Before Tuesday this week, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta had been sprinkling Washington D.C. with words like “doomsday mechanism,” “catastrophic,” and “shooting ourselves in the head” to describe any cuts in the Pentagon's budget beyond the $450 billion over 10 years (overall a 4 percent reduction) he and President Obama have already committed to. Panetta had set a new standard for overheated rhetoric to defend the Pentagon's budget.
Phi Beta Iota: Panetta, like Gates and others before him, is a political toad incable of telling the truth or pursuing the public interest. He is telling two major lies in all of his speeches: 1) that cutting the defense budget will weaken national security; and 2) that what we pay $1 trillion a year (in borrowed money) for is “the finest fighting force in the world.” Not so less the infantry, which is 4% of the force, takes 80% of the casualties, and receives 1% of the budget. In an honest government, Panetta would be impeached–and all his senior generals and senior executive sychopants retired.
The first of a four-part investigation into a world of greed and recklessness that led to financial collapse.
In the first episode of Meltdown, we hear about four men who brought down the global economy: a billionaire mortgage-seller who fooled millions; a high-rolling banker with a fatal weakness; a ferocious Wall Street predator; and the power behind the thron
Meltdown examines how an epidemic of fear caused banks to stop lending, triggered protests and led to industrial action.
In the second episode of Meltdown, we look at how the financial tsunami swept the world. We hear about a renegade executive who nearly destroyed the global financial system and the US treasury secretary who bailed out his friends.
As the toll of the financial crisis continues to mount, many are looking for its true causes – and finding a crime.
The third episode of Meltdown looks at how the victims of the 2008 financial crash fight back. A protesting singer in Iceland brings down the government; in France a union leader oversees the kidnapping of his bosses; and thousands of families are made homeless in California.
Some responded with denial, others by re-thinking capitalism, but who is preparing for the next crisis?
In the final episode of Meltdown, we hear about the sheikh who says the crash never happened; a Wall Street king charged with fraud; a congresswoman who wants to jail the bankers; and the world leaders who want a re-think of capitalism.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a world-class series that misses just two things:
A. Goldman Sachs has owned the US Treasury–providing the Secretary of the Treasurer (and today also the National Security Advisor to the President–for three critical administrations, each of which willfully eradicated safeguards.
B. Senator Phil Graham (R-TX) and the other Senators who had and still have zero integrity, passing 200 pages of lobbyist written deregulation inserted into the bill five minutes before the vote.
Penguin adds:
C. The perfidy of Clinton in his Glass-Steagall sellout and his CONTINUED malignant hyping of its ethic through obfuscation and the pimping of what “reputable” analysts who want access to his solon. For him America was built on deal making and networking.
Earlier this week I attended a breakfast panel sponsored by Gensler (http://www.gensler.com), an architecture, design, planning and consultation firm that focuses (among other things) on effective workplace environments, consulting for companies like Google, HP, Yahoo and Facebook. The title of the panel was “Designing your workplace for a competitive edge.”
Here’s my set of notes from the panel:
Evolving workplace:
Version 1.0: Move fast and break things. Emerging culture. Workplaces built for speed, transparency, flexibility.
Version 2.0: 8×8, 1:1. Cubic farms on vast floor plates. Cube dwellers. Butts in seats. Embedded hierarchy.
Version 3.0: (Now). Activity-based era. Changing work process. Mobile, remote work. “We” spaces, not “me” spaces. Support for collaboration. Drivers: faster pace, distributed teams, lean and mean. Changing work processes (from waterfall to agile). Closed to open. Get products to market faster. Multiple space times for multiple work modes. Coworking. Workers not tethered to one company.
Panelists
Derek Woodgate, The Futures Lab: futurist perspective
Eden Bruckman, International Living Future Institute: sustainability perspective
David Bumgardner, HP: real estate acquisition and management perspective.
Bumgardner’s job is to maximize HP’s real estate portfolio. He has to consider how employees work and what kind of environment is conducive to productivity, at the same time maintaining standards across the global HP properties. He focuses on optimal use of all properties, noting that the workforce increasingly consists of mobile employees who require no office or desk. The need for consistent standards is so that wherever the mobile employee goes to an HP facility, the work environment is fairly consistent. Other factors: environmental sustainability, affordability.
A green and sustainable workplace environment can be a competitive edge: some of the most talented employees will factor environmental impact into their decisions about where to work.
Google is another company that focuses on sustainability. The focus is authentic, no greenwashing. Google wants to move beyond LEED, looking through the lens of the Living Building Challenge (https://ilbi.org/lbc).
