03 Economy – Page 108 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/06/27

SchwartzReport: Corrupt Ratings Agency Enabled by Corrupt Government

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude

Here is the final bit explaining the complete corruption of the financial sector; it deals with the debasing of the the rating agencies. It is blatantly obvious from many sources that the Obama Administration Justice Department has failed to serve the public interest. We are five years past the 2008 meltdown, and it cannot be denied that no real effort has been made at the Federal level to hold these corporations, or the men and w! omen who control them, accountable. Thus, I do not see how it is going to be possible to avoid another meltdown. The system is simply too corrupt, I think it is going to implode again because of its unregulated greed.

The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis
MATT TAIBBI – Rolling Stone

EXTRACT:

Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever

Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits by the San Diego-based law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation's two top ratings companies, Moody's and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash.

In incriminating e-mail after incriminating e-mail, executives and analysts from these companies are caught admitting their entire business model is crooked.

“Lord help our fucking scam . . . this has to be the stupidest place I have worked at,” writes one Standard & Poor's executive. “As you know, I had difficulties explaining ‘HOW' we got to those numbers since there is no science behind it,” confesses a high-ranking S&P analyst. “If we are just going to make it up in order to rate deals, then quants [quantitative analysts] are of precious little value,” complains another senior S&P man. “Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card[s] falters,” ruminates one more.

2013/06/20

Patrick Meier: Using Big Data to Inform Poverty Reduction Strategies — Data Science for Social Good: Not Cognitive Surplus but Cognitive Mismatch

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Health, 11 Society, Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial

Using Big Data to Inform Poverty Reduction Strategies

My colleagues and I at QCRI are spearheading a new experimental Research and Development (R&D) project with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) team in Cairo, Egypt. Colleagues at Harvard University, MIT and UC Berkeley have also joined the R&D efforts as full-fledged partners. The research question: can an analysis of Twitter traffic in Egypt tell us anything about changes in unemployment and poverty levels? This question was formulated with UNDP’s Cairo-based Team during several conversations I had with them in early 2013.

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Data Science for Social Good: Not Cognitive Surplus but Cognitive Mismatch

I’ve spent the past 12 months working with top notch data scientists at QCRI et al. The following may thus be biased: I think QCRI got it right. They strive to balance their commitment to positive social change with their primary mission of becoming a world class institute for advanced computing research. The two are not mutually exclusive. What it takes is a dedicated position, like the one created for me at QCRI. It is high time that other research institutes, academic programs and international computing conferences create comparable focal points to catalyze data science for social good.

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2013/06/17

Jon Rappoport: Center for Disease Control is a Taxpayer-Funded Fraud — The Flu Is Not the Flu, Lies Focus on Protecting the Money Machine Not the Public

03 Economy, 07 Health, 11 Society, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

A new giant vaccine scandal exposes government lies and psyops

If you control the use of words and numbers, you can make trillions of dollars, and you can hide scandals that would otherwise take you down into infamy and prison.

You can pretty much operate a whole sector of society and remain untouched.

Nowhere is this more clear than in the criminal work of the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

The real name of that agency should be: Centers for Disease Information Control. That’s what they do. They manipulate words and numbers to present fictional images to the public.

They’re a tax-funded PR front for the medical cartel. A 24/7 psyop.

“Yes, of course I’m a criminal. I work for the CDC.”

Here is the latest blockbuster.

After writing about fake vaccine science since 1988, I thought I’d seen it all:

Wild falsehoods about vaccines creating immunity; suppressed information about toxic ingredients in the shots; the absence of proper controlled studies proving vaccines are safe and effective.

But now Peter Doshi, PhD, writing in the online BMJ (British Medical Journal), reveals a new monstrosity. It’s all based on the revelation that most “flu” is not the flu.

Follow this closely. If you blink, you might miss it.

You see, as Doshi states, every year, hundreds of thousands of respiratory samples are taken from flu patients in the US and tested in labs. Here is the kicker: only a small percentage of these samples show the presence of a flu virus.

This means: most of the people in America who are diagnosed by doctors with the flu have no flu virus in their bodies.

Continue reading “Jon Rappoport: Center for Disease Control is a Taxpayer-Funded Fraud — The Flu Is Not the Flu, Lies Focus on Protecting the Money Machine Not the Public”

2013/06/162013/06/16

Neal Rauhauser: Rivers of the Fertile Crescent (Six Graphics)

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 12 Water

Rivers Of The Fertile Crescent

The Fertile Cresent is often referred to as the cradle of civilization. The map show the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates. Not shown but equally important are the Jordan, which drains to the Dead Sea, and Lebanon’s Litani River.

Each of these waterways is shared between at least three countries, with the exception of the Litani, which has been determined to be entirely within Lebanon’s territory. Each is heavily overdrawn and plagued by mishandling, most often in the form of aging, leaky irrigation infrastructure.

The area was the scene of our mastery of agricultural and animal husbandry between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago. Cities such as Damascus and Jericho are believed to have been continuously occupied for the last 11,000 years. But current reports on all five drainage basins point to trouble brewing for the entire region.

