Four Time Bombs Centered on Wall Street

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Waste (materials, food, etc)
DefDog Recommends...

Paul B. Farrell

March 1, 2011, 12:01 a.m. EST

Four time bombs that will blow up Wall Street

Commentary: Too late to jail bank CEOs; only revolution will succeed

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

Phi Beta Iota: Highlights include extimate that US is 44 trillion in debt; that nothing and Administration does will stop Wall Street–this is now so bad the author believes a revolution (as in swarming homes and offices and demanding the return of ill-gotten wealth) will do.  We do not agree.  Yes, it is bad.  No, recovering the stolen money will not do.  The silver lining in all this is the obvious decrepitude of governments and corporations; the now obvious toxic nature of information asymmetries and data pathologies; and the less obvious but emergent need for a) restoring the integrity of the US Electoral process through Electoral Reform 2.2 ; and b) creating the Autonomous Internet so as to achieve Panarchy and create a prosperous world at peace in which transparency eliminates corruption, fraud, waste, and abuse, starting in the USA.

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Understanding America’s Decline: When…

09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Officers Call
Chuck Spinney Recommends....

… we reward incompetence and/or lying as described below in the essay by Robert Parry?

Chuck Spinney

The Blaster

Gates Agrees, Bush's Wars Were Nuts

By Robert Parry, consortiumnews.com, February 27, 2011

When Defense Secretary Robert Gates told West Point cadets that you’d have to be crazy to commit U.S. troops to wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, media commentators quickly detected a slap at his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who oversaw those conflicts.

But what about everyone else in the U.S. power structure who went along with those insane and bloody wars? Shouldn’t such people – whether they acted out of ideology or opportunism – be kept away from levers of authority that might get others killed?

For instance, what about the top editors at the Washington Post, the New York Times and a host of other establishment publications and TV outlets who hopped on the pro-war bandwagon and mocked anyone who suggested that negotiations or some less violent means might be preferable?    Read more….

Phi Beta Iota: Like most others, Dr. Gates finds his integrity late in life.  It was not just those who lied to the public who betrayed the public trust, but also  those like Dr. Gates who kept silent.  A handful of us tried to buy full page advertisements against  the wars, only to have them rejected by The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, etcetera.  This is what happens when the “elite” value their membership in the elite club more than they value their integrity.  Integrity matters most when you can still make a difference, not after the fact when you have reaped all you could from “going along.”  At this juncture in time, the simple best thing for America–apart from Electoral Reform–would be the resurrection of integrity among our senior officials.

No Such Thing As a Good War….

09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Key Players, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, True Cost
Chuck Spinney Recommends....

Advocates of humanitarian intervention like to use Kosovo as an example of a “good” war to distinguish it from Bush's bad war in Iraq and the Bush/Obama bungles in Afghanistan.  But Kosovo was a template for bungling and blowback in the wars of empire that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The below article is outlines some of the reasons why this is so.

Chuck Spinney
The Blaster

Wrong choice in Kosovo

By GREGORY CLARK,  Japan Times, 1 March 2011

A recent Council of Europe report says that during and after the 1998-99 Kosovo conflict, militia leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) tortured and killed hundreds of Serbs and political rivals in secret Albanian hideouts, removed their organs for sale and dumped their bodies in local rivers.

The report added that these people were also heavily involved in drug, sex and illegal immigrant trafficking across Europe. Yet while all this was going on, the NATO powers had decreed that Serbia should be bombed into accepting the KLA as Kosovo's legitimate rulers — rather than the more popular Democratic League of Kosovo headed by the nationalist intellectual Ibrahim Rugova advocating nonviolent independence.

Recent years have not been kind to Western policymakers. They have shown an almost unerring ability to choose the wrong people for the wrong policies. Think back to the procession of incompetents chosen to rescue Indochina from the communist enemy. Does anyone even remember their names today? Yet at the time they were supposed to be nation-savers.  Read more….

Phi Beta Iota: It is now known that the World Wars were enabled by bankers intent on empowering the evil side with loans so as to force the good side to borrow heavily.  Bankers–and corporate mercenary interests with zero respect for “the public interest,” have created a world of grostesque inquality instead of a prosperous world at peace.  Revolution 2.0 is connecting the public–that is phase one–to be followed by phase two, an informed public that will not brook corruption.

Foreign Policy Slanders Sy Hersh–Loses Its Integrity

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, Analysis, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, IO Sense-Making, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Media, Misinformation & Propaganda
(from left to right) Tom Ricks of Foreign Policy magazine and The Washington Post, along with fellow FP editors Joshua Keating and Blake Hounshell all rushed to discredit Hersh and the contents of his January 17th, 2011 speech.

Pulitzer Prize Winner Seymour Hersh And The Men Who Want Him Committed

By Matthew Phelan on February 23, 2011

WhoWhatWhy: Forensic Journalism

It seems unusual for a staid, respected publication (one that has received three National Magazine Awards in just this past decade) to start treating a celebrated journalist (who himself has won two National Magazine Awards in just this past decade) as if he were nothing more than a paranoid crank.

