Seeking to whip up public support for what’s expected to be a hard-fought budget battle in Congress, a group of defense contractors launched a lobbying campaign urging an end to cuts in military spending.
The campaign, named Second to None, was introduced by the Aerospace Industries Assn. trade group Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington. The group, which represents manufacturers and suppliers of aircraft, space systems and engines, warned of potential job losses and national security risks.
“While we do have a fancy logo, this campaign will not be your typical, glitzy, short term inside the Beltway blitz of advertising followed by deafening silence after one piece of legislation or another is finalized,” said Marion Blakey, chief executive of the association. “This will be a sustained effort, in states, cities and towns, as well as in Washington, to caution the American people and our leaders of risks associated with cutting defense further.”
According to the association, aerospace and defense supports 1 million direct jobs in the U.S. and affects another 2.9 million indirect jobs.
Phi Beta Iota: The defense contractors are not being honest. As Winslow Wheeler and others have documented, most of the defense dollars go into overhead and out-sourcing. Just as it is costing us $50 million per Taliban in a body bag, here these maliciously deception people are suggesting that the $1 trillion a year for defense and homeland “security” will protect one million jobs. Do the math–at a time when 22% of workers are unemployed, with more on the way once the federal government starts taking cuts, this is not just idiocy, it is treason. We NEED to cut defense, homeland “security,” and secret intelligence SHARPLY–while providing all those cut with a year's termination pay–to achieve the savings necessary to “reset” the economy including full salary training for every unemployed person in America.
Sometimes it is difficult to decide what to write about in the world of private military and security contracting issues, as there are usually a few different stories in the news on any given day that are relevant.
Today, however, I don't have that problem as there is clearly only one story worth discussing. That is the report issued yesterday by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) comparing federal and private sector employee compensation.
Full disclosure alert: back in the eighties I worked a year at POGO's predecessor organization, the Project on Military Procurement, and earlier this year POGO published a report I co-wrote
To appreciate the importance of this report keep in mind that one of the biggest talking points of PMSC advocates is that the virtue of using them is that they are cheaper than using full time government employees and that private sector rates are cheaper than government salaries. That is because they can be hired just for the task/mission, don't have to be paid pensions and other benefits, et cetera. As talking points go it's a good one and seemingly difficult to dispute; although when it comes to using private military and security contractors in the field there has not yet been much in the way of methodologically sound, peer reviewed evidence to support it.
So POGO decided to fill the data gap, or lacuna, as an academic would say. It compared total annual compensation for federal and private sector employees with federal contractor billing rates in order to determine whether the current costs of federal service contracting serves the public interest.
This item is from a very astute libertarian writer (he has a fantastic web site!), Justin Raimondo, and this column offers the best explanation or theory I have seen as to why BATF has given gazillions of guns to a Mexican drug cartel. And it’s not due to government incompetence. A brilliant analysis, and oddly, I have not seen any mention of it elsewhere, so it very much deserves to be more widely distributed! This article should be the basis for a “60 Minutes” investigation…
While the US military is being sent overseas in search of monsters to destroy, ignoring the good advice of the Founders, closer to home another war is brewing – right on the US-Mexican border. Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry, killed on Dec. 21 near Rio Rico, Arizona, was murdered by drug cartel gunmen – using weapons smuggled across the US-Mexican border under the auspices of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF).
While the cartels shoot up half of Mexico, and terrorize the other half, it seems they’ve been getting a helping hand from those geniuses in Washington, whose “law enforcement” agencies knowingly allowed sophisticated firearms to be smuggled across the border, into Mexico. As BATF special agent John Dodson told the House Oversight Committee:
. . . . . .
With Mexico at the mercy of US-armed drug gangs, and the central government in Mexico City about to lose control, the introduction of US troops to “keep order” is entirely within the realm of possibility. In that case, the North American Union will become a reality, in fact if not in the formal sense – and the latter can be arranged quickly enough.
For the past week, a secret meeting of 57 finance ministers aimed at setting up a new international financial system took place in a large ship on international waters near Europe, according to White Dragon Society representatives who were there.
The meeting, hosted by Switzerland, deliberately excluded representatives from the U.S. Federal Reserve Board and its Washington D.C. subsidiary, France, Italy, the UK, Germany and Japan.
Countries like Russia, China and the Netherlands were among the 57 represented.
Representatives from the Pentagon and the U.S. agencies at the meeting promised to bypass the Federal Reserve board and use their access to codes for the international collateral accounts to finance the U.S. military industrial complex in conjunction with the new system.
The Swiss used their financial intelligence to refuse would-be participants who were in any way associated with either,
the Bilderberg Group
the Council on Foreign Relations
or the Trilateral Commission
Among those refused entry were Naoto Kan (still Prime Minister of Japan as of last week), IMF head Christine Lagarde and U.S. Senator J. Rockefeller.
Rockefeller was actually physically prevented from boarding the ship, according to two eye-witnesses.