Water issues are embedded in any geopolitical concerns for the region, but this far I have only written The Nile’s Annual Flood, Losing The Euphrates, and mentioned the Jordan in passing in Monitoring The Golan Heights. Like my attention on wheat production, examining rainfall and groundwater usage can provide insight into the potential for trouble far in advance of events that actually make the news.

Continue reading “Neal Rauhauser: Rivers of the Fertile Crescent (Six Graphics)”

2013/06/162013/06/16

Marcus Aurelius: Reuel Marc-Gerecht on NSA High Cost – Low Return — Robert Steele Comments

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Idiocy, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military, Office of Management and Budget, Officers Call

The Costs And Benefits Of The NSA

The data-collection debate we need to have is not about civil liberties.

By Reuel Marc Gerecht

Weekly Standard, June 24, 2013

Should Americans fear the possible abuse of the intercept power of the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland? Absolutely. In the midst of the unfolding scandal at the IRS, we understand that bureaucracies are callous creatures, capable of manipulation. In addition to deliberate misuse, closed intelligence agencies can make mistakes in surveilling legitimate targets, causing mountains of trouble. Consider Muslim names. Because of their commonness and the lack of standardized transliteration, they can befuddle scholars, let alone intelligence analysts, who seldom have fluency in Islamic languages. Although one is hard pressed to think of a case since 9/11 in which mistaken identity, or a willful or unintentional leak of intercept intelligence, immiserated an American citizen, these things can happen. NSA civilian employees, soldiers, FBI agents, CIA case officers, prosecutors, and our elected officials are not always angels. Even though encryption is mathematically easier to accomplish than decryption, the potential for abuse of digital communication is always there—all the more since few Americans resort to encryption of their everyday emails.

But fearing the NSA, which has been a staple of Hollywood for decades, requires you to believe that hundreds, if not thousands, of American employees in the organization are in on a conspiracy. In the Edward Snowden-is-a-legitimate-NSA-whistleblower narrative, it also requires that very liberal senators and congressmen are complicit in propagating a civil-rights-chewing national surveillance system.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Reuel Marc-Gerecht on NSA High Cost – Low Return — Robert Steele Comments”

2013/06/122013/06/12

David Swanson: How Broke Do We Have to Be To Stop Trillion Dollar Pork?

03 Economy, Corruption, Government, Idiocy

by Lisa Savage and Janet Weil

The omnibus military spending bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) rolled out of the House Armed Services Committee pulling a trailer load of amendments and barreling down an increasingly potholed road. In the same week as news broke of massive school closings in Chicago and Philadelphia for lack of funding, only two members of the committee, California representatives Jackie Speier and John Garamendi, had the presence of mind to vote “no” on $637.5 billion more for drones, nukes, and missile “defense” in FY2014.

The NDAA will now make its way through a House of Representatives packed with liberals and conservatives who take massive campaign contributions from military contracting firms. Democrats will take their lead from President Obama, who proposed the $1.15 trillion annual budget that includes a whopping 56.5% military share of the discretionary spending pie. Source: NationalPriorities.org

Despite the crisis of sequestration and claims that the U.S. is too broke to adequately fund food stamps, Head Start, or “Meals-on-wheels” for the elderly, the NDAA contains $85.8 billion for the war in Afghanistan plus another $7.7 billion for the Afghan Security Forces. These funding levels are $52.2 billion over what sequestration would supposedly require — an additional $1 billion a week.

The House Armed Services Committee also passed a “Sense of Congress” endorsement of a continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan after 2014 as well as ongoing funding for the Afghan Security forces. Thus the U.S. “withdraws” from Afghanistan.

Why does Congress keep voting for military spending when the U.S. is supposedly so broke?

Continue reading “David Swanson: How Broke Do We Have to Be To Stop Trillion Dollar Pork?”

2013/06/12

SchwartzReport: Japan Solar Power Replaces Seven Nuclear Reactors — In ONE YEAR

03 Economy, 05 Energy, 07 Health, 08 Wild Cards, 11 Society, Commerce, Ethics, Government

The Germans have done it. The Japanese are doing it. We remain in the grip of the carbon energy barons.

Japan: The World's New Star in Solar Power

FORTUNE — Until recently less than 1% of Japan's electrical power output came from renewables. But following the catastrophe of Fukushima and the power blackouts that followed, Japan has seen an explosion in investment in alternatives. Solar, in particular, in this averagely photon-blessed country, has seen a seismic rise of late and is this year poised to become the world's largest solar market in volume after China.

According to a report by energy analyst IHS on Japan's energy mix, Japan's solar installations jumped by “a stunning 270% (in gigawatts) in the first quarter of 2013.” That means by the end of 2013 there will be enough new solar panels equal to the capacity of seven nuclear reactors. Such massive growth will allow Japan to surpass Germany and become the world's largest photovoltaics (PV) market in terms of revenue this year.

“Japan is forecast to install $20 billion worth of PV systems in 2013, up 82% from $11 billion in 2012,” IHS said. “In contrast, the global market is set for tepid 4% growth. The strong revenue performance for Japan this year is partly driven by the high solar prices in the country.” Germany still leads with the total number of units and capacity, however, with its 32,192 megawatts. Japan is now closer to the U.S.'s 8,069 megawatts at 7,429 megawatts, according to London-based BNEF.

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