Here is the latest in the For-profit American Gulag Trend. This is a truly shameful development.

The Private Prison Racket
MATT STROUD – Politico Magazine

EXTRACT:

As inmate populations have soared over the last 30 years, private prisons have emerged as an appealing solution to cash-starved states. Privately run prisons are cheaper and can be set up much faster than those run by the government. Nearly a tenth of all U.S. prisoners are housed in private prisons, as are almost two-thirds of immigrants in detention centers-and the companies that run them have cashed in. CCA, the oldest and largest modern private prison company, took over its first facility in 1983. Now it’s a Wall Street darling with a market cap of nearly $3.8 billion. Similarly, GEO Group, the second largest private-prison operator, last week reported $1.52 billion in revenue for 2013, its most ever and more than a hundredfold increase since the company went public ten years ago.

2014/02/26

Jean Lievens: Spain Rocks Content Aggregators with Decision They Must Share Income with Original Content Creators

Commerce, Ethics

Long live the link, an interview with David de Ugarte

On February 14th, a council of ministers passed a reform on the copyright laws in Spain. According to the reform, content aggregators including Google News, Yahoo News, Bing News and Spain’s famous Menéame would have to depart from part of their income in favor of the original content publishers. As for now it is uncertain how, at what percentage and when this tax will be effective. Google alone is supposed to have had a publicity income in Spain during 2013 close to US$ 50 million and with perspectives to increase by 14% its turnover in 2014.

Read full article.

2014/02/262014/02/26

SchwartzReport: Silencing the Scientist – Tyrone Hayes on Being Targeted by Herbicide Firm Syngenta

03 Environmental Degradation, 07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Corruption

This is what the virtual corporate states routinely try to do to scientists. All the sectors of science where billions of dollars are at risk are subject to this pressure. (See The Great Experiment: Genetically Modified Organisms, Scientific Integrity, and National Wellness.) I! t is severely distorting American science.

Silencing the Scientist: Tyrone Hayes on Being Targeted by Herbicide Firm Syngenta
Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez – Truthout

We speak with scientist Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley, who discovered a widely used herbicide may have harmful effects on the endocrine system. But when he tried to publish the results, the chemical’s manufacturer launched a campaign to discredit his work.

2014/02/252014/02/25

Chuck Spinney: How the Secret World Destroys Reputations – The Banality of Evil

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call

The political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “banality of evil” to describe her highly controversial thesis that “the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.” [source: Wikipedia]

Arendt argued that Adolf Eichmann's crimes resulted “not from a wicked or depraved character but from sheer ‘thoughtlessness': he was simply an ambitious bureaucrat who failed to reflect on the enormity of what he was doing. His role in the mass extermination of Jews epitomized ‘the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil' that had spread across Europe at the time. Arendt's refusal to recognize Eichmann as “inwardly” evil prompted fierce denunciations from both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals. Her argument, which has been criticized by many, came out of her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 for the New Yorker.” [source: Encyclopaedia Britannica]

Whether or not you accept Arendt’s thesis in regard to the perpetration of the Holocaust, it is impossible to deny the thoughtless, faceless, bureaucratic banality implicit in the briefing slides below support her thesis. These official briefing slides, leaked from the Snowden Archive and analyzed by Glen Greenwald, clearly describe in antiseptic, logically-disconnected, powerpoint detail how the employees of NSA and its cohorts plan to use cyber operations as a covert means to coerce the American people, as well as foreigners, into accepting the totalitarian premises of the emerging American State.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: How the Secret World Destroys Reputations – The Banality of Evil”

2014/02/25

Mother Jones: Can’t Touch This – Best Overview of Pentagon Corruption and Idiocy at This Time and Place

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Military

CAN”T TOUCH THIS

The wars are winding down. It's the age of austerity. But nobody messes with the Pentagon budget.

Until Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) rode to the rescue this week, Pentagon brass and their allies had been issuing dire warnings about the nation's military readiness: The armed services were being decimated, they said, by sequestration—the automatic budget cuts that were set to trim $1 trillion from the Pentagon budget over the next decade. “It's one thing for the Pentagon to go on a diet. It's another for the Pentagon to wear a straitjacket while dieting,” grumbled Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.). The message got through: The House overwhelmingly approved the Ryan-Murray plan just two days after it was introduced.

But now, the Pentagon has once more gotten a reprieve from the budget ax: Under Murray and Ryan's congressional budget deal, the Pentagon will get an additional $32 billion, or 4.4 percent, in 2014, leaving its base budget at a higher level than in 2005 and 2006. (The Department of Defense expects its total 2014 budget, including supplemental war funding, to be more than $600 billion.)

Before the budget deal, some critics of defense spending had been ready to accept sequestration as the blunt, imperfect tool that might force the military to shed some of the bulk it acquired while fighting two of the longest and most expensive wars in our history. Even with the sequester in place, the Pentagon's base budget was set to remain well above pre-9/11 levels for the next decade, and the military would have taken a far smaller haircut than it did after Vietnam and the Cold War wound down.

MUST READ WITH MUST SEE GRAPHICS AND SPECIFICS

Phi Beta Iota: This is a dishonest budget that is not in the public interest. While the DoD budget has been dishonest since the Cold War was manufactured in the aftermath of WWII, we are now in an era where public intelligence with integrity is capable of exposing lies and blatant corruption at the highest levels. Neither the Secretary of Defense nor the service chiefs are being honest or professional in relation to real needs. Not only do we NEED a 450 ship Navy, a long-haul Air Force, and an air-mobile Army, but we need a Pentagon that can accomplish this AND cut 30% of the budget over 4 years. Absent intelligence with integrity, this will not happen.

2012 Robert Steele: Addressing the Seven Sins of Foreign Policy — Why Defense, Not State, Is the Linch Pin for Global Engagement

2012 Robert Steele: Reflections on the US Military — Redirection Essential — and a Prerequisite to Creating a 450-Ship Navy, a Long-Haul Air Force, and an Air-Liftable Army

2012 U.S. Naval Power in the 21st Century: 450-Ship Navy, <24 Hours to Anywhere, Peace from the Sea — Full Text Online

2014/02/252014/02/25

Mini-Me: Cyber Expert: Open Source Intelligence Needs Improvement

Communities of Practice, Ethics, IO Impotency

Huh?

Cyber Expert: Open Source Intelligence Needs Improvement

The advantage of cyberspace is the large volume of information it holds,” said Esti Peshin, Director of Cyber Services for IAI, at the Israeli Video Analysis Conference organized by iHLS. Peshin was referring to the intelligence gathering potential of open source intelligence (OSNIT), adding that “on the other hand, this forces us to use much more advanced methods of analysis.”

According to Peshin one of the most significant challenges lies in categorizing the mass of information in terms of reliability. The only way to overcome this problem is to cross-reference many sources of data. “We want to create a comprehensive intelligence picture, rather than producing just one single item of information, since that single item can be faked.” IAI experiments, added Peshin, have shown that it takes only 48 hours to create a believable and complex fake identity, with no less than a hundred facebook friends who believe it is a real person. All it takes is opening an e-mail account.

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