Like the horsemeat scandal in Europe this report on fake pharmaceuticals shows what happens when appropriate regulation is not maintained, because industries capture the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us, and the Congress is in the pocket of those industries as well. Once again we face the bitter fruit produced by anti-regulations forces. The t! ruth is we have become a thoroughly corrupted nation and, until we find the strength to speak truth to power it will only continue.
The risks of fake and flawed medicines have leapt from developing nations to Western supply chains, thanks to gaps in oversight of drug wholesalers, lax law enforcement, and ineffective tactics for tracking drugs as they change hands, according to a report released Wednesday by the Institute of Medicine.
‘It’s distressing to see vividly just how huge a problem it is in the United States,” said Larry Gostin, a Georgetown University law professor and World Health Organization adviser who led the study. ‘It’s more lucrative to traffic in illegitimate drugs than cocaine or heroin,” he said.
The Russian system is beginning to decay. It cannot sustain the crumbling status quo, nor can it be certain of finding a new incarnation for itself. The only real questions are what stage of decay the system is in, whether the agony of its final demise has already started, and, if so, how long it will last.
To be sure, the system still has some resources, if not to revive itself, then to draw out its death, and that survival instinct could take a nasty, even bloody, form.
The Future of the Russian Matrix
The system can still reproduce itself through regime change and the emergence of a new Leader, who will personify authoritarian rule.
It can't be excluded that the forces who present themselves as “liberal,” declaring the need to “influence” the system from within and supporting “partial” changes, will try to highjack the protest movement and reestablish personalized power under liberal slogans.
Most certainly, any new attempt to breathe life into the rotting Matrix will necessarily involve coercion in order to preserve its power.
Prospects for Change
For the first time in its long history, Russian society is ready to free itself from the stifling embrace of the Russian system and of the political regime that is its engine, and to accept new rules of the game.
It is true that only a minority is ready to publicly stand up for a state based on the rule of law. It is more important, however, that the idea of the new order is not rejected by the vast majority of Russians, and they are ready to accept it, if it is offered to them.
At this point, however, the demoralized and corrupt Russian ruling elite is not ready for any change that will endanger its monopoly and its corporate and personal interests.
For its part, the Russian opposition, still weak and fragmented, has so far failed to present society with a viable agenda for an exit solution.
However, there is no doubt that Russia's moment of truth is fast approaching. The question is whether the confluence of several specific factors will occur in the same time frame and in the not too distant future. These factors include:
public pressure on the regime;
the consolidation of the non-system opposition;
the split of the ruling elite, with its pragmatic part joining the opposition;
the power structures' reluctance to defend the old order; and
the creation by the opposition of a “road map” for the transition to the new rules of the game that will include Constitutional reform and a new state structure.
Failure to reach these goals will deepen the rot and/or implosion of the system and the state.
Read rest of report.
Phi Beta Iota: Carnegie has written a perfect self-description of the USA. They will never admit this, and no one in a position of power is capable of actually connecting to the truth even if the US intelligence community were capable of presenting the truth — as Daniel Ellsberg lectured Henry Kissinger:
The danger is, you’ll become like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours” [because of your blind faith in the value of your narrow and often incorrect secret information].
The Joint Chiefs of Staff testified to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees this week arguing that unless their budgets are augmented with still more money they will hollow out the armed forces. Most in the press and Congress didn't read their assertions that way, but two near simultaneous reports that provide some meaningful context for the Chiefs' demands recently became public. They put the Chiefs' behavior in a very different light.
America's generals are just as morally bankrupt as Congress.
BY WINSLOW WHEELER
Foreign Policy | FEBRUARY 14, 2013
I read two critically important reports this week on the impact that sequestration would have on national defense. That possible reduction in military spending — $48 billion, or 7.4 percent of the $645 billion currently appropriated for fiscal year 2013 — is being characterized by the stampede of hysterics who run the Pentagon as the virtual end of national security as we know it. What these two reports show is that we should now consider the Pentagon as morally and mentally broken as Congress.
