Category: 11 Society

Posted on

Berto Jongman: Economic Consequences of War

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, IO Impotency, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Berto Jongman

Economic Consequences of War

New report released by the Institute for Economics & Peace analyses the macroeconomic effects of US government spending on wars and the military since World War II.

The IEP’s latest report,  Economic Consequences of War on the US Economy,  analyses the macroeconomic effects of US government spending on wars and the military.

The report studies five periods – World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and the Afghanistan/Iraq wars – exposing the effect of war financing on debt, consumption, investment, jobs, taxes, government deficits, and inflation.

The findings of the report show devastating trends for US tax, debt and deficit debates.

Download the report here

Key findings

The U.S. has paid for its wars either through debt [World War II, Cold War, Afghanistan/Iraq], taxation [Korean War] or inflation [Vietnam]. In each case, taxpayers have been burdened, and private sector consumption and investment have been constrained as a result.

Report highlights

The report shows the following economic indicators experiencing negative effects either during or after the conflicts:

  • Public debt and levels of taxation increased during most conflicts
  • Consumption as a percent of GDP decreased during most conflicts
  • Investment as a percent of GDP decreased during most conflicts
  • Inflation increased during or as a direct consequence of these conflicts

The higher levels of government spending associated with war tends to generate some positive economic benefits in the short-term, specifically through increases in economic growth occurring during conflict spending booms. However, negative unintended consequences occur either concurrently with the war or develop as residual effects afterwards thereby harming the economy over the longer term.

Phi Beta Iota:  There appears to be a continued reluctance to address the real causes of our terrible situation: corruption across the board.  No amount of intellectual posturing, whether in a book or in a conference, is a substitute for full transparency and the truth — the whole truth.  The lack of integrity across all eight tribes — academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit — is the ROOT CAUSE of our collapse.

See Also:

Journal: Politics & Intelligence–Partners Only When Integrity is Central to Both

2012 THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

2010 The Ultimate Hack Re-Inventing Intelligence to Re-Engineer Earth (Chapter for Counter-Terrorism Book Out of Denmark)

Posted on

Chuck Spinney: Investigating NATO’s War Crimes Against Libya

02 China, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, DoD, Government, Law Enforcement, Military, Non-Governmental, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence
Chuck Spinney

Investigations Around Libya

NATO’S Craven Coverup of Its Libyan Bombing

by VIJAY PRASHAD, Counterpunch, March 15, 2012

Ten days into the uprising in Benghazi, Libya, the United Nations’ Human Rights Council established the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya. The purpose of the Commission was to “investigate all alleged violations of international human rights law in Libya.” The broad agenda was to establish the facts of the violations and crimes and to take such actions as to hold the identified perpetrators accountable. On June 15, the Commission presented its first report to the Council. This report was provisional, since the conflict was still ongoing and access to the country was minimal. The June report was no more conclusive than the work of the human rights non-governmental organizations (such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch). In some instances, the work of investigators for these NGOs (such as Donatella Rovera of Amnesty) was of higher quality than that of the Commission.

Due to the uncompleted war and then the unsettled security state in the country in its aftermath, the Commission did not return to the field till October 2011, and did not begin any real investigation before December 2011. On March 2, 2012, the Commission finally produced a two hundred-page document that was presented to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. Little fanfare greeted this report’s publication, and the HRC’s deliberation on it was equally restrained.

Nonetheless, the report is fairly revelatory, making two important points:

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Investigating NATO's War Crimes Against Libya”

Posted on

Mini-Me: US Government Witch Hunting Continues…

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Government, Intelligence (government), Law Enforcement, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

My friends and colleagues,

Forgive the interruption. I reach out to you on a matter of some urgency, about my dear friend, a former CIA officer, dedicated, stoic, talented … and now in deep and terrifying trouble. What's happening to him is so stunningly crappy, and so unjustifiable, that his defense and support has become a personal priority. Though triggered — I believe — by a personal and political agenda, I see his cause as strikingly apolitical: this is about a man falsely persecuted, and the survival of his family.

Please, please take a minute to look at the below. Any questions, reach out to me, and/or check out the sites at the bottom of this email.

Thanks so much,
Peter Landesman

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

We write to ask you to join us in supporting, protecting and materially helping our friend and colleague, John Kiriakou, a long-time former C.I.A. official and case officer. Incredibly, John has been accused by the Department of Justice of crimes under the 1917 Espionage Act, a charge historically reserved for persons who betrayed their country to foreign governments for money.

Why? The prosecutors have not claimed that John talked to any foreign government, passed any government documents or accepted funds from anyone hostile to the United States. Instead, according to the facts asserted in the indictment, he committed the “crime” of responding honestly to a query from the New York Times related to the agency's interrogation program under the Bush Administration, which included waterboarding.

