Month: October 2011

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Tom Atlee: Understanding Occupy Wall Street

Blog Wisdom
Tom Atlee

Robert Steele to Tom Atlee:

From a very smart, very senior observer who is trying to understand how I see what I see. This is a problem. The movement needs some clarity for the externals.

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One of us is wrong on what they want. You have been there and I have not. No matter what you say, I believe most, not all, are advocating a free ride. I do not buy the idea that everything being written is misinformation. Who is paying to support the people staying there. If they are students they are missing school. How many are engineers, scientists, and business majors? There is still opportunity in this country. Jobs are going unfilled because qualified candidates are unvavailable, mainly in the technical areas. I fail to see what these folks want. I can agree that there are too many people in Wall Street making obscene amounts of money on questionable trading practices. Do the protesters want these people tried and sent to jail or do they just want their money? They need to be specific.

For most, electoral reform means making sure the candidate they want wins. No corporate donations should also mean no union contributions, and the unions are supporting the rallies. Everyone should be entitled to support who they want. One person's corruption is another's bread and butter. Is bailing out banks any worse that spending money on energy projects that make no economic sense? I don't think so and I don't like either.

Almost everyone is upset with the state of the economy. I have not heard of any ideas from the protesters on how to improve the situation. They think government is the answer, mainly government spending.

TOM ATLEE RESPONDS

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Marcus Aurelius: WSJ on Viet-Nam War – Lack of Integrity

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, DoD, Intelligence (government), IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call, Policy, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy
Marcus Aurelius

Well, this is harsh w/r/t Westy…

Wall Street Journal
October 8, 2011
Pg. C5

Bookshelf

The War Over The Vietnam War

By Max Boot

Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam. By Lewis Sorley, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 416 pp., $30

September 2006. Violence levels are spiking in Iraq. Every day brings reports of more suicide bombings, more IEDs, more death and destruction. So bad has it gotten that the Washington Post reveals that a senior Marine intelligence officer has concluded “that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.”

This was the situation when I was among a dozen conservative pundits escorted into the Oval Office for a chat with President George W. Bush. I asked him why he didn't change a strategy that was clearly failing. He replied that he had no intention of micromanaging the war like Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have personally picked bombing targets in Vietnam. This commander in chief vowed to respect the judgment of his chain of command.

Phi Beta Iota:  Full text with added links below the line.  This review and the book are largely crap.  Viet-Nam was lost for two reasons: because all historical and indigenous influences were for the residents and against the occupiers; and because the US Government was corrupt and was in direct support of a Catholic mandarin and his sister who took corruption, torture, and exploitation of a Buddhist et all land to new heights.  The review misses two of the most important books on the matter, one, Triumph Foresaken that supports the “we could have won” argument, the other, Who the Hell Are We Fighting? that makes it clear that the corruption of intelligence and the corruption of military and political planning were at the heart of America's failure in Viet-Nam.  Westmoreland was not a bad man, but he represented–as most Army leaders do today–the orthodox, the West Point Protective Association, the Army above Republic, the “go along to get along,” and of course the toxic brew of “leadership” that is arrogant, inattentive, poorly educated, and not at all concerned about the welfare or their troops.  In the US Army today, “education” is for show or ticket punching, not to actually learn anything useful to the future.

Full Text and Links below the Line.

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Graphic: Influences on Policy Maker (1995)

Analysis, Balance, Capabilities-Force Structure, Leadership-Integrity, Policies-Harmonization, Political, Processing, Strategy-Holistic Coherence, Threats, Tribes
Click on Image to Enlarge

This chart is reproduced from Steele, ‘A Critical Evaluation', Fig.11, p.90, and in turn was taken from the CIA ‘Intelligence Successes and Failures Course', which has been discontinued. It also appears in ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (2000).

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John Robb: Occupy (Insert XYZ) – Capitalism’s Crisis

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Government
John Robb

OCCUPY (Insert Your City Here): Protesting Capitalism's Crisis

Let me spool you up on what's going on with the Occupy movement.

It's an open source protest (there's lots about how open source protests and insurgencies work on this blog, in posts all the way back to 2004).  So, it's not like the protests you've seen in the past (just as the insurgency in Iraq was different than 20th Century insurgencies).

This protest is more like what we saw in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, etc.  You know, the protests that toppled governments.  The big difference between this protest and those protests is that it's not directed at governments.  It's aimed at companies.  Not just any companies, it's aimed at the banks that run/own the global economy.  The heart of the global Capitalist system.

Click on Image to Enlarge

So, why have governments suffered disintermediation (either consciously or subconsciously by these protestors)?  This protest is ignoring governments and standard political processes because:

  • governments are much weaker than the global economy (they are bankrupt, hollow shells of what they were at the end of the Cold War),
  • they are too ineffectual and/or corrupt to change anything even if they are coerced (see the US, Ireland and Greece for recent examples),
  • too little will change even if the government changes parties (see the US for how lame politics and politicians have become).

What Occupy is Really About

The real reason we are seeing this movement right  now is because

Capitalism, the last great ideological system, is in crisis.

This isn't merely a crisis of outcomes (economic depression, financial panic, etc.), it's a crisis of BELIEF.  While people generally believe in the idea of capitalism, a critical mass of people now think that the global capitalist system we currently have is so badly run, so corrupt, so terrible at delivering results that it needs either a) a complete overhaul or b) we need to build something new.

In short, in its tiny way, this protest may be the start of a reformation of the church of capitalism.

A splintering that may change everything….  For better or worse depending on how well you did in the old, corrupt system.

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Robert Steele: Trip Report – Occupy Wall Street 6 October 2011 – Second American Revolution is Real

11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Hacking, InfoOps (IO), IO Deeds of Peace, IO Deeds of War, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Mobile, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Threats
Robert David STEELE Vivas

I visited New York City 6-7 October 2011.

First I met with Alexa O'Brien, one of the brilliant minds behind U.S. Day of Rage and its focus on Electoral Reform and non-violence as an absolute.  [My memo that Fox news still has not read is here.]

Although they are also focused on a Constitutional Convention, as Lawrence Lessig has been, I reiterated the point that Electoral Reform is the one thing that can be demanded today (no later than 6 November, one year prior to Election Day), with severe consequences for every elected person if Congress fails to pass Electoral Reform by President's Day (February 2012), to include recall or impeachment, and camp-outs at their offices and in public spaces near their homes through to Election Day 2012.

Photos and Additional Comments Below the Line

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