Communities of Practice – Page 946 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/10/162012/10/16

Paul Craig Robert: America (RIP) – The True Cost of Government Corruption and Banking Greed – Moral Bankruptcy Assures the Death of a Nation

Review: Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America

QUOTE (32): What has taken place over the last generation is a highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government. Far from taking care of the rest of us, the financial leaders of America and their political servants have seemingly reached the cynical conclusion that our society is not work saving and have taken on a new mission that involved not creating wealth for us all, but simply absconding with whatever wealth remains in our hollowed out economy. They don’t feed us, we feed them.

America R.I.P.

Paul Craig Roberts

Institute for Political Economy, October 16, 2012

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following.

EXTRACT:

In the early years of the 21st century, the Federal Reserve substituted a rise in consumer debt to drive the economy in place of the missing rise in consumer incomes. Low interest rates drove up housing prices, and people refinanced their mortgages and spent the equity. The Federal Reserve kept the economy alive by loading up consumers with debt that housing prices and consumer incomes would soon be unable to support.

Continue reading “Paul Craig Robert: America (RIP) – The True Cost of Government Corruption and Banking Greed – Moral Bankruptcy Assures the Death of a Nation”

2012/10/16

Tom Atlee: Webinar on Empowering Public Wisdom

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence

Empowering Public Wisdom with Tom Atlee

Tom Atlee, author of The Tao of Democracy, is on a mission to bring the citizen back into democracy through a simple and practical method. The co-director of The Co-Intelligence Institute in Eugene, Oregon, calls for the introduction of citizen councils that offer a platform for “collective intelligence.” This political pioneer shares his views in his new book, Empowering Public Wisdom, and with you in this engaging online seminar.

Logistics

Date: October 18, 2012 (=October 19 for Dutch viewers due to timedifference)
Location: Online
Time: 5 pm-6:30pm PDT (02.00-3.30 for Dutch viewers)
Price: $10 (€10 for Dutch registrants)

FREE: Read major article.

FREE: 2009 TEDx by Tom Atlee (26:06)

2012/10/162012/10/16

SmartPlanet: Corrupt Government Allows Corporate Socialism – Privatized Profits and Externalized Losses

Commerce, Corruption, Government, Media

How corporations are crippling U.S. prosperity

By David Worthington | October 15, 2012

face worthington — David Cay Johnston
Click for Biography

A dearth of competition in major U.S. industries and a government that’s policy making has been severely corrupted by moneyed interests has led to depressed wages and stifled innovation, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist says in a new book.

In essence, you’re being ripped off, and those responsible are taking everyone’s money while assuming very little risk.

David Cay Johnston was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reporting the inequalities and loopholes that exist in the U.S. tax code and exposing corporate tax evasion. His latest work, The Fine Print: How Big companies Use “Plain English” to Rob You Blind, examines his findings about how the U.S. economy has strayed away from capitalism and into “corporate socialism,” where the free market, its engine of prosperity, has stalled.

Some argue that globalization has caused a smoothing of salaries as developing economies grow. We asked Johnston to make his case about how the alleged subversion of competitive markets could actually be what’s responsible. Here’s our interview with David Cay Johnston:

SmartPlanet: Are our markets competitive or is the game fixed?

David Cay Johnston: A growing number of industries are monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies even as they claim to be in highly competitive markets. Cable, Internet and telephone provide a good example of this. In most places you have one phone company and one cable company offering similarly slow, by world standards, Internet speeds and very similar prices. Computers make it possible for companies to match prices quickly, as airlines do in just a few minutes for millions of fares when one airline changes its pricing structure.

SP: Are we paying too much for goods and services?

DCJ: We pay four times what the French do for a triple play package of cable, Internet and telephone — and they get worldwide TV, not just domestic; their Internet is ten times faster and instead of two country calling, they get long-distance to 70 countries at no extra charge. All that for $38 compared to the U.S. average of $160 including taxes. By one measure we pay 38 times as much as the Japanese per bit of information on the Internet. In states where the electric utilities were broken up so power generation could be a competitive business prices did not fall. Instead since 1999 they rose 48% more than inflation, compared to just 8 percent in states that retained traditional regulation. Everywhere there is a lack of competition, or only the appearance of competition, we pay way too much.

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2012/10/152012/10/15

Mini-Me: Web Hosting Firm ServerBeach Cannot Be Trusted…

Access, Commerce, Corruption, Idiocy, IO Impotency

Huh?

How a single DMCA notice took down 1.45 million education blogs

Web hosting firm ServerBeach recently received a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violation notice from Pearson, the well-known educational publishing company. The notice pertained to Edublogs, which hosts 1.45 million education-related blogs with ServerBeach, and it focused on a single Edublogs page from 2007 that contained a questionnaire copyrighted by Pearson. ServerBeach informed Edublogs about the alleged violation, and Edublogs says it quickly took down the allegedly infringing content.

