Watchdog Group Files Formal Complaints To Disbar And Prosecute Clarence Thomas For 20 Years Of False Statements, Financial Conflicts Of Interest, And Using His Decisions On The Supreme Court To Enrich His Wife
Pressure Building On Department Of Justice To Take Action
Washington, D.C.– February 8, 2011, ProtectOurElections.org filed two formal complaints against Justice Clarence Thomas for falsifying 20 years of financial disclosure statements, engaging in financial conflicts of interests, and using his decisions on the Supreme Court to enrich his wife. The first complaint, filed with the Washington D.C. Bar Disciplinary Committee, seeks Justice Thomas’ disbarment. It has 19 exhibits and can be viewed online.
From the inventors of McNamara's electronic line (which failed spectacularly in Vietnam) comes the Electronic Coup/Revolution Predictor (EC/RP)! This is explained below in the attached Wired report.
The EC/RP is merely the latest effort in DARPA's continuing campaign to overthrow Boyd's Law* (i.e., Machines don't fight war wars, people do, and they use their minds) by taking the mind out of the military's Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) loop, and hardwiring what little is left of it with a automated predict-decide-act computer algorithm — the goal, apparently, being to make stupid decisions faster.
This particular DARPA boondoggle is bizarre even by DARPA's tolerant standards for lunacy. That is because the EC/RP is aimed predicting discontinuities in order to remove uncertainty from the future.
In a 13 February 2011 op-ed column [also attached below], George Will, a self-proclaimed conservative, who by definition must favor adherence to the Accountability and Appropriations Clauses of the Constitution, not to mention the rule of law (for example, the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990), announced that he has discovered the Pentagon's bookkeeping shambles! He ends his op-ed by saying … “To govern is to choose, always on the basis of imperfect information. If, however, the strong language of [Congressman Randy] Forbes and [Senator Tom] Coburn is apposite, Congress cannot make adequately informed choices about the uniquely important matters that come to McKeon's committee. This fact will fuel the fires of controversy that will rage within the ranks of Republicans as they come to terms with the fact that current defense spending cannot be defended until it is understood.”
When American Conservative Magazine and a senior Fellow of the Ludvig von Mises Institute collaborate to produce a dynamite article that builds on and reinforces the great work of my friend, the late Professor Seymour Melman of Columbia University, a card-carrying liberal, you know it is time to sit up and read it carefully.
Below is a an excellent article describing how the political economy of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex drains and distorts the civilian economy. Melman did the path breaking research in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s and his warnings about deindustrialization were prophetic. No less an authority that William Anders, CEO of General Dynamics, confirmed Melman's warnings in spades, when Anders explained to a group of defense contractors in the 1991 why General Dynamics was not going to convert into civilian production after the cold war ended, because “most [weapons manufacturers] don’t bring a competitive ad-vantage to non-defense business,” … and … “Frankly, sword makers don’t make good and affordable plowshares.” [see The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War, pages 58-59 & footnotes 4 and 5.]
Phi Beta Iota: Summing up, we have military spending distorting the economy, Wall Street defrauding the economy, and a mix of politicians completely out of touch with reality and pretending to be “governing.” We can't make this stuff up.
Politico is a inside the beltway newsletter that revels in political gossip — the kind of new media phenomena that reflects the self-inflating, self-referencing character of behavior in the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac. This rag is funded by right leaning contributors. That said, Politico is a barometer of sorts — in this case of bad ju ju (see report below).
Note, for example — its description of how pressure is building to whack the Pentagon’s budget. It will be interesting to see how Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) will wiggle out of the squeeze described in last few graphs. For what it is worth, my guess is that the MICC will move to protect its hi-tech cold-war rice bowls at the expense of its people and readiness. But we are in the middle of at least two wars — which of course will generate effective counter-pressures, because we “must to protect the troops!” — and so in the end very little will happen beyond a few cometic swipes. This one of the benefits of perpetual small wars or the perpetual threat of small wars (explained more fully in my essay, The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War) A more extensive discourse on the MICC's game will be found in soon to be released anthology, The Pentagon Labyrinth, which will be freely available in hard copy as well as electronic form).
So, get ready for a run on Social Security (and Medicare?), which conveniently is not even mentioned in the Politico “report.” Obama made SS more vulnerable with his recent “temporary” 2% cut in withholding tax. My guess is that little will happen to SS in near term, but the “phony solvency issue” was strengthened by the cut, and we should expect it to be reinforced endlessly in the looming political debate. Liberal economists who recently welcomed Obama's tax cut by arguing that it will clarify the real “pay as you go” nature of economic debate over SS may be in for a nasty surprise.
Secrecy News reported Monday on strange new guidance from the Air Force Materiel Command declaring that Air Force employees and even their family members could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for accessing the WikiLeaks web site. On Monday night that new guidance was abruptly withdrawn.
Lt. Col. Richard L. Johnson of Air Force Headquarters released this statement: read statement….
“[I]f a family member of an Air Force employee accesses WikiLeaks on a home computer, the family member may be subject to prosecution for espionage under U.S. Code Title 18 Section 793,” the legal guidance reads. “The Air Force member would have an obligation to safeguard the information under the general guidance to safeguard classified information.”
Phi Beta Iota: We do not make this stuff up. If SecDef wants an excuse to dismiss Air Force leadership down to the one-star level, this is it. This is utterly insane, and a clear demonstration of moral and intellectual and leadership vacuum that exists in the US Air Force.
In a major shift to reinvigorate the post-9/11 spy world inside the Central Intelligence Agency, Director Leon Panetta has decided to change how the agency's National Clandestine Service operates, potentially impacting up to half the CIA's workforce. The shift is part of Panetta's long-range “CIA 2015″ reorganization plan and should make the agency much more agile and quick to respond in the war on terror and other national security flare-ups.
Phi Beta Iota: This is not a shake-up. This is an abandonment of language skills and cultural knowledge as a foundation for effective clandestine operations, and a general acknowledgment that the clandestine service is merely in liaison business, and “one size fits all” since English is the common languages for both spies and air traffic controllers. A “real” clandestine service would have five classes of personnel in more or less equal measure:
Career Trainees 20%
Mid-Career US Citizen Non-Official Cover Hires 20%
Foreign Liaison Rotationals to Multinational Field Stations 20%
One-Time “It's Just Business” Contracts 20%
What CIA has today is way too many youngsters with no real foreign experience, and way too many annuitants (contractors) and old guys who will finally retire when the money dries up, as it is about to. CIA clandestine operations have no bench, no middle, and no strategy for the future, in part because CIA analytics are not serious, CIA multi-lingual processing at machine speed does not exist, and CIA leverage of global open sources and methods is both out-sourced and pedestrian. At the same time that our Embassies have become “bunkers,” our spies are increasingly uninformed, disconnected, and ineffective for lack of language, context, and leadership.
