- Leewanta's Observationer
- Posted in: Blogg
- on december 15, 2010
Robert David Steele Vivas Talar Ut [Interview with Robert Steele–Swedish]
Articles & Chapters, Officers CallReference: The Private War of LtCol Tony Shaffer
07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Shaffer’s book rips the lid off several stories the bureaucrats wanted to suppress: the role of a program named Able Danger in yielding information that could have uncovered the 9/11 plot; Operation Dark Heart, which could have nabbed Al Qaeda’s number two leader; and early indications that Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, actively supported the Taliban. These are the incendiary bombs the censors tried to defuse. And this is the real story of Tony Shaffer’s book.
Phi Beta Iota: The Playboy folks did not do their homework–the destruction of an entire first edition is not unprecendented, it was done by CIA to the first printing (1972) of Col L. Fletcher Prouty's The Secret Team: CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (Skyhorse, 2008). While the title is hyped and the good Colonel was not aware of the over-arching financial crime families that the US Government has secretly supported and in some instances actually spawned from scratch, his general point to the public was clear: what is done in our name under the guise of secrecy is often criminal, generally unconstitutional, and almost always very costly in long-term blood, treasure, and spirit over both the short and the long term. What is at issue here is straight-forward: either we have a government that works in the public interest and displays integrity at every level, or we do not. It is not only the political “leaders” who have lost their integrity, but the professional “leaders” as well. Until the truth of this is understood by the majority of the American people, nothing will change.
Reference: The Fraud-Based US Economy
Reference: Mortgage Fraud in Detail
Reference: The Fraud-Based US Economy
07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Congressional Research Service, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, General Accountability Office, Intelligence (government), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Office of Management and Budget, Officers Call, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Waste (materials, food, etc)
The attached blog, “Failing to Prosecute Wall Street Fraud Is Extending Our Economic Problems,”
is a cut-and-paste accumulation of a variety of outlooks. Most are based on analyses or accumulated wisdom, but some appear based on hunches, ideologies, etc. Taken together, however, they paint a horrifying picture of the American political economy and our prospects for the future. Moreover, that picture does not change materially if you throw half of the pastings away. While the implications of fraud, per se, are clear, the horrifying picture of what is happening emerges when one tries to generalize on the description.
The anonymous guest author is telling us, in effect, that the neural network of our political-economy — i.e., the information system that provides the wherewithal for implicit and explicit homeostatic guidance and control – – has become so corrupted by fraud and disinformation that a pervasive atmosphere of confusion, menace, fear, mistrust, and alienation is breaking down the system into non-co-operative activities, thereby creating a kind of paralysis of will that, left unchecked, will prolong and deepen our economic crisis. <
One psychologist insightfully likened the situation to trauma and post traumatic stress disorder on a national scale.
Any student of Colonel Boyd's theory [1] of competition and conflict (Patterns of Conflict) and his idea of the OODA loop will immediately recognize the symptoms of confusion, menace, fear, mistrust, and alienation, expressed below. These are the emergent properties of decision cycles, or Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action (OODA) Loops, that have been folded back inside themselves and have become focused inward and are disconnected from their environments, but connected to some kind of internal dynamic that feeds on itself. Of course, Boyd was discussing military strategy and the art of winning by wrecking his adversary's OODA loops to undermine his adversary's organic cohesion, while preventing his adversary from doing the same thing to him.
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to dismiss his ideas as applying only to the art of war. That is because Boyd's aim was to describe in a generalized sense how the human mind works in any conflict involving a clash of independent wills, what the mind's strengths and weaknesses are, and how these strengths and weaknesses play out in the competition that is the essence of life.
So, it should not be surprising that many politicians, businessmen, and scholars have recognized that Boyd's general ideas can be tailored to any kind of competition or game (just google “OODA loop”) and have sought gain by exploiting these ideas against others. Most people, however, instinctively evolve similar if less well defined ideas, because if Boyd's synthesis of the OODA loop is correct, these dynamics are innate in the evolved wiring of left and right hemispheres of our brains [2], and therefore will exhibit their outward manifestations in repetitive patterns in conflicts over time — which brings back to the tapestry of confusion, menace, fear, mistrust, and alienation and the counter weights that are necessary to overcome them.