Instead of calling the matter settled, though, ServerBeach took Edublogs' servers offline last Wednesday, temporarily shutting off all 1.45 million blogs, according to Edublogs. ServerBeach confirms taking all of the Edublogs offline, telling Ars that the outage lasted for “roughly 60 minutes before we brought them back online and confirmed their compliance with the DMCA takedown request.”

As you might expect, ServerBeach and Edublogs have slightly different accounts of how it all happened.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The criminal insanity of how ServerBeach handled this matter should be broadcast widely. We certainly would not trust any company so cavalier, so utterly oblivious to the unwarranted cost of their unbirdled actions. This specific instance should be the poster child for why an Autonomous Internet is needed with multiple backups such that no one unprincipled moron can wreak such havoc. ServerBeach – posterchild for how not to do business.

2012/10/152012/10/15

David Isenberg: Secret Contracting – Totally Beyond the Reach of Inspectors-General

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude

The use of private contractors is not just for the Pentagon or the State Department. It is also for that frequently crashing collection of agencies euphemistically known as the intelligence community (IC).

I have written previously on this but let's consider some of the costs of using contractors in the IC. The following is taken from a paper, “‘We Can't Spy … If We Can't Buy!': The Privatization of Intelligence and the Limits of Outsourcing ‘Inherently Governmental Functions” by Simon Chesterman of the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law, presented at a meeting of the International Studies Association in San Diego back in April. Chesterman is author of the book One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty, published last year.

Just like old Pentagon contractors, IC contractors can go way over budget. One example was the “National Security Agency's contract with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to modernize its ability to sift vast amounts of electronic information with a proposed system known as ‘Trailblazer,'” according to Chesterman's work.

“Between 2002 and 2005, the project's $280 million budget ballooned to over $1 billion and was later described as a ‘complete and abject failure'. Perhaps the most spectacular such failure was Boeing's Future Imagery Architecture, a 1999 contract with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) to design a new generation of spy satellites. It was finally cancelled in 2005 after approximately ten billion dollars had been spent. Nevertheless the pool of potential contractors — in particular given the requirement for security clearances — remains small. Thus when the NSA sought a replacement to the failed Trailblazer, the contractor it retained to develop the new programme ExecuteLocus was SAIC.”

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2012/10/14

DefDog: Reuters – Western Defense Cuts May Be Unstoppable – The Era of Rising Spending on Weapons and Wars is Over

Commerce, Economics/True Cost, Government, Military

Western defense budget cuts may be unstoppable

Companies, governments already preparing for reduced military spending

Peter Apps,, updated 10/13/2012

WASHINGTON — Whether or not America's politicians can find a way to sidestep the brutal automatic military cuts of sequestration, the era of rising Western spending on weapons and wars is over.

That reality increasingly is challenging major arms manufacturers, spurring them to look for new markets, cost cuts and mergers. It is also confronting policymakers with difficult political and strategic choices as new rivals, particularly China, spend more on their armed forces.

U.S. military spending still dwarfs that of other countries – the equivalent of the next 13 nations' spending by some estimates – but the global military balance is clearly shifting. With European states already cutting, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies this year reported that Asian military spending outstripped Europe's for the first time in several centuries.

Read full article.

2012/10/13

Winslow Wheeler: Facts on US Military “Superiority”

Corruption, Idiocy, Ineptitude, Military

WinslowWheeler Cropped — Winslow Wheeler

Are US armed forces “the best in the world”? What makes you think so?

Not All That It Can Be

The myth of American military superiority.

WINSLOW WHEELER

Foreign Policy | OCTOBER 11, 2012

EXTRACT:

We also heard a lot of bombast after the first war with Iraq, Operation Desert Storm in 1991; then, the technologists declared a “revolution in military affairs.” The Government Accountability Office (GAO) spent two years looking at that: The air campaign should more accurately be characterized as bombing a tethered goat led by a military jackass, and even then, the air campaign did not live up to the hype. The high-cost “silver bullet” of the war, the F-117 stealth light bomber, badly underperformed its puffery. For example, in contrast to claims that “alone and unafraid” it destroyed Saddam's air defense system in the first hours of the first night, the F-117s actually had help from 167 non-stealthy aircraft and were confirmed by the Defense Intelligence Agency's bomb-damage assessments to have effectively destroyed only two of the 15 air defense targets assigned to them that first night. Overall, the GAO found that effectiveness did not correlate with cost and that on many dimensions the ultralow-cost A-10 close-combat attack aircraft was the top performer.

Full article below the line.

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