Category: Threats

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Koko: Bernie Sanders on Time to Change Fed

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Hill Letters & Testimony, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Koko

Worth a close reading.  The revealed conflicts of interest and probably high crimes and misdemeanors and nothing less than expected, but astonishing all the same.

The Veil of Secrecy at the Fed Has Been Lifted, Now It's Time for Change

By Sen. Bernie Sanders

Huffington Post, November 4, 2011

As a result of the greed, recklessness, and illegal behavior on Wall Street, the American people have experienced the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Millions of Americans, through no fault of their own, have lost their jobs, homes, life savings, and ability to send their kids to college. Small businesses have been unable to get the credit they need to expand their businesses, and credit is still extremely tight. Wages as a share of national income are now at the lowest level since the Great Depression, and the number of Americans living in poverty is at an all-time high.

Continue reading “Koko: Bernie Sanders on Time to Change Fed”

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Venessa Miemis: Geoffry West on Math of Cities

Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, IO Sense-Making, Key Players, Movies, Policies, Threats
Venessa Miemis

Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities — that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city's population.

In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and corporations.

TED Page with Video

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Behavioural Conflict: Why Understanding People and Their Motives Will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict by Andrew Mackay and Steve Tatham ; foreword by Stanley McChrystal.

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Genocide, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 10 Transnational Crime, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Information Operations (IO), Peace Intelligence, Public Intelligence, Uncategorized, Worth A Look

        The Small Wars Journal Blog has a post previewing a new book by Andrew Mackay and Steve Tatham. Behavioural Conflict: Why Understanding People and Their Motives Will Prove Decisive in Future Conflict considers how the West's Post Cold War conflicts have been fought amongst people rather than between armies. From publisher's description:

“These people, amongst others, have been Mendes, Kissis and Konos (and the 13 other tribes of Sierra Leone), they have been Serbo-Croats, Bosnians, Kosovars, Albanians, Unizzahs, al-Ribads, al-Zobaids, Kurds, al-Montifig (and the other tribal groups of the nearly 40 that make up Iraq), Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbecks (and the other 6 ethnic groupings that make up Afghanistan's rich tapestry of population), they have been Sunni, Shia, Orthodox, Agnostic, Christian, Catholic; they have been farmers, politicians, police, administrators, businessmen, narco khans, war lords, men, women and children. In fact you can divide them in any one of a hundred or so different ways but the only certainty is that all of these groups and people will exhibit behaviour, that may appear utterly irrational but for better or worse will have profound effects upon the manner in which military missions are conducted.” 

The book is based on a paper written in 2009 for the Defence Academy of the United Kingdom. The tale of the lone Afghan farmer sowing seeds in a field near the Kajaki Dam should be a warning to those from the developed world who underestimate the intelligence of people just because they don't speak English or have grown up without electricity and running water.

This book will have utility for anyone working in military, peacekeeping, policing or any other other cross cultural situation.

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John Robb: Micro Drones Threaten US Citizens at Home

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Military
John Robb

DRONES and US Internal Security

Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren't always known. The bulk of CIA's drone strikes are signature strikes.  Wall Street Journal.

Drones are changing the dynamics of warfare in very scary ways.  They make oppression much easier (and cost-effective).

Click on Image to Enlarge

To recap:  Drones are extremely cost effective vs. ground/air assets (particularly in that with drones, operators aren't put at risk).  They also enable extremely centralized command and control (as in: operations can be micro-manged in Washington, down to the decision to kill).  In sum, a small number of people in Washington DC can control/operate a vast 24×7 killing field for very few $$.

