The Zeitgeist Movement & The Extremely Limited Energy Definition Box

You might want to vote @ Washington University's "Planet Forward". Remaining confined in a tiny, extremely micro sized Energy Definition Box will prove fatal to our and future generations.
The Promise of Energy for Everyone – A Power Point Introduction - Planet Forward Planet Forward is where experts and engaged citizens weigh in on energy, climate and sustainability http://planetforward.org/idea/the-promise-of-energy-for-everyone-a-power-point-introduction

The quantity C is actually the kinetic energy equivalent of the mass energy of matter

The Chinese dragon symbolizing our current world wide Economic design, will completely devour itself without an upgrade of energy definitions, applications, with a return to Wisdom (i.e., ability to survive)

The Zeitgeist Movement & The Extremely Limited Energy Definition Box limiting, restricting future possibilities




http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=17&setLang=en-GB&Itemid=50

Started in late 2008, The Zeitgeist Movement exists as the communication and "Activist Arm" of an organization called The Venus Project. The Venus Project was started many decades ago by Social/Industrial Designer Jacque Fresco and his life's work has been to address and overcome the lack of sustainability existing currently across the world and work to incorporate new methods and values before it is too late. The basic pursuit of The Movement is to begin a transition into a new, sustainable social design called a “Resource-Based Economy”. This term was first coined by Jacque Fresco of the Venus Project and refers to an economic structure based exclusively on strategic resource management as the starting point for all decisions.

Basic Observations:
In the view of The Movement, the world today has become very detached from the physical world, with techniques of production and distribution that have no relationship to the environment. Our use of a profit based, “growth” driven monetary system has become one of the greatest destroyers of the natural world, not to mention sustainable human values. It is important to understand that the entire global economy requires “cyclical consumption” to operate, which means that money must constantly be circulating. Thus, new goods and services must be constantly introduced regardless of the state of the environment and actual human necessity. This "perpetual" approach has a fatal flaw, for resources as we know it are simply not infinite. Resources are finite and the Earth is essentially a closed system.
The true goal of any economy is to preserve - or "economize" - this is not occurring and cannot occur in a monetary driven system where labor for income requires consumer demand. We actually live in a global "anti-economy" by all rational standards.

Also, the intents inherent within a monetary system are counter progressive and derive a strategic edge from scarcity. This means that depleted resources are actually a positive thing for industry in the short term, for more money can be made off each respective unit. This is known as the basic law of supply & demand and hence “value” in economics. This creates a perverse reinforcement to ignore environmental problems and the negative consequences of scarcity, for it literally translates into profit. There is little intrinsic motivation to "solve" any problem or to make things that last in the current model. It is much more beneficial for jobs and hence profit to "service" things- not resolve them.

In other words, the system requires problems/constant consumer interest in order to work. The more people who have cancer in America, the better the economy due to expensive medical treatments. Needless to say, this generates an inherent disregard for human well being. The monetary arrangement, whether in the form of capitalism, communism, socialism, fascism, free-market or the like, is utterly detached from natural resources and thus human well-being. It is erroneously assumed that the incentive to seek money is also the incentive to help society. Nothing could be further from the truth. For example, every single product created by a corporation today is immediately inferior by design, for the market requirement to cut creation costs in favor of lowering the output "purchase price" to maintain a competitive edge, automatically reduces the quality of any given item by default. In other words it is impossible to create the “strategically best”, long lasting anything in our society and this translates into, again, outrageous amounts of resource waste. This is entirely and provably unsustainable as a social system and the world you are beginning to see emerge around you, with growing starvation, poverty, unemployment; along with the growing scarcity of water, food and arable land, is the result.

Likewise, most occupations are not directly related to the actual necessities of life. Rather, they are artificial concoctions in order to keep people employed so they can acquire purchasing power to keep cyclical consumption going. The very reality that each human being is required to be put in a position of servitude to a corporation or client in order to gain income to purchase the necessities of life also perpetuates extreme, needless waste... however, this time, it is the waste of the human mind and human life. In the modern world, advancements in science and technology have shown that we can automate a great deal. In fact, statistically speaking, the more we have applied mechanization to labor, the more productive things have become. Therefore, it is not only negligent for us to waste our lives waiting tables, working at a bus station, fixing cars, or other repetitive, monotonous jobs, it is also entirely irresponsible for us not to apply modern mechanization techniques to all industries possible for, apart from strategic resource management, this is a powerful way to achieve balance and abundance for all the world's people, reducing crime generating imbalances.

