editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Sounds Off....

Laura Rozen, Politico, 21 February 2011

As several Libyan diplomats Monday denounced their country’s four-decade ruler Col. Muammar Qadhafi for unleashing the army against anti-government protesters, U.S. consultancies that have worked to burnish Libya’s and Qadhafi’s U.S. image were laying low.

Several consulting, law and lobbying firms have moved in to advise the Libyan government and energy interests since U.S. sanctions were lifted on Libya in 2004, some of which have since canceled their contracts, according to Justice Department records.

Fahmy Hudome International canceled its contract with the Libyan government in 2007. The Livingston Group canceled its $360,000-per-year lobbying contract with the Libyan government as well as one with an associated Qadhafi charity in September 2009, following the hero’s welcome Libyan leaders gave for the convicted Lockerbie bomber upon his release in August 2009 from a Scottish prison on humanitarian grounds. Justice Department records indicate the law firm White & Case LLP has been registered since 2008 to represent Libya regarding a litigation matter.

One of the more unlikely figures to have advised a firm which has worked to burnish Libya's image and grow its economy is not registered with the Justice Department. Prominent neoconservative Richard Perle, the former Reagan-era Defense Department official and George W. Bush-era chairman of the Defense Policy Board, traveled to Libya twice in 2006 to meet with Qadhafi, and afterward briefed Vice President Dick Cheney on his visits, according to documents released by a Libyan opposition group in 2009.

Perle traveled to Libya as a paid adviser to the Monitor Group, a prestigious Boston-based consulting firm with close ties to leading professors at the Harvard Business School. The firm named Perle a senior adviser in 2006.

The Monitor Group described Perle’s travel to Libya and the recruitment of several other prominent thinkers and former officials to burnish Libya’s and Qadhafi’s image in a series of documents obtained and released by a Libyan opposition group, the National Conference of the Libyan Opposition, in 2009.

Read rest of article….

Phi Beta Iota: In fairness to the Neocons, there is no real difference between the two parties that vie for control of the public purse to favor private ends. US Government support for dictators, criminal gangs, and selected terrorist groups has always been “bi-partisan” and completely devoid of any public benefit.

2011/02/222011/02/22

Tim Geithner: Con Man, Dupe, Idiot? Dangerous!

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Government

Geithner’s Gamble

Simon Johnson

Geithner’s Gamble

LOS ANGELES – In a recent interview, United States Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner laid out his view of the nature of world economic growth and the role of the US financial sector. It is a deeply disturbing vision, one that amounts to a huge, uninformed gamble with the future of the American economy – and that suggests that Geithner remains the senior public official worldwide who is most in thrall to the self-serving ideology of big banks.

Geithner argues that the world will now experience a major “financial deepening,” owing to growing demand in emerging markets for financial products and services. He is thinking, of course, of “middle-income” countries like India, China, and Brazil. And he is right to emphasize that all have made terrific progress and now offer great opportunities for the rising middle class, which wants to accumulate savings, borrow more easily (for productive investment, home purchases, education, etc), and, more generally, smooth out consumption.

Read detailed critique….

Phi Beta Iota: The persistent idiocy of the Administration can only be understood if one recognizes that the White House and Congress have been bought and paid for. They are NOT representing the American public interest, and they are a danger to the rest of the world. The silence of the goats in senior positions is reprehensible. Foreign countries should be banning US banks [and expelling US forces] entirely–the US has taken legalized corruption to extraordinary heights, and as Matt Taibbi has documented so well, “no one goes to jail“–the US Government and Wall Street have merged to become GRIFTOPIA.

2011/02/202011/02/20

USA Spectrum Out of Control & Self-Destructing

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Advanced Cyber/IO, Computer/online security, Corruption, Cyberscams, malware, spam, InfoOps (IO), Military, Mobile, Officers Call, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Real Time, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Standards, Technologies

Interesting, and if the point about Garmin is true, what is the relationship between them and the Air Force? The Air Force has gotten into a lot of areas that include tracking to the individual level (RFI) under the guise of tracking logistics….

