Public Intelligence Blog

I thought the short piece below might help people better analyze and report on the defense spending budget that will be released on Monday, February 13.  As you know, DOD has already released some numbers; however, they are quite incomplete.  They do not even cover all Pentagon spending, let alone all defense-related spending.  Using the Pentagon’s press release on Monday will likely mean missing the more complete picture.  I try to explain below, and I address where you can find a more complete display of the numbers–all of them.

Decoding the Pentagon’s Budget Numbers

Winslow T. Wheeler

This Monday, February 13, the Pentagon will release the details of its fiscal year 2013 budget.  The press, congressional staff and think tank-types go through an annual routine, scrambling to get out their take on the numbers and some selected issues.  Some of these efforts are quite predictable; this year we will surely hear about

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Ralph Peters

Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations
House Committee on Foreign Affairs
Baluchistan Hearing, February 8, 2012
Testimony of Ralph Peters, military analyst and author

“PAKISTAN AS A FAILING EMPIRE”

2012-02-09 Ralph Peters House Testimony, Baluchistan and Pakistan (8 pages, doc)

Introductory remarks: This testimony arises from three premises.

First, we cannot analyze global events through reassuring ideological lenses, be they left or right, or we will continue to be mistaken, surprised and bewildered by foreign developments. The rest of the world will neither conform to our prejudices nor behave for our convenience.

Second, focusing obsessively on short-term problems blinds us to the root causes and frequent intractability of today’s conflicts.  Because we do not know history, we wave history away.  Yet, the only way to understand the new world disorder is to place current developments in the context of generations and even centuries.  Otherwise, we will continue to blunder through situations in which we deploy to Afghanistan to end Taliban rule, only to find ourselves, a decade later, impatient to negotiate the Taliban’s return to power.

Third, we must not be afraid to “color outside of the lines.”  When it comes to foreign affairs, Washington’s political spectrum is monochromatic: timid, conformist and wrong with breathtaking consistency.  We have a Department of State that refuses to think beyond borders codified at Versailles nine decades ago; a Department of Defense that, faced with messianic and ethnic insurgencies, concocted its doctrine from irrelevant case studies of yesteryear’s Marxist guerrillas; and a think-tank community almost Stalinist in its rigid allegiance to twentieth-century models of how the world should work.

If we do not think innovatively, we will continue to fail ignobly.

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Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Pentagon Transfers War on Drugs to Private Mercenaries Including Blackwater

Eric Blair
Activist Post

Since the drug war has become so unpopular with the electorate, instead of politicians actually changing the drug laws, the Department of Defense seeks to reduce and conceal the real costs by transferring the “dirty work” to private contractors to do what “U.S. military forces are not allowed or not encouraged to do.

The BBC (in Spanish) is reporting that the U.S. Department of Defense is delegating the war on drugs to private mercenary companies. Of those companies, the increasingly infamous organization previously known as Blackwater is said to have received several multimillion-dollar government contracts for “providing advice, training and conducting operations in drug producing countries and those with links to so-called “narco-terrorism” including Latin America.”
The “no bid” contracts, issued under the Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office’s $15 billion dollar budget, are described as “non-specific” and are said to be “juicy” for the private contractors. The Pentagon says “the details of each cost in very general contracts do not go through bidding processes.”

An unnamed analyst says “the responsibility of the public and national security changing from a state’s duty to be a private business…has become the trend of the future.”

Although parts of the drug war have been privatized for years, the BBC reports this “transfer” of responsibilities is an attempt to placate those looking for Pentagon budget cuts in an election year.

Read full article.

Our local government agencies may be whining about the budget and how they don’t have enough money resulting in higher taxes, cutting services or both. They cite a budget shortfall and need us to dig them out now! Next time this happens ask them to look at the cash account on the statement of net assets from the comprehensive annual financial report. Say what is a CAFR?

Every governmental agency produces this document by law yet the Federal version is a labyrinth compared to the State level on down. It’s simply a statement to the wealth of the government, the sum total of everything we’ve entrusted them with. Would you say they’re doing a lousy job? When we don’t have the money from a paycheck we dip into savings and the government has done a great job of saving a giant pile of your money! In the past few years a few politicians have begun to question these savings demanding at least a discussion of them. Here is a story from Oregon detailing one such discussion on how to use the funds.

