Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public doesand, at least on one occasion, before elected officials.
In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to shoot to kill in the event of martial law.
InfraGard is a child of the FBI, says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm.
InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats. Then the FBI cloned it, says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years.
InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing the local InfraGard chapters. (There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization of private sector InfraGard members. We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility, says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing. At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector, the InfraGard website states. InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.
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I say let's deputize all sensible people! Which would certainly leave out the ACLU and pretty much all liberals and Muslims. The government can provide the badge and I'll bring my own weapon. We'll be a 'well-regulated militia'.
Tony Blair is being tipped as a candidate for the new post of EU Council President, and suddenly it's 2003 all over again.
Mr. Blair's sin is his alliance with the U.S. in the Iraq war. His detractors want Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and the EU's other national leaders, who choose the Council President, to pass over the most successful politician of his generation, and one of the most eloquent advocates of the fight against Islamic terrorism, for the leader of tiny Luxembourg. Somehow, the argument goes, this will better enhance Europe's presence on the global stage -- the raison d'être for this new Presidency.
It's a curious time to renew the Iraq debate, just as the U.S. surge has put al Qaeda on the defensive and allowed for slow but sure political progress in Baghdad. Events on the ground make the antiwar crowd's narrative of a "disastrous" invasion less plausible almost daily. So it's compensating by repeating its claims of catastrophe until the public believes they're true. Mr. Blair's potential candidacy -- he hasn't yet declared whether he will stand -- provides an excuse to keep trying.
Leading the people's revolt against Mr. Blair is the European Tribune. The Web site this week launched a petition in 13 of the EU's 23 official languages, with the aim of collecting one million anti-Blair signatures. (By yesterday afternoon they were rocketing toward 5,000, with much support from "Anonymous.")
Prominent among the petition's list of grievances is that the Iraq war "has claimed hundreds of thousands of victims." This assertion was made most famously in the British medical journal The Lancet in a 2006 article that has since been debunked as a statistically flawed exaggeration. Maybe it's too much to expect blogging buddies of the Daily Kos to stick to the facts.
But this is hardly the nastiest attack on Mr. Blair. A blogger on the Guardian's Web site, Neil Clark, says a President Blair would be "the culmination of the neocon dream." The result would be "to fully neuter Europe as an alternative source of global power" so that "European troops [could] be sent -- in their thousands -- to die on the front line" of "U.S. illegal wars of aggression." (The same Mr. Clark in August urged against granting asylum to imperiled Iraqi interpreters who worked with U.K. troops, saying the "real heroes in Iraq are those who have resisted the invasion of their country.")
Beyond exaggerations and conspiracies, some of Mr. Blair's critics conclude that the Iraq war has made him too unpopular in Europe to serve as Council President. They offer no evidence that this is true. But they do raise a valid point: Shouldn't the people of Europe get to vote for the face of their union to the rest of the world?
Here, Europe's timing is just plain embarrassing. EU leaders are gearing up to choose an unelected President, after ramming through a warmed-over version of the Constitution that voters rejected twice and right when Americans are flocking to voting booths for primary elections.
Mr. Blair helped bring this about. Days before stepping down as Prime Minister in June, he signed off on the guts of the new Lisbon Treaty. Since then he's offered no protest as his successor, Gordon Brown, has reneged on a Labour campaign promise to give Britons a vote on any EU Constitution -- which, for all practical purposes, is exactly what the Lisbon Treaty is.
Mr. Blair may be culpable here. But he deserves a debate on these issues, not an ideological lynching by an angry but fading movement.
This newspaper reported recently that Bill Gates hates my ideas. I have no hurt feelings, at least nothing that months of intensive psychotherapy can't cure. Mr. Gates, after all, has allied himself with the foreign aid establishment. This establishment is notoriously sensitive to criticism from people like me, who find no evidence that the aid industry's grand schemes are actually lifting anyone out of poverty.
Mr. Gates has now put forward his own scheme -- "creative capitalism" -- in a speech at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. He argues that today's capitalism does not benefit the poor. For Mr. Gates, regular capitalism works "only on behalf of those who can pay." While entrepreneurs fall all over themselves trying to meet the needs of the rich, "the financial incentive to serve [the poor is] zero." As a result, basic needs such as food and medicine go unmet.
Mr. Gates seems to believe that the solution is to persuade for-profit companies to meet the poor's needs by boosting the "recognition" of corporate philanthropy. But the dossier of historical evidence to suggest this would work is as thin as Kate Moss on a diet. First of all, the recognition motive has proven to be awfully weak compared to the profit motive. Otherwise we would have had a lot more than the $5.1 billion of annual American corporate philanthropy to the Third World (as of 2005, which has the most recent reliable figures). That was four one-hundredths of 1% of the $12.4 trillion of U.S. production for the free market. Is it really the poor's only hope that the Gap will donate a few pennies per sexy T-shirt for AIDS treatment in Africa?
Profit-motivated capitalism, on the other hand, has done wonders for poor workers. Self-interested capitalist factory owners buy machines that increase production, and thus profits. Capitalists search for technological breakthroughs that make it possible to get more output for the same amount of input. Working with more machinery and better technology, workers produce more output per hour. In a competitive labor market, the demand for these more productive workers increases, driving up their wages. The steady increase in wages for unskilled labor lifts the workers out of poverty.
