myopia

"We live in the world of Perverse Cosmic Myopia, an inability to focus attention on the most perilous matter at hand." - David Brooks

Myopia is defined as:

not clearsighted

nearsightedness; shortsightedness

eyesight abnormality resulting from the eye's faulty refractive ability

lack of discernment or long range perspective in thinking or planning

a visual defect in which distant objects appear blurred because their images
are focused in front of the retina rather than on it; nearsightedness

(what are they thinking?!)

"If I were to sit down with Al Gore, Elaine Kamarck, Jamie Gorelick and Chris Edley, I would expect their explanations would involve more obfuscating policy discussions but it would ultimately come down to a similar notion of going with the flow. As would the hundreds of thousands of highly credentialed, well-paid Americans who have actively lead the day-to-day implementation of policies that - when we pierce the veil - are really dictated by powerful private interests outside of the law as most are conditioned to believe it to be. All these policies and actions add up to genocide - of our families and communities and of all living things, both throughout America and around the world." - Catherine Austin Fitts

The executive branch of the government of the United States of America which was being run by executives recruited from corporate America and is now being run by academics recruited from acadamia has failed to perceive reality clearly.

Chief Executive Officers, Chief Financial Officers, executives and academics that have excelled in their field of expertise must have certain personality traits to succeed. One of these traits is the ability to focus on a problem in an attempt to solve the problem.

If 'the problem' has been carefully analyzed, if all the facts are known and if there are sufficient resources with which to address 'the problem' then it is highly likely that 'the problem' can be solved with the correct action.

On the other hand if 'the problem' has not been carefully analyzed, if all the facts are not known, if the facts are erroneous or if the resources are insufficient then it is likely that 'the problem' cannot be solved within existing parameters and there is a very real possibility that action taken to solve 'the problem' will only create greater problems - especially if the "players" are dependent on "gaming the system."

The corporate failures of Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossing, Tyco, Adelphia, Long-Term Capital Management, Kmart, Schwinn, Motorola, Rubbermaid, Quaker Oats, Iridium, Conseco, Johnson & Johnson, Sunbeam, General Motors, Countrywide Financial, IndyMac Bancorp, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Citigroup, American International Group, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and others bear witness to the truthfulness of the preceding statement.

Corporate failures stem from breakdowns in how executives perceive reality, how the individuals within an organization face up to reality and how information and control systems in organizations are managed.

To perceive reality correctly requires structured self-reflection.

To perceive reality correctly requires the ability to overcome egocentric self aggrandizement.
To perceive reality correctly requires one to feel empathetic toward every individual that one's actions affect.

A failure to perceive reality clearly results in organizational leaders adopting faulty thought proccess'. Thought proccess' which clearly declare spiritual corruption - seen in the self-centered actions taken.

"CEOs are very pompous and they assume they are right about everything." - Charles T. Munger

Every single organizational procedure is subject to break down in the real conditions under which a coporation operates.

Executive mindset failure is at the root of most large-scale corporate failures. Great corporate mistakes have at their heart a fundamental breakdown of managerial reasoning and strategic thinking. Executives regularly send their corporations off in completely wrong directions or fail to restructure them in the way they should. They do this for one of two reasons: they have made a fundamental error in the way they are thinking about the opportunities and problems their business faces; for reasons unbeknownst to them they have given inadequate information by corporate directors to properly prepare for the future or perhaps the directors have been con-vinced by the syndicate of the soulless that the status quo is perferable .

All of the corporations listed above were successful at one point and their CEOs became superstar celebrities. Success bred arrogance in many of the CEOs of these corporations; arrogance blinded many of them to reality; subservience to domination by the syndicate of the soulless left most of them with spiritually corrupt thought proccess'.

"A great deal of wreckage is caused by boys behaving badly. The healthy ones - well balanced human beings in full command of their alpha strengths - are natural leaders who are trusted by colleagues, respected by competitors, revered by employees and loved by Wall Street. But other alpha males are risks to their organizations - and sometimes to themselves." - Alpha Male Syndrome, Kate Ludeman and Eddie Erlandson

Halliburton

Halliburton Watch

Halliburton business dates back to 1919 when Erle Halliburton, a Tennessean, began lining oil well shafts with cement to seal the shaft from water contamination and cave-ins. Cementing is an essential step in currently drilling oil wells - and Halliburton dominates this process of the oilfield business.

By 1981 Halliburton revenues had soared to $8.5 billion, profits were $674 million, and Halliburton employed more than 110,000 workers.

In August 1995, Dave Lesar, who had spent 16 years at Arthur Andersen as the Halliburton accountant and had no experience operating a business, became CFO of Halliburton.

Dick Cheney was hired to run Halliburton in September 1995.