In other words, it is time to update society to present day knowledge, taking the carrying capacity of the earth into account and realigning our methods based not on the reward of monetary gain..but the goal of social sustainability as a whole.

Even with our current, destructive methods, the Earth is still abundant with resources. Today our practice of rationing resources through monetary methods is irrelevant and counter-productive to the well-being of people. Today’s society has access to highly advanced technologies and can easily provide more than enough for a very high standard of living for all the earth’s people. This is possible through the implementation of a Resource-Based Economy.

A Resource-Based Economy utilizes existing resources rather than money, and provides an equitable method of distribution in the most humane and efficient manner for the entire population. It is a system in which all natural, man-made, machine-made, and synthetic resources would be available without the use of money, credits, barter, or any other form of symbolic exchange. A Resource-Based Economy would utilize existing resources from the land and sea, and the means of production, such as physical equipment and industrial plants, to enhance the lives of the total population. In an economy based on resources, conservation and the most advanced methods of science and technology, we could easily produce all of the necessities of life and provide a high standard of living for all. To do this, we have to overcome our current, outdated, establishment practices. This is the purpose of The Zeitgeist Movement- to create a global awareness to thus transition into a new, sustainable direction for humanity as a whole

Drowning in the "Impostures of Pretended Patriotism"

Freedumb, Freedumb, Read All About It! In a world of exploding human population, with its myriad needs, wants and desires, the economy keeps falling, with more and more working people around the world, poorer, lacking basic needs and going hungry. Freakohnomics: The new 21st Century Supply & Demand Economics - absolute greed, absolute power brings on absolute madness - Turns into Freakohnomics gone berserk. Or mafia economics by deliberate Design - the greater the need, the higher the price of all commodities required to sustain Life. The Outcome, economic strangulation and workaholic enslavement of a people was not designed by the lord thy God, nor (for the non-believer) is it a Natural or Nature's Law, nor a Scientific Law

The Deadly Dangers of a Mis-informed, Dis-informed & Un-informed Population, Ultimately to Itself, History Provides Ample Evidence.

The Solution: The Promise of New Energy Systems & Beyond Oil

Evaporates the Problem: The ill designed "Corporism: The Systemic Disease that Destroys Civilization." when lacking a Bill of Rights for Human Life

Mild shock and disbelief barely registered in the nation of the most productive, overworked, underpaid, underinsured, vacation deprived, low paid slave/workers in the world, as they watched their bridges fall down along with their retirement savings in equity & stocks, while their taxes, gas, energy and food costs continued skyrocketing to uncharted realms and many continue to lose their homes and go hungry; as the masses stagnated in unmovable traffic, and government departments threatened to close due to lack of funds - On the bright side, the worldwide corporate 2% greedy guts, individually, had aplenty, more wealth than 30 nations combined, apiece.... irrelevant to who is paying for their errors (as in subprime loans).

As common sense in science is lost with the continued stagnation of our energy base and deep troubling theoretical foundational issues in physics, so too, Civilization's Survival Parameters fly out of sight, out of mind, along with the values and morals inherent within new scientific understanding which new energy systems would reveal. Scientific Stagnation bodes an ill wind to evolution, sustainability, and survival as "cycles of humiliation, dumbing us down, violence, and Unrestrained Corporate Greed prompting resource wars with nuclear finality" join hands with global warming and ecological imbalance to precipitate the historical "rise and fall of civilization" - a Tsunami accelerating toward us with a far more spectacular event than the legends and myths of 'Atlantis and Lemuria"........ had more people known that Energy from Corn (or going backwards to a dimwitted concept of radioactive nuclear power application ) sounded a wee bit kindergartenish and senile for the twenty first century......the Future may have had a chance.




