CAIRO — As Egyptians turned their anger on symbols of the state late last month, torching police stations along with the headquarters of President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling party, they reserved a special hatred for a garish building with black tinted windows in an upscale neighborhood, setting fire to it three times.
Phi Beta Iota: Americans are slow to anger, but we see the day coming when Connnecticut mansions begin to burn….the preconditions for revolution in the USA are virtually all present.
Perpetrators falsely claim weather or insects destroyed their crops and cash in on a government-backed insurance program. Some don't bother planting at all. Others sell their harvests in secret.
The vast majority of U.S. farmers follow the rules, insurers and federal officials said. Bert Little, director of the data-mining group Center for Agribusiness Excellence, said that less than one-half of 1% of the farmers who take part in the program cheat the system.
“But that less than 1% represents a pretty big chunk of money, between $100 million to $200 million a year,” said Little, whose Texas group is contracted by the federal government to analyze farm records in search of fraud clues.
Phi Beta Iota: Bert Little has been saving the taxpayer millions at a 20:1 ratio (80 million discovered for 4 million in data mining–finding the 1% can be a challenge). He first briefed his successes at OSS '04. If we had the Open Source Agency as recommended by the 9-11 Commission, it would provide intelligence and counterintelligence to Whole of Government, addressing both the legal fraud (Wall Street) and the illegal fraud (inattentive government).
Laurel Adams February 6th 2011
Center for Public Integrity
EXTRACT: The GAO singled out the Pentagon, the Department of Energy, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as agencies with risky contractor oversight. The GAO also said the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services failed to review contractor rates and identified $90 million in questionable costs.
Phi Beta Iota: Government–and society–are comprehensive design problems–advanced intelligence (decision-support). The US Government is archaic in its design, and lacks integrity (holistic accurate feed-back loops) at all levels across all mission areas. It is a useful challenge for 2012 and beyond.
Maj. Nidal Hasan, accused in the murders of 13 people and the attempted murders of 32 others in the shooting spree at Fort Hood, Tex., in November 2009, appears to be the toughest kind of terrorist to spot: a lone wolf who plots without the overt support of domestic cells or foreign sponsors.
Still, the attack did not come as a complete surprise to some in the Army and the FBI, and that makes this incident all the more tragic. Our Senate committee's 14-month investigation of the Fort Hood killings has concluded that the Department of Defense and the FBI “collectively had sufficient information to have detected Hasan's radicalization to violent Islamist extremism but failed both to understand and to act on it.”
The deaths at Fort Hood could and should have been prevented. The Defense Department's failure to acknowledge the threat of violent Islamist extremism within its ranks, coupled with organizational and communication flaws in the FBI's counterterrorism operations, contributed to the tragedy.
Computer hackers have repeatedly breached the systems of the company that runs the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York but did not penetrate the part of the system that handles trades, according to several law enforcement officials.
One of central causes of the financial meltdown was the lack of transparency in the complex derivatives, like bundled mortgages and credit default swaps. Advocates of global warming would have us to believe that they can construct a transparent carbon emissions trading scheme that will provide market incentives to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases.
At the center of this trading scheme is the idea of a carbon credit, which is a generic term for any tradable certificate or permit representing the right to emit one ton of carbon or carbon dioxide equivalent. Think of a carbon credit as property in a free market economy — Ayn Rand, meet Global Warming.
WASHINGTON — Health care fraud used to be a faceless crime — until now.
Medicare and Medicaid scams cost taxpayers more than $60 billion a year, but the average bank holdup is likely to get more attention. Seeking the public's help to catch more than 170 fugitive fraudsters, the government has launched a new health care most-wanted list, with its own website. Read more…
Phi Beta Iota: What the government does in terms of fraud, waste, and abuse is VASTLY greater, resulting from a mix of ignorance and corruption. It's a good idea–achieving full transparency for all records would put all citizen eyeballs on the mix and produce more corruption leads faster, better, cheaper. What the government is not telling us is that the Connelly law firm has created a 15 company team led by Booz Allen that is about to take over “profit recovery” for the US Government across the entire health care industry–privateers with with civil and criminal authorities. BAD IDEA and the natural outcome of the government not being able to do the right thing–competent employees and trusted information–so instead it does the wrong thing righter–gets bigger, more expensive, outsources more.
