Robert Altman, James Baker, Bill Bradley, Harold Brown, Hodding Carter, William Coleman, Walter Cronkite, Barabara Ehrenreich, Vartan Gregorian, Robert Hackney, Doug Henwood, Mike Dedavoy, Joseph Nye, Samuel Peabody, John Perkins, Pete Seeger, Lawrence Summers, Arthur Sulzberger, William Taft, Kurt Vonnegut, Howard Zinn
This DVD is superb and also subversive. I doubt that the “stars” in this movie, particularly James Baker, Bill Bradley, Howard Brown, and Larry Summers, really knew what they were getting into, since their words–and their bland denials–ring so false in this context.
I put the film in while trying to deal with Microsoft's latest “update” that cost me half the morning, and I recommend it very strongly as a Christmas present or for classrooms and book clubs.
My notes:
+ A Peabody, whose ancestors came on “the boat” and also founded Groton, laments that whereas all the leaders used to pass through Groton, now there is no real “source.” I am reminded of Lee Iacocca's Where Have All the Leaders Gone?.
+ Hedge fund visits basically boils all ownership in America down to four banks, and later in the film we learn that six multinational control almost all “content.”
I disagree with those that criticize this book. This is PRECISELY the kind of book we need to see, at a reasonable price, being discussed in schools, clubs, and churches.
QUOTE page 27: “The Founders set out to prove that ordinary people could be entrusted with governing themselves in a state where no one could arbitrarily arrest them, lock them up, or torture them.”
Do NOT buy the hard-copy. Amazon obscures the fact that the paperback is available, this is a very thin book, buy the paperbackWorld-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (A John Hope Franklin Center Book). I would have been furious had I bought the hard copy at the grotesquely inflated price for 100 pages at 1.5 line spacing.
The big eye-opener for me was that “World Systems” is NOT the same as Whole Systems. World Systems is entirely anthropomorphic and addresses the inter-relationships among forms of human organization, with the state and the marketplace/capitalism being the primary focus.
Phi Beta Iota: We love this, even though it is very time and bandwidth intensive. As voice to text matures (China is rreported by Atlantic Monthly to be much further ahead than Google) it will become much easier to aggregate citizen views into the Global Game, and to create a “level playing field” for true democratic self-governance acrosss all issues and boundaries–it's called Panarchy.
Last week, we announced the CNN/YouTube Climate Debate in Copenhagen, an effort to make sure that your voice is included in the climate debate – and that your questions are posed to decision-makers on an international stage.
These leaders will include Kofi Annan, Thomas Friedman, Yves de Boer, and Bjorn Lomberg.
To submit your question, upload a short video of yourself posing the question and submit it here: www.youtube.com/cop15. We've already seen some top-notch video questions like this one from Mo in Florida who is concerned about the cost of going green:
A place to encourage our understanding of space
in the fluid flow of nature.
Is it possible to understand what gets in the way of human understanding?
That is the question we are asking ourselves as we invite you to participate in the development and communication of a natural awareness that we call ‘inclusionality'.
We think that inclusional understanding , a natural capability that can be “re-awakened” in all of us, can radically transform the way we think, feel and behave, enabling us to live more harmoniously in sustainable dynamic relationship with our living space and one another.
