The disclosure comes after the head of Pakistani intelligence abruptly cut short a trip to Washington this week after meeting with CIA director Leon Panetta yesterday.
Phi Beta Iota: We know that US intelligence is failing to provide more than 4% “at best” of what commander and policy makers need. That makes $80-90 billion a year a hot prospect for cuts. To have this fraud, waste, and domestic abuse compounded by its use–with the willful orders of the White House and the impeachable neglect of the Congress–within another sovereign country whose permission has NOT been secured, suggests that a total draw-down of inept and expensive and offensive US intelligence operations should join the closure of US military bases overseas as part of the total “first phase” of budget cuts. What US secret intelligence does “in our name” dishonors the Republic, it does NOT secure anything.
Members of Waziristan Students Federation chant slogan during a rally to condemn US drone attacks in Waziristan tribal regions, on March 19, in Peshawar, Pakistan. Mohammad Sajjad/AP
The internet means that many time-consuming forms of white-collar drudgery have disappeared, or at least been offloaded to cheaper people who aren't you, permitting you to spend more time on things that are actually productive and highly leveraged.
No more standing in line at the copier, trudging to the Fedex box, waiting two weeks for a letter to be returned, leaving voice mails, searching for the right person to contact, waiting months to learn a skill or a fact, discovering that a project is hopelessly broken, and on and on.
It's a little like the bump we got after the Cold War ended. The peace dividend was there, just waiting for us to repurpose our military, our military budget and our military research. We didn't. We squandered the window, wasted the money and didn't rush to fill it with the sort of top-down industrial projects (like high speed rail and efficient new forms of energy) that could have changed everything.
So, what are you going to do with the digital dividend? Cruise Facebook?
Phi Beta Iota: The blatant dishonesty of the US Government is breath-taking in that it fails to inspire a public backlash. Instead of spending $12 billion a year on Internet freedom, it spends it on corporate vapor-ware ostensibly to achieve cyber-security. NEWS FLASH: The current grid is impossible to defend and not worth defending; what we can steal is not worth the cost or time. For the public to not realize that one third of the federal budget, over one trillion a year is borrowed, and to allow the “debate” to be about less than $100 million, suggests that the US public has the government it deserves: the stupid “led” by the unethical.
Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari was held in a Tehran jail for 118 days in 2009. His arrest came as he worked for western media outlets, including BBC Panorama. In this analysis, Mr Bahari explains why the regime fears information, the internet and a free press.
“Information is a weapon, and in the wrong hands it is even more dangerous than a real gun!”
This was my torturer's message to me in the summer of 2009 after my arrest.
Relying on a UN Security Council Resolution, but without asking Congress or the American people, President Obama attacked Libya on 19 Mar 2011. He finally got around to explaining his actions on 28 March 2011 in a nationally televised speech given at the National Defense University. Attached below are two analyses of that speech:
Story 1 by Ed Felien appeared in The Rag Blog on April 5, a spunky left-leaning website based in the hinterlands of Austen Texas. It is harshly critical of the speech by comparing Obama's assertions to conditions in Libya and the tensions within Libya that have created a civil war.
Story 2 by Anne Marie Slaughter appeared in the the New York Review of Books blog on 20 March 2011. The New York Review of Books appeals to a far more high-falutin readership than The Rag Blog, and is a kind of a forum for the panjandrums in what's left of the American Left. Dr. Slaughter gushes over Obama's speech, saying it made an “important contribution to the Libya debate.” She bases her conclusion (“let us protect the Libya's civilians by any means necessary”) by analyzing (a word I use charitably) some impenetrable comparisons of interests versus interests to interests versus values, but curiously, she says nothing about actual conditions in Libya, or who is fighting whom, or why they are fighting.
The contrast between information and puffery in these two essays is stunning and says a lot about what's wrong with the American Left.
Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Slaughter means well, but has drunk the kool-aid. No one in Washington appears capable of reconnecting with reality and using clarity, diversity, and integrity to actually understand how far the US Government has diverged from core values of the Republic, and the public interest. The right/neo-conservatives have cost the US tens of trillions of dollars in fraud, waste, and abuse–Dick Cheney and the Iraq/Afghanistan faux wars on terror being the current classic–but so also has the left/Demopublicans so intent on keeping their own money flowing they have completely lost sight of basic principles of governance. These are all good people trapped in a bad system–all it takes to fix this is ONE LEADER committed to transparency, the truth, and trust. Barack Obama is clearly NOT that leader.
The last time the price of oil topped $100 a barrel for an extended period, we ended up in a global financial meltdown. Is this time any different?
Not much.
All of the excessively financial leverage and fraudelent derivative wealth we had during the last melt down is still in place. Total debt to GDP levels in the US are about the same (370% of GDP or so). No reforms were made on Wall Street. Nobody at fault for the fraud that led to the last melt down went to jail, so behaviors haven't changed.
This is classic Tainter (the excellent anthropoligist/historian). He posited that complex societies only collapse when the costs of basic inputs increase at the same time the returns on investments in complex institutions/etc. turn negative. So, with oil going up again, we are seeing basic input costs rise. It's also clear that our twin overheads Government and Global Finance are well past the point they delivered positive returns for additional complexity. Worse, they are colluding, via cronyism, to prevent any meaningful changes.
The discussion of corruption–and the urgency of reasserting integrity–permeates this website.
Here are a general comment and a few links.
General comment: Corruption consists of a lack of integrity, which in turn is not just about dishonesty, but about a failure to achieve transparency, truth, trust, and accurate feedback loops. The cost of corruption, calculated in terms of waste, is at least 50% and could be as high as 75%. In the US, on Capitol Hill, the known kick-back for earmarks seen to allocation is 2-5%. In fairness to the lobbyists, they are not offering the money, they are being shaken down by Senators and Representatives. It is the lack of integrity in government that makes the lack of integrity in the private sector so pervasive. What we do know is in the first two links. The first documents health waste, the second the cost of peace versus war (one third).
The first is “A revolution against neoliberalism” by Abu Atris, it appeared in Al Jazeera on 24 Feb. The second is “Of the 1%, by the 1%, and for the 1%” by Joseph Stiglitz. One is about the Arab Revolt in Egypt and the other is about income inequality in the United States … they raise stunningly similar — and very disturbing — themes when compared to each other. I urge readers to read each carefully and think about the likenesses and differences between them.
Americans have been watching protests against oppressive regimes that concentrate massive wealth in the hands of an elite few. Yet in our own democracy, 1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income—an inequality even the wealthy will come to regret.
Maziar Bahari faces jail if he returns to Iran