It seems unusual, but it’s exactly what the staff of Foreign Policy has done to Seymour Hersh, following a lecture the venerated reporter gave at Georgetown University’s campus in Doha, Qatar. You may know Hersh as the dogged investigator who exposed the My Lai Massacre during Vietnam. You may know him as the staff writer for The New Yorker who published some of the earliest pieces on Abu Ghraib in May 2004. You might even know him as the man derided and then vindicated for claiming that Dick Cheney was running a secret assassination squad right out of the Vice President’s office. (In truth, the squad was and is a bipartisan affair, initiated under Clinton and still operative under Obama.)  Read more….

Phi Beta Iota: Sy Hersh is as honest as it gets.  Foreign Policy used to be a reputable, imaginative endeavor.  This is now the second time it has been disreputable and ignorant.  Inquiry has established that Moises Naim, the extraordinary editor who took Foreign Policy from nothing to being twice as good as Foreign Affairs, has moved to other duties within the Carnegie Endowment, and it is clear to us that with his departure, Foreign Policy has lost its integrity as well as its intelligence.

Guest Post: Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion

01 Agriculture, 01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth

Guest Post: Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion

Tyler Durden's picture

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/26/2011 20:53 -0500

If you think what’s happening in Egypt won’t happen within the United States, you’ve been watching too much TV. The statistics speak for themselves.

Join The MovementIn previous Revolution Roundups, before we were knocked offline, we featured mass protests by the people of Ireland, Italy, Britain, Austria, Greece, France and Portugal, as the Global Insurrection contagion spread throughout Europe. And now, as we have seen over the past month, North African and Middle Eastern nations have joined the movement as the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Morocco, Gabon, Mauritania, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan and Algeria have taken to the streets en masse.

The connection between this latest round of uprisings and the prior protests throughout Europe is one the mainstream media is not making. We are witnessing a decentralized global rebellion against Neo-Liberal economic imperialism. While each national uprising has its own internal characteristics, each one, at its core, is about the rising costs of living and lack of financial opportunity and security. Throughout the world the situation is the same: increasing levels of unemployment and poverty, as price inflation on food and basic necessities is soaring.

Whether national populations realize it or not, these uprisings are against systemic global economic policies that are strategically designed to exploit the working class, reduce living standards, increase personal debt and create severe inequalities of wealth. These global uprising, which have only just begun, are the first wave of the inevitable reaction to the implementation of a centralized worldwide Neo-Feudal economic order.

The global banking cartel, centered at the IMF, World Bank and Federal Reserve, have paid off politicians and dictators the world over — from Washington to Greece to Egypt. In country after country, they have looted national economies at the expense of local populations, consolidating wealth in unprecedented fashion – the top economic one-tenth of one percent is currently holding over $40 trillion in investible wealth, not counting an equally significant amount of wealth hidden in offshore accounts.  Read More….

Tip of the Hat to Contributing Editor Jock Gill for the link.

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Poverty, Not Terrorism, Is Threat #1

01 Agriculture, 01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney Recommends....

The price of food is at the heart of this wave of revolutions

No one saw the uprisings coming, but their deeper cause isn't hard to fathom

By Peter Popham
Independent, Sunday, 27 February 2011

Revolution is breaking out all over. As Gaddafi marshals his thugs and mercenaries for a last-ditch fight in Tripoli, several died as protests grew more serious in Iraq. Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah tried to bribe his people into docility by splashing out $35bn on housing, social services and education. Across the water in Bahrain the release of political prisoners failed to staunch the uprising. In Iran, President Ahmadinejad crowed about chaos in the Arab world, but said nothing about the seething anger in his own backyard; in Yemen, the opposition gathers strength daily.

And it's not just the Middle East. This is an African crisis: Tunisia, where it started, is an African country, and last week in Senegal, a desperate army veteran died after setting fire to himself in front of the presidential palace, emulating Mohamed Bouazizi, the market trader whose self-immolation sparked the revolution in Tunisia. Meanwhile, the spirit of revolt has already leapt like a forest fire to half a dozen other ill-governed African nations, with serious disturbances reported in Mauritania, Gabon, Cameroon and Zimbabwe.   Read more….

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Greater Democracy: Citizen in Search of a Leader

09 Justice, 11 Society, About the Idea
Jock Gill Recommends....

Sunday 27 Feb 2011

Citizen in Search of a Leader

Author: Robert David Steele Vivas

Summary of Qualifications

America needs a leader that is balanced, thoughtful, integrative, supportive of dissent and debate, and above all, educated enough to craft a national strategy for security and prosperity that will stand the test of time. I want a leader who is at least as committed to the future of my children as to the passing security and prosperity of the moment. Individuals obsessing on being elected or re-elected need not apply.

In my view as a citizen, there are four areas where the right individual, as a team builder rather than a personal icon, could help America restore its balance. These four areas are: 1) electoral reform, 2) intelligence reform, 3) global issues & national security reform, and 4) governance reform inclusive of corporate ethics and accountability. I would sum up the objective of all four reform initiatives with the phrase: “Creating a Smart Nation, Of, By, and For the People.”

The full essay: Citizen In Search of a Leader

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Electoral Reform ..  Coalition Cabinet ..  Public Policy-Budget Outreach Model