Dick Cheney, a career politician with head of state contacts, would serve as Halliburton's global salesman-in-chief as Halliburton desperately needed more work overseas. Within a year of his arrival, Dick Cheney had fired Tommy Knight - a respected 32-year Brown & Root veteran - and named Dave Lesar as CEO of Brown & Root, in addition to his duties as CFO of Halliburton.

In 1998 Halliburton payed a $7.5 million penalty to the Securities and Exchange Commission for failure to disclose an accounting change that allowed the company to hit its quarterly earnings targets.

In February 1998 under the direction of Dick Cheney Halliburton made a $7.7 billion purchase of Dresser Industries. Dresser Industries, based in Dallas, was nearly as big as Halliburton, with separate oilfield and engineering divisions of its own. (The engineering business, M.W. Kellogg, would be merged with Brown & Root to form Kellogg Brown & Root, or KBR.)

"A win-win combination for both companies' shareholders, customers, and employees. We went from being a second-tier, second-rank energy-services company to being the biggest on Earth." - Dick Cheney

Halliburton bought Dresser Industries near the top of the market, at a 16% premium. One of Dick Cheney's first moves after the deal closed was to cut 10,000 jobs.

Dresser Industries faced 66,000 asbestos claims at the time of purchase. Asbestos claims later escalated to 274,000, dating back to a former Dresser subsidiary in Pittsburgh, Harbison-Walker. Until the 1970s, Harbison-Walker had used asbestos in industrial products it sold, such as insulating bricks and coatings.

In 2002 Halliburton used legal shenanigans to place just pieces of the company in Chapter 11, retain control of the corporation, and avoid wiping out shareholders. In the end, the price tag for asbestos claims soared to $5.1 billion. (If it was not for Iraq no-bid contracts Halliburton would have been carved up and sold off!)

Between August 2000 and February 2005 Halliburton reported net losses of nearly $2 billion.

In February 2005 federal prosecutors were investigating how Halliburton sidestepped United States sanctions against doing business with Iran as well as a former KBR chairman's alleged involvement in a Nigerian bribery scandal and possible bid-rigging overseas.

Dick Cheney's net worth in 2005 was between $17,120,041 and $79,588,010.

Halliburton under investigation for bribery, bid rigging, defrauding the military and illegally profiting in Iran is moving it's headquarters to the United Arab Emirates. The United Arab Emirates has no extradition treaty with the United States. The United Arab Emirates has not yet ratified the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime.

"In 2007, America finds itself at a moral and demographic crossroads. It cannot expect the upper class to provide strong moral leadership because the upper class is filled with people who work for Halliburton." - Joe Queenan

ABOUT HALLIBURTON (@ halliburtonwatch.org)

war on terror

"Does anyone today remember that World War I was fervently believed to be the "war to end all wars"? Despite that stupendous failure, equivalent false logic lives on in the current "war on terror"." - Charles Eisenstein

The executive branch of the government of the United States of America in its rush to a 'war on terror' has failed to analyze the problem carefully, does not have all the facts, many 'known facts' have proven to be erroneous and has deluded itself if it believes it has sufficient resources to eliminate terrorism across the face of the Earth. At this point in time the United States of America has troops stationed in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, what was once known as Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Columbia, the Philippines, Iraq and many others.

These troops are stationed in these places to protect the syndicate of the soulless' vital interests.

The United States of America is attempting to create hegemony on Earth and they are doing it for one reason, one reason alone - a Talmudic/imperial Christian mind set has taken control of American aristocracy.

"War is the most ancient method for keeping one's people scared, unquestioning and obedient, and it is highly profitable for people who make weapons. It was a historically brilliant act for George W. Bush to declare a global war that he and his successors can extend for as long as bombings and kidnapings exist." - David Meadow

Why must history keep repeating itself?

History keeps repeating itself because there are always greedy egocentric men. Greedy egocentric men gravitate to positions of power because all they truly care about is making other humans conform to their ideal of a perfect world - typically designed to shower said ideologue with material wealth. The war on terror will never end because there are not enough exorbitant profits in simply running an economy to provide for the welfare of the people that make up the social culture.

As long as there are profits to be made in war there will be war!

Every empire that has ever risen on Earth has fallen in its rush toward hegemony. Alexander the Great's empire collapsed in fighting between his generals after his death. The Roman empire extended its influence until it collapsed dividing itself in two and then falling separately. The Inca and Aztec empires collapsed after contact with the Spanish empire which shortly thereafter rose to international prominence and then promptly collapsed. After the conquest of the world the over extended British empire collapsed.

Where are these empires now?

In this century we have had Germany and Japan strive for hegemony.