Recently the most famous case has been CA with their deficits yet lets check the 2010 CAFR, pg 46 they have $25 BILLION sitting in the cash account alone which is invested in federal treasuries and other short term investments. This is the total of decades of over collecting taxes, taking too much from us and yet some of the same people who know this come begging us to pay more taxes! They had over $11 BILLION in receivables; I wonder what the past due ratios are!?

The government isn’t a for profit company is it? Wasn’t this social contract a giant trust agreement anyway? There is money sitting in the coffers of these government accounts that are controlled by who? That’s the real question as you dig deeper and deeper you start to look at pension funds and where that money gets invested and you sum total all the various lower levels on up and the big picture doesn’t really surprise you. Time is short so I won’t digress into that so lets focus on what we can do.

Look yours up! Google  ”Comprehensive annual financial statement” (not “CAFR”) and the name of the government entity being researched (lottery, school district, water district, city, county, or state etc). Find the statement of net assets, look at the first line, this is cash! It might be held in short term government debts but its liquid like cash. Lets start forcing this question to be answered whenever we interact with them! Let’s ask the hard questions!

There is a lengthy 3 hour documentary on the extent of this scam by Walter Burien who runs a website CAFR1.com detailing the extent of this duplicity. Time is short and the time to act is now so get a handle on the basic idea and just go with it. Look up as many as you can but Walter has most of them listed on his site to  save some time. For a great analogy check out this article. Tell everyone who will listen but it is hard to accept, they programmed us well. Time to take the red pill folks.

Tip of the Hat to Patrick Ivy.

Watch 9:59 Video and Learn Much More

Wikipedia / Comprehensive annual financial report

Marcus Aurelius

Various media pieces on defense.

Gutting defense
Obama to shrink armed forces
The President’s Risky Defense Strategy
President Obama’s defense strategy rests on shaky assumptions
Obama military strategy: Is it bipartisan enough?
U.S. right to focus on Asia
The battle for the Pacific will reshape the world
Military fighting force strategy set, but what will it mean?

Big Bat USA:  4% of the force (the infantry) takes 80% of the casualties and receives 1% of the budget.  This FACT alone gives the lie to all of the above pontifications.  Both the US Government and the US media are inept and misrepresenting reality to the American people.  99% of the Pentagon budget is fraud, waste, and abuse–the policy is based on ideology rather than reality; acquisition is broken–we simply transfer money from the taxpayer to the corporations without thinking about it; and operations are mostly theater.  We do not have a strategy–we have a collection of criminally insane people posturing for the public and getting away with it.  For those who lived through the same thing in the 1970′s, remember the movie King of Hearts?  There are only two candidates that are both informed and honest on this matter:  Ron Paul and Robert Steele.

See Also:

Chuck Spinney: Bin Laden, Perpetual War, Total Cost + Perpetual War RECAP
Chuck Spinney: Israel To Bomb Iran Soon + RECAP
DefDog: Defense Contractors Start the Big Lie Again–Jobs PLUS Winslow Wheeler Defense Budget Facts RECAP
DefDog: Over-Stating China – Close Down PACOM + RECAP
Defense Science Board to DoD: Get Brain + RECAP
Dr. Russell Ackoff on IC and DoD + Design RECAP
G.I. Wilson: Killer Drones, Moral Disengagement, + War Crimes RECAP
Marcus Aurelius: SecDef to McCain on Sequester + RECAP on DoD Fraud, Waste, & Abuse
Marcus Aurelius: US at Permanent “War” + War RECAP
Reference: American Soft Power is Vanishing + RECAP
Reference: Cutting the Defense Budget + RECAP
Reference: Invisible Empire New World Order DVD + RECAP
Reference: On WikiLeaks and Government Secrecy + RECAP on Secrecy as Fraud, Waste, & Abuse
Robert Steele: Cutting the US Military Budget – and Firing the Civilian and Uniformed “Leaders” Betraying the Public Trust + RECAP
Robert Steele: Global Trends 2030 – Gaps + RECAP
Search: cost of corruption + Corruption RECAP
USA National Military Strategy 2011 + RECAP

Europe:  Updates. In an interview with a French daily on 25 December, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Christine Lagarde stressed that Europe’s financial crisis is turning into “a crisis of confidence in public debt and the solidity of the financial system.