US Air Force raises concerns over LightSquared's LTE network messing with GPS

Following a navigation system's instructions without driving into a ravine is hard enough as it is — can you even imagine how hard it'd be if you kept losing GPS reception every time you drove within range of an LTE tower? There have been a few anecdotal concerns raised over the last several weeks that LightSquared's proposed LTE network — which would repurpose L-band spectrum formerly used for satellite — is too close to the spectrum used by the Global Positioning System, leading to unintentional jamming when the towers overpower the much weaker GPS signals. Things have gotten a little more interesting, though, now that the US Air Force Space Command has officially piped in. General William Shelton has gone on record saying that “a leading GPS receiver manufacturer just … has concluded that within 3 to 5 miles on the ground and within about 12 miles in the air GPS is jammed by those towers,” calling the situation “unbelievable” and saying he's “hopeful the FCC does the right thing.”

Read rest of article….

Phi Beta Iota: Electromagnetic conflicts have been a known issue since the 1980's. The Soviets had emission control standards ten times tougher than the US, which had (and continues to have) virtually no standards at all. This is one reason why US forces in Afghanistan are so severely hampered, with drones, aircraft, radars, and various other “systems” all interfering with one another. Elsewhere, notably in England, modern cars come to a complete stop within a couple of kilometers of certain Royal Air Force emitting stations. All of this can be attributed to at least four root problems:

1. An acquisition archipelago (nothing sytematic about it) so stupid and out of control as to defy belief. No standards, no brains, no integrity.

2. Service-centric and mission-centric “preferred contractor” and “proprietary single point solutions” standard operating processes that are deliberately not orchestrated with other services, civilian elements of the government, or other nations.

3. A lack of integrity among senior officers who should know better.

4. A lack of integrity in Congress, where the focus is on collecting the 5% kick-back from delivered programs, not on actually serving the public interest by insuring affordability, interoperability, sustainability, and utility.

2011/02/202011/02/20

NIGHTWATCH Comment on US Mid-East Policy

02 Diplomacy, 07 Other Atrocities

Special comment. Readers are watching the crumbling of the US policy architecture in the Middle East during the past four decades which stressed regional stability over all other considerations. That policy did not restrain Israel but did help limit conflicts, It also had many negative consequences for devout Muslims and supporters of the Palestinians.

The 2011 uprisings do not invalidate that policy relative to its effectiveness in earlier times, but show how legacy policies can atrophy, if not updated and refreshed skillfully. Three months ago, leaders who have been ousted or are now under stress were lauded by the US media as allies in the fight against Islamist terrorists. Suddenly in the US press, there is no threat of terrorism any longer, only of suppression of “universal human right”s by regimes that had US backing.

Readers, it is an astonishing coincidence that former allies are now labeled dictators and that the dictators are almost all US allies. The leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, as dictatorial as any, face no uprisings. Nor does Asad in Syria or Bashir in Sudan. All are military-backed regimes in one sense or another. What are the probabilities of Arab turbulence only in countries friendly to the US, from Senegal to Djibouti?

As for the rising tide of human rights , apparently in the Middle East that is a male phenomenon. Women protest in public at great personal risk. It also seems targeted only at leaders, not at government systems. It is shallow as well as misogynist.

A final point is that the uprisings are different country-by-country. Like diseases that mimic each others' symtoms, they look and sometimes sound alike but are not in underlying impulses or ultimate goals. That means that one policy will not fit all.

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH Comment on US Mid-East Policy”

2011/02/202011/02/20

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? + US Fraud RECAP

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Phi Beta Iota: With a tip of the hat to Rolling Stone and author Matt Taibbi, reproducing the entire article was the only way to show the emphasis added by Brother Chuck. Updated to add photo and observe that this particular article is rocketing around the Internet. See also our review of GRIFTOPIA.