Continue reading “Mini-Me: US Government Witch Hunting Continues…”

Posted on

Marcus Aurelius: State Department Moves to Fire Peter Van Buren Author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government
Marcus Aurelius

For those of you with experience or interest in such things, State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS, long ago SY), has developed for itself a very negative reputation in personnel security arena.

Through AFSA, American Foreign Service Association (I am not a member having never been a FSO), I have read numerous accounts of horror show DS cases.

Overall, DS comes across as an internal State Dept Gestapo, much different from the RSOs I dealt with in embassies in LATAM and Africa.

Amazon Page

State Dept. moves to fire Peter Van Buren, author of book critical of Iraq reconstruction effort

Lisa Rein

Washington Post, 14 March 2012

Peter Van Buren, a foreign service officer who wrote anunflattering bookabout his year leading two reconstruction teams in Iraq, was stripped of his security clearance, banned from State Department headquarters for a time and transferred to a telework job that consists of copying Internet addresses into a file.

Read full story.

Phi Beta Iota:  Most Departmental “security” services turn into little Gestapos, but they do so on command from the top.  Peter van Buren's book was APPROVED by  the proper Department of State publication review process, which has integrity.  Evidently now someone at the top, probably not the Secretary of State but one of the top six mandarins, is abusing their authority and perhaps giving Peter van Buren a $10 million lawsuit on a platter.  When governments stop telling the truth they lose legitimacy.  When they begin persecuting people who tell the truth they lose authority.  We're there.

Posted on

DefDog: China Tries Real Name Registration Online

02 China, 11 Society, Government, IO Impotency
DefDog

Real-Name Registration Threatens the Lively World of China’s Microblogs

WIRED.com, 15 March 2012

The timeline on Sina Weibo, China’s popular Twitter-like service, is filled with pithy comments about “Beijing Fashion Week,” chronicling the comings and goings and sartorial choices of the elite.

But the commenters aren’t fashionistas, and they aren’t talking about supermodels or design stars. They are referring, in not-so-secret code, to Communist Party officials.

“Beijing Fashion Week” is a thinly veiled, sarcastic commentary on the Communist Party’s annual summit, now under way in the nation’s capital. And many of the assembled are making it easy to be ridiculed by showing up in luxury garb — a far cry from the staid image they aspire to project.

Click on Image to Enlarge

. . . . . .

And all this may change in the face of a new, more stringent policy designed to clamp down on free expression where other methods have been less successful. In a move to exert greater control on citizen speech online, the government is requiring that Sina Weibo and China’s other microblogs register the real names and identification cards of users in several cities. Those who do not register this week in many major cities like Beijing will not be allowed to share or forward posts; after a period of testing, the policy will go into effect nationwide.

Read full article.

Graphic Source (separate posting)

Posted on

Patrick Meier: #UgandaSpeaks: Al-Jazeera uses Ushahidi to Amplify Local Voices in Response to #Kony2012

08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Media
Patrick Meier

#UgandaSpeaks: Al-Jazeera uses Ushahidi to Amplify Local Voices in Response to #Kony2012

Invisible Children’s #Kony2012 campaign has set off a massive firestorm of criticism with the debate likely to continue raging for many more weeks and months. In the meantime, our colleagues at Al-Jazeera have repurposed our previous #SomaliaSpeaks project to amplify Ugandan voices responding to the Kony campaign: #UgandaSpeaks.

Together with GlobalVoices, this Al-Jazeera initiative is one of the very few seeking to amplify local reactions to the Kony campaign. Over 70 local voices have been shared and mapped on Al-Jazeera’s Ushahidi platform in the first few hours since the launch. The majority of reactions submitted thus far are critical of the campaign but a few are positive.

Read full post with graphics and many links.

Posted on

Mini-Me: PriceWaterHouseCoopers to Go Down?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth
Who? Mini-Me?

Robert Steele has for some time been saying that “The truth at any cost lowers all others costs.”  He has also been focusing on the importance of intelligence with integrity.  Among all governments, only Iceland appears to be serious about dealing with the financial crisis as it should be dealt with: as a criminal conspiracy enabled by all of the parties in both public and private sectors who sacrificed their integrity and betrayed the public trust.

Corporations operate under public charters.  It is difficult to police the corporations when the governments have themselves become criminalized, but the tide is turning — the public is beginning to recognize that governments  lack integrity and intelligence and cannot be trusted — in their present form — to manage the public interest.

When Goldman Sachs goes out of business the healing can begin.  Slamming PWC is a good start.

Old Landsbanki to sue PriceWaterhouseCoopers for ‘deliberate’ auditing errors

The resolution committee of the failed Icelandic bank Old Landsbanki has subpoenaed the international auditing firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers, accusing the company of creating wrong annual accounts which misled the markets. The committee’s damages claim runs to hundreds of millions of krónur.