Germany lost because they failed to conquer Russia.

Japan lost because they failed to create hegemony in the Pacific Ocean.

"If you are not with us you must be against us" might as well read "Bow down before me and obey my commands".

For a nation that proclaims itself as the birthplace of freedom we are sending a very convoluted and contradictory message to the other sovereign nations of Earth. Or do our leaders feel that our might (an arsenal of nuclear weapons) gives us the right to demand the nations of Earth to become our vassals? Osama bin Laden avowed goal is to breakup these United States of America and the dreams of hegemony carried by our leaders - agents of the syndicate of the soulless.

The myopia that has engulfed the leadership of the United States of America
threatens the very life of the these United States of America.

"In recent years , I have become increasingly concerned by a host of radical government policies that now threaten many basic principles espoused by all previous administrations, Democratic and Republican.

These include the rudimentary American commitment to peace, economic and social justice, civil liberties, our environment and human rights.

Also endangered are our historic commitments to providing citizens with truthful information, treating dissenting voices and beliefs with respect, state and local autonomy and fiscal responsibility.

Instead of our tradition of espousing peace as a national priority unless our security is directly threatened, we have proclaimed a policy of "preemptive war," an unabridged right to attack other nations unilaterally to change an unsavory regime or for other purposes.

When there are serious differences with other nations, we brand them as international pariahs and refuse to permit direct discussions to resolve disputes.

Regardless of the costs, there are determined efforts by top American leaders to exert American imperial dominance across the face of the Earth.

These revolutionary policies have been orchestrated by those who believe that America's tremendous power and influence should not be internationally constrained.

Another disturbing realization is that every effort has been made to conceal or minimize public awareness of casualties in the 'war on terror'.

Instead of cherishing our role as a great champion of human rights, we now find civil liberties and personal privacy grossly violated under some extreme provisions of the Patriot Act.

Of even greater concern is that America has repudiated the Geneva accords and espoused the use of torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

It is embarrassing to see the president and vice president insisting that the Central Intelligence Agency should be free to perpetrate "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment or punishment" on individuals in American custody.

Instead of reducing America's reliance on nuclear weapons and their further proliferation, we have insisted on our right to retain our arsenals, expand them, and therefore abrogate or derogate almost all nuclear arms control agreements negotiated during the last 50 years.

America has abandoned the prohibition of "first use" of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear nations, and is contemplating the deployment of weapons in space.

Protection of the environment has fallen by the wayside because of government subservience to political pressure from the oil industry and other powerful lobbying groups.

The last five years have brought continued lowering of pollution standards at home and almost universal condemnation of our nation's global environmental policies.

Our government has abandoned fiscal responsibility by unprecedented favors to the rich, while neglecting America's working families. Members of Congress have increased their own pay by $30,000 per year since freezing the minimum wage at $5.15 per hour (the lowest among industrialized nations).

I am extremely concerned by a literalist shift in many houses of worship and in government, as church and state have become increasingly intertwined in ways previously thought unimaginable.

As the Earth's only superpower, America should be seen as the unswerving champion of peace, freedom and human rights.

America should be the focal point around which other nations can gather to combat threats to international security and to enhance the quality of our common environment.

We should be in the forefront of providing human assistance to individuals in need.

It is time for the deep and disturbing political divisions within America to be substantially healed, with Americans united in a common commitment to revive and nourish the historic political and moral values that we have espoused during the last 230 years." - Jimmy Carter, 39th, Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, November 14, 2005

"America was grossly unprepared for the challenges we have faced since the fall of Baghdad in May 2003. The task of running a country of 25 million people was turned over initially to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which had been created just two months before the invasion. Then came the equally slapdash Coalition Provisional Authority, which was so short of resources that soldiers joked that its initials stood for Can't Provide Anything." -Max Boot

"The most dangerous person in corporate America is the highly enthusiastic incompetent. He's running faster in the wrong direction, doing horribly counterproductive things with winning enthusiasm."- Tay Kurtz

"George W. Bush's myopic vision of how to defeat the terrorists has led us down the solitary path to quagmire in Iraq." - Avalon Hill

"I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Harry Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that George W. Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and Jerry Bremer - three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key posts."- Kenneth Adelman

lack of creative imagination

"At times the creative imagination seems to work in isolation, when an individual, impelled by some uninstructed spark of originality, glimpses relationships or possibilities never seen before, or devises forms of expressions never heard before.

Most often the creative imagination does not flare in isolation. Creative minds stimulate each other, interaction and competition have a generative effect, sparks fly from disagreement and rivalry, and entire groups become creative.

