Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests – Page 30

2011/01/182011/01/18

NIGHTWATCH Extract: Tunesia & USA Politics

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Phi Beta Iota: If one reads the Winner Take All Politics book review by Retired Reader first, and then the analytic comments here, one is struck by the raw nearly identical nature of the corrupt politicians and the dysfunctional political system. Third World America, indeed.

Tunisia: Politics. The Speaker of the Parliament is the new temporary President of Tunisia, in accord with the constitutional succession and as announced by Prime Minister Ghannouchi two days ago.

Local television broadcast on 17 January the formation of the new government — the national unity government. The cabinet includes the defense, finance and foreign ministers when Ben Ali was president. Three leaders of opposition parties are included in the cabinet for the first time.

Prime Minister Ghannouchi created three high-level panels, for political reform, to investigate the recent violence and to investigate reform. He also ordered political prisoners released.

Security

Some gun shots were fired on the 17th but the worst of the fighting occurred over the weekend when Army soldiers and armed citizen groups fought gun battles with Presidential guards from the Ben Ali regime.

The government announced that 78 people died in the past week of violence.

About 1,000 protesters who assembled near the Interior Ministry called for the ruling party to relinquish power. News services reported the protesters chanted: “Out with the RCD!” and “Out with the Party of the Dictatorship!”

Comment: The government appears to be in transition from a strong presidency to a government led by parliament. The Prime Minister, not the temporary president, is leading the political metamorphosis. The announcement of a unit government has quieted conditions in Tunis, by most accounts, but its adequacy and genuineness are questionable.

The uprising was not fundamentally political and not a challenge to authority, until the government made it such. The demonstrations primarily were about economic conditions – the price and availability of food, according to contacts in Tunis, and unemployment, according to the international press. As yet the new government has made no statements about its plan to tackle either.

In other words, the mismatch between public grievances and government remedies portends more unrest that may yet usher in a revolution – a change of government system not just a change in the head of government. At this point no revolution has occurred. The leaders of the pre-existing regime are maintaining themselves in office and that looks like political deception. [Emphasis Added.]

Continue reading “NIGHTWATCH Extract: Tunesia & USA Politics”

2011/01/18

Review (Guest): Winner-Take-All Politics–How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned its Back on the Middle Class

03 Economy, 04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Waste (materials, food, etc)

Paul Pierson and Jacob S. Hacker

5.0 out of 5 stars Political Economy

January 17, 2011

Retired Reader (New Mexico) – See all my reviews

This book is an effort by two political scientist to explain how in the last thirty years or so wealth in the U.S. has become concentrated in the hands of a smaller and smaller number of people. The fact that this has occurred is indisputable. So is the fact that the gap between the richest Americans and everybody else has grown exponentially just as the U.S. middle class is gradually disappearing. The explanation of why this has occurred offered by Hacker and Pierson is rather more controversial.

They begin by noting that over the last thirty years not only have the already rich gotten much richer, but that the U.S. National Economy has been transformed into a system that no longer serves the interests of the once broad and thriving American Middle Class that once was the backbone of that economy. In their view the system now serves the interests of a small minority of the rich and very rich (one to five per cent of the population). So their book begins by asking how and why did this occur and why over the last thirty years?

Since Hacker and Pierson are political scientists not economists, they argue that this transformation was due to political, not economic factors. Using what appears to be accurate statistical data they cite three `clues' or factors that point to what happened to the U.S. economy: 1) hyper-concentration of wealth; 2) sustained hyper-concentration; and 3) during the thirty years under study, while wealth concentrated at the very top of the income scale, the economy essentially stopped working for the middle and working classes who continually lost ground during this period.

This economic transformation in favor of the rich they argue is not the result of impersonal economic forces but of deliberate government actions or at times inaction (drift). Their central thesis is that mostly incremental government policies over the last thirty years have had the cumulative effect of changing the U.S. economic system into a `winner take all' system heavily biased in favor of the rich and very rich. At the same time federal government policies undermined the traditionally strong labor unions that served as a counter weight to corporations' power and systematically deregulated financial markets and executive compensation.
Continue reading “Review (Guest): Winner-Take-All Politics–How Washington Made the Rich Richer – and Turned its Back on the Middle Class”

2011/01/172014/01/01

Richard Wright: MILITARY INTELLIGENCE: All Eyes No Brain Part II

Advanced Cyber/IO, Ethics, Methods & Process, Military, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy

The USAF claim that the tragic killing of 23 innocent Afghan civilians last February by one of its Predator UAVs was due to “information overload” reflects an appalling lack of critical thinking on the part of senior Air Force officers. General Mike Hayden (USAF ret.) when director of the NSA used regularly entertain the U.S. congress with the same complaint again reflecting the same lack of critical thought.

The problem for both the USAF and the NSA is that both seem to be following collection and processing strategies that belong to the Cold War era before the information revolution.

The Soviet Union may have been the most incompetent super power in world history, but it was extremely good at information denial. When the NSA could actually find and collect a signal containing exploitable information emanating from the USSR, it was common practice to collect and process everything from that signal 24/7 because it was such a rare occurrence. Because of the Soviet practice of immediately shutting down any signal that there was even as hint had been comprised the material so obtained was compartmentalized and distribution was tightly controlled. All this was possible because the information collected from such a signal at best was miniscule by today’s standards. In the same manner before such neat things as down linking digital images, the number of images to be processed were absurdly small and scarcely time sensitive. So again ‘full take’ was the best, and indeed, the only option.

