January 2012 – Page 14 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/01/212012/01/21

Review (Guest): World in Crisis – The End of the American Century

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Country/Regional, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

Gabriel Kolko

5.0 out of 5 stars Simplify, Simplify, Simplify,June 22, 2009<

By Tracy McLellan (Chicago) – See all my reviews

One could almost condense the whole of Kolko thought into a single sentence: “Political problems have political and social, not military solution.” He says this at least four or five times in the current volume, as he has even more often previously. A common criticism of Kolko is that he's repetitive. This doesn't speak to the fact that the deafening silence with which his work is greeted is a far harsher, and equally invalid, criticism. Kolko's alleged repetitiveness is more grasp of nuance and comprehensiveness than it is lack of imagination.

World in Crisis: the End of the American Century is an implicit rejoinder to what Kolko himself calls the lunatics in the Bush regime. It is the typically unique type of excellence in political observation I, at any rate, expect of Kolko. The essays in the current volume are a second, yet enduring draft of history reviewing the political turmoil of the last four or five years. They examine the financial crisis, US foreign policy, Israel, the current and historical US alliance system, US intelligence agencies, and other US policies. The essays have appeared previously on ZNet, […], Counterpunch, in anthologies, and elsewhere. All of them are updated for this book, because, as Kolko notes, they become obsolete almost as soon as they are published due to the accelerated trajectory of geopolitical, technological, financial, and sociological events.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): World in Crisis – The End of the American Century”

2012/01/212012/01/21

Penguin: Gabriel Kolko on CIA’s Contradictions / Cassandras

10 Security, Blog Wisdom, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Officers Call

GABRIEL KOLKO is the leading historian of modern warfare. He is the author of the classic Century of War: Politics, Conflicts and Society Since 1914 and Another Century of War?. He has also written the best history of the Vietnam War, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the US and the Modern Historical Experience.

Paid to be Ignored

The CIA’s Cassandras

GABRIEL KOLKO

Counterpunch, 20-21 January 2012

At no time has the U.S. based its foreign policies on facts — as opposed to its conceptions reliant on sheer wishes, interests, or pretensions, (its ambitions are often a mixture of all of these). Nor has it had fears that are warranted by reality. It has needs, whether economic or geopolitical. It has, however, often had the correct intelligence and the facts before it to warrant entirely different policies on its part. At the same time as it gets into tenuous military situations, situations it is often destined to lose and pay a great deal for while in the process of doing so, it employs people to produce rational analyses—which it then ignores. Why?

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: This is one of the longest, most cogent pieces we have seen on the internal and external contradictions inherent in the CIA archipelago of contrasting functions, values, and marginal outputs. It is totally consistent with the many books reviewed here on intelligence.

2012/01/212012/01/21

Worth a Look: The People’s Money – How Voters Will Balance the Budget and Eliminate the Federal Debt

Book Lists, Policies, Worth A Look

PART ONE: The Political Class
1. What the Political Class Thinks Voters Think
2. How the Political Class Deceives

PART TWO: How Voters Would Spend the People's Money
3. How Voters Would Fix Defense
4. How Voters Would Fix Social Security
5. How Voters would Fix Medicate and Health Care
6. How Voters Would Fix the Tax System
7. How Voters Want to Be Generous

PART THREE: How Voters Would Save the People's Money
8. Ending Corporate Welfare
9. Giving the People a Return on Investments
10. Tightening the Belt of the Beltway
11. Adding it All Up

CONCLUSION: The End of the Political Class

Phi Beta Iota: This book will be released on 31 January 2012. It has been ordered and a full review will be provided right away. This may be one of the most exciting books to be released in 2012, and one of the most relevant, for it is certain to break the back of the political class with transparency and truth. The fact is that the two-party tyranny is corrupt and Congress in criminally neglectful of the public trust.

2012/01/21

David Swanson: War and Being and Nothingness

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Future, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

War and Being and Nothingness

The best book I've read in a very long time is a new one: The End of War by John Horgan. Its conclusions will be vigorously resisted by many and yet, in a certain light, considered perfectly obvious to some others. The central conclusion — that ending the institution of war is entirely up to us to choose — was, arguably, reached by (among many others before and since) John Paul Sartre sitting in a café utilizing exactly no research.

Horgan is a writer for “Scientific American,” and approaches the question of whether war can be ended as a scientist. It's all about research. He concludes that war can be ended, has in various times and places been ended, and is in the process (an entirely reversible process) of being ended on the earth right now.

