09 Justice – Page 164 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/04/17

Massive Fraud, Common Crime, No Prosecutions

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Why haven't any high-profile execs been prosecuted for their role in the financial crisis?

In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON and LOUISE STORY

The New York Times, April 14, 2011

It is a question asked repeatedly across America: why, in the aftermath of a financial mess that generated hundreds of billions in losses, have no high-profile participants in the disaster been prosecuted?

Read full article….

See Also:

Neil Weinberg, Corrupt Bank Oversight Is Creating New Immoral Hazard, Forbes, 14 April 2011

To me the moral of this story is that Washington has created a vast immoral hazard. We are all truly in a world of peril when regulators and law enforcers believe our financial institutions are too big to be brought to justice—and when our leadership in Washington is so gutless that its response is to let these same institutions emerge bigger and more beyond challenge than ever.

Read rest of this hard-hitting article…

Tip of the Hat to Lynn Wheeler at LinkedIn for the clean links.

Phi Beta Iota: It is our view that the President, the Attorney General, the Secretary of the Treasury, and most Senators and Representatives are immediately impeachable for failing to uphold their oaths to the Constitution and failing to represent the public interest in the face of massive legalized fraud on the part of Wall Street.

2011/04/152011/04/15

Liberation Technology Stakeholders…

09 Justice, 11 Society, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, IO Technologies

Preliminary List of Stakeholders

Appropedia
Brave New Software
Creative Commons
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Free Network Movement
Free Software Foundation
FreedomBox
Future Forward Institute
New America Foundation
Open Source Ecology
P2P Foundation
Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium
Tor Project Anonymnity Online
Unhosted–Open Web Standard for Decentralizing
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Phi Beta Iota: We disagree on the inclusion of the New America Foundation–they are not stakeholders as much as beltway “think-tank” opportunists, and too heavily reliant on proprietary hooks going nowhere. New Software Foundation has been changed to Free Software Foundation. We would add to the above list:

Autonomo.us
Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference
Cook Report on Internet Protocol
Free Internet
GNU Operating System
Liberation Technology Project (Standford University)
NetZero Free Dial-Up Internet Access
Technology Liberation Front

Many others will be identified over time.

2011/04/152011/04/15

Serious (Honest) Thinking About US Budget

03 Economy, 07 Health, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military

Dear friends,

The three articles below describe major approaches to addressing the deficit — for health care, taxes and the military — that would have a greater impact on America's budget woes than ANYTHING being currently negotiated by Congress and the Obama Administration. Even better, these three things would, if implemented, actually improve the quality of life in the U.S., instead of degrading it, as so many of the current proposals would do. They give a taste of some excellent thinking emerging from the fringes of this “budget crisis” debate.

[After I wrote this I was alerted to another very interesting “People's Budget” recently released with little coverage in the mainstream media, which I recommend to those interested in alternatives.]

When I imagine a Citizens Jury, a Citizens Assembly, or any other randomly selected body of citizens convened to deliberate about the “budget crisis”, this is the kind of information I believe they should be exposed to. We don't need to undermine public health to create affordable health care. We don't need to undermine the wealth of the nation to have a reasonable tax system. We don't need to endanger American security to have a strong, affordable military.

We just need to think a bit outside of the boxes that most mainstream media, pundits, politicians and partisan activists (intentionally) put our minds in, and ask ourselves “What's the REAL problem here — and what would ACTUALLY solve it?”

How to Save a Trillion Dollars

Taxes on the Wealthy: New Top Brackets Needed for the Have Mores

Want to improve US national security? Cut the defense budget.

Continue reading “Serious (Honest) Thinking About US Budget”

2011/04/152011/04/15

US Government Bails Out and Pardons Wall Street, Sends Barry Bonds to Jail–What’s the Difference?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Barry Bonds Faces Jail Time While Wall Street Execs Sit Pretty

What’s the difference between Barry Bonds and Goldman Sachs executives? The later was fortunate enough to be questioned by incompetent lawmakers while Bonds ended up in a courthouse with an actual jury and prosecutors.

. . . . . .

“The Goldman guys may have worse batting average than Barry Bonds but they were better educated by their lawyers about they should shouldn’t say. They also had the benefit of being questioned by incompetent people who had no idea about the financial nomenclature at the heart of their allegations,” Singer says.

For more on why and how Wall Street has avoided criminal charges and jail time check out today’s story in the New York Times about how regulators have, in some cases, willingly protected banks and their executives.

Of course, Matt Taibbi’s Why Isn’t Wall Street In Jail? is also a must-read.

2011/04/15

Harvard “Boys” Crash, Burn, No Apology

04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Academia, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Impotency

economicprincipals.com

March 27, 2011, David Warsh, Proprietor

A Recent Exercise in Nation-Building by Some Harvard Boys

It was worth a smile at breakfast that morning in February 2006, a scrap of social currency to take out into the world. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School management guru, had grown famous offering competitive strategies to firms, regions, whole nations. Earlier he had taken on the problems of inner cities, health care and climate change. Now he was about to tackle perhaps the hardest problem of all (that is, after the United States’ wars in Afghanistan and Iraq).

He had become adviser to Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya.

Phi Beta Iota: Harvard is now the poster child for all that is wrong with education–no intelligence, no ethics, and grotesquely expensive. Yale can now claim the mantle in the East.

Read full original….

Safety copy below the line.

Continue reading “Harvard “Boys” Crash, Burn, No Apology”

2011/04/142011/04/14

From BRIC to BRICS–Sanya Declaration

01 Brazil, 02 China, 03 Economy, 03 India, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 07 Venezuela, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Earth Intelligence, Government, IO Multinational, Reform, Strategy

Full text of Sanya Declaration of the BRICS Leaders Meeting

Xinhuanet.com English.news.cn 2011-04-14 21:58:57

SANYA, Hainan, April 14 (Xinhua) — Leaders of five BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, released on Thursday a joint document, Sanya Declaration, at the BRICS Leaders Meeting in south China's resort city of Sanya.

The following is the full text of the document.

Sanya Declaration

(BRICS Leaders Meeting, Sanya, Hainan, China, 14 April 2011)

Read full text (nine screens)–videos and photos in sidebar.

Continue reading “From BRIC to BRICS–Sanya Declaration”

2011/04/142011/04/14

US Intelligence: Militarized to Lowest Common Denominator

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call

Phi Beta Iota: Posted with permission. We strongly recommend the Intelligence Online offerings. We have received a number of commentaries around this topic, and they boil down to the situation being much, much worse than depicted here:

1. Budget weenies without substantive experience running entire agencies (e.g. NRO)

2. Nose-dive to the lowest common denominator, completely destroying regional and country expertise and having no linguistic capabilities or grasp of history and culture (CIA, DIA)

3. Completely out of control procurement, rotten requirements definition, no full life-cycle planning (e.g. buy collection, do not buy processing), and generally disconnected from reality (NSA/Cyber-Command)

4. We are reminded that there are 1,200 distinct “organizations” wasting money and going through the motions on counter-terrorism–meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security gropes little girls, confiscates aftershave, and is generally on the underside of institutionalized tyrannical idiocy.