Happy Oil Dependence Day
July 2, 2008
NYT (The Nation) This column was written by Robert Scheer.
As we head into the Fourth of July weekend of patriotic bluster and beer swilling--but before we are too besotted with ourselves--might we also for once consider our imperfections? Why not take a moment to heed the cautions of our founding father, George Washington, whose true legacy will most likely be ignored during the flag-waving weekend? Washington's Farewell Address to the new nation was a warning about the threat of American imperial ambitions and a declaration of his high expectations for a republic of free men: "In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish; that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But, if I may even flatter myself, that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism." We are drowning in the "impostures of pretended patriotism," used to cover the lies that got us into Iraq, the defense of torture and the violation of our basic liberties. In the name of patriotism, we presume a God-given American right to reorder the world to our liking, masking the vice of unfettered greed as an obligation of national security. Any doubts as to this later governing impulse of our imperial ambitions were shattered with the recent news that US advisers to our puppet government in the Green Zone of occupied Iraq have worked out agreements for American oil companies to gain control of Iraqi oil fields. But, then again, what did we expect when we elected a Texas oil hustler, and a failed one at that, to be our President? Only in an America dumbed down by constant propaganda about our innate moral superiority will anyone any longer believe that we didn't invade Iraq for the oil, even though Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came to the Bush Administration from the board of directors at Chevron, where they named an oil tanker after her. Like Vice President Dick Cheney with those Halliburton contracts, Rice has stayed true to her corporate sponsors. That's what the US invasion of Iraq accomplished; for the first time in more than three decades after Iraq joined a worldwide trend of formerly colonized nations gaining control of their own resources, Big Oil is getting its black gold back. It was always about the oil--that's why "we" invaded Iraq--only "we" aren't getting any, at least not at a reasonable price. The oil companies are. I know it's difficult for the corporate media and politicians, both fueled generously by energy money, to grasp the distinction, but we the people and they the oil companies are not one and the same. While we suffer at the pump, they make record profits, which is the way they like it. Don't think for a second that US oil companies are rushing into Iraq to expand production to help lower world oil prices, thus making their investments less profitable. They just want to be on the winning side, which is why the CEO of Halliburton relocated his office from Texas to the United Arab Emirates, where I am certain he and his fellow corporate expatriates are able to happily celebrate the Fourth of July. So, take that American flag off your lapel and replace it with a button bearing the Exxon or Chevron logo. C'mon, Dick Cheney and Condi Rice, be straight about what it is you are really pushing here. 'Fess up--it's not the good old USA as represented by the sucker taxpayers conned by your patriotic blather. No sirree, what you would have Americans paying homage to is the majesty of the big multinational corporations that exploit American military power to rule the world. But recognize that you have shamed the legacy of our first President. George Washington, who distinguished the promise of the new world from the corruptions of the old by shunning imperial conquest, said: "Our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences; consulting the natural course of things; diffusing and diversifying by gentle means the streams of commerce, but forcing nothing." If Barack Obama or John McCain were to offer such words of wisdom this Fourth of July, he would be vilified as "weak," and that is a fit measure of just how far we have descended from the high hopes of our first President.
By Robert ScheerReprinted with permission from The Nation.

Report: Bush Misled U.S. On Iraq Intel

Freedumb, Freedumb, Read All About It! "linked Iraq to Al Qaeda and raised the possibility that Mr. Hussein might supply the terrorist group with weapons of mass destruction. “Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote."

The Deadly Dangers of a Mis-informed, Dis-informed & Un-informed Population, Ultimately to Itself, History Provides Ample Evidence.

The Solution: The Promise of New Energy Systems & Beyond Oil

Evaporates the Problem: The ill designed "Corporism: The Systemic Disease that Destroys Civilization."

Mild shock and disbelief barely registered in the nation of the most productive, overworked, underpaid, underinsured, vacation deprived, low paid slave/workers in the world, as they watched their bridges fall down along with their retirement savings in equity & stocks, while their taxes, gas, energy and food costs continued skyrocketing to uncharted realms and many continue to lose their homes and go hungry; as the masses stagnated in unmovable traffic, and government departments threatened to close due to lack of funds - On the bright side, the worldwide corporate 2% greedy guts, individually, had aplenty, more wealth than 30 nations combined, apiece.... irrelevant to who is paying for their errors (as in subprime loans).

As common sense in science is lost with the continued stagnation of our energy base and deep troubling theoretical foundational issues in physics, so too, Civilization's Survival Parameters fly out of sight, out of mind, along with the values and morals inherent within new scientific understanding which new energy systems would reveal. Scientific Stagnation bodes an ill wind to evolution, sustainability, and survival as "cycles of humiliation, dumbing us down, violence, and Unrestrained Corporate Greed prompting resource wars with nuclear finality" join hands with global warming and ecological imbalance to precipitate the historical "rise and fall of civilization" - a Tsunami accelerating toward us with a far more spectacular event than the legends and myths of 'Atlantis and Lemuria"........ had more people known that Energy from Corn (or going backwards to a dimwitted concept of radioactive nuclear power application ) sounded a wee bit kindergartenish and senile for the twenty first century......the Future may have had a chance.



