“The financial industry was targetted on 9-11, and is now a target again.  However, we must remember that both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organizations (WTO), two of the current targets, have also been targetted by Lori Wallach and her angry citizen activists in Seattle and Davos, and have been featured in William Greider’s book on immoral capitalism as well as Clyde Prestowitz’s book on our rogue nation.  We need to reflect.

“There are in fact three competing paradigms for protecting America and all of its elements, including the financial industry.  As a group, they can be roughly differentiated as the ‘Elite Violence’ versus the ‘Mass Consensus’ models.  Jonathan Schell addresses both models in his book ‘Unconquerable World,’ while Zlauddin Sardar & Merrly Wun Davies in ‘Why Do People Hate America?’, and Mark Hertsgaard in ‘The Eagle’s Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World,’ and Lori Wallach, Michelle Sforza, and Ralph Nader in ‘The WTO: Five Years of Reasons to Resist Corporate Globalization,’ provide a plethora of reasons why the U.S. financial industry specifically, but all U.S. corporations in general, will continue to be targetted for violence, extortion, riots, strikes, and—in the best of cases—nonviolent civil opposition.  If we continue to practice immoral capitalism, no amount of structured military violence will save us from ourselves.

“It boils down to this: the world has reached its ‘Limits to Growth’ (Meadows), and ‘The Future of Life’ (Wilson) is in peril.  We are at ‘HIGH NOON’ (Rischard).  At the same time, the efficacy of state violence has come to an end—80% of the Pentagon’s budget is military-industrial waste.  In retrospect we can all now see the true cost and fraud of the ‘Fifty Year Wound’ (Leebaert), and understand that ‘War is a Racket’ (Marine General Smedley Butler).  We are also privy now to the pathology of secrecy and of elite power as well as imperial hubris and the sorrows of empire.

“Nor will spies will not protect us from Al Qaeda, nor our own angy citizens.  Only a change in our global behavior, and a change in our financial paradigms, offer the prospect of a sustainable stabilization of relations between America and the rest of the world, and between America’s elite, and her working poor and declining middle class.

“For this reason, we have to change our intelligence paradigm. The spies (I was one), will have you think that the recent capture of information is a great victory.  It is in fact ten to fifteen years too late.  In 1989 Bin Laden was given carte blanche to spread violent radicalized Islamic fundamentalism around the world—the spies missed it because they refused to follow either open sources of information in many languages at the street level, and they refused to focus on the internal opposition to our 45 dicator pals (44 now).  In 1992 the first Global Information Forum told the U.S. Government in no uncertain terms that it was missing the boat and that a modest amount of money redirected to properly cover open sources of information would be extremely helpful in meeting our national security objectives.  In 1994, using open sources of information, Steve Emerson documented the emergence of jihad in America—on PBS no less—and was ignored.  Yossef Bodansky, publishing in 1999 but speaking as early at 1992, clearly documented Bin Laden’s intentions to attack America.  In 1996 the Aspin-Brown Commission concluded that our access to open sources was ‘severely deficient’ and should be a ‘top priority’ for DCI attention.  In 1999, George Tenet, then DCI, turned his back on a study he ordered, and concluded that he did not desire to spend $1.5 billion a year on ‘Global Coverage,’ all those pesky lower tier issues—including terrorism, anti-Americanism, and ecological economics—that directly impacted on American national security and prosperity but were not ‘big. 

“The alternative—not the substitute—but the complementary alternative—to spies and secrecy is the Open Source Agency that The Honorable Lee Hamilton has recommended.  Today we know that Al Qaeda is using fake couriers and delivery men to gain entry to financial institutions in order to plot both suicidal explosive attacks and non-suicidal bio-chemical attacks.  Had we had an Open Source Agency from any year past, but in particular from 2001 forward, by today every citizen, every security guard, would be an ‘intelligence minuteman’ (the concept was conceptualized in 1992), and every building would have a ‘building watch’ approach to ensuring that every person not just in the building, but in the vicinity of the building, was somehow accounted for.

“Americans are good-hearted people, and even the most craven of our capitalists thinks they are working for the greater glory of their corporation.  Our big problem is that we don’t ‘get it.’  From elites that think they can buy safety or coerce compliance, to Joe and Jane Sixpack that live for the week-end without regard to the future, we have as a Nation lost our mind and lost our grip on reality.

“A complete free graduate education on Global Reality is available at Amazon by reading all of our reviews (first link).  If you want further information on why we are losing the war on terrorism (GWOT), on needed intelligence reforms including the need for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and the Open Source Agency, and on the slowly emering Collective Intelligence or ‘wisdom of the crowd’ within America, please visit the links shown below.

"The Open Source Agency recommended by the 9-11 Commission as a whole, and by Lee Hamilton in particular, is perhaps the most fundamental 'bottom-up' fix that we could make, and the only real prospect we have of connecting our citizens and our Congress as well as our federal bureaucracy, to 'reality.'"