Corruption – Page 651 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/09/252012/09/25

Penguin: Bandi Mbubi at TED – Demand a Fair Trade Cell Phone

02 Diplomacy, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Liberation Technology

Your mobile phone, computer and game console have a bloody past — tied to tantalum mining, which funds the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Drawing on his personal story, activist and refugee Bandi Mbubi gives a stirring call to action. (Filmed at TEDxExeter.) Bandi Mbubi would like to make sure that you are using a fair trade cell phone.

Bandi Mbubi grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, experiencing first hand the political unrest and oppression which have since worsened there. As a student activist, Bandi suffered persecution and fled the country, seeking political asylum in the U.K. But Mbubi has kept his home country on his radar, noting how the mining of tantalum — a mineral used in cell phones and computers — has fueled the ongoing war there in which 5 million have died.

While Mbubi sees the cell phone as an instrument of oppression for this reason, he knows that phones can also bring great freedom. And so he has formed CongoCalling.org, a campaign to inspire both the public and companies that make electronics to pay attention to how tantalum used in consumer electronics is mined and traded.

Mbubi is also the Director of the Manna Society, a center for the homeless in South London, and a Trustee of Church Action on Poverty.

TED Video (9:22)

2012/09/252012/09/25

Eagle: Oil Lies, Oil Spills – Technology Sucks, Human Intelligence Rules

05 Energy, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government

1) All stakeholders in the Keystone Pipeline are lying to the public. There are THREE sucking chest wounds in the Keystone Pipeline proposal: a) Canada cannot afford to use clean water it is running out of, to flush tar sands no one needs; and the USA does not need any more oil. b) The pipeline will NOT create jobs and it will be a curse to every community anywhere near it, externalizing costs to everyone along the way. c) The legacy refineries are lying in order to get the public to pay the cost of delivering very dirty crude that they will refine for EXPORT.

2) Technology does NOT work as claimed.

3) Human intelligence rules again. What is LACKING is integrity at all points of the compass.

Few Oil Pipeline Spills Detected by Much-Touted Technology

InsideClimate News analysis of a decade of federal data shows general public detected far more spills than leak detection technology.

EXTRACT:

Between 2002 and July 2012, remote sensors detected only 5 percent of the nation's pipeline spills, according to data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).

The general public reported 22 percent of the spills during that period. Pipeline company employees at the scenes of accidents reported 62 percent.

Anthony Swift, an attorney who has spent years researching pipeline safety for the Natural Resources Defense Council, was taken aback by the findings. Swift's organization opposes the Keystone XL, and he said he had always known that leak detection systems didn't catch most of the spills. But “the fact that 19 out of 20 leaks aren't caught is surprising, and certainly runs counter to a lot of rhetoric we hear from the industry,” he said.

Read full article.

2012/09/252012/09/25

Jon Lebkowsky: Bad Pharma – Lacking Intelligence AND Integrity

Commerce, Corruption, Economics/True Cost, Government, IO Impotency, Knowledge

According to Cory Doctorow at bOING bOING, physicians often prescribe drugs that are ineffective or harmful because pharmaceutical companies provide misleading data, according to an article by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian, “The drugs don’t work: a modern medical scandal.” Goldacre is the author of the forthcoming book Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. Summary from the caption on the photo above Goldacre’s article: “Drugs are tested by their manufacturers, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques that exaggerate the benefits.”

It’s a tough problem: you depend on your physician’s authority, and the authority of the healthcare establishment, to guide your decisions about health. Even if you trust your physician, can you trust the voices persistently whispering in his ear, especially if those voices are motivated by profit as a priority. Do pharma companies place their profit above your health? Don’t assume an easy answer – it’s complicated, though Goldacre’s book blurb suggests a belief that pharma uses the complexity as a cloak (“All these problems have been protected from public scrutiny because they’re too complex to capture in a sound bite.”)

Continue reading “Jon Lebkowsky: Bad Pharma – Lacking Intelligence AND Integrity”

2012/09/242012/09/24

Berto Jongman: US Military Game Plan for Defeating Militia Occupation on US Soil — Being Read in Europe

Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Ineptitude, Military

This has been noticed. Of course we have no direct knowledge.

US Army Training and Doctrine Command, The Army Operating Concept 2016 – 2028, TRADOC Pamphlet 525-3-1, dated 19 August 2010, p. iii. Hereafter cited as TD Pam 525-3-1. The Army defines full spectrum operations as the combination of offensive, defensive, and either stability operations overseas or civil support operations on U.S. soil.

Full Spectrum Operations in the Homeland: A “Vision” of the Future (Small Wars Journal, 25 July 2012)

In this paper, we posit a scenario in which a group of political reactionaries take over a strategically positioned town and have the tacit support of not only local law enforcement but also state government officials, right up to the governor. Under present law, which initially stemmed from bad feelings about Reconstruction, the military’s domestic role is highly circumscribed. In the situation we lay out below, even though the governor refuses to seek federal help to quell the uprising (the usual channel for military assistance), the Constitution allows the president broad leeway in times of insurrection.

