Yoda: Neil Irwin in NYT Gets Its Right – Scotland’s Independence Vote Shows a Global Crisis of the Elites — Robert Steele Comments + Book Review RECAP

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At last, NYT gets something right.

Scotland’s Independence Vote Shows a Global Crisis of the Elites

New York Times, 18 September 2014

When you get past the details of the Scottish independence referendum Thursday, there is a broader story underway, one that is also playing out in other advanced nations.

It is a crisis of the elites. Scotland’s push for independence is driven by a conviction — one not ungrounded in reality — that the British ruling class has blundered through the last couple of decades. The same discontent applies to varying degrees in the United States and, especially, the eurozone. It is, in many ways, a defining feature of our time.

. . . . . . . .

Power is not a right; it is a responsibility. The choice that Scotland is making on Thursday is of whether the men and women who rule Britain messed things up so badly that they would rather go it alone. And so the results will ripple through world capitals from Athens to Washington: The way things are going currently isn’t good enough, and voters are getting angry enough to want to do something about it.

Read full article.

ROBERT STEELE: Finally, after weeks of watching the NYT drool Zionist and neocon garbage about ISIS, we get an intelligent commentary on something that matters. Mr. Irwin has nailed it. What he does not tell the reader is that there are 5,000 secessionist movements, and the City of London with E. J. Rothschilds recently held a conference on “inclusive capitalism” that is nothing less than a primal scream: “hold the pitchforks.” William Greider, John Bogle, and Matt Taibbi as well as Mark Lewis, John Perkins, Naomi Klein and many others, have documented the the combined corruption of two-party tyrannies and complicit media with the financialization of economies to the point that they are literally crap shoots that screw the 99% and create further largely fictitious wealth for the 1%. The vote in Scotland is too close to call, but the root reasoning that Mr. Irwin has placed before his readers is spot on. Capitalism — the over-emphasis on capital over land, labor, and love — has hit bottom. Other forms of economics are emergent — below is an extract from a forthcoming article — but too many of them lack the social safety net needed to be sustainable: the sharing or collaborative economies, for example, depreciate the value of labor far below the minimum wage and provide no benefits or social insurance at all.

Language remains an issue – there is a great deal of confusion, some overlap, and many bits of unclear thinking in relation to varied terms associated with emerging economic practices. Terms include circular (Lovins et al 2014), collaborative (Lowitt 2013, Schwartz 2014), ecological (Daly 2010) ethical (Arvidsson and Peitersen 2013) , free (Sirico 2012), gift (Eisenstein 2011), inclusive (Scott 2013), mutuality (Roche 2014, Badger et al 2014), new (Kelly 1999), open source (Lerner and Tirole 2002, Benkler 2005, Steele 2012), purpose (Hurst 2014), peer-to-peer (Bauwens 2011), regenerative (Tillman, 1996), redemptive (Rinaldi 2014), resilient (Briguglio et al 2006), sharing (Botsman and Rogers 2010, Gansky 2012)), and solidarity (Davidson 2010). Other terms in vogue include cognitive surplus (Shirky 2011), conscious manufacturing (Kutz 2007), direct economic democracy (Boik 2014), social enterprise (Frankel and Bromberger 2013), and the triple-bottom line (Savitz 2013). This is a partial list, merely the most prominent among the descriptors.

For some time now I have been focused on the convergence of balance as a stabilizing attribute, and transparency with truth and trust as the enabling factor for achieving balance. My latest book, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, and Trust, given a wonderful boost by Dr. Nafeez Ahmed in his interview as published (The open source revolution is coming and it will conquer the 1% – ex CIA spy, The Guardian, 19 June 2014), shows the way forward. A precis of that view is forthcoming in the Spanda Journal that has an issue dedicated to Collective Intelligence. The title of my forthcoming article is “APPLIED COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE:
Human-Centric Holistic Analytics, True Cost Economics, and Open Everything.

I would make several points in relation to this excellent article by Mr. Irwin:

01 Government has failed because intelligence — and counterintelligence — have failed. Governments have not adapted, have been corrupted — even the allegedly democratic governments such as those of the US and UK are as toxic to the public interest as those managed by dictators — and are out of touch with reality. They have no sustainable strategy, no coherence of policy across whole of government or whole of society, acquisition processes that make beastiality look like rocket science, and an approach to operations that is at best infantile and at worst pathologically criminally insane.

02 No one of any intelligence wants to confiscate wealth from the 1% or cause the 1% pain. I am myself on record, as are others, pointing out that the confiscation of this wealth, most of its fictitious digits that are not translatable into tangible wealth, does nothing at all for the 99%. What would do well for the 99% is recognition of by the 1% that corrupting governments is counter-productive, that governments have a vital role to play in advancing economies and societies, and that what the 1% should be doing is earmarking 1% of their wealth under management for a complete make-over of the academy, economy, governance, and society.

03 Scotland — as with Quebec before it and Catalan today — along with the other 4,998 separatist movements that include Hawaii, Vermont, and Alaska in the USA — have in common is the common sense of the public coming to the fore and recognizing what Elinor Ostrom documented in Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions of Collective Action. Complex situation cannot be understood without the full engagement of the public occupying the ground to be governed; and complex rule sets cannot be reliably implemented and enforced without the complete collaboration of the public occupying the ground to be governed. Absentee governments, like absentee landlords, are an abomination.

04 We are at a turning point. The Industrial Era has hit bottom, and a design revolution is waiting in the wings, a revolution that will integrate true cost economics (supply intelligence), holistic analytics (demand intelligence), and open source everything (engineering intelligence). The 1% — and the retarded governments that fear for their privileges and prerogatives without understanding that they have almost strangled the Golden Goose, the public — have no alternative, if they wish to see their wealth pass on to their future generations, but to “reset” how we do everything. There is no downside to secession and independence — none. There is no downside to transparency and truth creating trust — none. The world is returning to its natural form, in which communities closest to nature thrive, and those in denial implode.

See Especially:

2008 The Substance of Governance

Allen Roland: Honoring Chalmers Johnson, Prophet of Truth + Empire Meta-RECAP

Answers: Robert Steele to Ramin D on Education & Elites in Context of Revolution

Graphic: Preconditions of Revolution in the USA Today

Matt Taibbi: GRIFTOPIA – RECAP

Mini-Me: Vaclav Havel – Reflections on Dissent & Democracy

Reference: Electoral Reform

Review: A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

Review: Death of a King – The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year

Review: Economic Direct Democracy – A Framework to End Poverty and Maximize Well-Being

Review: Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War