Report: Bush Misled U.S. On Iraq Intel
WASHINGTON, June 5, 2008

June 5, 2008
Senate Panel Accuses Bush of Iraq Exaggerations
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON — A long-delayed Senate report endorsed by Democrats and some Republicans has concluded that President Bush and his aides built the public case for war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda.
The report was released Thursday after years of partisan squabbling, and it marks the close of five years of investigations by the Senate Intelligence Committee into the use, abuse and faulty assessments of intelligence leading up to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
That some Bush administration claims about the Iraqi threat turned out to be false is hardly new. But the report, based on a detailed review of public statements by Mr. Bush and other officials, is the most comprehensive effort to date to assess whether policymakers systematically painted a more dire picture about Iraq than was justified by available intelligence.
The 170-page report accuses Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and other top officials of repeatedly overstating the Iraqi threat in the emotional aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. Its findings were endorsed by all eight committee Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Olympia Snowe of Maine and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.
In a statement accompanying the report, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said: “The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein.”
Dana Perino, the White House spokesman, on Thursday called the report a “selective view,” and said the Bush administration’s public statements were based on the same faulty intelligence given to Congress and endorsed by foreign intelligence services. Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the committee’s top Republican, called the report a “waste of committee time and resources.”
The report on the prewar statements about Iraq found that on some key issues — most notably Iraq’s purported nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs — the public statements from Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other senior officials were generally “substantiated” by the best estimates at the time from American intelligence agencies. But the report found that the administration officials’ statements usually did not reflect the intelligences agencies’ uncertainties about the evidence or disputes among them.
In a separate report, the Intelligence Committee provided new details about a series of clandestine meetings in Rome and Paris between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in 2001 and 2003. The meetings included discussions about possible covert actions to destabilize the government in Tehran, and they were used by the Pentagon officials to glean information about internal rivalries inside of Iran and suspected Iranian “hit” team targeting American troops in Afghanistan.
The report concludes that Stephen J. Hadley, now the national security adviser, and Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary, “acted within their authorities” to dispatch the Pentagon officials to Rome. At the same time, the report criticized the meetings as ill-advised and accused Mr. Hadley and Mr. Wolfowitz of keeping the State Department and intelligence agencies in the dark about the meetings, which it portrayed as part of a rogue intelligence operation.
The two reports were the final parts of the committee’s so-called “phase two” investigation of prewar intelligence on Iraq and related issues. The first phase of the inquiry, begun in the summer of 2003 and completed in July 2004, identified grave faults in the Central Intelligence Agency’s analysis of the threat posed by Mr. Hussein.
The report was especially critical of statements by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney that linked Iraq to Al Qaeda and raised the possibility that Mr. Hussein might supply the terrorist group with weapons of mass destruction. “Representing to the American people that the two had an operational partnership and posed a single, indistinguishable threat was fundamentally misleading and led the nation to war on false premises,” Mr. Rockefeller wrote.
Mr. Bond and four other Republicans on the committee sharply dissented from the report’s findings and suggested the investigation was a partisan smokescreen to obscure the real story: that Central Intelligence Agency failed the Bush administration by delivering intelligence assessments to policymakers that have since been discredited.
In a detailed minority report, four of those Republicans accused Democrats of hypocrisy and their own campaign of cherry-picking — namely, refusing to include misleading public statements by such top Democrats as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Mr. Rockefeller.
As an example, they pointed to an October 2002 speech by Mr. Rockefeller, who declared to his Senate colleagues that he had arrived at the “inescapable conclusion that the threat posed to America by Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction is so serious that despite the risks, and we should not minimize the risks, we must authorize the president to take the necessary steps to deal with the threat.”
The report about the Bush administration’s public statements does shed some new detail about the intelligence information available to policymakers as they built a case for war. In September 2002, for instance, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the Iraq problem cannot be solved by airstrikes alone” because Iraqi chemical and biological weapons were so deeply buried that they could not be penetrated by American bombs.
Two months later, however, the National Intelligence Council wrote an assessment for Mr. Rumsfeld concluding that the Iraqi underground weapons facilities identified by the intelligence agencies “are vulnerable to conventional, precision-guided, penetrating munitions because they are not deeply buried.”
On Thursday, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democratic member of the Intelligence Committee, said Congress was never told about the National Intelligence Council assessment.