The number of poor people who can't afford food for their children is a lot smaller than it used to be -- thanks to capitalism. Capitalism didn't create malnutrition, it reduced it. The globalization of capitalism from 1950 to the present has increased annual average income in the world to $7,000 from $2,000. Contrary to popular legend, poor countries grew at about the same rate as the rich ones. This growth gave us the greatest mass exit from poverty in world history.
The parts of the world that are still poor are suffering from too little capitalism. Foreign direct investment in Africa today, although rising, amounts to only 1% of global flows. That's because the environment for private business in Africa is still hostile. There are some industry and country success stories in Africa, but not enough.
Mr. Gates also announced his foundation is starting "a partnership that gives African farmers access to the premium coffee market, with the goal of doubling their income from their coffee crops." This is fine as a modest endeavor to help a few Rwandan and Kenyan coffee farmers, but it's hardly going to remake capitalism. The main obstacles to exports in poor countries are domestic ones like corruption and political strife, not lack of interest from rich-country buyers for premium coffee.
Moreover, how do philanthropists choose just which product is going to be the growth engine of a country? Much research suggests that "picking winners" through government industrial policy hasn't worked. Winners are too unpredictable to be discovered by government bureaucrats, much less by outside philanthropists. Why did Egypt capture 94% of Italy's import market for bathroom ceramics? Why did India, an economy with scarce skilled labor, become a giant in skill-intensive IT and outsourcing? Why did Kenya capture 39% of the European market in cut flowers? Why did tiny Lesotho become a major textile exporter to the U.S.? Why did the Philippines take over 72% of the world market in electronic integrated circuits? Because for-profit capitalists embarked on a decentralized search for success.
Sure, let those who have become rich under capitalism try to do good things for those who are still poor, as Mr. Gates has admirably chosen to do. But a New-Age blend of market incentives and feel-good recognition will not end poverty. History has shown that profit-motivated capitalism is still the best hope for the poor.
Mr. Easterly, professor of economics at New York University and visiting fellow at Brookings, is the author of "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good" (Penguin, 2006).
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It was almost like it wasn't even real, like no way could this be happening. This is too NOT mundane. Like there was a movie screen on the back of the bird with all sorts of crazy wind blowing in.
Dear God, this kid can write!
Posted by: Mike ||
02/08/2008 13:54 Comments ||
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I have been waiting for this analysis, because I remembered reading about the "dire plight of those discriminated redlined neighborhoods" in the Chicago Trib.
You also had a glimpse of the future anytime you bought or refi'd your home or financed a car, when the broker might say "Um, we can't do this loan, but I know another company that can".
So then the standards were lowered, not by your named "brand" you had heard of, but by some other unknown entity with slightly to vastly higher rates. Standards were replaced, from the lending institutions perspective, with the lure of higher closing fees and interest rates.
Then, with housing pricing escalating to cover all sins, after about the 200th mail solicitation to refinance, the house you couldn't get a mortgage on before now was an ATM machine.
The story of the "little old inner city lady" who owned her tiny house outright in 1997 that is now being forclosed on for a mortgage debt of $125,000 is the result of foolish behavior all the way around.
But it sold newspapers then, with Jesse Jackson calling us racists for not loaning her money and sells newspapers now, with Jesse pointing to the greed of the same mortgage bankers he strong armed before.
Brutally honest
Labeled extreme right-winged for only telling what is clear to the majority of the Dutch citizens. The Grand Mufti of Syria accusing him of inciting wars and bloodshed and he will be responsible , the Iranian Parliament warning of extensive repercussions around the world if Geerts movie is shown.
In my humble opinion Mr. Wilder is not picking a fight. The fight has already begun. Hes only giving his opinion. Not allowing to give such an opinion, which is different then that of the Muslims, is what those who oppose of the movie want. The leftists because of their moonbat-(hidden)agenda, the Muslim so they can stay hiding behind their religious beliefs to justify their hate against the Infidel humans.
After some 10 years of getting shut and being told Im a racist and in-tolerant , I ask myself: who is the chief-honcho in my country? Rational thinking folks or a group of foul-crying, newly imported, uneducated, hate-inducing, mullah-obeying, respect less, violent, bullying and denigrating scumbags?
Question; Who in particular is forced to act in a way that goes against his/her heart-felled opinion AND the freedom of speech? Who is forced to bow his/her head and allowed to be suppressed into a life-style which is anything but free? Whos getting closer to get forced into making the next choice in the near future:
a. submit and convert
b. live as a sub-human under Muslim dominance or
c. be killed (preferable beheaded)?
So, who exactly will have to walk down the street in the not-so-far future, wearing a noticeable sign of not-worthy/sub-human?
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What is happening in Europe is Quraysh-hudna, This is a Muslim tactic where more and more Muslims move into an unsuspecting and tolerant country until they have enough soldiers in place to take over by force. Recognise it?
Yeah, I recognize it. The same exact thing just happened in Kosovo. Sorry to say, our leaders don't seem to get it.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