UPDATE: Three comments from Facebook:

Robert Smith Socrates became disheartened. Machiavelli was on to something – power corrupts. I suspect that a true and totally transparent democracy of ideas and information are requisite groundwork for an enduring democracy.
Robert David Steele Vivas Transparency, truth, and trust. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both understood, Will Durant says it best (see my review of his Philosophy and the Social Problem)
Lynn Wheeler In the late 90s, got asked by NSCC (before they merged with DTC) to look at improving integrity of trading transactions (in part because had recently done something similar for payment transactions) … after putting some amount of work int…it was suspended. The comment was that a side-effect of improving the integrity would have also greatly increased transparency and visibility (which apparently is antithetical to trading culture … some x-over with recent RS article focusing on secrecy as a fraud-enabler).

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?

Financial crooks brought down the world's economy — but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them

Matt Taibbi. Rolling Stone, 16 February 2011

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer.

“Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,” he said. “That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that.”

I put down my notebook. “Just that?”

“That's right,” he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. “Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there.”

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18.

Entire Piece with Emphasis from Chuck Spinney Below the Line

Continue reading “Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? + US Fraud RECAP”

2011/02/202011/02/20

Suicide turns attention to Fairfax County school discipline procedures

04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, Advanced Cyber/IO

Suicides are never associated with a single cause, experts say. But Nick's difficulties – based on interviews with family, friends, experts and school officials, and more than 100 pages of case documents – allow a close look at how consequences intended to help a student correct course instead can fuel a growing despair.

His story follows patterns described by parents in at least a dozen other Fairfax cases with similar disciplinary consequences. Even first-time offenders are out of school for long periods – a month, two months, longer if an appeal is filed. When they return, more than half are not returned to their original schools and can face difficult transitions – new teachers, new friends and new classes.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: We grieve for this family, and this post is a contribution to the public dialog. In Fairfax County, the school is an extension of the police, not an extension of the family. Originally inspired by the spread of very young Hispanic gangs into the schools–the police did a phenomenal job in shutting that down–today the police are an alternative to intelligent internal discipline. The schools have failed to evolve and adapt to digital natives to the point that the brightest students are dropping out or turning out, with the schools becoming advanced child care. This is not a new problem, but these suicides do offer an opportunity for re-examining what we regard as very poor administration of the Fairfax County school system philosophy and practice.

Journal: It’s Official–Social Media EDUCATES

Open Space Technology (OST)

Worth a Look: Live Language Lessons Online

Worth a Look: Books Reviews on Education for Freedom & Innovation

Review: The World Is Open–How Web Technology Is Revolutionizing Education

Review: Making Learning Whole–How Seven Principles of Teaching can Transform Education

Review: Why Don’t Students Like School–A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

Review: Reflexive Practice–Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World

Review: Ideas and Integrities–A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure

Review: Philosophy and the Social Problem–The Annotated Edition

2011/02/192011/02/19

Participatory Budgeting Practices, Games, Resources

03 Economy, Budgets & Funding, Collective Intelligence

Dear friends,

Recently I've seen a swirl of information (mostly on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation listserv) about participatory budgeting. Below, you'll find a sampling of this info, in relatively raw form. I do not know enough to sort it all out, but it looks really fascinating.

Most of this material is about online public budgeting exercises, but some of it also describes the kind of face-to-face, seriously empowered mass-participatory civic budgeting processes developed in Brazil which have spread widely in the last decade or so.

I had no idea there was so much activity in this arena. Given

(a) the attention currently focused on the budget crisis,

(b) the dire impact of that crisis at all levels of government in so many places,

Continue reading “Participatory Budgeting Practices, Games, Resources”

Category: Policies

How Neocon Central Worked for Muammar Qadhafi

Tim Geithner: Con Man, Dupe, Idiot? Dangerous!

Geithner’s Gamble

Simon Johnson

USA Spectrum Out of Control & Self-Destructing

US Air Force raises concerns over LightSquared's LTE network messing with GPS

NIGHTWATCH Comment on US Mid-East Policy

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? + US Fraud RECAP

Suicide turns attention to Fairfax County school discipline procedures

Participatory Budgeting Practices, Games, Resources