Here's how they are changing warfare:

  • An Assassination List.  Drones, in combination with other forms of electronic surveillance, make it easy to rapidly find and kill people (even in non-permissive areas).  As a result, assassination of threats has become the easy solution to many problems.  It has become so popular that the process has become bureaucratized and automated through the development of an assassination list.  The US President has one, and he can put US citizens on it via a simple, non-judicial, bureaucratic process.
  • Signature Strikes.  The current practice of the CIA in Pakistan is to kill groups of people that “look” like terrorists or guerrillas.  Exactly what a group of people needs to do, wear, or be to trigger the signature of a terrorist/guerrilla group is unknown.  The Pakistani authorities are only told about strikes that kill more than 20 people.   While these strikes have generated some push-back from Pakistani press/politicians, it's relatively small given the number of people killed.
  • Borders melt.  Nearly every country in the world, except a few key allies, can be penetrated with drones.  In most cases, they don't know they've been penetrated.  In others, there's nothing they can do to prevent it.  The big barrier to cross border special ops or air force hits/strikes in the past was the chance that operators would be captured.  That's not true anymore.  So, in effect, anybody can be killed nearly anywhere at anytime by a flip of a switch.

What's Next?

It's a pretty slippery slope from here.  The simple answer is that US practice we see at work in Pakistan will eventually become common place in Mexico, Central America, and Northern Africa.  However, the more interesting answer is how it gets applied to US internal security when the US/global economy crumps into depression, the US government goes bankrupt, and the current system loses much of its remaining legitimacy.  In that scenario:

  • any armed group would instantly fit the signature of terrorists/guerrillas (the further you are away from an urban zone, the easier a target you will be),
  • even a mildly radical post to a blog, Facebook or Twitter ( particularly if it could lead to a flashmob or an occupy style protest) would invite inclusion on the drone assassination list (in that case, the occasional flash of a car being blown up by a drone patrolling a highway and IDing a listed driver, will become common),
  • drone to citizen ratios will rise to 100:1 as new micro-drones cut cost and new software allows DHS control centers to manage large region wide “drone clouds.”
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John Robb: Greece, MF Global, & Crony Capitalism

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
John Robb

JOURNAL: Greece, MF Global and Crony Capitalism

The slow motion bankruptcy of MF global and Greece should prove we're still on the brink of an economic meltdown that will likely result in a global depression.  Why?  These events demonstate how the global economy, like the Communist system before it, is run by a small group of central planners (that allocate the world's collective capital).  These planners:

  • Make lots of VERY bad decisions.  Wall Street and EU planners routinely attempt to sink the entire economic and financial system with excessive leverage and risk.  These systemic threats have become so commonplace now, it's nearly inevitable that one will cause a major collapse.
  • Become morally and ethically depraved.   They operate on a continuous stream of fraud and lies.  Too many instances to count.  These planners are unencumbered by ethical or cultural norms.  They actually believe these rules are below them.  In reality, by doing so, these planners are eviscerating their own decision making (i.e. in terms of an  OODA loop, they aren't orienting themselves to the deep/rich cultural experience these rules represent).
  • Completely arrogant and unapologetic.  They are never wrong.  Nobody could have foreseen it.  It's a one in 10,000 year event.

Of course, this situation will persist until it doesn't.  At that point, we'll be in for a long rebuilding process.

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Chuck Spinney: William Pfaff on USA Gone Awry

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Chuck Spinney

Good summary of the American sickness.

One Nation, Gone Awry

William Pfaff – truthdig – 02/11/11

The theme of most political and social commentary is that things are more complicated than you think. For once, I wish to write that things are simpler than you think. This concerns two matters at the core of the present American political crisis.

The first is that control over the government has passed all but completely into the hands of business corporations. The country has become a plutocracy. This has occurred because corporations are the principal supplier of funds essential to the election of federal officials—the president and the members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, and through them, the members of the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary, all of whom are nominated and confirmed by the elected officials of the executive and legislative branches of the government.

. . . . . . .

I spoke of a second source of American crisis to which there is a simple solution, an intellectual solution, which to impose would require conversion of the hard hearts and biased minds of a sizable part of the international economic community (at least that part of it educated at the University of Chicago since the Second World War), as well as a near-revolutionary change in how the American government presently functions (see above). The crisis is easily described as the 1 percent problem. One percent of the American population receives income equivalent to the other 99 percent put together.

This is caused by the consensus decision of the economists and business schools to define profit as the sole criterion of corporation efficiency and public (and civic) worth. The automatic consequence of this has been the de-industrialization of the United States, the export of its manufacturing capacity, unemployment in the U.S. comparable to that of the Great Depression, poverty levels with no modern American precedent, and the moral corruption of American politics.

Read full article.

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