10 Transnational Crime – Page 158 – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/05/202014/05/20

SchwartzReport: Matt Taibbi on the Legal Divide — Two Justice Systems — Criminalization of Poverty Among the 99%, Impunity for the 1%

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

This is a very good interview with Matt Taibbi discussing what has happened to the American justice system. One of our myths is that we have the fairest justice system in the world but, like our fantasy that we have the world's freest press, it is a delusion. As with the press we aren't e! ven in the top 25. It is very hard to maintain a healthy democracy if both the government and the people insist upon lying to themselves.

‘It’s Total Moral Surrender”: Matt Taibbi Unloads on Wall Street, Inequality and our Broken Justice System
ELIAS ISQUITH, Assistant Editor – Salon

EXTRACT

Morally, it doesn’t work anymore. You just cannot have a society where people instinctively know that certain people are above the law, because it will create total disrespect for authority among everybody else. And that’s completely corrosive. You need to have people believing in the system to some degree – even if it’s just an illusion, you need to have them believing. And that was … another thing I was trying to get to in this book, the difference between what happened in the Bush years, with the scandals with Adelphi and Enron and Tyco, and what happened now, [when] they just stopped seeing the necessity of keeping up appearances. They didn’t even make a few symbolic prosecutions, and so it leaves the entire public with this glaring statistic that there were no prosecutions and there was massive crime. How does that make anybody else feel? How does it make you feel when you pay a speeding ticket, you can’t write that off, but HSBC can write off its $1.9 b! illion fine for drug trafficking? People start to think about these things, and they start losing their faith in the system and it doesn’t work anymore. It’s funny, because when they talk about income inequality on the campaign trail and in these elections … They always talk about it in this unthreatening, antiseptic way, and it’s just so much more extreme than that. It’s much broader and more disgusting problem than the way they typically present it in our political debate. So that was another thing I was trying to do, was to try to bring out the grotesque nature of the whole thing.

2014/05/192014/05/19

Wayne Madsen: NSA Spies on US Allies — With Direct Witting Assistance of AT&T, EDS, Qwest, H-P, Motorola, Cisco, Qualcomm, Oracle, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Verizon

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Idiocy, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call

Washington Spies on NATO; Other Allies

Wayne MADSEN

Strategic Culture.org | 18.05.2014

EXTRACT

Implants are inserted by NSA into targeted computer systems and network devices through what the NSA calls «supply-chain interdiction». Equipment is intercepted between the manufacturer and the end-user. At a secret facility called a «load station», devices called «beacons» are inserted clandestinely into a device’s hardware. These pre-positioned access points permit later access by NSA into «hard target» networks around the world.

NSA names its strategic partners in its «collect-it-all», codenamed ASPHALT operations, around the world. These are AT&T, EDS, Qwest, H-P, Motorola, Cisco, Qualcomm, Oracle, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Verizon. In all, over 80 «major global corporations» support NSA’s worldwide collection efforts. With corporate cooperation, NSA captures Internet data from seven «international choke point» access sites in the continental United States. Their cover names are Breckenridge, Tahoe, and Sun Valley on the U.S. West Coast; Whistler in the South; and Killington, Coppermountain, and Maverick on the East Coast.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Wayne Madsen: NSA Spies on US Allies — With Direct Witting Assistance of AT&T, EDS, Qwest, H-P, Motorola, Cisco, Qualcomm, Oracle, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, and Verizon”

2014/05/162014/05/16

Chuck Spinney: William Grieder on US Merchants of Death Profiteering on the Ukraine

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

‘Merchants of Death’ Could Make a Lot of Money Off a War in Ukraine

William Greider, thenation.com, May 13, 2014 – 3:57 PM ET

If you’re wondering why some US politicians are so hot for war in the Ukraine, think “merchants of death.” At the height of the antiwar movement, that was nasty label some of us applied to Lockheed Martin, Boeing and other major manufacturers of high-tech war-fighting equipment—planes, tanks, missiles, whatever does the job. When the drums of war are sounding in some distant land, these the weapons makers naturally smell sales opportunities.

Trouble in Ukraine has aroused the same ambitions and hawkish politicians have picked up the ball and are running with it. They are demanding that the US government send military stuff to Kiev to hold off threatening Russians (our favorite bad guys). The hawks are portraying President Obama as a wimp who’s insufficiently bellicose. But the president is so far playing a cool hand. He has been getting us out of two wars. He’s pretty sure the people don’t want another one.