The first report, by Chuck Spinney, who spent a few decades inside the Department of Defense evaluating budgets, weapons, and bureaucratic behavior, was published at Counterpunch and Time's Battleland blog. The second was a Congressional Research Service report by Amy Belasco, who has spent the last few decades at CRS and the Congressional Budget Office parsing defense budgets and their implications.
Both authors indirectly address the testimony this week of the deputy secretary of defense and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff at the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. To a man, they lent all the rhetorical and substantive support they could muster to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's depiction of sequestration as “doomsday” and to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey's description of it as an “unprecedented crisis” — a characterization he augmented by adding that he was “jumping up and down.” He truly was.
Put simply, the chiefs and their ostensible civilian masters plan to implement the cuts mandated by law in the most destructive, negative way possible, which has the convenient effect — for them — of pushing Congress and the White House to cough up more money. According to their testimony, the Army will reduce training levels to such a low point that units cannot be sent to Afghanistan. The Navy plans to postpone, if not cancel, maintenance for ships in a fleet already at historic lows for upkeep and repair, and deployments to the Persian Gulf have already been postponed. The Air Force is going to further reduce its historically low training of pilots, and maintenance will also hit new lows. Throughout the services, civilian maintainers, auditors, and program overseers will be furloughed, aircraft will be grounded, and ships held in port.
The Subprime Mortgage Crisis: A Perfect Example of the Potential Benefits of Open-Source Governance in the Real World
The article: The Nature and Origin of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, (San Jose State University Department of Economics) says,”The guilt for the subprime mortgage financial crisis lies both with the lenders who knowingly put borrowers into booby trapped mortgages and the management of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for making a market for such booby trapped mortgages thus giving the lenders the incentive for writing them.”
The article goes on to say, “It seems that everyone but the dimwits running Fannie Mae (into the ground) understood intuitively that a poor risk for a mortgage cannot be made a better risk by charging a higher interest rate.”
Of course its a complex problem, with many parties to blame (the article goes on to say). But if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had been required to post their data online where the general public could access it, some citizen would have seen the mortgage crisis coming. And if there had been an open-source forum where they could drawn attention to the problem, and an open-source vehicle for proposing a solution, or at least writing up some kind of formal complaint to the government, then the disaster might have been averted before it grew so immense.
Little by little science is showing us that all life is interconnected and interdependent, refuting the corporate exploiters' proposition that nature is just an unconscious bank account of resources. This is one of the major reasons the Right's disinformation machine has sought to unde! rmine a fact based world.
This is why the U.S. has been so slow to deal with climate change. This is the funding source of the disinformation campaign that has crippled good sense. This is also a significant part of the reason the Republican Party has become what it is today. Notice that once again to get an accounting of what is going on I had to go to a non-U.S. source.
Yet another facet of the vast Far Right funding apparat that is responsible for changing the fabric of America. This is what Citizens United permitted to blossom like an evil growth.
Mali: Special comment. Western news reporters have discovered in Timbuktu confidential guidance documents that the fleeing jihadists failed to destroy.
On the 13th The Telegraph reported that one of its reporters had discovered some confidential documents in the building used by the jihadists in Timbuktu as their command post. One was an account of a meeting in March 2012, but only the first page survived.
According to The Telegraph, the one page document confirmed that al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb had decided to take command and control of all operations in the Sahara. The Telegraph reporter observed that al Qaida seemed to be very bureaucratic.
Like the horsemeat scandal in Europe this report on fake pharmaceuticals shows what happens when appropriate regulation is not maintained, because industries capture the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us, and the Congress is in the pocket of those industries as well. Once again we face the bitter fruit produced by anti-regulations forces. The t! ruth is we have become a thoroughly corrupted nation and, until we find the strength to speak truth to power it will only continue.
