The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
For the past year the Executive Director of Earth Intelligence Network, “JZ” Jason Liszkiewicz has been pursuing a self-designed project to understand, deeply and in detail, the “true cost” of a plain cotton t-shirt. Click on either photo to read all about it and if you wish, to order one of these examples of citizen intelligence in action.
A Call to the People of the World to Support Iceland Against Financial Blackmail
Birgitta Jónsdóttir
Infowars.com
January 6, 2009
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.
Stiglitz’s 5 Lessons from 2009
Thursday, 12/31/2009 – 12:01 pm by Joseph Stiglitz
New Deal 2.0
Roosevelt Institute Braintruster and Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz identifies five lessons we can take away from the financial crisis.
The best that can be said for 2009 is that it could have been worse, that we pulled back from the precipice on which we seemed to be perched in late 2008, and that 2010 will almost surely be better for most countries around the world. The world has also learned some valuable lessons, though at great cost both to current and future prosperity — costs that were unnecessarily high given that we should already have learned them.
The first lesson is that markets are not self-correcting. Indeed, without adequate regulation, they are prone to excess. In 2009, we again saw why Adam Smith’s invisible hand often appeared invisible: it is not there. The bankers’ pursuit of self-interest (greed) did not lead to the well-being of society; it did not even serve their shareholders and bondholders well. It certainly did not serve homeowners who are losing their homes, workers who have lost their jobs, retirees who have seen their retirement funds vanish, or taxpayers who paid hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the banks.
Continue reading “Journal: Financial Intelligence for the Public”
UN to produce bullion coins as world currency (Before Its News, 24 December 2009)
Gold coins to bear the UN logo (World Gold Council, 16 December 2009)
UN to produce bullion coins as world currency (Examiner, 15 December 2009)
The below article written by my two good friends Winslow Wheeler and Pierre Sprey is one of the very best case studies describing how the incredible corruption of critical thinking that prevails in the day to day life of the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) produces techno trash.
With programs like the F-35 populating the Pentagon's modernization plan, there can be no question of why the defense budget is now at a post World War II high, yet is powering the Defense Department into a Death Spiral, where forces continue to shrink (the AF is now contemplating yet another reduction of its fighter structure by 2 more tactical fighter wings), weapons continue to get older, and there is continual pressure to cut readiness, even though we are fighting two wars. Add in the fact that the Pentagon's planning and budgeting system can not pass a simple audit that identifies and verifies the links between money appropriated by Congress to the money expended by the Pentagon, which is required by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, not to mention the Accountability and Appropriations Clauses of the same Constitution every member of the federal government has sworn to protect and uphold … and you have a prescription for ever increasing disasters at ever higher costs.
Chuck Spinney
by Winslow T. Wheeler and Pierre M. Sprey
Huffington Post
23 December 2009
Setting aside the not-so-proud history of the P-38, the Lightning II moniker is a poor fit for the F-35. Despite the F-35's whopping (and still growing) $122 million per copy price tag, the Air Force and other advocates pretend it is the low-priced, affordable spread in fighter-bombers. Though horrendously overburdened with every high tech weight and drag inducing goodie the aviation bureaucracy in the Pentagon can cram in, the Lightning II is hardly a pioneer, being little more than a pastiche of pre-existing air-to-air and air-to-ground technology – albeit with vastly more complexified computer programs. The P-38 Lightning of the twenty-first century it is surely not, especially for those who hold the P-38 in undeserved high regard.
In the interests of giving credit where credit is due, a more historically fitting moniker for the F-35 would be “Aardvark II.” Aardvark — literally ground pig in Afrikaans — was the nickname pilots (and ultimately the Air Force) gave to the F-111–and for good reasons. The F-111 was the tri-Service, tri-mission fighter-bomber of the 60s, and also a legendary disaster. The F-35 is rapidly earning its place as the Aardvark's true heir.
There are astonishing parallels between the two programs.
Click A Tale of Two Pigs to read entire story. other references below the fold.
I doubt it, but hope springs eternal could this be a significant development? To date, Simon Johnson has been a very astute observer of the financial meltdown and has been crusading for breaking up the mega banks …
Dec 17, 2009
For most the past 12 months, Paul Volcker was sitting on the policy sidelines. He had impressive sounding job titles – member of President Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board immediately after last November’s election, and quickly named to head the new Economic Recovery Board.
But the Recovery Board, and Volcker himself, have seldom met with the President. Economic and financial sector policy, by all accounts, has been made largely by Tim Geithner at Treasury and Larry Summers at the White House, with help from Peter Orszag at the Office of Management and Budget, and Christina Romer at the Council of Economic Advisers.
With characteristic wry humor, Volcker denied in late October that he had lost clout within the administration: “I did not have influence to start with.”
But that same front page interview in the New York Times [10/21/09] contained a well placed shock to then prevailing policy consensus.
Volcker, legendary former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board with much more experience of Wall Street than any current policymaker, was blunt: We need to break up our biggest banks and return to the basic split of activities that existed under the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 – a highly regulated (and somewhat boring) set of banks to run the payments system, and a completely separate set of financial entities to help firms raise capital (and to trade securities).
Continue reading “Journal: Integrity (Truth) Coming to the Top on Banking”
Although the faltering dollar could rebound in the short run, the longer-term prognosis is terminal unless Washington dramatically reduces spending and borrowing. When the global run on treasury debt and the dollar develops, the current relative minor fluctuations in values will be replaced by a virulent death spiral of historic proportions seen few times in world history.
Phi Beta Iota: Above is just one of hundreds of stories along the same lines.
