Category: Corruption

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Michel Bauwens: Reclaiming the Right to Insolvency

Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
Michel Bauwens

Reclaiming the Right to Insolvency

 

Michel Bauwens
5th December 2011

Excerpted from Franco Berardi:

“A new concept is coming out from the fogs of the present situation: a right to insolvency. We’ll not pay the debt.

The European countries have been obliged to accept the blackmail of debt, but people are refusing the concept that we have to pay for a debt that we have not taken. Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Debt the first 5000 years, (Melville House, 2011), and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, in La fabrique de l’homme endetté (editions Amsterdam, 2011), have started an interesting reflection on the cultural origin of the notion of debt, and the psychic implications of the sense of guilt that the notion of debt brings in itself. And, in his essay, Recurring Dreams The Red Heart of Fascism, the Anglo-Italian young thinker Federico Campagna locates the analogy between the post Versailles Congress years and the present in the debt-obsession:

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  Gripping.  Mankind is at a philosophical turning point.  Organized people are confronting organized money, and the integrity of humanity is in the balance.

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DefDog: SASC Questions Sanity of Pentagon InfoOps

Corruption, Government, IO Impotency, Military
DefDog

The Pentagon may have hit a speed bump in the expansion of its growing worldwide information operations…………

A speed bump for Pentagon’s information ops

The Pentagon may have hit a speed bump in the expansion of its growing worldwide information operations.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has asked Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to assess the effectiveness of a series of news and information Web sites that have been initiated by U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in recent years in a bid to counter extremist messaging. The so-called “influence Web sites” are maintained by various overseas commands and operated by defense contractors.

For fiscal 2012, SOCOM sought $22.6 million in the Overseas Contingency Operations account — primarily intended to fund the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — for the initiative.

Congress, over the past few years, has been pressing the Pentagon to justify the hundreds of millions of dollars spent overseas under various headings such as “strategic communications” and “information operations.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  No one now serving in the US Government actually has a clue what Information Operations (IO) should be, because no one now serving in the US Government can combine intelligence and integrity to get to holistic analytics with deep “true cost” data.  IO is all information in all languages all the time.  Secret intelligence is 10% of all-source intelligence and all-source intelligence is 10% of IO.  IO includes policy, acquisition, and operations feed-back loops that must be transparent, truthful, and replete with trust–that pretty much eliminates ALL inter-agency and intra-agency information.  We've learned nothing since 1992.

See Also:

2011 Cyber-Command or IO 21 + IO Roots

2011 from 1999: Setting the Stage for Information-Sharing in the 21 st Century (Full Text Online)

2008: Creating a Smart Nation (Full Text Online for Google Translate)

Paul Fernhout: Open Letter to the Intelligence Advanced Programs Research Agency (IARPA)

Search: Steele USMC C4I 1990′s

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DefDog: War with Iran? Opening Pandora’s Box!

02 Diplomacy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
DefDog

Has the War with Iran Already Begun?

The evidence of an extensive Western covert program against Tehran, and Iranian retaliation, is now too obvious to ignore

Michael Hirsh

National Journal, 4 December 2011

Two incidents that occurred on Sunday—Iran’s claim of a shoot-down of a U.S. drone, and an explosion outside the British embassy in Bahrain—may have been unrelated. But they appear to add to growing evidence that an escalating covert war by the West is under way against Iran, and that Tehran is retaliating with greater intensity than ever.

Asked whether the United States, in cooperation with Israel, was now engaged in a covert war against Iran’s nuclear program that may include the Stuxnet virus, the blowing-up of facilities and the assassination or kidnapping of scientists, one recently retired U.S. official privy to up-to-date intelligence would not deny it.

Read full article.

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John Steiner: US Chamber of Commerce – Kill It?

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Non-Governmental, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
John Steiner

Click here to sign your name:
“Google, stand up for democracy and your users—quit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce!”