Report: Bush Misled U.S. On Iraq Intel
WASHINGTON, June 5, 2008
(CBS/ AP) Two reports issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee Thursday leveled harsh criticism at both the White House and Pentagon for their handling of intelligence concerning Iraq and Iran. One report examined statements by top Bush administration officials between October 2002 and March 2003, when the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq began, about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime. These officials, from President Bush on down, deliberately misled the American public about Saddam's relationship with al Qaeda and "led the nation to war on false premises," according to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. According to the report, officials erroneously linked Saddam to the Sept. 11 attacks and al Qaeda; claimed Iraq would give terrorist groups chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, and said Iraq was developing drones to spread chemical or biological agents over the United States. None was borne out by intelligence. "These reports are about holding the government accountable and making sure these mistakes never happen again," Rockefeller said Thursday. Bush's press secretary, Dana Perino, said the problem was flawed intelligence heading into the war. "We had the intelligence that we had, fully vetted, but it was wrong. And we certainly regret that," she said. According to Rockefeller, the problem was that the Bush administration concealed information that would have undermined the case for war. "We might have avoided this catastrophe," he said. However, the report found that intelligence substantiated most of the administration's statements about Iraq before the war. But officials often did not mention the level of dissension or uncertainty in the intelligence agencies about the information. Two Republicans, Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, endorsed the report. The committee's five other Republicans, however, assailed it as a partisan exercise. They accused Democrats of covering for their own members, including Rockefeller and Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who made similar statements about Iraq based on the same intelligence the Bush administration used. A report released earlier Thursday concluded that Pentagon officials concealed from U.S. intelligence agencies potentially useful tips from Iranian agents in 2001 and 2002, including one that Tehran allegedly sent hit teams to Afghanistan to kill Americans. The Iranians also told two Pentagon employees at a December 2001 meeting in Rome of a purported tunnel complex used to store weapons and covertly move personnel out of Iran after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the U.S., according to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In addition, the Iranians told of a long-standing relationship with the Palestine Liberation Organization and the growth of anti-government sentiment inside Iran. The information was questionable, the report suggests, citing the sources: a discredited former arms dealer who was peddling a plan to overthrow the Iranian government and a former U.S. official whose leads had failed to yield any substance for the CIA. Nonetheless, the report sheds new light on the mistrust and lack of cooperation by Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld with the CIA and the State Department after 9/11. Committee Republicans, in a dissent, said the report had nothing to do with the original scope of the review prewar intelligence on Iraq. They said it would be a "disappointment" to people looking for evidence of Pentagon wrongdoing. The Iran-related report focuses on the series of meetings in Rome held over three days in December 2001. The U.S. was fighting in Afghanistan and working on initial planning for the Iraq war. Then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley authorized the meetings. Two Pentagon employees, one of whom worked for then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, went to Rome to meet with two Iranians - one a current member of the security service, the second a former member. Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian middleman already dismissed by the CIA as untrustworthy, also attended, as did a representative from an unspecified foreign government's intelligence service. Michael Ledeen, a former Pentagon official and an analyst with the conservative American Enterprise Institute, arranged the meeting and attended. In one meeting, Ghorbanifar pressed for a change of government in Iran and, on a napkin, outlined a plan to do that, saying he would need $5 million to set it in motion, according to the report. The report said Hadley failed to fully inform then-CIA Director George Tenet and then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage about the meeting. But Hadley and the Pentagon were within their rights to conduct the meeting, the report said. White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Hadley notified all parties concerned appropriately. But the report said Defense Department officials refused to allow "potentially useful and actionable intelligence" to be shared with intelligence agencies, even in the Defense Intelligence Agency. Then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz briefed the head of the DIA on the Iranian intelligence but would not let him discuss it, the report said. Ledeen said Thursday that the meetings were not kept secret from U.S. intelligence, and said he had briefed the U.S. ambassador to Italy twice about them. "Any time the CIA wanted to find out what was going on all they had to do was ask," he said. One of the two Pentagon representatives, Larry Franklin, now faces jail time after pleading guilty to espionage-related charges unrelated to the Rome meeting. Franklin told the committee he believed the intelligence gathered at the meetings "saved American lives." He passed word of the alleged hit teams to a special operations forces commander in Afghanistan.

Airlines Sue FBI And CIA Over 9/11 Blame

What others are saying since 9-11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P682rGIhZwI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgfzqulvhlQ

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the priority one subheadings below remain in LIMBO ...................