In fact, neutral historians may someday conclude that it was the United States who stirred up the trouble in the Ukraine, inadvertently if not intentionally, and that US arms makers played an important supporting role. When the Cold War ended in 1991, these companies saw a promising new market opening for their stuff—the newly liberated Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe. Let’s expand NATO! The manufacturers lobbied policy makers in Washington and courted governments of post-Soviet nations as potential customers.

Bill Clinton decided to do it, cheered on by the arms merchants. Why is nobody talking about that? Because It might sound unpatriotic. And the media love bang-bang, even if the cause is stupid.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: William Grieder on US Merchants of Death Profiteering on the Ukraine”

2014/05/112014/05/11

SchwartzReport: Genocide of the Bees by Pesticide

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society

I think the evidence is now in, and it seems quite clear, as this story describes. The toxins produced by companies like Monsanto and Dow are literally putting the world's food supply at risk. It is going to be very interesting to watch how the Obama Administration reacts. He has proven to be so disappointing in so many ways, but this is a clear and urgent da! nger. We are about to see whether Obama thinks profit for a few corporations is more important than the wellbeing of all humanity.

More Evidence Suggests Honeybees Are Dying en Masse Because of Pesticides
DANIELLE WIENER-BRONNER – The Wire

Honeybees exposed to a certain class of insecticide are more likely to die from Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the name given to whatever is causing a mass decline in the bee population over the past six years, according to a new study.

See Also:

Bees @ Phi Beta Iota

The Collapse of the Bees… And How To Save Them -Two new reports—one alarming and the focused on solutions—take focus on the deep crisis facing the world's best, but most threatened, pollinators

2014/05/102014/05/10

SchwartzReport: Cheney Rules

01 Poverty, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

Here is a very good assessment discussing what I think is wrong with American foreign policy first under Bush and, now, under Obama. In my view Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld are mass murderers no less than John Wayne Gacy, Jr., and ought to be in prison. It is it any wonder we are hated around the world?

‘We’re All Cheneyites Now’
MAJOR TODD PIERCE, USA (RET.) – Consortium News

Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the course of that assignment, he researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Dick Cheney’s ideology of U.S. global domination has become an enduring American governing principle regardless of who is sitting in the Oval Office, a reality reflected in the recent Ukrainian coup, the 2011 ‘regime change” in Libya and drone wars waged in several countries by President Barack Obama.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Cheney Rules”

2014/05/082014/05/08

John Robb: Ukraine, Putin, and Open Source Warfare: In the 21st Century, Warfare is business by other means.

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 10 Transnational Crime, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

Putin and Open Source Warfare

Is Putin using open source warfare?

Of course he is. Who sold him on the approach? Apparently, he has an advisor called Vladislav Surkov who is a science fiction writer. He recently wrote a short story (published under his nom de guerre) called “Without the Sky” about a many vs. many war. A type of warfare very familiar to readers of Brave New War.

“This was the first non-linear war. In primitive wars of the nineteenth, twentieth and other Middle Ages fought usually two sides. Two nations or two temporary union. Now faced four coalition. And is not that two on two. Or three against one. No. All against all. And what were the coalition! Not like before. Rare state included in them entirely. Sometimes, several provinces were on one side, some on the other, and any city or generation, or gender, or professional community of the same state – the third. Then they could change its position. Go to whatever site. “

In other words a swirling “bazaar of violence.” The author and TV producer Peter Pomerantsev also sees a connection between this approach an a corporatist view of the world. A world where “corporate raiding” can now be accomplished by states and the raids can be violent. I see that too.

In the 21st Century, warfare isn't politics by other means.

Warfare is business by other means.

PS: I wrote some interesting scenarios depicting economic warfare against Russia as a means of defeating it bloodlessly back in 2004.

2014/05/08

SchwartzReport: War

03 Economy, 06 Family, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

The War on Drugs has always been a charade, a flashy story to get the rubes riled up, whose real purpose was to justify increased law enforcement budgets, prison budgets, judiciary budgets, and inflated corporate profits for all the technology this bogus war involves. It has been a disaster at every level of social policy, albeit ever so profitable.

Group of Nobel Prize Winners Warns: The ‘War on Drugs’ has Failed
Agence France-Presse (France)/The Raw Story

The global ‘war on drugs” has been a catastrophic failure and world leaders must rethink their approach, a group including five Nobel Prize-winning economists, Britain’s deputy prime minister and a former U.S. secretary of state said Tuesday.

An academic report published by the London School of Economics (LSE) called ‘Ending the Drug Wars” pointed to violence in Afghanistan, Latin America and other regions as evidence of the need for a new approach.