Viewed through the lens of Boyd's theory of competition and conflict, the attached blog clarifies one question about the players in the economic game in particular: The information assembled below clearly shows who is the hoser and who is the hosee.
One final point, history has shown that once an nation's political-economic OODA loops become infected by the virus of corrupted information it is very very hard to clean it out. The hosing will continue unless ruthless action roots it out, otherwise, we will experience continued disintegration ending in a sudden collapse, like what happened to Rome on a grand time scale or to France's Third Republic [3] on a more tangible time scale.
With this background in mind, now read the attached blog and draw you own conclusions about what is needed to re-oreint the corrupted political-economic OODA loops that are leading America to ruin.
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NOTES:
[1] A short bio of Boyd and his theories as well as the briefing slides he used to explain his theories can be found in the Boyd folder here. Robert Coram's excellent biography of Boyd and his theories can be found here.
[2] See, for example, my analysis of how Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton and John McCain here.
[3] William L. Shirer's Collapse of the Third Republic, is a case study in how the dry rot of inward focus in the 1930s set France up for its sudden collapse in during the German invasion of May 1940. His description of how the flow information among the military and political leaders became corrupted during the invasion is a microcosm of how inwardly focused OODA loops, lubricate by menace, mistrust, and fear result inevitably in the breakdown of cohesion, paralysis, chaos, and collapse.
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ATTACHED BELOW THE LINE IN FULL for Information Availability Assurance Into the Future
Failing to Prosecute Wall Street Fraud Is Extending Our Economic Problems
Posted By Guest Author On December 15, 2010 @ 8:30 am In Think Tank
Journal: USA Slouching Toward Tyranny
08 Wild Cards, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats
Bruce FeinAuthor, American Empire: Before the Fall
Posted: December 10, 2010 02:42 PM
The state of civil liberties and national security in the United States is alarming.
In the American Empire, the former are routinely crippled or lacerated in the false name of the latter. Trust in government plunges. Dangers are magnified manifold to wound constitutionally venerated freedoms. International terrorist suspects who have never attempted to kill an American are treated as existential threats to U.S sovereignty. Predator drones employed off the battlefield in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen are spawning more enemies than are killed. Habeas corpus is suspended. Military commissions denuded of due process and which combine judge, jury, and prosecutor in a single branch of government are substituted for independent civilian courts. Time-honored privacy rights are trampled. Torture or first cousin enhanced interrogation techniques are endorsed. Congressman Peter King (R. N.Y.), slated for the chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee, insists that prosecutions of alleged international terrorists in civilian courts are intolerable because guilty verdicts are not guaranteed. The worst violations are dared by few, willed by more, but tolerated by virtually all.
The nation needs a new birth of freedom dedicated to the proposition that the life of a vassal or serf — even in absolute safety — is not worth living.
At present, procedural safeguards against injustice are jettisoned for the counter-constitutional dogma, “Better that many innocents suffer than that one culprit eludes punishment.” A craving for a risk-free and comfortable existence fuels the nation's war on individual freedom. Acceptance of risk, however, is the lifeblood of a free society. Every human sports DNA capable of anti-social behavior — even the saintly. The United States is headed for the same ruination as Athens for the same reasons penned by historian Edward Gibbon: “In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all — security, comfort, and freedom. When…the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free.”
Contrary to longstanding orthodoxies, civil liberties and national security are more aligned than opposed. Scrupulous respect for freedom works hand-in-glove with national security by evoking unbegrudging loyalty among citizens eager to risk that last full measure of devotion to foil opponents and to maintain government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Patriotic soldiers are superior to mercenaries. Hessians were no match for the Minutemen in the American Revolutionary War. A military that fights more for love of country than fear or money will triumph. And love of country is elicited by the government's securing unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Read the rest of this specific article….