Priority One A: energy evolution - stagnant and dead with a 100 year old equation, E=MC2, unexpanded, unevolved, petrified as in stone

Priority One B: Survival Criteria for increasingly complex, energy intensive 'holistic' global systems - nonexistent. (these criteria are derived directly from evolving energy stages beyond the caveman approach to nuclear energies - but then, that's The Trouble With Physics and pending trouble with civilization's future survival)

Airlines Sue FBI And CIA Over 9/11 Blame
NYT NEW YORK, Aug. 7, 2007
(AP) Airlines and aviation-related companies sued the CIA and the FBI on Tuesday to force terrorism investigators to tell whether the aviation industry was to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks. The two lawsuits in U.S. District Court in Manhattan sought court orders for depositions as the aviation entities build their defenses against lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages for injuries, fatalities, property damage and business losses related to Sept. 11, 2001. The aviation companies said the agencies in a series of boilerplate letters had refused to let them depose two secret agents, including the 2001 head of the CIA's special Osama bin Laden unit, and six FBI agents with key information about al Qaeda and bin Laden. The airlines, airport authorities, security companies and an aircraft manufacturer said they were entitled to present evidence to show the terrorist attacks did not depend upon negligence by any aviation defendants and that there were other causes of the attacks. They said that the depositions were likely to result in evidence showing the terrorists were sophisticated, ideologically driven and well-financed and would have succeeded regardless of any action by the aviation entities. "The aviation parties are entitled to show that operations conducted by the federal intelligence agencies were the most effective way to uncover and stop the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and that the inability of the federal intelligence agencies to detect and stop the plot is a more causal circumstance of the terrorist attacks than any allegedly negligent conduct of the aviation parties," the FBI lawsuit said. In the CIA lawsuit, companies including American Airlines owner AMR Corp., United Airlines' UAL Corp., US Airways Group Inc., Delta Air Lines Inc., Continental Airlines Inc. and Boeing Co. asked to interview the deputy chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit in 2001 and an FBI agent assigned to the unit at that time. The names of both are secret. In the FBI lawsuit, the companies asked to interview five former and current FBI employees who had participated in investigations of al Qaeda and al Qaeda operatives before and after Sept. 11. Those individuals included Coleen M. Rowley, the former top FBI lawyer in its Minneapolis office, who sent a scathing letter to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller in May 2002 complaining that a supervisor in Washington interfered with the Minnesota investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks. The lawsuits also sought to speak to Harry Samit, an FBI agent in the Minneapolis office who was among those who arrested Moussaoui in August 2001. They said he had testified that he suggested to his superiors that the Federal Aviation Administration be notified that Moussaoui was involved in a plot to hijack a commercial airliner. The testimony was critical to their defense because both agencies play key roles in advising the FAA as to whether new security measures were needed to protect civil aviation against terrorists, the lawsuits said. The airline entities said they need the testimony to defend against accusations that they had primary responsibility to assess the threat posed by terrorists, that they should have detected terrorists' weapons, that they should have anticipated the attacks and that they should have identified and stopped the 19 terrorists who carried out the suicide hijackings. Requests to interview the agents were rejected as not sufficiently explained, burdensome or protected by investigative or attorney-client privilege, the lawsuits said. Government spokeswoman Yusill Scribner said she had no immediate comment on the lawsuits. FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said the agency had not reviewed the lawsuit against it and would not comment on pending litigation. A victims' compensation fund established by Congress has paid $6 billion to 2,880 families of those who died in the attacks and more than $1 billion to 2,680 injured victims. But 41 cases filed on behalf of 42 victims remain pending in federal court in Manhattan because some victims decided to pursue the usual court route rather than accept payouts from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001. The first trials to assess damages are scheduled to begin in September.

U.S. Heading For Financial Trouble?

