Ethics – Page 228 – Public Intelligence Blog

This upsets me. Especially when compared to what is being spent on toxic aircraft.

Broken Promise to an Army Veteran: Change to GI Bill Proves Costly

A cost-cutting change to the GI Bill has cost hundreds of thousands of veterans thousands of dollars, reports Winston Ross.

After serving 14 months in Iraq, U.S. Army Sgt. Hayleigh Perez planned to use her GI Bill benefits to get a master’s degree and become a physician’s assistant. When she enlisted, the government was paying for any veteran who signed up after Sept. 11 to go to any public university in America.

When she got out, she got screwed. Twice. A change in the GI bill forced Perez to apply to in-state schools if she wanted free tuition, and then a university in her home state of North Carolina determined that she wasn’t a resident—because she’d spent two years with her active-duty husband Jose in Texas, where he was reassigned in 2009.

Read full article.

2012/10/282012/10/28

Marcus Aurelius: Toxic Army Leadership Casts Long Shadow – Not Just Generals but Field Grade Also

Corruption, Ethics, Military

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius

While many of you criticize WaPo, believe this is a real and growing problem within Army. I have read both Ward and O'Reilly DoDIG reports — shocking. IMHO, if 5 percent of what's in those reports is 10 percent true, those two generals should be going to Disciplinary Barracks at Leavenworth. Yet both cases have been at route step for months. O'Reilly is a West Pointer, Ward is not. At least in Sinclair case, a court martial process is gearing up. Even worse, we have field grade officers throughout Army mimicking this kind of behavior, particularly the O'Reilly variant. Toxic leadership gets a great deal of lip service but almost zero action in Army. Center for Army Leadership and Association of the United States Army have both written on topic, but nothing seems to happen. For those of you familiar with Anton Myrer's classic historical novel on military leadership, “Once an Eagle,” Courtney Massengales seem to be proliferating in Army. At least that's what I'm perceiving.

Washington Post, October 28, 2012, Pg. 3

Accusations Against Generals Cast A Long Shadow Over Army

Leadership screening is scrutinized; Complaints about senior officers are growing

By Ernesto Londono

The accusations leveled against three Army generals over the past six months are as varied as they are striking, the highest-profile of a growing number of allegations of wrongdoing by senior military officials.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Toxic Army Leadership Casts Long Shadow – Not Just Generals but Field Grade Also”

2012/10/202012/10/21

Worth a Look: Books on Ethics and Democracy

Ethics, Worth A Look

Eric Beerbohm is assistant professor of government and social studies and director of graduate fellowships for the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

“Are citizens in a democracy complicit in the injustices perpetrated by a state that acts in their name? Yes they are, argues Eric Beerbohm. In Our Name is a major statement in democratic theory that develops a novel approach to the relationship between citizen and representative. This book will reorient our understanding of the nature of representation in a democracy and appeal to philosophers, political theorists, and social scientists alike.”–Rob Reich, Stanford University

Gary B. Adams and Danny L. Balfour

Although social scientists generally do not discuss “evil” in an academic setting, there is no denying that it has existed in public administration throughout human history. Hundreds of millions of human beings have died as a direct or indirect consequence of state-sponsored violence. The authors argue that administrative evil, or destructiveness, is part of the identity of all modern public administration (as it is part of psychoanalytic study at the individual level). It goes beyond a superficial critique of public administration and lays the groundwork for a more effective and humane profession

Constructing a positive future for public administration requires a willingness to deal with the disturbing aspects of the field's history, identity and practices. Rather than viewing events such as genocide as isolated or aberrant historical events, the authors show how the forces that unleashed such events are part of modernity and are thus present in all contemporary public organizations. This book is not an exercise in bureaucrat-bashing. It goes beyond superficial critique of public administration and lays the groundwork for a more effective and humane profession.

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2012/10/202013/04/25

Mini-Me: REPLAY Future of the USA in 3 Parts

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Hacking, Military, Office of Management and Budget, Officers Call, Policies, Threats

Huh?

The future of the USA – 2012-2016: An insolvent and ungovernable United States (first part)

Thus, according to LEAP/E2020, the 2012 election year, which opens against the backdrop of economic and social depression, complete paralysis of the federal system (3), strong rejection of the traditional two-party system and a growing questioning of the relevance of the Constitution, inaugurates a crucial period in the history of the United States. Over the next four years, the country will be subjected to political, economic, financial and social upheaval such as it has not known since the end of the Civil War which, by an accident of history, started exactly 150 years ago in 1861. During this period, the US will be simultaneously insolvent and ungovernable, turning that which was the “flagship” of the world in recent decades into a “drunken boat”.