We know something about how this happens - how such creative groups have formed - in art, in science, and in literature; the same has happened in politics, though in ways the average citizen does not commonly perceive. I do not mean sudden turns in legislation or public policy. I mean the recasting of the entire sphere of power, the reformation of the structure of public authority, of the accepted forms of governance, obedience, and resistance, in practice as well as in theory.

The creative reorganization of the sphere of authoritative power has happened at various points in history, but rarely as quick and successful as the reorganization created by a single generation on the eastern shores of North America two hundred years ago.

Convinced of their moral integrity and the rightness of the principles they wished to make real - well informed but relying heavily on their own local experience and common sense - the Revolutionary leaders believed that, as Thomas Paine put it, they had it in their power to begin human social culture anew.

In all of this there are broad implications. In the most general sense, what stimulated the founders' imaginations and hence their capacity to begin human social culture anew was the fact that they came from outside the metropolitan establishment, with all its age-old, deeply buried, arcane entanglements and commitments.

From their vantage point they viewed the dominant order with a cool, critical, challenging eye, and what they saw was something atrophied, weighted down by its own complacent, self-indulgent elaboration, and vulnerable to the force of fresh energies and imaginative designs.

Refusing to be intimidated by the received traditions and confident of their own integrity and creative capacities, they demanded to know why things must be the way they are; and they had the imagination, energy, and moral stature to conceive of something closer to the grain of everyday reality which would be more likely to lead to individual and collective human happiness.

Americans have the need and the opportunity to recast the existing corrupt American political culture.

Americans have the obligation, as inheritors of the Founding Father's success, to view every establishment critically, to remain in some sense on the margins, and forever to ask why things must be the way they are, that it is never enough to say they must be so, one needs to know why."

- adapted from Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew - Politics and the Creative Imagination

the achievement drive

A new study by Hay Group, June 19, 2006, shows a dramatic rise in the achievement drive of business executives.

The desire to achieve is a major source of strength in business - the innate drive to continually improve performance or meet or exceed a standard of excellence - has risen sharply among executives over the past decade. This period of innovation and rapid business growth has coincided with a period also marked by scandal and loss of confidence in executive decision making, the dark side of this trend.

By relentlessly focusing on tasks and goals, an executive or manager can ultimately damage corporate performance. Overachievers tend to command and coerce, stifling subordinates which if unchecked can prove harmful not only to their own careers, but also to the organizations they lead.

Overachievement often results in ineffective, sometime unethical leadership of the organizational overachiever who is driven to continually improve results—no matter how they are accomplished.

Psychologist David McClelland identified three drivers of behavior: achievement, meeting a standard of excellence; affiliation, maintaining close relationships; and power, having an impact on others.

The power motive comes in two forms: personalized, in which the leader draws strength from controlling people, and socialized, where the leader derives strength from empowering people.

Studies show that great charismatic leaders are highly motivated by socialized power. The leaders who created high-performing and energizing climates got more lasting results by using a broad range of styles, choosing different ones for different circumstances. Rather than order people around, they provided vision, sought buy-in and commitment, and coached.

"Achievement has long been an important ingredient in the recipe for individual, organizational, even national success. In today's uber-competitive environment, it is fast becoming the performance enhancer of choice as more organizations hire, promote, and reward achievement driven leaders.

But, be careful what you ask for. It can backfire big time.

We've seen highly ethical, well meaning executives transformed into vicious louts who behave very badly.

They focus on the end to the exclusion of the means and become coercive and demanding, destroying morale and motivation. The really hard cases cut corners, lie, even cheat, all in the name of outstanding results." - Scott Spreier

See American aristocracy

See The Corruption of the American Dream

See The Subversion of American Democracy

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This web site is not a commercial web site and is presented for educational purposes only.

This website defines a new religious ideology to which its author adheres. The author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has created a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel through their agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the human race. Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious ideology. This web site marks the founding of the religion aptly named The Truth of the Way of Life - a rational religion based on reason which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is encouraged to develop a personal relation with God through the pursuit of the knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the spiritual corruption that has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of The Truth of the Way of Life are spelled out in detail on this web site by the author. Violent acts against individuals due to their religious beliefs in America is considered a “hate crime.”

This web site in no way condones violence. To the contrary the intent here is to reduce the violence that is already occurring due to the international corporate cartels desire to control the human race. The international corporate cartel already controls the world central banking system, mass media worldwide, the industrial military entertainment complex of America and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems. Civilization is based on cooperation. Cooperation does not occur at the point of a gun.

American social mores and values have declined precipitously over the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general through mass media by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population through prior mass media psychological operations. The results have been the destruction of the family and the destruction of social structures that do not adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a perfect world. Through distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the bulk of the population has been directed toward solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite that further consolidates their power and which further their purposes.

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(or what are they thinking?!)