WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Intelligence activities across the U.S. government and military cost a total of $75 billion a year, the nation's top intelligence official said on Tuesday, disclosing an overall number long shrouded in secrecy.
Phi Beta Iota: So much for all those who questioned our long-standing repetitive statement that secret U.S. intelligence is costing the U.S. taxpayer $65 billion a year. We were deliberately off by $10 billion. Now that we have established this, perhaps the time has come for both the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the General Accountability Office (GAO) to ask the obvious question: What does the taxpayer get for this vast sum, and how could it be spent better?
Mr. Rockwell is a very gracious and well-spoken person. He delivered a prepared speech that will be posted online by the Ludwig von Mises Institute at some point. Our bottom line up front: the hard-core Libertarians are a one-trick-pony with an obsessive focus on one thing and one thing only: all against the State. Sadly, despite a great deal of hand waving about Austrian economists, there is not much in the way of economic reflection visible, and the gentlemen was specifically unable to address a question about a natural alliance between the Libertarians armed with scarcity-centered Austrian economics, and the Greens, armed with Ecological Economics, Natural Capitalism, and “true cost” accounting; nor was he able to engage with a subsequent question on a natural alliance with those interested in Evolutionary Living.
Mr. Rockwell, who served as Chief of Staff to Congressman Ron Paul and is now Chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute at a time when it is experiencing extraordinary growth and drawing a great deal of attention, sought to do several things with his planned remarks:
With a tip of the hat to Jean-Francouis Noubel, a pioneer of both Collective Intelligence and Open Money, we point today to the just-launched FLOWPLACE.
Free Currencies
Do not fail to listen to the short briefing. The money economy, based on secrecy, scarcity, and information asymmetries, is on the way out. The open economy, empowering the five billion poor with transparent open means of creating, recording, sharing, and exchanging value, is on the way in.
In an era when changes to the Earth that used to take 10,000 years now take three;
In an era when all information in all languages all the time is the non-negotiable first step to achieving holistic understanding of the Earth's system of systems as well as all the chaotic sub-systems;
In an era when the Nordics are far ahead of everyone else in thinking about Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2),
it is helpful to have a sense of what the U.S. Department of Defense is going with respect to it's own Global Information Grid (GIG).
Below are a few headlines as well as pointers to a couple of devastatingly critical reviews from the General Accountability Office (GAO).
Phi Beta Iota has just one question: when, if ever, will DoD plan, program, budget, and implement for a world in which 96% of the information DoD needs to exploit is not secret, not in English, and not originating from a DoD device?
After the GAO reports, click on the Frog Left to read what we said to the National Research Council about the Army Communications Architecture in the early 1990's and Frog Right to read about our recommendations for National Information Infrastructure (NII) cyber-security in the mid-1990's.
DoD needs a Chief Knowledge Oficer (CKO)–someone that knows the difference between knowledge management, network management, content capture and exploitation, and the Holy Grail, organizational intelligence.
BY THREATENING to veto the defense appropriations bill if it included money for more F-22 stealth fighter planes, President Obama signaled that he was going to put an end to the way business has been done in Washington. We applaud the president?s announcement, but so far it is more symbolic than real.
In the attached essay, my friend Jeff Madrick uses the unbridled greed of the finance industry (now trying to rescue itself from its own excesses by sucking at the government teat) to highlight the basic hypocrisy in the so-called free-market economy of go-go capitalism. Jeff summarizes the results of two recent mainstream economic studies which show the egregious bonuses in the finance industry are simply the fruits of unfair economic privilege. To economists, this privilege takes the form of obscene economic “rents” — i.e., the excessive revenues and inefficiencies that competition is supposed to eliminate under the capitalist theory (ideology) of free markets.
This is the budget created to support Col Vincent Stewart, USMC, then the action officer for surveying Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) reequirements and capabilities across the Department of Defense (DoD). This amount–not necessarily these specific priorities–was offered to the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which continues to have the only full-spectrum OSINT capability in the USA, but turned down by subordinates to the Combatant Commander who did not understand that the Long War is a war of both ideas, and universal coverage at the neighborhood level of granulaty, as Dr. Stephen Cambone so wisely called for in January 2004.
If $1.5 Billion is added to this budget for 50 Community Information-Sharing and Sense-Making Networks, a total of no less than $3 billion a year, and ideally $3.5 billion a year, is recommended.
