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Archive for the 'Government' Tag
51 post(s) are associated with this Tag
Development Aid: The Investment Banks of the Humanitarian Sector
We had some discussions during the last weeks and a few times we ended up with the same question:
Are there institutions / instruments in the Humanitarian / Non-Profit sector that could be compared to the mess in the banking sector specifically with the Investment banks - a species which in that habitat by today got almost extinct.
And yes we found them.
Created during the last decade on the back of the MDG, many have been installed with targets like deregulation of development funding (yes this did happen - aka budgetary aid aka the thin line along institutionalized corruption), avoidance of regulatory frameworks (e.g. via PPPs), avoidance of multi-national oversight across geo-political blocks (to go around the UN) or to just create the illusion of acting / transparency.
And these organizations share many properties with private sector Investment banks:
Fancy names - most of them answer to names like global, facility, fund, emergency plan. They are almost completely unregulated and their activities are at best opaque…
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Video: Interview - Naomi Wolf - Give Me Liberty
A must see 27 minute interview with Naomi Wolf - with the seemingly relaxing of rule for deploying military troops in the U.S. and other western countries (we just heard the same about Germany today) against their own citizens, we soon will all be terrorist (if not warranted otherwise) and she is warning that martial law is just around the corner.
She is also mentioning that members of congress have been threatened with Martial law if they would not pass the so-called “Bailout” plan.
Also mentioned is the change of oath of the U.S. armed forces that…
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Quote of the day: Politics by Fear
We would normally not quote a leading Nazi figurehead, but when this leader said the following lines he was certain that his life will soon end in the Nuremberg Trials and had no interest to palliate one of the fundamental principles of the Nazi reign in Germany 1933-1945.
The Nazis in Germany during that period were the first in recent history that have…
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Corruption: At least USD 13 Billion Iraq Aid wasted or stolen
The Washington Post today (link below) has a very interesting report on fraud, corruption and waste surrounding the U.S. Iraq reconstruction program.
Salam Adhoob, the former chief investigator of the Iraq’s Commission on Public Integrity (the equivalent to the U.S. FBI) estimated in a hearing of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee yesterday, that out of the about USD 50 Billion U.S. taxpayer money that has so far been disbursed to the Iraq reconstruction program, at least USD 13 Billion have been wasted or stolen through various fraud schemes.
The former chief investigator and head of a 200 strong auditors team was one of three Iraqis testifying before the committee yesterday - all providing evidence of widespread corruption and waste up to the point, as one of them said, that Iraqi government officials are financing al-Qaeda terrorists through some of these schemes.
An additional USD 9 Billion were estimated…
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Sexual assault in the US military
When you are just starting to believe that you have heard all the mind blowing stories about the US military in Iraq, what their contractors do, the enormous corruption and abuse going on at that place and there can’t be anything worse in their closets anymore you see a story like this.
GAO released a report last week and the CNN has written an editorial on the report and the House panel investigating the way the cases are handled. Rep. Jane Harman, D-California said that her “jaw dropped” when she was told that 4 of 10 women serving in the US military have been raped or otherwise sexually harassed by “fellow” US soldiers. And the GAO report indicates that…
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Politics: The opening statements of the “Constitutional Limits of Executive Power” committee
The House Judiciary Committee yesterday held a hearing titled “Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitations”.
While almost every speaker tried to express that this is “not a Bush impeachment hearing” it was setup to examine legal and legislative responses to allegations of misconduct and expansions of executive powers by the Bush administration.
In short there has been at least a committee put into place to speak up on these outrageous things that have deteriorated the standing and reputation of the US around the globe.
While we do understand the anger of the millions of Americans, particularly of those who lost their husbands, wives and children in a “war” for Oil and Trillions of Dollars “for the boys” and all those who have lost their homes, life’s work, pensions or possibility to get looked after when their ill, unfortunately history is telling us a rather crude and sad reality.
Many impeachment movements also of the very few (17) in the history of the US that…
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CNCI - A new cybersecurity program
It’s G.W. Bush’s single largest request for funds in the 2009 intelligence budget and its a “highly classified, multiyear, multibillion-dollar project“.
It goes by the name CNCI aka “Cyber Initiative” and the director National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, calls it a pro-active measure to protect the US Government computing infrastructure and in the future potentially also the computing environments of (US) private entities.
While the secrecy surrounding the program does not even provide specific funding figures or a breakdown, the House Intelligence committee in its report on the program “recognizes” that “…it will be imperative that the government also take into account the interest and concerns of private citizens, the US information technology industry, and other elements of the private sector…“.
They call it a public-private partnership and outlined how the oversight should happen by a panel of lawmakers, executive branch officials and some private sector representatives. And the House has already approved 90% of the requested budget.
So far so good, sounds all nice and positive - a fresh start, “unlike any model currently existing“, well, well, well if your memory in that branch of IT goes back long enough (10 years+) then you will say together with us: Nice words but we have heard them before and when we acted within the scheme we got heavily burned and a bunch of gov. crooks around the world filled their pockets with Billions of Dollars.
So if its a “fresh start” back up your words with actions!
Demonstrate that you have learned from the past mistakes and…
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News: Disgruntled IT Admin blocks access to SF city network
From time to time there are stories passed around how a single tech employee is holding a company or agency hostage over a personal dispute or after being fired. This time its a story about an senior admin from San Francisco.
As the SF Chronicle reported yesterday he was arrested by Police this weekend and is being hold in jail on a USD 5 Million bail. He’s accused of having tampered with San Francisco’s new fiber network that provides access for officials to government documents, their emails and the administrative systems…
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US Credit Crisis: Fed borrowing shown as a chart
If you would like to see the “official version of how much money the Fed is pumping into banks and financial institutions recently, have a look at the chart below.
The gray shaded areas are times officially recognized as recessions. The underlying data is available at the St. Louis Fed web site together with a charting application that allows you to further customize the range and other parameters.
To better visualize the substantial change we have split the data into two charts:
The larger chart shows the borrowing from the FED for the period 1919 to 2007 and the smaller one data for 2008 only. As you can see during these almost 90 years borrowing remained continuously within a range of almost none to max 8 Billion USD per month.
Since the beginning of 2008 the numbers have drastically changed and are now at about 155 Billion USD per month. The monthly figures for 2008 in detail…
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Germany: Rent a Demonstrator for your Political Protest
If your shouting days are through – Fred Kasulzke shouts for you! That’s how German/French songwriter and singer “Reinhard Mey” was singing in the 70s about the business idea of renting people for demonstrations and riots. Seemingly these days “claqueurs” are getting popular again in Germany particularly with the bureaucrats and stakeholders in the state backed German health system…
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