Continue reading “Richard Wright: MILITARY INTELLIGENCE: All Eyes No Brain Part II”

2011/01/17

HAARP: Electromagnetic Atmospheric War Games

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Earth Intelligence, Military, Peace Intelligence, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy, Technologies

Jesus. Now I understand a remark made twenty some years ago by an angry senior Mexican scientist who essentially accused the US of provoking a horrific hurricane that caused terrible damage in Mexico. He added: “And you [the US] know exactly what I mean.” You can tell the men from the boys by the cost of their toys, but this is like a tree full of monkeys masturbating. The quotes from Brzezinski below are confirmation enough of the US psychotic craving for high-tech global dictatorship, risking everything for total control. And we think Hitler was nuts?

U.S. global climate change weapon called HAARP

World news Friday, December 31st, 2010

The United States Navy and Air Force have joined with the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and built a ground based “Star Wars” weapon system located in the remote bush country of Alaska. Scientific evidence reveals that it is now active.

The US has developed a new type of weapon called the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). HAARP zaps the upper atmosphere with a focused and steerable electromagnetic beam. It is an advanced model of an “ionospheric heater.” (The ionosphere is the electrically-charged sphere surrounding Earth’s upper atmosphere. It ranges between 40 to 60 miles above the surface of the Earth.) HAARP is a super-powerful radiowave-beaming technology that lifts areas of the ionosphere by focusing a beam and heating those areas. Electromagnetic waves then bounce back onto earth and penetrate everything — living and dead.

Phi Beta Iota: This is not new. Conspiracy theorists have been all over this for decades, and the lack of transparency has enabled the Soviets, among others, to leverage this against the US within normal propaganda channels. What is new is the combination Brzezinski quotes and current context in which the “elite” are now known to have exploded the global economy, contrived food, water, and energy shortages, and generally sacrificed a prosperous world at peace in favor of obscene wealth for the few. Apart from this we know two things: first, that Acts of God are actually acts of man, but more associated with the catastrophic effects of paving over wetlands, producing toxic goods, and generally ignoring the Precautionary Principle; and second, that governments and corporations cannot be trusted to be transparent, tell the truth, or be worthy of the public trust. Transparency is the new app, Truth is the new wealth, the times they are a-changing. The article is worth a full read.

Structured Web Hits

See Also:

Reference: Infinite Wealth for All

Review: Water Wars–Privatization, Pollution, and Profit

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Environmental Degradation (Other than Emissions)

2011/01/17

MILITARY INTELLIGENCE: All Eyes No Brain

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Advanced Cyber/IO, info-graphics/data-visualization, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Military, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Real Time, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Technologies

Interesting, but also fails to mention we do not train our analysts on the
basics, know your enemy……we are so focused on technology we forget
that the basics are still the best way to view the situation…..

When military investigators looked into an attack by American helicopters
last February that left 23 Afghan civilians dead, they found that the
operator of a Predator drone had failed to pass along crucial information
about the makeup of a gathering crowd of villagers.

In New Military, Data Overload Can Be Deadly

By THOM SHANKER and MATT RICHTEL

New York Times, Published: January 16, 2011

When military investigators looked into an attack by American helicopters last February that left 23 Afghan civilians dead, they found that the operator of a Predator drone had failed to pass along crucial information about the makeup of a gathering crowd of villagers.

But Air Force and Army officials now say there was also an underlying cause for that mistake: information overload.

See Also:

Gorgon Stare–USAF Goes Nuts (Again)

Gorgon Stare (All Eyes, No Brain)

2011/01/162011/01/16

Worth a Look: Good Jobs First

01 Agriculture, 03 Economy, 05 Energy, Commerce, Corporations, Government, Open Government, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Worth A Look

www.goodjobsfirst.org
Good Jobs First is a national policy resource center for grassroots groups and public officials, promoting corporate and government accountability in economic development and smart growth for working families. We provide timely, accurate information on best practices in state and local job subsidies, and on the many ties between smart growth and good jobs. Good Jobs First works with a very broad spectrum of organizations, providing research, training, communications and consulting assistance.

Related:
+ Subsidyscope.org
+ GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES: Revealing the Hidden Budget (candybars to hybrid cars, wineries to refineries)

2011/01/16

Worth a Look: The Age of American Unreason

04 Education, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Real Time

Combining historical analysis with contemporary observation, Susan Jacoby dissects a culture at odds with America’s heritage of Enlightenment reason and with modern knowledge and science. With mordant wit, the author offers an unsparing indictment of the ways in which dumbness has been defined downward throughout American society. America’s endemic anti-intellectual tendencies have been exacerbated by a new species of semiconscious anti-rationalism, feeding on and fed by a popular culture of video images and unremitting noise that leaves no room for contemplation or logic.

Finally, the author argues that anti-rational government is not the product of a Machiavellian plot by “Washington” but is the inevitable result of “an overarching crisis of memory and knowledge” that has left many ordinary citizens and their elected representatives without the intellectual tools needed for sound public decision-making. The real question is not why politicians have lied to the public but why the public was so receptive and so passive when it heard the lies. At this crucial political juncture, The Age of American Unreason challenges Americans to face the painful truth about what our descent into intellectual laziness and our flight from reason have cost us as individuals and as a nation. [Emphasis added.]