See also the following collections relevant to getting DoD OSINT up to flank speed for policy support, acquisition support, and of course operational support beginning with Afghanistan, where no one seems to have been told what multinational translators and tribal experts can do for us via reach-back.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a replay of a Wayne Madsen report. Over lunch we checked with our most connected consultant and learned that this is roughly half right, with some of the specifics names and methods not right, but that over-all there is general consensus on three points: Rahm is playing dirty “within and against the Democratic family”; Rahm is a big problem for the President; Rahm has to go (along with Brennan and if it were up to us, Axelrod would also be moved out of the White House). The President needs a neutral professional Chief of Staff, someone like General Jones, who is the perfect Presidential-level administrator. The President needs a national STRATEGY & POLICY advisor that can restore Whole of Government balance, an Office of Management and Budget director that can MANAGE, and a Director of National Intelligence–Admiral Blair deserves first shot–with AUTHORITY. The below material is replayed to provoke reflection, nothing more.
WMR's White House press sources have revealed that President Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, is conducting a virtual political pogrom within the administration and the Democratic caucus in Congress. WMR has learned that the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, once known as STELLAR WIND but changed after the classified code name was leaked to the media, is being used by Emanuel to force administration officials and Democrats in Congress to “toe the line” in their support of Obama's policies, including health care. the surge in Afghanistan, and the bail out of Wall Street.
InfoWar Editor’s note: Birgitta Jónsdóttir is the leader of The Movement, a group within the Icelandic Parliament which has emerged from the mass struggle of Icelanders against the financial blackmail brought to bear against their country by the governments in London and The Hague, with the backing of the IMF, in the wake of the insolvency of three large Icelandic banks in the midst of the Lehman Brothers-AIG world financial panic of September-October2008. Birgitta Jonsdottir is a courageous leader in the fight for national sovereignty, independence, dignity, and the economic well-being and future of her country.
Phi Beta Iota:This story is being ignored in the mainstream media, which is a mistake. This is an early signal of the populism that will come like a tsunami over the next few yeras. People of good will and common sense are beginning to recognize that governments are no longer working in their interests, and are making decisions that may be legally binding under the old paradigm, but are questionable in terms of sustainability of the commonwealths the governments are supposed to be protecting and nurturing. In the end, as both Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and Howard Zinn and Joanathan Schell all agree, demography rules.
In the coming months, we are going to be inundated by the rhetoric surrounding an economic policy debate over the question of whether or not the Federal Government ought to begin to reduce the fiscal imbalances in its budget. The ideology of Joseph Schumpeter's Creative Destruction will be pitted against ideology of John Maynard Keynes, and the dominant issue will be the question of retrenchment: Should the Federal Government retrench? … or .. Will consumers and businesses continue to retrench?
The chart, which I have used before. It portrays the buildup of debt as a percentage of GDP for the different categories indebtedness that are at the center of the retrenchment question. All of the data from 1946 forward was compiled by the Federal Reserve. Earlier data is from a mixture of sources including the Census, Fed, GAO, and Morgan Stanley. I believe , it shows why some kind of retrenchment is now inevitable.
Although most economists and policy makers like to think of an economic system in mechanistic terms, the economy is in fact an unpredictable living thing made up of millions of players who move forward on a one-way trip through time along a pathway shaped by an interplay between chance and necessity. In this sense, you can think of the figure above is an outward manifestation of the historical behaviour of a complex living organism. When we hear pundits speak of the interplay of fear and greed, Greenspan's “irrational exuberance, or Keynes' “animal spirits” they are talking about the living aspects of this system (to which they immediately slip backward in to applying mechanistic diagnostics). When they do so, they forget that all living systems are complex open systems that use an ever-changing homeostatic mix of positive and negative feedback loops to maintain stability, while they maintain their structure by feeding on and expelling waste into their environment. When these internal control loops get out of balance, the homeostatic regulating system breaks down, and the entire organism goes out of control in a form of runaway behavior, like cancer cells in living tissue.
Phi Beta Iota: See also the many superb references in the US Agency for International Development (AID) Development Experience Library. In our own experience encountering AID across Asia and Latin America, their capacity for ground truth and grass roots effectiveness is phenomenal, held back only by Congressional mandates that are politically motivated and operationally insane–such as the requirement to spend 75% of every development dollar via a US beltway bandit.
Phi Beta Iota: Senator Phi Gramm (R-TX), then Chairman of the Banking Committee, will go down in history as the most impeachable Senator of all time who destroyed the American economy by putting 200 pages of lobbyist legislation into a bill 5-minues before the vote–and all those Senators then serving are impeachable for failing to read the bill (as they failed to read the Patriot Act). There were two criminal outcomes: derivatives, and credit card ursury to 29.9%.
Returning our business to community banks is a great start. However, community banks are not suffering from a lack of customers so much as from a lack of the capital they need to make new loans, and investment capital today is scarce. There is a way out of this dilemma, demonstrated for more than 90 years by the innovative state of North Dakota – a partnership in which community banks are backed by the deep pockets of a state-owned bank.
Arianna Huffington just posted an article that has sparked a remarkable wave of interest, evoking over 4,500 comments in a mere three days. Called “Move Your Money,” the article maintains that we can get credit flowing again on Main Street by moving our money out of the Wall Street behemoths and into our local community banks.
Ralph Nader has spent decades seeking to restore both government and corporate accountability. Eight electoral reforms were drawn from his book Crashing the Party–Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender and are available for any citizen to use in order to agitate for non-violent legal ethical reform at the local, state, and national levels.
The chart, which I have used before. It portrays the buildup of debt as a percentage of GDP for the different categories indebtedness that are at the center of the retrenchment question. All of the data from 1946 forward was compiled by the Federal Reserve. Earlier data is from a mixture of sources including the Census, Fed, GAO, and Morgan Stanley. I believe , it shows why some kind of retrenchment is now inevitable.