Personal for Mike Bloomberg (Huffington Post)
Empire of Lies & Secrecy (Huffington Post)
Read More at Huffington Post: Afghanistan , American Revolution , Bagram , Cia , Civil Liberties , Constitution , Counterterrorism , Edward Gibbon , Empire , Extraordinary Rendition , Fbi , Founding Fathers , Hessians , Homeland Security , Homeland Security Committee , Imperialism , Kidnapping , Law , Material Assistance , Military Commissions , National Security , Pakistan , Patriot Act , Peter King , Philosophy , Predator Drones , President Bush , President Obama , State Secrets , Terrorism , Torture , United States , Us Constitution , War Crimes , Politics News
Journal: US Army Civil Affairs Left for Dead…
08 Wild Cards, Civil Society, Corruption, Government, Methods & Process, Military, Non-Governmental, Officers Call, Policies14 December 2010 CRYTOME
US Army Starving its Civil Affairs Functions: Prefers New Age HTS, PRT’s
by John Stanton
“If the expansion of the Human Terrain System gains traction at TRADOC it could kill any efforts to develop a cultural expertise construct by the Civil Affairs community, specifically the Civil Affairs Proponent at USA JFK SWCS. Everybody is looking to get as much money as they can for their organizations as the Defense budget begins to get squeezed. Naturally there could be a potential dog fight between TRADOC and any other Army organization making claims for HTS-like capability. Once something becomes institutionalized in the military it is difficult to change the new status quo.”
Phi Beta Iota: The US Army Civil Affairs Brigade got off to a very good start under Col Ferd Irizzarry, USA, and then he got sent to Afghanistan to punch his pre-flag combat operations ticket and it took a nose dive. HRT is the most badly managed–unethically managed–program in the DoD Human Intelligence inventory. While recognizing that the author above is on a vendetta against HRT, the bottom-line is that he is right, HRT is wrong, and TRADOC does not know the difference.
See Also:
Journal: Sun Tzu is with the Taliban in Afghanistan
02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Military, Non-Governmental, Officers Call, Peace IntelligenceDecember 14, 2010
Memo From Sun Tzu to President Obama
Who is the Wise General in Afghanistan?
By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY Counterpunch
In the first treatise written on the art of war, sometime around 450 BC [1], Sun Tzu explained why “the wise general sees to it that his troops feed on the enemy,”
EXTRACT: The militarization of development aid is a central pillar of General Petaeus's counterinsurgency strategy to buy the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, ninety per cent of whom are spread out in remote rural areas. So it should not be surprising that the military is controlling the bulk of the billions of dollars in aid money flowing into (and being smuggled out of) Afghanistan.
In the very important CounterPunch report on 13 December, Patrick Cockburn, certainly one of the most informed observers of insurgencies in the Middle East and Central Asia, described how the militarization of development aid in Afghanistan is riven with corruption.
Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Save Democracy
07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Methods & Process, Non-Governmental, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Save Democracy
“The most durable and dangerous ‘special interest’ – the only one that can directly traduce the Constitution – is the political class.” George F. Will
Robert David Steele (Vivas) has produced a significant, but short, political essay for the Huffington Post, titled, “Citizens Fiddle, Obama Dances.” The central argument of the essay is that there is a ‘confrontational convergence’ of major proportions set to occur in the U.S. presidential election year of 2012 between a set of negative and positive forces that Steele has been able to identify and summarize. At stake is nothing less than the constitutional government of the U.S. and the continued prosperity of the U.S. and probably the world.
To put it another way, the current U.S. Political System has two major problems that threaten the Constitutional Foundations on which it is built:
First to a greater extent than anytime in U.S. History, the U.S. Government no longer effectively represents the interests of the majority of its citizens, but is actually controlled by a very wealthy minority (an oligarchy–many would say a kleptocracy).
Michael Lind in a perceptive article “Nobody Represents the American People,” at Salon, makes this point most clearly. And he correctly, I believe, noted that this control was not the result of a vast conspiracy against popular democracy, but was due to a systemic problem. The way the U.S. Political System is structured and operated, wealthy individuals and institutions have gained inordinate influence over both political parties and the politicians that they sponsor. The people who pay the bills have the ability to direct legislation and guide policy formulation. As the result, politicians of both parties will pay lip service to the popular will during elections, but in the end it is the people who actually pay for their campaigns who own their allegiance. Lind somewhat overstates his case for the decline of mass participation in public affairs, but basically he is correct.