David Walker is the nation's top accountant, the comptroller general of the United States. "..the current health care system is way too expensive, and overrated. On cost we're number one in the world. We spend 50 percent more of our economy on health care than any nation on earth," Walker says. "We have the largest uninsured population of any major industrialized nation. We have above average infant mortality, below average life expectancy, and much higher than average medical error rates for an industrialized nation....." (is he confirming Michael Moore's Sicko?). "You know the American people, I tell you, they are absolutely starved for two things: the truth, and leadership," Walker says. (What's he saying, the free people are being lied to?????) He calls it a fiscal wake up tour, and he is telling civic groups, university forums and newspaper editorial boards that the U.S. has spent, promised, and borrowed itself into such a deep hole it will be unable to climb out if it does not act now. As Walker sees it, the survival of the republic is at stake. Add to this the Trouble with Physics and the energy stagnation the last 50 years, and we have a tsunami of ultimate magnitude heading our way

U.S. Heading For Financial Trouble?
July 8, 2007
(CBS) This segment was originally broadcast on March 4, 2007. It was updated on July 8, 2007. When the stock market soars or plunges, everyone pays attention. But short term results aren't that important to the man you're about to meet. David Walker thinks the biggest economic peril facing the nation is being ignored, and for nearly two years now he has been traveling the country like an Old Testament prophet, urging people to wake up before its too late. Who is David Walker and why should we care? As correspondent Steve Kroft first reported earlier this year, he is the nation's top accountant, the comptroller general of the United States. He's totaled up our government's income, liabilities, and future obligations and concluded that our current standard of living is unsustainable unless some drastic action is taken. And he's not alone. It's been called the "dirty little secret everyone in Washington knows" – a set of financial truths so inconvenient that most elected officials don't even want to talk about them, which is exactly why David Walker does.
"I would argue that the most serious threat to the United States is not someone hiding in a cave in Afghanistan or Pakistan but our own fiscal irresponsibility," Walker tells Kroft. David Walker is a prudent man and a highly respected public official. As comptroller general of the United States he runs he Government Accountability Office, the GAO, which audits the government's books and serves as the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress. He has more than 3,000 employees, a budget of a half a billion dollars, and a message he considers urgent. "I'm going to show you some numbers…they’re all big and they’re all bad," he says. So bad, that Walker has given up on elected officials and taken his message directly to taxpayers and opinion makers, hoping to shape the debate in the next presidential election. "You know the American people, I tell you, they are absolutely starved for two things: the truth, and leadership," Walker says. He calls it a fiscal wake up tour, and he is telling civic groups, university forums and newspaper editorial boards that the U.S. has spent, promised, and borrowed itself into such a deep hole it will be unable to climb out if it doesn’t act now. As Walker sees it, the survival of the republic is at stake. "What’s going on right now is we’re spending more money than we make…we’re charging it to credit card…and expecting our grandchildren to pay for it. And that’s absolutely outrageous," he told the editorial board of the Seattle Post Intelligencer. You have heard this before, from Ross Perot 15 years ago. You might have even thought the problem had been solved, when President Clinton announced, "Tonight, I come before you to announce that the federal deficit … will be simply zero." "Well, those days are gone. We've gone from surpluses to huge deficits and our long range situation is much worse," Walker says. "President Bush would argue that the economy is in pretty good shape, unemployment is down, the deficit is actually less than expected," Kroft remarks. "The fact is, is that we don't face an immediate crisis. And, so people say, 'What's the problem?' The answer is, we suffer from a fiscal cancer. It is growing within us. And if we do not treat it, it could have catastrophic consequences for our country," Walker replies. The cancer, Walker says, are massive entitlement programs we can no longer afford, exacerbated by a demographic glitch that began more than 60 years ago, a dramatic spike in the fertility rate called the "baby boom." Beginning next year, and for 20 years thereafter, 78 million Americans will become pensioners and medical dependents of the U.S. taxpayer. "The first baby boomer will reach 62 and be eligible for early retirement of Social Security January 1, 2008. They'll be eligible for Medicare just three years later. And when those boomers start retiring in mass, then that will be a tsunami of spending that could swamp our ship of state if we don't get serious," Walker explains. To illustrate their impact, he uses a power point presentation to show what would happen in 30 years if the U.S. maintains its current course and fulfills all of the promises politicians have made to the public on things like Social Security and Medicare. What would happen in 2040 if nothing changes? "If nothing changes, the federal government's not gonna be able to do much more than pay interest on the mounting debt and some entitlement benefits. It won't have money left for anything else – national defense, homeland security, education, you name it," Walker warns. Walker says you could eliminate all waste and fraud and the entire Pentagon budget and the long-range financial problem still wouldn't go away, in what's shaping up as an actuarial nightmare. Part of the problem, Walker acknowledges, is that there won't be enough wage earners to support the benefits