The war abolitionists of the 1920s Outlawry movement would have loved this book, would have seen it as a proper extension of the ongoing campaign to rid the world of war. But it is a different book from theirs. It does not preach the immorality of war. That idea, although proved truer than ever by the two world wars, failed to prevent the two world wars. When an idea's time has come and also gone, it becomes necessary to prove to people that the idea wasn't rendered impossible or naïve by “human nature” or grand forces of history or any other specter. Horgan, in exactly the approach required, preaches the scientific observation of the success (albeit incomplete as yet) of preaching the immorality of war.

Continue reading “David Swanson: War and Being and Nothingness”

2012/01/21

John Robb: When Government is Hollow, Servant to the Rich

Uncategorized

The Copyright Cartel's Enforcers: The FBI

What happens when a government hollows out?

Answer: Private interests take control of the machinery of state to enhance and protect their profitability.

In some cases, this results in simple looting (like the US mortgage fiasco and EU meltdown). In others, Byzantine laws and rules are enacted that crush innovation and trample personal rights.

Unfortunately, based on this measure, the US and the EU is well on the way to becoming hollow. There's no going back.

Take today's example. At the behest of the Copyright Cartel, the US Justice Department's FBI raided the offices, seized the assets, and criminally indicted/arrested the senior management of the Hong Kong based firm, Megaupload. The crime? Copyright infringement MAY have happened on this extremely popular file sharing site.

What?

And this was on the heals of the attempt to pass the global censorship bills SOPA/PIPA. Here's an amazingly lucid video, by the new media professor Clay Shirky, on what those bills actually do and the contorted thinking behind them.

The first example Clay provides has the feel of the last days of the USSR. A government/private enforcement regime, so intrusive, it stops kids from doodling on birthday cakes. Wow!

2012/01/21

Jon Lebkowsky: Clay Shirky on SOPA as Keeping Us Passive Not Producing and Not Sharing

07 Other Atrocities, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Commerce, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Government, Movies

Clay Shirky has the best overview I’ve seen/heard/read of PIPA and SOPA and the context from whence they emerged; the bottom line: the legilsation’s about wanting us to be passive consumers, not producing and not sharing.

Phi Beta Iota: To this we would add it is also about a criminally negligent and corrupt Congress exercising its power against the public interest (treason), and a criminally negligent and corrupt combination of Hollywood and Internet Service Providers seeking to legitimize vigilante arbitrary untempered attacks on anyone anywhere without due process.

2012/01/202012/01/20

Tom Atlee: Strategies to Rein in Corporate Power?

Uncategorized

Dear friends,

I know this is framed in U.S. terms, because that is where I and most of the people on my list live. I hope, if you are not living in the U.S., that it can be adapted to the country where you live – because the impact of corporate power on our political lives is now a global phenomenon.

Coheartedly,
Tom

Strategies to rein in corporate power?

EXTRACT:

My own preference, of course, would be to find a co-intelligent approach. I can imagine advocates of these various strategies coming together around one integral strategy – one that includes and/or effectively transcends most or all of the different strategies – a super strategy more powerful and wise than anything currently being proposed. If the diverse strategists cannot do this among themselves, perhaps someone could convene a deliberation in which the deliberators are dozens if not hundreds of the most influential activists and organizations whose work is impeded by corporate power. The advocates and opponents of the various strategies would then present their arguments to these powerful political players. With help – perhaps with Dynamic Facilitation – these leading activists and organizations would then discover or design a strategic vision they could all agree on, which embraced the values of all the approaches in a synergistic way.

In the meantime, here are the strategies I see:

LIST ONLY–to read descriptions and links read full article.

1. Community declarations of independence from corporate domination.

2. A Constitutional amendment to declare corporations are not natural persons and therefore don't have the civil rights of persons.

3. A Constitutional amendment to require that all campaigns for federal office be financed exclusively with public funds and prohibit any expenditures from any other source, including the candidate, and prohibit independent support or opposition ads.

4. Congress declares that the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, do not have jurisdiction over political matters (as per the Constitution) and simply reassert Congress' Constitutional right to manage elections.

5. Pass federal laws that reduce the range of corporate political power without directly tackling the underlying challenge.

6. Promote the capacity for citizens, communities and states to generate empowered public wisdom which, to the extent it is developed, can create a wise We the People capable of resisting any attempt to control them unjustly or unwisely.

7. Reduce the power of giant corporations by building alternative (mostly local and green) economies.

8. See if corporate domination will die from a million cuts or mosquito bites.

Read full article.