Category: Ethics

Posted on

Journal: Steele on Integrity and the Secretary of Defense Specifically

Ethics, Military
Robert Steele
Robert Steele

In the notional conversation below,  Robert Steele first defends the Secretary of Defense in the context of a White House that is insanely criminal or criminally insane, and then outlines the other position, one rooted in the Constitution and the inviolate nature of Integrity as the foundation for a Republic Of, By, and For We the People.

Robert Gates as Victim

Gates was not and is not the problem.  The problem on this is specifically in the White House and NSC.  Gates is doing his best, but probably wishes he had not agreed to stay on. I don't understand what you've got against Gates.  Every military person I respect thinks the world of him.  The complaints are about the WH crowd.  Gates is trying to make things work–despite the WH.

Robert Gates as Enabler

Gates is an enabler.  Powell left his integrity at home and allowed Cheney to commit high crimes and misdemeanors, now Gates (and Jones) are doing the same thing.  Loyalty is NOT what we swear an oath to.  The Constitution is ABOVE the slime in the White House and on the Hill.

My point is that the absolute most important duty of anyone who swears an Oath to defend the CONSTITUTION is to refuse illegal orders.  I believe that the order to gag McChrystal on needing more troops is an illegal order, a high crime, an impeachable offense, and if Gates “goes along” as Colin Powell “went along” with the 25 high crimes and 935 lies of Dick Cheney, then Gates is —  however good and intelligent a man he might be – himself guilty of an impeachable offense.  This is crystal clear to me.

Posted on

Journal: Chuck Spinney on Moral and Mental Collapse of the Federal Government

Ethics, Government, Legislation, True Cost

Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

EMPHASIS: The larger result of this cynical behaviour is a widespread moral and mental collapse that is rapidly transforming our experiment in building a government of the people, by the people, and for the people into a sham that is more like a 21st Century corporatist mutation of 18th Century court of Louis XVI.

Viewed retrospectively, the political economy of Versailles on the Potomac admits to only two stages in the life cycle of any government program, be it defense, a bailout of the banks, healthcare reform, or anything else: (1) It is too early to tell, and (2) it is too late to do anything about it.

Nowhere is the decision-making conundrum implied by these stages more clearly evident than in the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex, MICC, particularly in the acquisition of high tech weapon systems, but also in the decision to go to war.

Continue reading “Journal: Chuck Spinney on Moral and Mental Collapse of the Federal Government”

Posted on

Journal: Rolling Stone on Sick and Wrong (Washington Corruption, Health Care Example)

Ethics, Legislation, Media Reports, Reform

Full Story Online
Full Story Online

SICK and WRONG: How Washington is Screwing Up Health Care Reform – and Why It May Take a Revolt to Fix It

Matt Taibbi

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment – a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable – and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.  [Emphasis added.]

STEP ONE: AIM LOW

STEP TWO: GUT THE PUBLIC OPTION

STEP THREE: PACK IT WITH LOOPHOLES

STEP FOUR: PROVIDE NO LEADERSHIP

STEP FIVE: BLOW THE MATH

As Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His latest collection is Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire

Posted on

Journal: Markle Foundation Focuses on Lack of Information–We Focus on Lack of Integrity

Ethics, Government, InfoOps (IO)
Parent Web Site
Parent Web Site

Nation At Risk: Policy Makers Need Better Information to Protect the Country

For all the nation has invested in national security in the last several years, we remain vulnerable to terrorist attack and emerging national security threats because we have not adequately improved our ability to know what we know about these threats.

Phi Beta Iota: The Markle Foundation means well, but like most in the two-party tyranny and its circle of “fellow travelers” this report misses two big points:   first, Washington does not lack for information, it lacks for integrity.  Second, with integrity, there would not only be plenty of money for both Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) within government, and Public Intelligence outside of government, but we would also recognize, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently noted with commendable integrity: it is our mis-behavior that is the threat.  We KNOW what the ten high-level threats to humanity are, LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft helped prioritize them.  INTEGRITY.  One word.  Without it, no amount of information or intelligence will do.  Markle, and everyone else, need a strategic analytic model as well as the proven process for doing decision-support–absent that, an appreciation for the essential role that integrity plays, they are as irrelevant or counterproductive as are all courtiers to any corrupt government.

Tip of the Hat:  Docuticker from Secrecy News.

Posted on

Journal: Ralph Peters on Stifling of General McChrystal

Ethics, Military
Full Story Online
Full Story Online

O's Afghan woes

White House stifles general

September 3, 2009

The classified status report from Afghanistan by Gen. Stanley McChrystal was censored by the White House before its submission. As a result, it's all bun and no burger.