of the baby boomers. "But the real problem, Steve, is health care costs. Our health care problem is much more significant than Social Security," he says. Asked what he means by that, Walker tells Kroft, "By that I mean that the Medicare problem is five times greater than the Social Security problem." The problem with Medicare, Walker says, is people keep living longer, and medical costs keep rising at twice the rate of inflation. But instead of dealing with the problem, he says, the president and the Congress made things much worse in Dec. 2003, when they expanded the Medicare program to include prescription drug coverage. "The prescription drug bill was probably the most fiscally irresponsible piece of legislation since the 1960s," Walker argues. Asked why, Walker says, "Well, because we promise way more than we can afford to keep. Eight trillion dollars added to what was already a 15 to $20 trillion under-funding. We're not being realistic. We can't afford the promises we've already made, much less to be able, piling on top of 'em." With one stroke of the pen, Walker says, the federal government increased existing Medicare obligations nearly 40 percent over the next 75 years. "We’d have to have eight trillion dollars today, invested in treasury rates, to deliver on that promise," Walker explains. Asked how much we actually have, Walker says, "Zip." So where's that money going to come from? "Well it's gonna come from additional taxes, or it's gonna come from restructuring these promises, or it's gonna come from cutting other spending," Walker says. He is not suggesting that the nation do away with Medicare or prescription drug benefits. He does believe the current health care system is way too expensive, and overrated. "On cost we're number one in the world. We spend 50 percent more of our economy on health care than any nation on earth," he says. "We have the largest uninsured population of any major industrialized nation. We have above average infant mortality, below average life expectancy, and much higher than average medical error rates for an industrialized nation," Walker points out. Walker says we have promised almost unlimited healthcare to senior citizens who never see the bills, and the government already is borrowing money to pay them. He says the system is unsustainable. "It's the number one fiscal challenge for the federal government, it's the number one fiscal challenge for state governments and it's the number one competitive challenge for American business. We're gonna have to dramatically and fundamentally reform our health care system in installments over the next 20 years," Walker tells Kroft. And if we don't? "And if we don't, it could bankrupt America," Walker argues. You’re probably expecting to hear from someone who disagrees with the comptroller general’s numbers, projections, and analysis. But hardly anyone does. He is accompanied on the wake-up tour by economists from the conservative Heritage Foundation, the left-leaning Brookings Institution, and the non-partisan Concord Coalition. The only dissenters seem to be a small minority of economists who believe either that the U.S. can grow its way out of the problem, or that Walker is over-stating it. "The Wall Street Journal for example calls you 'Chicken Little,' running around saying that the 'sky is falling, the sky is falling,'" Kroft remarks. "Unfortunately they don't get it. I don't know anybody who has done their homework, has researched history, and who's good at math who would tell you that we can grow our way out of this problem," Walker replies. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke validated much of Walker's take on the situation at congressional hearings this year, and so did ranking Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee. Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota is the chairman. Sen. Conrad thinks David Walker is "providing an enormous public service." Asked if he agrees with Walker’s figures and his projections, Sen. Conrad says, "I do. You know, I mean we could always question the precise nature of this projection or that projection. But, that misses the point. The larger story that he is telling is exactly correct." Conrad acknowledges that most people in Washington are aware how bad the situation is. "They know in large measure here, Republicans and Democrats, that we are on a course that doesn't add up," the senator tells Kroft. "Why doesn't somebody do something about it?" Kroft asks. "Because it's always easier not to. 'Cause it's always easier to defer, to kick the can down the road to avoid making choices. You know, you get in trouble in politics when you make choices," Sen. Conrad says. Asked if he thinks taxes should be raised, the senator says, "I believe first of all, we need more revenue. We need to be tough on spending. And we need to reform the entitlement programs … we need to do all of it." But he admits he doesn't think there's a consensus for raising taxes. "Any politician who tells you that we can solve our problem without reforming Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is not telling you the truth," Walker told an audience at the University of Denver. Over the next year, the nation’s top accountant will be traveling to the early primary states, telling voters that we need to begin raising taxes or government revenues and put a cap on federal spending if we want to maintain our economic security and standard of living. "If you tell them the truth, if you give them the facts, if you explain this in terms of not just numbers but values and people, they will get it and empower their elected officials to make tough choices," Walker argues. Asked if he knows any politicians willing to raise taxes or cut back benefits, Walker says, "I don't know politicians that like to raise taxes. I don't know politicians that like to cut spending, but I think what we have to recognize is this is not just about numbers. We are mortgaging the future of our children and grandchildren at record rates, and that is not only an issue of fiscal irresponsibility, it's an issue of immorality."
Produced by Andy Court© MMVII, CBS Interactive