Mini-Me: Not only is the Greek default both inevitable and necessary, it may be the best possible catalyst for a new financial system combined with a massive global legal attack on Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and others that–with the full complicity of the US Government–“exploded” the global economy. Cases are starting to pop up that include racketeering charges (triple damages). My best guess is that Goldman Sachs, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve will cease to exist within 4-6 years.
When a system is so slosh with money that it does not know what its costs are, it is time to take serious action. But what do you do when no one cares?
The US Air Force misreports, even to itself (and to Congress and OSD), the cost to operate and support its own aircraft. That is the bottom line of my recent attempt to uncover operating and support (O&S) costs for aircraft like the F-22 and the B-2.
It also gets more interesting: the official USAF data that are available show that, despite promises to the contrary, “stealth” aircraft are far, far more expensive to operate than the aging (and expensive to maintain) relics they are to replace. Moreover, the data that are available are very likely an understatement. Also, there are some other cost Queens in the USAF inventory; still others are hidden in the missing data.
The amounts of money involved are huge. Generally, O&S costs for aircraft are twice (very probably more) the cost to acquire them. For example, OSD predicts the $379 billion F-35 program will cost an additional $916 billion to operate and support. (However, the O&S number is a low-ball prediction.)
What is happening about this? Nothing.
These are some of the points in a 3,000 word study piece I recently completed. The piece, with a one page summary, follows below. It is also at the CDI website at , and you can also see journalists Colin Clark's take.
The text of the short study and its summary follows:
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.
For years and years, advocates of big defense spending have argued there is a major economic benefit — jobs. These claims are ever more strident now because of high unemployment and threats to further growth in the defense budget. Hearing the footsteps on the unaffordable, underperforming F-35, Lockheed, among others, touts the jobs they pretend the program creates.
The defense budget does create jobs, but it is highly inefficient at it. Large portions of the total defense budget are spent on things that have nothing to do with jobs in the US; even the procurement and R&D accounts (i.e. the portions that porkers in and out of Congress claim to be US-jobs-rich) are terrible investments for employment.
The question is not whether military spending creates jobs – it is whether more jobs could be created by the same amount of money invested in other ways. The evidence on this point is clear.
A billion dollars spent for military purposes creates 25% fewer jobs than a tax cut;
one and one-half times fewer jobs than spending on clean energy production;
and two and one-half times fewer jobs than spending on education.
And though average overall compensation is higher for military jobs than the others, these other forms of expenditure create more decent-paying jobs (those paying $64,000 per year or more) than military spending does.[1]
Shadowy Figures: Tracking Illicit Financial Transactions in the Murky world of Digital Currencies, Peer-to-Peer Networks, and Mobile Device Payments
John Villasenor, Cody Monk, Christopher Bronk
Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings and James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy Rice University, August 29. 2011
EXTRACT:
Scale enables vanishing low transaction costs, which are an essential element in the ability to hide larger movements of money by conducting many smaller transactions. A movement of $900,000 using 100 different electronic transfers might be easy to spot. If, however, the power of a large, distributed online networks were used to move this money using 100,000 transactions with randomized amounts generally in the $6 to $15 range, detection would be much more difficult.
Phi Beta Iota: As considerable as the illicit transactions are, we cannot help but observe that it is the licit transactions, the legalized crime by the financial industry, that have destroyed the global economy. It would be helpful if the authors of this reference were to turn their attention to the obserse.
Phi Beta Iota: Mr. Johnson is the author of Integrity at Scale, free online, whose many ideas are being integrated into the vision for a Smart Nation Act and the hub of the Smart Nation, an Open Source Agency and global Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) network of networks. He is a party to the on-going push to establish the Open Source Agency and create a more competent and ethical America.
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As I look at the Open Source idea, I find myself experiencing a fair amount of dissonance between a methodological vision of open source intelligence, at one level, and at a very different level, an aspirational vision that sees it as a way of disinfecting a misguided and corrupt set of bureaucracies.
One mission is potentially endorsable by the powers-that-be. The second mission is not. Ask people to endorse both and it isn’t likely that either will move forward. If corruption prevention is to be the mission, the open source agency will have to find a home outside of government. If transparency of intelligence is the mission, then perhaps it can find a home inside government.
My second source of dissonance has to do with design and scale. Open source intelligence is potentially as vast as all the server farms Google will ever own. How does a relatively modest site, squeezed in between State and Watergate, ever acquire the heft to handle the challenge? The scope of the mission and the scope of the agency seem out of sync with the scope of the real estate footprint.
Item 1 is an insightful essay by Patrick Seale outlining the common characteristics of the political instabilities and revolutionary pressures now sweeping Europe and the Middle East. Although Seale uses the term Global Intifada to describe these instabilities, the term Intifada evolved out of the Palestinian struggle against occupation. He suggests the instabilities may be following a more general dynamic. The common causal factors he describes in the second paragraph also bring to mind a very loose comparison of the unrest unleashed in 2011 to the explosion of revolutions in 1848 across Europe. That many of Seale's common factors also exist in varying degrees in the United States makes one wonder why the politics of rage in the US remain confined to the right side of political spectrum. Item 2, “The World Consequences of US Decline,” is an equally insightful essay by Immanuel Wallerstein that suggests obliquely that this may be a temporary condition.