Dear MoveOn member,

Right now we have a huge opportunity to deal what's being called a “serious blow to one of Washington's most powerful lobbies.”1

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is an army of lobbyists for hire by mega-corporations like banks and those in the fossil fuel industry. In 2009, it spent more corporate money on lobbying than the next five biggest spenders combined.2 And 93% of its campaign spending goes to support Republicans and attack Democrats.3

Google is a paying member of the Chamber, which means that part of the money they make from Google users—ordinary people like us using Gmail, Google search, and other Google products—goes into the Chamber's pockets to fight for Wall Street and Big Oil. But the Washington Post and Politico recently reported that at Google headquarters, employees are intensely debating whether Google should quit the Chamber in the next few weeks.4

Continue reading “John Steiner: US Chamber of Commerce – Kill It?”

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Steve Denning: Itemization of How We Blew Up the World

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, Analysis, Blog Wisdom, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Policy, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Steve Denning

Lest We Forget: Why We Had A Financial Crisis

Steve Denning

Forbes, 22 November 2011

When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this infallible sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

Jonathan Swift

It is clear to anyone who has studied the financial crisis of 2008 that the private sector’s drive for short-term profit was behind it. More than 84 percent of the sub-prime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending. These private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year. Out of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006, only one was subject to the usual mortgage laws and regulations. The nonbank underwriters made more than 12 million subprime mortgages with a value of nearly $2 trillion. The lenders who made these were exempt from federal regulations.

How then could the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg say the following at a business breakfast in mid-town Manhattan on November 1, 2011?

It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I’m not saying I’m sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn’t have gotten them without that. But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it’s one target, it’s easy to blame them and Congress certainly isn’t going to blame themselves.”

Barry Ritholtz in the Washington Post calls the notion that the US Congress was behind the financial crisis of 2008 “the Big Lie”. As we have seen in other contexts, if a lie is big enough, people begin to believe it.

Full Story Below the Line with BLOCKBUSTER Itemization

Continue reading “Steve Denning: Itemization of How We Blew Up the World”

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Mini-Me: US Gasoline Exports–Reason for Tar Sands Fraud

03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 05 Energy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, Government, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Who? Mini-Me?

Gasoline: The new big U.S. export

Steve Hargreaves

CNN Money, 5 December 2011

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — The United States is awash in gasoline. So much so, in fact, that the country is exporting a record amount of it.

The country exported 430,000 more barrels of gasoline a day than it imported in September, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That is about twice the amount at the start of the year, and experts and industry insiders say the trend is here to stay.

The United States began exporting gas in late 2008. For decades prior, starting in 1960, the country used all the gas it produced here plus had to import gas from places in Europe.

But demand for gas has dropped nearly 10% in recent years. It went from a peak of 9.6 million barrels a day in 2007 to 8.8 million barrels today, according to the EIA.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  The entire Tar Sands scheme is a scam on the US public, and atrocity against the Canadian public.  In Canada, they are proposing to use precious water they do not have to spare, to flush tar we do not need out of the sands; in the US, there is no need for the tar sands as the sleazy campaigns suggest, the oil companies want the tar sands so they can externalize the costs to the US public and privatize the profits of exporting the gasoline.

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Josh Kilbourn: 46 Million Americans on Foodstamps

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Government
Joshua Kilbourn

Over 46 Million Americans On Foodstamps For The First Time Ever

Tyler Durden

Zerohedge.com, 12/05/2011

While the capital markets may be cheering that in the past month 120,000 people supposedly found jobs, even if these were largely temporary or part-time just in time for the year end shopping sprees, we wonder how they will react when learning that according to the latest update from the Supplemental Nutrition

Click on Image

Assistance Program (SNAP), some 423,000 Americans found their way to minimum way subsistence, courtesy of Food Stamp handouts from Uncle Sam. Since the start of the Second Great Depression, food stamp participation has increased by 18.7 million, and is now at an all time higher 46.3 million. All Bush's fault, or something. At least the chart below appears to be plateauing… Actually, sorry, no isn't.

See Also:

Food Stamp Use Surges By Most In Years As Alabama Foodstamp Recipients Double In May

US Food Stamp Usage Hits New Record

6M young U.S. adults live with their parents

Cost of federal unemployment benefits so far: $434 billion

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