To make the complexity of the current process understandable, our team has chosen to organize its anticipations around three key areas:

1. US institutional deadlock and the break-up of the traditional two-party system
2. The unstoppable spiral of recession/depression/inflation
3. The breakdown of the US socio-political fabric

Read rest of analysis.

Below the line: the other two parts of the series.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: REPLAY Future of the USA in 3 Parts”

2012/10/202012/10/20

Michel Bauwens: Worker-Owned Cooperatives

03 Economy, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Ethics

220px-Michel_Bauwens_crop — Michel Bauwens

Worker-Owned Cooperatives Offer A Vision Of A Different Kind Of Capitalism

A new documentary, Shift Change, explores a kind of company where the workers are also the owners, which results in a quite different economic model than we’re used to.

In an era when income disparities and anger with financial institutions in the U.S. are generating powerful social movements, it’s not surprising that people are starting to look towards alternative business models. Shift Change, a new movie from filmmakers Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin, looks at the world of worker cooperatives, where reasonable salaries, job security, and general work satisfaction prevail.

Nowhere are the benefits of this model more obvious than in the Mondragon Corporation, a giant federation of worker cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain (there’s nothing about dragons involved, it was founded in a town called Mondragon) that works in finance, retail operations, production of consumer goods and industrial components, and more. Co.Exist spoke with Young about her experiences making the film, and visiting the notoriously closed-off Mondragon Corporation.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Worker-owned cooperatives do not out-source jobs and do focus on community equities.

2012/10/202012/10/20

Berto Jongman: Top 10 Whistle Blowers

09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Ethics, Government, IO Deeds of Peace, Military, Officers Call

Top 10 Most Influential Whistleblowers

The subject of insiders — or “whistleblowers” — is somewhat tricky; anyone on the inside is often presumed to be compromised by their former allegiance. Nonetheless, the nature of government work is rooted in compartmentalization. So, perhaps the best indication as to whether whistleblowers have something valid to say is the level of persecution they have endured.

The following whistleblowers have endured a varying degree of pushback from the system, but are still around to reveal key points of information that make us all question what we are being told by our government and the corporate media.

List Only, In Order Presented:

01 Jesslyn Radack, Department of Justice
02 Thomas Drake, National Security Agency
03 William Binney, National Security Agency
04 Matt Klein, AT&T for the National Security Agency
05 Sibel Edmonds, Federal Bureau of Investigation
06 Susan Linauer, Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Justice
07 Anthony Shaffer, Department of Defense
08 Joe Banister, Internal Revenue Service
09 Bradley Manning, Departments of Defense and State
10 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks

Read snapshots and watch individual videos.

2012/10/192012/10/19

SmartPlanet: Open Mind = Resilience

Advanced Cyber/IO, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics

Defining ‘resilience’ as an innovation strategy

By Reena Jana | October 18, 2012, 5:51 PM PDT

CAMDEN, ME — On a chilly October day, a stone’s throw from a postcard-perfect New England harbor and across from an adorable town square, a group that included chief executives, grad students, physicians, public-school educators, activists, scientists, and artists gathered. Some members of this diverse crowd, assembled for the annual PopTech conference from October 17-20 at the Camden Opera House, were from large companies such as Nike, Google, and Procter & Gamble. Others were the twentysomething founders of start-ups that no one has ever heard of–yet. Or they were academics, investors, designers, engineers.

They came to listen to, and mingle with, the head of a public school for pregnant girls in Detroit; a Paralympic World Cup snowboarding gold medalist; an Icelandic childcare specialist; and a bank robber/hacker turned neuroscientist, among many others. While this roster is only a tiny sample of the PopTech speaker list, it offers a taste of the broad spectrum of voices and stories presented on the Opera House stage. As varied as they are, they all share the common theme of “resilience.” It is a topic that is gaining momentum not only as a coping strategy in an age of economic uncertainty and dramatic natural disasters, but also as an innovation strategy, too. And the first day of PopTech offered a number of lenses from which to understand the concept, which is also the conference’s theme.

“Resilience is the ability to recover, persist, or even thrive under disruption,” Andrew Zolli, curator and executive director of PopTech, said in his opening remarks.

“It’s not the same thing as robustness. It’s not the same thing as redundancy. It’s not about reserves. And it’s not about real-time information,” Zolli continued.

Read full article (safety copy below the line)

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Category: Ethics

Penguin: Military Breaks Educational Promises, Congress Complicit