Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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Smartphone Money (AT&T,Verizon) & Global Currency (IMF) Weak Signals

Corporations, Mobile, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Technologies
Source article

AT&T, Verizon to Target Visa, MasterCard With Smartphones

By Peter Eichenbaum and Margaret Collins – Mon Aug 02, 2010

AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless, the biggest U.S. mobile carriers, are planning a venture to displace credit and debit cards with smartphones, posing a new threat to Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc., three people with direct knowledge of the plan said.The partnership, which also includes Deutsche Telekom AG unit T-Mobile USA, may work with Discover Financial Services and Barclays Plc to test a system at stores in Atlanta and three other U.S. cities that would let a consumer pay with the contactless wave of a smartphone, the people said. The carriers have been searching for a chief executive officer.The trial would be the carriers’ biggest effort to spur mobile payments in the U.S. and supplant more than 1 billion plastic cards in American wallets. Smartphones have encroached on tasks ranging from Web browsing to street navigation and now may help the phone companies compete with San Francisco-based Visa and MasterCard, the world’s biggest payments networks.“This is definitely a game-changer,” said industry consultant Richard Crone of San Carlos, California-based Crone Consulting LLC. The firm advises card networks, issuers and phone companies. The mobile carriers “are the biggest recurring billers in every market. They are experts at processing payments,” Crone said.  Full article

Comment: We have been told that in Shanghai, it is common to see many instances of people–including children–using their cellphones to pay for goods and services, including mass-transit fares. Supposedly GlobalAgora was the first to penetrate the Chinese mobile market (2001) with the help of Nicholas Rockefeller.
Here it mentions a main technology was wireless internet WAP phones for mobile payments. On a wild side note, this video reveals interesting information from the now deceased Aaron Russo (film-maker of Trading Places, The Rose, Wiseguys, also managed Bette Midler) who was a former friend of Nick Rockefeller after Russo ran for governor of Nevada.

IMF blueprint for a global currency – yes really

Posted by Izabella Kaminska on Aug 04, 2010

FT Alphaville missed this IMF paper when it first came out in April, 2010.

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Huge Gaps in Gov’s Knowledge About Chemicals in Everyday Products (need for true cost public intelligence)

07 Health, Corporations, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, True Cost

U.S. regulators lack data on health risks of most chemicals

By Lyndsey Layton
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 2, 2010

This summer, when Kellogg recalled 28 million boxes of Froot Loops, Apple Jacks, Corn Pops and Honey Smacks, the company blamed elevated levels of a chemical in the packaging.

Dozens of consumers reported a strange taste and odor, and some complained of nausea and diarrhea. But Kellogg said a team of experts it hired determined that there was “no harmful material” in the products.

Federal regulators, who are charged with ensuring the safety of food and consumer products, are in the dark about the suspected chemical, 2-methylnaphthalene. The Food and Drug Administration has no scientific data on its impact on human health. The Environmental Protection Agency also lacks basic health and safety data for 2-methylnaphthalene — even though the EPA has been seeking that information from the chemical industry for 16 years.

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Journal: Fairfax County Intelligence Up for Bid

10 Security, 11 Society, Intelligence (government), Law Enforcement, Methods & Process, Peace Intelligence
Friday, August 6, 2010

FedBiz

Fairfax County looking for intelligence analysts

Fairfax County is seeking bidders for a new contract that injects private sector intelligence analysts into regional law enforcement and homeland security efforts.

The county began working with intelligence analysts five years ago, and the existing contract with Fairfax-based ManTech International Corp. is set to expire at the end of the year.

Under the agreement, the defense contractor has provided eight analysts who work to identify terrorist threats in the national capital region and also provide support for more bread-and-butter police work.

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Journal: The Unconstitutional Empire

Corruption, Government
Chuck Spinney Recommends

Today we have a Pentagon that is spending more money (in inflation adjusted dollars) on defense than at any time since WWII, yet it can not pass the relatively simple audits required by the Chief Financial Officer's Act of 1990. This law was intended to put teeth into the Accountability and Appropriations clauses of the Constitution.  The audits required by the CFO Act are “checks and balances” audits — they merely describe whether or no any agency of the federal government spends the money Congress appropriated on the items Congress authorized for appropriations — essentially the line between where the money comes from and where it goes.  The attached article helps to put the implications of this travesty into a frightening perspective.  CS

An Empire, If You Can Keep It

BY JUSTIN LOGAN, American Conservative, 1 Mar 2010

Periodically, it is worth remembering just how much the American Founders detested the signs of a bloated state: standing armies, a large fiscal-military federation, and a capacious national bureaucracy. It may be going too far to say that today’s conservatives would denounce the Founding Fathers as unpatriotic conservatives—but not much too far. While members of the Right now flutter like schoolgirls at the mention of military leaders like Gen. David Petraeus, the Founders scorned the prospect of military leaders becoming figures of worshipful esteem. As the historian Arthur Ekirch has highlighted, aversion to standing armies and centralism was at the heart of the American founding.

Full Source Online

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Free Republic: US Grand Strategy? List of 11 No-Nos

Articles & Chapters, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Strategy

Phi Beta Iota: Free Republic came to our attention today, as a good example of the common sense of We the People.  We have added  them to Righteous Sites.  Below found there on Grand Strategy.

FPRI-Temple University Consortium on Grand Strategy • The Telegram No. 3

Can the United States Do Grand Strategy?

April 2010

By Walter A. McDougall

Excerpt: Angelo Codevilla, who says that what passes for strategy in the U.S. government is mostly wishful or sloppy thinking, made the same point in operational terms. “Because doing the right thing is important to Americans as to no other people, American politics is like politics nowhere else…. Basing statecraft on the American people’s penchant for trying to do the right thing, as did Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, brings forth awesome energy…. But using the American people’s righteousness as a propellant for private dreams, as did [Woodrow] Wilson, or as cover for tergiversation, as did George W. Bush, is ruinous.”

Related piece same title, with bibliography, by McDougall in Orbis, Journal of World Affairs:

Excerpt: “So whatever buzz words become the shorthand for a new American strategy, I expect the most we can hope for is that our national security agencies and their consulting firms just post on their walls the business strategist Richard Rumelt’s list of ten strategic blunders and meditate on them every day.[32] They are:

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