Greece: According to an IMF source involved in discussions with Greece, the situation in Athens is “deteriorating” and “a further 10-15 billion euros ($13.1-19.6 billion) still needs to be found.” Banks may be asked to agree to write off 65 % instead of 50% of Greece’s debt.

France: The French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) said on 26 December that there were 29,000 new job seekers “without any occupation” in November, up 1.1% over October. The year-on-year increase reached 5.2%. In total, 2,844,800 people did not have any occupation, the highest such figure since November 1999.

An economist at the French Observatory of Economic Conditions speculated that France’s unemployment rate — which currently stands at 9.3% — will reach 10.7% by the end of 2012, and predicted that Paris will not succeed in bringing the deficit down to 3% of GDP by 2013.

Spain: At a news conference on 26 December, Spanish Economy Minister Luis De Guindos said that the Spanish economy had suffered a “relapse” and would record negative growth in the fourth quarter of 2011. De Guindos warned that “the next two months are not going to be easy, neither from a growth nor a jobs point of view.”

Comment: According to the Financial Times and multiple economists the fate of the euro depends on what happens in Italy. This week Italy intends to auction bonds worth Euros 20 billion. The market reaction to the auction will be an important indicator of whether the central bankers have found a way to stabilize the financial crisis, or have just made it worse.

All analysts of European economics predict a recession in 2012. They differ only about how severe it will be. In an integrated global economy, the ripple effects from Europe will drag the US and the Chinese economies, among all others.

Phi Beta Iota:  Christine Lagarde, perhaps because she is a woman with a smaller ego and larger intuition than most men, appears to be the first Epoch A leader to “get” that we are all calling into question the very existence of the Western financial system that is rooted in fraud, waste, and abuse.  When she begins to point to Iceland as an example, and to demand that Western countries arrest and try Goldman Sachs, Morgan, Citi-Bank, Bank of America, and other officials for high crimes against the public, the healing can begin.  Until then, the West is avoiding the fundamentals.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

See Also:

Mini-Me: Iceland Breaks the Back of Western Banking

Chuck Spinney: Financial Coups Destroying Europe

Michel Bauwens: Human Evolution – Who Are We Becoming?

Mini-Me: European-US Banking–Tangled Web — Tell Me Again, Why Shouldn’t We Default and Let the Banks Fry? + Financial Terrorism RECAP

Marcus Aurelius

The last word — as with Viet-Nam, we did not lose the battles…

See Also:  Iraq (48 Reviews)

And Especially:

Review: We Meant Well – How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People

Review: Grand Theft Pentagon–Tales of Corruption and Profiteering in the War on Terror

Review: The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace

Review: Losing the Golden Hour–An Insider’s View of Iraq’s Reconstruction

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on War Complex—War as a Racket

Click on Image to Enlarge

C/O Charles Faddis

Governor Buddy Roemer merits a look.

Buddy Roemer is a candidate for the Republican nomination for president. He served in Congress from 1981-88 as one of the last truly conservative Democrats who crossed the aisle to back the Reagan agenda. He later was governor of Louisiana and switched party affiliation to the GOP. A longtime business executive, Mr. Roemer founded and was CEO of Business First Bank, a small community lender with $650 million is assets.

Memorable Line: “I’m a Methodist boy, and I believe in miracles.”

Memorable Line:  “I want Washington DC to stop being the capital for corruption.”

Governor Buddy Roemer’s Campaign Website

We are going to move from denial to realization.  Physical world events will drive the process of realization. The primary trend is between stability and instability. We are moving from a multi-class system running from Super Elite to Unperson into a model of have’s and have-nots, the unpersons. Labor has become a problem because less than 500 million are involved in life support activities thereby leaving more than 7 billion people very vulnerable to dependency (and treated as expendable containers). We are watching a redistribution process bound towards divestiture as more people become unpersons. Destruction of paper assets, debt collapse, bank failure, and war are all part of the redistribution process. With more unpeople, it becomes easier to reduce population through death and abuse. Our current economic structure has at least six trajectories of support; the physical world, human capital, transportation, technology, rule of law,and money.

Fukishima, Katrina, Gulf of Mexico oil spill — all examples of entire populations treated as “unpersons.”

See Also:

VIDEO: Fukushima – Total Cost (33)

W. E. Pollock Web Site