The American Foreign Policy Council’s World Almanac of Islamism is a comprehensive resource designed to track the rise or decline of radical Islam on a national, regional and global level. This database focuses on the nature of the contemporary Islamist threat around the world, and on the current activities of radical Islamist movements worldwide.
Phi Beta Iota: This is terribly shallow. It's also so out of context as to be nearly useless. A more sophisticated focus would track where the top Islamic families have their wealth invested; populations of nominally assimilated as well as blatantly non-assimilated Muslims, and future potential for severe disruption from Muslim immigrants, both legal and illegal, growing so rapidly as to be inevitably destabilizing. For over a decade we have been calling for religious intelligence and counter-intelligence. Governments are not taking this seriously, and in the USA at least, do not have a population policy or a credible security strategy for immigration of all sorts.
Study says US government, business need to kick network security up a notch
Michael Cooney
Network World, 12 September 2011
There is an urgent need for businesses and our government to develop high-level cyber intelligence as a way to combat the unacceptable levels of online security threats because the current “patch and pray” system won't cut it in the future.
That was the major thrust of a study by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance's (INSA) Cyber Council which went on to state that such a cyber-intelligence discipline will demand discussion of the unique training, education and skill sets that will be required to successfully conduct meaningful collection and analysis in the cyber domain.
“While there is a great deal of focus on current cyber security issues, there is little focus on defining and exploring the cyber threat environment at a higher level,” INSA stated. INSA describes itself as a non-profit, non-partisan, public-private organization.
The group says the dilemma that exists in the current cyber intelligence apparatus is that the Department of Homeland Security has the authority but lacks the experience and capabilities to orchestrate a comprehensive approach to cyber intelligence. The Department of Defense has much of the actual cyber intelligence capabilities, and private industry owns most of the infrastructure. “Ultimately, INSA's Cyber Council would like to see a meaningful partnership among all relevant government agencies and the private sector to ensure seamless sharing of threat information, timely analytical judgments, and reasoned, measured responses to clear threats.”
The group made a number of suggestions to help businesses and government build this intelligence community including:
Develop strategies (beyond current “patch and pray” processes), policies, doctrines, legal frameworks, and overall global context for cyber intelligence matters
Increase global business, diplomatic and other forms of engagement, which should discuss potential ways to create more stability and mutual security in the cyber arena in order to reduce the potential for cyber conflict, theft, sabotage, and espionage
Support development of deterrence, dissuasion, and other high level concepts and measures for maintaining peace and stability at all levels of conflict and crisis
Define cyber intelligence professions, needed skillsets, training, and education for both industry and government needs.
Enable the creation of cyber intelligence related polices, approaches, and pilot efforts across industry, academia/non-profits, and government that provide unclassified situational awareness and indications and warning data, analytics and 24/7 unclassified and classified (as appropriate) reporting to government agencies, trusted industry, and global partners.
Corporately define specific activities, plans, and intentions of adversaries; continuously identify current and emerging threat vectors, and support our plans and intentions
Identify the specific technical means utilized or planned for cyber attack operations in deep technical detail to include supply chain issues, paths to be exploited, nature and character of deployed infections, systems/product weakness, effects, and anticipated planned or ongoing adjacent activities
Maintain detailed cyber situational awareness writ large
Participate in the rapid control and release of cyber means in order to ensure a viable intelligence gain and loss awareness
Identify what criminal activities are ongoing or have already happened in cyber networks, do formal damage assessments in these areas, and support development of improved defenses
Partner on research and development in the challenging areas of attack attribution, warning, damage assessment, and space related threat collection and analysis
Organize and support counter-intelligence and counter-espionage (CI/CE) activities, with special focus on identifying/using auditing tools and processes to deal with the insider threats
Create a consistent and meaningful approach for the cyber equivalent of Battle Damage Assessment (BDA)/Combat Effectiveness Assessment
Establish public-private partnership cyber outreach forums that address these areas in a comprehensive, practical, and executable fashion. These forums can take the form of commissions that study the demand for cyber intelligence and value added to cyber security.
Phi Beta Iota: The US is not just lacking in cyber-intelligence, it is lacking in all forms of intelligence qua decision-support. The US intelligence community lacks integrity, and General Keith Alexander and General Jim Clapper and Mr. Mike Vickers have all been given too much money with zero adult leadership. Top Secret America is a disgracefully dysfunctional enterprise, and now richly deserving of almost complete shut-down. Congress and the White House have failed to be ethical or intelligent in this matter.
Editor’s Note: The following report includes adapted excerpts from David DeGraw’s book, “The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World War III.”
Release Date: 9.28.11
Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America By David DeGraw, AmpedStatus Report
EXTRACTS
The following report is a statistical analysis of the systemic economic attacks against the American people.
Currently, at least 62 million Americans, 20% of US households, have zero or negative net worth.
Recently, the National Academy of Science released their latest findings, backing up my claim by revealing that 52,765,000 Americans, 17.3% of the population, lived in poverty in 2009.
…counting the total number people in need of employment, you get a current unemployment rate of 22.5%, which is an all-time record total of 34 million people currently in need of work.