Second political power is addictive and in the absence of real safeguards, the Republican and Democratic Parties have colluded to exclude any other parties from threatening their hold on government. And since they are controlled by the same set of wealthy patrons their policies are essentially identical, a fact concealed by political rhetoric and a highly suspect public media. They form a duopoly that has been able to hold on to power for forty years and to marginalize non-duopoly candidates by manipulating election laws, election districts, political debates and, of course, the print and broadcast media. As a toxic by-product of duopoly control of government, civil liberties as guaranteed by the Constitution have been steadily eroded usually under the guise of public safety. In the elegant prose of Michael Lind, “The disconnect between the actions of the government and public opinion is the central fact of American politics today. It doesn’t seem to matter whether liberal Democrats or conservative Republicans are in power. Only minor, marginal reforms ever take place.”
So what is the solution to these dangerous, I use the word advisedly, problems? Well Steele with the aid of some collaborators has devised what he correctly suggests is the “Magna Carta’ of the 21st Century, the Election Reform Act of 2011. This is a one page document that is presented among other places in his Huffington Post essay Electoral Reform (1 Page, 9 Points). If enacted it would break the power of the duopoly and its wealthy patrons and truly return power to the people. But would it ever be enacted by a congress controlled by a power addicted duopoly which in turn is employed by a wealthy oligarchy? The original Magna Carta of 1214 (CE) was forced down King John’s throat by a consortium of land barons and wealthy merchants who gave him the choice of acceptance or abdication. Does the U.S. citizenry have similar leverage over congress? Certainly not now, but Steele believes that a
movement started by thought leader Tom Atlee, with the meme of “Change the Game,” may be able to mobilize enough voters to force congress to pass the act and the executive branch to enforce it.
Atlee heads an Oregon based outfit called the “Co-intelligence Institute”, which to date has not been co-opted the U.S. oligarchy. The Institute in essence is trying to create a collaborative movement among the voters that will be a force for change through the power of the collective intelligence of its participants. Among other things Atlee hopes that as the movement grows, natural leaders will come to fore who will use integrity and decency to turn the movement into a politically powerful force.
If Atlee can reach enough citizens through other means, such as GroupOn (originally a citizen democracy idea by founder Andrew Mason), the National Council on Dialog and Deliberation (NCDD); and what Steele calls the “eight tribes” of intelligence, he–Tom Atlee–may be offering us all a last chance at regaining true political freedom and restoring the Republic.
Robert Steele, a truly important and original thought leader himself, has somehow managed to retain his sanity and integrity in spite of living within spitting distance of the nation’s capital. He now is pleading for monetary and participatory support for Tom Atlee and his institute; I think this plea should be heeded.
Richard Wright
From the Heartland
12 December 2011
Phi Beta Iota: $25 is the norm, send more if you can, this is the one person in the USA who is absolutely without question working on behalf of We the People. Donation Link Here. Below is from the Co-Intelligence Institute donation page.
Why should I donate to the Co-Intelligence Institute rather than some other charity or cause?
We hope that you will donate to the Co-Intelligence Institute if you believe, as we do, that our work offers a very high potential for positive change.
We believe that our current social systems — especially our political and governance systems — are dangerously unresponsive to positive change, and even actively block the very changes we need to survive and thrive in the 21st century.
No matter what other issues concern you (and there are a huge number that concern us), we suggest that the existing system will not handle them well. The Co-Intelligence Institute is currently focusing on changing the political system so that it will handle every other issue wisely — and inspiring a movement of conscious evolutionary agents to catalyze cultural shifts, systemic evolution, and technological development into more co-intelligent forms.
To the extent we succeed at that, we'll get the world we all want, because we'll be able to freely and wisely co-create it, using these more responsive and wise democratic systems. We invite you to consider the logic of this and — if you agree — support our work.
If you believe, as we do, that our work offers a very high potential for positive change, we hope that you will donate to the Co-Intelligence Institute.