According to multiple (angry) sources, McChrystal — our top soldier on the ground — intended to ask for 28,000 more US troops. A presidential hatchet man directed the general not to make the request: Troop increases would be “addressed separately.”

. . . . . . .

Cooking the political books doesn't win wars. It didn't work for the Bush administration, and it won't work for Obama. We shouldn't waste another American life without a clear strategy our president will back with his full authority.

When the White House silences the generals in the field, it condemns our troops to the silence of the grave.

Phi Beta Iota: Old news but new anger.  The “hatchet man” was Secretary of Defense Robert Gates himself, calling an urgent meeting in Europe. read the full story from August as published in Foreign Policy.  Lies kill ones comrades.  When the Secretary of Defense is the point man for gutting his own general in the field, it is time for the Secretary to dig deep and either resign on principle, or tell the truth to the public and Congress.  The Obama Administration, and we specifically include General James Jones, USMC (Ret) is an extension of the ideological fantasy land that characterizes the two-party tyranny that represents Wall Street rather than the U.S. citizen, voter, and taxpayer.  It is high time we restored the integrity of our Cabinet officials, demanded integrity of our Congress and White House, and demanded reality-driven policy that is crafted with the best interests of the American people rather than Wall Street.  Zbigniew Brzezinski is behind most of this, and is long overdue for the same war criminal status that Henry Kissinger has enjoyed for the past decade, ever since being chased out of France by a warrant for his arrest.

Posted on

Journal: Petition for Peace Engineering

02 Diplomacy, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Ethics, Peace Intelligence, Reform, Strategy, Worth A Look
Petition for Peace
Petition for Peace

The average American is now in motion.  The Independent movement has reached critical mass, and the public recognition that everything the government is doing lacks a strategic analytic rationale as well as–in many cases–a moral rationale, is gathering force.

The below message captured our attention.  Note the “social engineering” of the military-industrial complex that has labored for decades to connect jobs to war, patronage to war,  bribes to war, high crimes and midemeanors (betrayal of the public trust) to war.  The call for social engineering for peace is, in our view, a strong signal that public intelligence is now becoming more commonplace, but we make the observation that the “lag time” between Congressional and Executive high crimes and misdemeanors, and the public discovery, analytis, outrage, and action, is still too great.  Public intelligence is going to have to do something secret intelligence cannot do: develop global REAL-TIME and NEAR-REAL-TIME information-sharing and sense-making, and do this across all ten high-level threats and all twelve policies that must be harmonized across all boundaries.

Continue reading “Journal: Petition for Peace Engineering”

Posted on

Journal: Questions for supporters of the Democrat-Republican duopoly

Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Reform
Full Story Online
Full Story Online

Questions for supporters of the

Democrat-Republican duopoly

August 31, 7:49 AM

Chad MacInnes

Orange County Independent Examiner

EXTRACT: The fact of the matter is that career politicians will say anything to get re-elected and will do anything to stay in power. This then becomes a classic dichotomy: the politicians say one thing, yet continue to act in ways anathema to what they repeatedly profess they stand for. Yet they are re-elected over and over again. Both Republicans and Democrats alike are equally guilty, and this becomes clear when one simply compares the rhetoric with what they actually do. With very few notable exceptions, Dr. Ron Paul comes to mind, there is no honor, no integrity, no intestinal fortitude among them. They are weak and spinless creatures driven only by an insatiable thirst for power and control, yet fancy themselves saviors, strong and powerful simply by their ability to manipulate the system and ignore the people. The self-serving Democrat-Republican duopoly is symptomatic of our sick republic, and the only medicine that will cure it is to remove this duopolistic tumor.

Phi Beta Iota: INTEGRITY.    The Average American has more common sense, decency, and integrity that most Graphic B JPEGserving in Washington as political appointees sworn to a partisan agenda, or as elected officials who have betrayed their constituencies by toeing to the party line.  Mr. MacInnes is articulating a broad “pox on both parties” that has been in motion since everyone realized that Al Gore sold out (Warren Christopher carried the offer) in 2000.

Now, having said that, we reiterate our view that President Barack Obama could be the George Washington of this century if he rejects the partisan hacks and the Wall Street hucksters that are looting the Treasury and avoiding responsibility.  All he has to do is demand the Electoral Reform Act of 2009 followed by the Smart Nation-Safe Nation Act of 2010, and we will have a Republic again–an informed, secure, sane, responsible Republic.