Frustration with poor managers is costing the CIA some of its most talented staff, internal surveys and former officers say.
By Ken Dilanian
Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2013
WASHINGTON — For the Central Intelligence Agency, he was a catch: an American citizen who had grown up overseas, was fluent in Mandarin and had a master's degree in his field. He was working in Silicon Valley, but after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he wanted to serve his country.
The analyst, who declined to be named to shield his association with the CIA, was hired in 2005 into the agency's Directorate of Intelligence, where he was assigned to dig into Chinese politics. He said he was dismayed to discover that unimpressive managers wielded incredible power and suffered no consequences for mistakes. Departments were run like fiefdoms, he said, and “very nasty internecine battles” were a fixture.
By 2009, he had left the CIA. He now does a similar job for the U.S. military.
Are healthcare costs in developed countries simply opportunistic? One Indian healthcare entrepreneur thinks so.
Devi Shetty, heart surgeon turned businessman, has a vision for India — cut-price, life-saving surgery for those who cannot afford it otherwise. Shetty has created 21 healthcare centers around India with a difference; by trimming down operational costs, the price of artery-clearing coronary bypass surgery has been sliced in half in the last two decades.
In the surgeon’s centers, cardiac surgery costs 95,000 rupees ($1,583).
Does the US Intelligence Community have NSA-sourced leverage that allows it to avoid — to refuse — being sequestered? Is there a shadow government? These are questions asked on this program. Is Dick Cheney still in charge? What's different? “The Orwellian scale.” “Post office taking a photo of every envelope.”
Despite consumer confidence at a six-year high, the latest AP survey of the real America shows a stunning four out of five U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, are near poverty, or rely on welfare for at least parts of their lives amid signs of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream. Hardship is particularly on the rise among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among whites about their families' economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987.
“Poverty is no longer an issue of ‘them', it's an issue of ‘us',” as ‘the invisible poor' – lower income whites – are generally dispersed in suburbs (Appalachia, the industrial Midwest, and across America's heartland, from Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma up through the Great Plains) where more than 60% of the poor are white.
More than 19 million whites fall below the poverty line of $23,021 for a family of four – accounting for more than 41% of the nation's destitute – nearly double the number of poor blacks and as one survey respondent noted “I think it's going to get worse.”
This is a really good take on what is happening financially, and why it has a deadening effect on technological development. When immediate profit is your only priority, there are no correcting forces, and you slowly go off course in terms of wellness. Until you crash. We ask the wrong questions so we get the wrong answers.Author’s note: This post is based on papers presented and remarks made during a *conference panel I moderated featuring William Lazonick of U Mass-Lowell, Jan Kregel of the Levy Institute and Damon Silvers of the AFL-CIO.
Note how the information in this NYT report is consistent with a need for even greater surveillance of John Q Average American. This helps to prop up the establishment’s panicky pushback against the growing populist threat to rein in NSA’s snooping that became so evident in the surprisingly narrow defeat of the Amash Amendment — a panic which Blumenthal noted was also on display in the Snowden angst pervading Aspen.
Now think of the unstated elegance implicit in the closed loop of the snooping mentality on display in these two reports: The US and its European establishments (and the Sunni Gulf Monarchies) stoke up a sectarian revolt against Syrian President Assad. Predictably, the best fighters in the revolt are radical Sunni Jihadis, many of whom were trained by our wars in Iraq and Libya and perhaps Afghanistan. Also predictably, given Jihadi spillover from Libya, the radical Jihadis take over the Syrian revolt. The US and Europeans now claim these Syrian Jihadis are attracting Jihadi wannabees from the West (also predictable), who may return to the Europe and US, where they can use their enhanced terrorist skills and Al Qaida connections to wreak havoc at home. Therefore, given the new domestic threat created by the Establishment's policies of perpetual war, we need to increase NSA surveillance (really data mining) capabilities to sniff out indicators of prospective terrorist behaviour at home. Naturally, to do this, we must accept the greatly increased risks of false positives* implicit in all data mining schemes, because they all rely on the mechanistic assumption that the targets of the mining action will not bother to modify their behaviour sufficiently to neutralize their identification by the data mining algorithm or template. (A rather peculiar assumption given the proactive conspiratorial confrontation dynamics so pervasive throughout the Middle East.)
Of course, these legal niceties of avoiding false positives are irrelevant, because thanks to the Patriot (Enabling?) Act, we can detain targets without charging them, and besides, the real threats to be neutralized are the outliers at home who are trying to defend and anachronistic Fourth Amendment like Congressmen Amash and Conyers. So, a few more false positives of innocent John Q. Average Americans are merely collateral damage that must be accepted in the defense of ‘freedom' in the perpetual wars of American Empire.
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* A false positive occurs when a statistical deduction tells you something is true when it is in reality not true. Finding an innocent man guilty of a crime is a false positive, and it is no accident that most legal systems in democracies are premised, at least in theory, on a value system that it is more important to avoid false positives and than false negatives (i.e. it is more important not to convict and innocent person than to fail to convict a guilty person)
WASHINGTON — A rising number of radicalized young Muslims with Western passports are traveling to Syria to fight with the rebels against the government of Bashar al-Assad, raising fears among American and European intelligence officials of a new terrorist threat when the fighters return home.
The income of the average American family is nine per cent lower than it was a decade ago, and it gets harder and harder to get a job. And now this survey showing that young adults, even when they have some work, are working full-time jobs less and less.
DENNIS JACOBE, Chief Economist – The Gallup Organization
WORSE:
We have reached the Orwellian state of continuous war. Who are we fighting? That's a secret. You are required to pay for it, but you are not entitled to know.
