Obama’s surge and de-surge has, therefore, created a reinforcing dynamic that is playing into the hands of the insurgents by seducing the United States into increasing its reliance on a pointless, reactive, “whack-a-mole” strategy. Like a judo specialist, the insurgents will use the expenditure of American energies to exhaust American forces and paralyze American political willpower by inducing our military to over and under react to an unfolding welter widely dispersed insurgent attacks
Phi Beta Iota: At home, the teen riots have started in Philadelphia. More riots are certain to follow, and more “random” shootings of anyone representing the US Government are likely west of the Mississippi. This is almost the perfect storm–all that is missing is a water failure in New York City followed by a firestorm, and massive epidemic across California.
Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire and Ten Steps to Take to Do So
1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism
2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us
3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases
. . . . . . . .
Chalmers Johnson
10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire (Abridged)
Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:
1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.
2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the “opportunity costs” that go with them — the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can't or won't.
3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture. Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.
4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters — along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth — that follow our military enclaves around the world.
5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.
6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world's largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism.
7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.
8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Ending empire would make this possible.
9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.
10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.
Phi Beta Iota: The second article is a stunning review of the intellectual life of Chalmers Johnson, who was among many things a net assessments analyst for Allen Dulles. He pioneered the study of “State Capitalism” and considered the US to be a greatly under-performing economy for its failure to move away from military unilateralism and toward sustainable development.
They got it wrong…. Internal Auditor recently published an article by Neil Baker “Managing the Complexity of Risk” claiming that “The ISO 31000 framework aims to provide a foundation for effective risk management within the organization.” Well….not so fast.
“Complexity” has become something of a buzz word in today’s business culture, becoming more vague and imprecise than many of us attempting to understand complexity would like. Naming something is not the same as actually knowing anything about what you just named (see my essay “The Red Wagon Principal: Knowing Is Better Than Naming”). The misappropriation of the concept is always done with the best of intentions. However, Neil was savvy enough to introduce Mandelbrot and fractal geometry into the mix doesn’t get a free pass.
The story of what might be called the ghost of chicken pox future starts with Najlaa International Catering Services (NICS), a KBR contractor, headquartered in Kuwait. NICS was solicited by KBR in the spring of 2008 to provide a Request for Proposal (RFP) for approximately 32 Dining Facilities (DFAC) at various military camps in Iraq under the Army's LOGCAP (Logistics Civil Augmentation Program) III program. NICS subsequently won the contract.
Around the end of the first week of November 2008 it was discovered that NICS's temporary tent city housing camp at Victory Base Camp had a confirmed chicken pox case and 37 employees were supposed to be quarantined. NICS disputed with GlobalMed, its KBR-approved medical service provider, that it was a chicken pox case. NICS began to release the employees from the quarantine tent and put them back to work at the DFAC's.
Phi Beta Iota: This little-noticed story is actually–in our view–a major investigative expose. At multiple levels, from irresponsible acquisition to potentially catastrophic infections of entire divisions by “friendly contractors,” this is a story that merits much more attention. It is also a story that reinforces our view that contractors have no business being employed or engaged in a combat zone.
The Public Intelligence Blog has speculated that the financial elites who indirectly are the principal influencers the U.S. Congress and the Presidency have decided that their best interests will be served if U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) spending is substantially reduced. It has long been obvious that DOD budgets have been bloated beyond any rationality so any real effect to bring those budgets under control should be welcomed.
Yet I have concerns about how DOD will respond to major reductions in military spending. The permanent senior civilian leadership of DOD and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), for the most part, appear to be completely devoid of integrity and indeed common sense. I seriously doubt if DOD leadership can be trusted to execute intelligent reductions in spending. I worry that the bureaucrats and JCS staffers will end up cutting back even further on support to our actual fighting forces (real men and women) in order to continue funding parochial badly conceived programs that are expensive, but often useless. There is such a close relationship between DOD and the Defense Industries that as the late Colonel John Boyd (USAF ret.) observed the real strategy of the JSC is to keep the money flowing (and increasing if possible). Too many military and civilian DOD officials use a revolving door between high level DOD positions and high paying defense industries jobs to be able to objectively evaluate the real worth of many defense projects.
In the past six months, hedge fund manager George Soros has been an outspoken critic of the economicrecovery.And as the U.S. digests the S&P downgrade, it's helpful to remember that as Barclays analysts Ajay Rajadhyaksha and Anshul Pradhan put it, The S&P's action is not a surprise. So to gain a market expert's view, we've gone through many of Soros' recent interviews and selected his main points.
Soros describes the key arguments the market is dealing with right now and makes predictions on what will happen next.
His quotes are dated in chronological order.
Phi Beta Iota: The original article has photos and more context for each quote. Eleven quotes only are below the line.
The fleet of 158 F-22 planes — costing $412 million each — has never entered combat and has been grounded since May 3 because of a government safety investigation. The probe follows more than a dozen incidents in which oxygen was cut off to pilots, a problem suspected of contributing to at least one fatal accident.
Phi Beta Iota: The Los Angeles Times was among several mainstream newspapers that refused $100,000 full page ads against the Iraq War. Like CNN and Fareed Zakaria, they do not stray from the approved party line. This is a very clear sign (to us, at least) that Wall Street is throwing DoD under the bus. Leon Panetta probably has no idea what is about to hit him–hyping Al Qaeda will not match a deliberate Wall Street shut down of all support for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Comples (MICC). A Civil War is in progress in the USA, on multiple fronts.