Military Will Defeat Any Militia Type Rebellion On US Soil According To Study (OpEdNews, 24 September 2012)

Report Will Make Every American Well Rehearsed In What Our Government & Military Is Prepared To Do If Ever Confronted With Homegrown Insurgents

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: US Military Game Plan for Defeating Militia Occupation on US Soil — Being Read in Europe”

2012/09/24

Gold Transformer: Federal Reserve Transparency Ploy, End of the Middle Period in Predatory Central Banking — Fed Cannot Account for $9 Trillion + Meta-RECAP

Commerce, Corruption, Economics/True Cost

Ben Bernanke's Fed Transparency … Transparent Ploy?

Monday, September 24, 2012 – by Staff Report

Under Ben Bernanke, a more open and forceful Federal Reserve … In what might be his final years as chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben S. Bernanke is transforming the U.S. central bank, seeking to shed its reclusive habits and make it a constant presence in bolstering the economy. The new approach would make the Fed's policies more responsive to the needs of the economy — and likely more forceful, because what the Fed is planning to do would be much clearer. A key feature of the strategy would be producing a detailed set of scenarios for when and how the Fed would intervene, which would mark a dramatic shift for an organization that throughout its history has been famously opaque. – Washington Post

Dominant Social Theme: The Federal Reserve is maturing with the times.

Free Market Analysis: More Fed promotions; it never ceases, of course. Control money and you control society. And those “in charge” have a vested interest in ensuring the social solvency of the Fed.

We were on record years ago with the idea that the Fed had lost its moral authority in this Internet era. And we see no reason to revise our view. The Fed and its leader, Ben Bernanke, are flagellated every day by both the mainstream and the alternative media, deservedly so. And yet in the 20th century this was not the case.

Of course, there was no outlet in the 20th century. The mainstream press controlled pretty much all the information when it came to central banking and thus there wasn't much launched that was critical of the current system.

That all changed in the 21st century with what we call the Internet Reformation and now information on the real role of central banking in the world's larger economy is fairly well disseminated.

Beginning of the End? Fed Cannot Account for $9 Trillion

Continue reading “Gold Transformer: Federal Reserve Transparency Ploy, End of the Middle Period in Predatory Central Banking — Fed Cannot Account for $9 Trillion + Meta-RECAP”

2012/09/242012/09/24

Chuck Spinney: US Economy Still Hollow, Election Will Not Change That Fact

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, Commerce, Corruption, Government, IO Impotency

Who Will Create More Jobs: Romney or Obama?

Why It's a Distinction Without a Difference

by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY

CounterPunch, 24 September 2012

My prediction: The eventual answer will turn out to be a distinction without a difference. Here’s why.

Both political parties and their candidates for President now accept neoliberal ideology as being the incontrovertible truth. This belief is more theological than scientific, because neoliberalism has a thirty year track record of not producing the high-paying jobs for the middle class its promisers say it will produce. Quite the reverse would be a more accurate description.

According to neoliberal dogma, the only way to stimulate the growth of high-paying jobs for Americans is to unleash the private sector by getting government off the back of business. Therefore, given this truism, the government’s economic purpose is simply to make it easier for the private sector to invest in productive capacity at home — or to use a popular but vacuous buzzword: to invest in the ‘supply side’ of the economy.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: US Economy Still Hollow, Election Will Not Change That Fact”

2012/09/24

Theophillis Goodyear: How American Democracy Became the Property of a Commercial Oligarchy

Civil Society, Corruption, Government, Politics

Feast of Fools: How American Democracy Became the Property of a Commercial Oligarchy

Huffington Post, 20 August 2012

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

[A longer version of this essay appears in “Politics,” the Fall 2012 issue of Lapham's Quarterly; this slightly shortened version is posted at TomDispatch.com with the kind permission of that magazine.]

All power corrupts but some must govern. — John le Carré

The ritual performance of the legend of democracy in the autumn of 2012 promises the conspicuous consumption of $5.8 billion, enough money, thank God, to prove that our flag is still there. Forbidden the use of words apt to depress a Q Score or disturb a Gallup poll, the candidates stand as product placements meant to be seen instead of heard, their quality to be inferred from the cost of their manufacture. The sponsors of the event, generous to a fault but careful to remain anonymous, dress it up with the bursting in air of star-spangled photo ops, abundant assortments of multiflavored sound bites, and the candidates so well-contrived that they can be played for jokes, presented as game-show contestants, or posed as noble knights-at-arms setting forth on vision quests, enduring the trials by klieg light, until on election night they come to judgment before the throne of cameras by whom and for whom they were produced.

Best of all, at least from the point of view of the commercial oligarchy paying for both the politicians and the press coverage, the issue is never about the why of who owes what to whom, only about the how much and when, or if, the check is in the mail. No loose talk about what is meant by the word democracy or in what ways it refers to the cherished hope of liberty embodied in the history of a courageous people.

Read full article.