The build environment is an extension of who we are. We see increasing interest in building bio measurement and feedback into environments. China is looking closely at metrics in building 20 megacities.
Community will no longer be a matter of who’s aggregated in any place, but also how they share and manage resources.
Health and well-being is the new perq for employees; it’s no longer about having a corner office or other sings of hierarchy.
At Zappos, the number 1 priority is company culture, feeling that if you get that right, the rest will happen naturally. How does the built environment impact that culture?
The contemporary work environment needs spaces for energizing and spaces for discharging that energy.
Technology is moving fast, but the build environment is inherently slow.
HP created the Halo Room (http://www.humanproductivitylab.com/archive_blogs/2007/08/28/hp_halo_releases_hp_meeting_ro.php), a set of global networked technology-mediated remote conferencing environments. As these kinds of environments proliferate, travel requirements will decrease. “You’re not going to see that people interaction go away. You’re going to see better ways to get it.”
Increasingly building sustainability into design standards, which may have to vary for different (non-U.S.) contexts. Striving for a zero effect (carbon neutral). Changing densities.
Currently workers don’t feel the same commitment from companies as before, and vice versa. Companies are reducing the numbers of employees and relying more on contractors. We’re creating a world of experts (consultants).
Future workers (currently under 25 years of age) are growing up with a different set of assumptions. Their world is a world of peer groups, not authoritarian hierarchies. It’s a world that’s saturated with technology, especially for communications. For the first time ever, we’re starting to see multiple generations of employees working together in the same office.
Phi Beta Iota: Notice the butts in seats model, which is where the US and most governments are today. OWS is already at the new model. All this was known in the 1980's, relearned in the 1990's, and is now being relearned a third time, but the lack of integrity in senior management–an inability to listen and adapt–has retarded both democracy and capitalism. See the list below for many new books, and the two books not on the old lists. The earliest book to “get it” that we know of was by Robert Carkhuff, The exemplar: The exemplary performer in the age of productivity (Human Resource Development Press, 1984).
Commentary: Structural woes in economy creating ‘permanent underclass’
Howard Gold
Wall Street Journal, 14 October 2011
The public knew this much earlier than economists or pundits did, and as for politicians — don’t ask!
. . . . .
Listen to Charles Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, in a speech a couple of weeks ago.
“These numbers are troubling, especially when more than 40% of the unemployed, or some six million people, have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer,” he said.
“Millions of unemployed workers may take longer to find jobs because their skills have depreciated or they may need to seek employment in other sectors. These structural issues will take time to resolve. Jobs and workers will need to be reallocated across the economy, which is a long and slow process.”
Phi Beta Iota: The US Government is in grid-lock, with 1950's mind-sets, 1970's technologies, and 1990's spendthrift ways–in other words, it is completely out of touch with reality and has no idea how to cope with the need to retrain a quarter of the population across all age groups in a year or two. Hint: bail out the public, not the banks and certainly not the multiple complexes of corruption. Start by using military to ingest the entire unemployed population into receiving and retraining centers with full salary for each individual committing to retraining.
New Rules from Zucotti ParkMayor Bloomberg is moving to shut down Occupy Wall Street at Liberty Square tomorrow at 7 AM.
The ruse he is using: the need to clean the “park.” He has promised that Liberty Square will be reopened after the cleaning but nobody will be allowed to set up anything in park, nor will sleeping bags be allowed (click the sheet to the left for larger version).
Click on Image to Enlarge
This is going to get interesting. Will be working up some ideas for how this could play out. Let's start off with an assumption. This is Bloomberg vs. Occupy. One mind vs. many minds. The goal is to coerce him into changing his mind. Dissuade him. Get inside his OODA loop.
Go straight for him. Maximize the eviction's taint on Bloomberg's personal brand. Personalize the protest/eviction by attaching the blame to him personally. Pierce his shield of bureaucratic impersonality. Brand the eviction with the name: Bloomberg. This is/will be a global stage, use it.
Confuse him. Lots and lots of Flash Mobs. Shut down bridges and major streets. Overwhelm with volume/speed. Non-violent disruption. As soon as police arrive in force, disperse and reassemble at new location. Bikes + Kids. Disrupt, disrupt, disrupt. More flashmobs = more disruption. As long as the square is under attack, keep the city tied in knots. NOTE: If they lock down the area, flashmobs are the best way to participate (and get some exercise).
Connect with more people than him. Best way to do this: Eyes in the sky. Get a camera/cameras above Liberty Square. Stream the feed. The better the quality the more impact it will have. It will play across the world. Think about how important AJs video feed over Tahrir was when things got hot. Better yet, get AJ to cover it and stream it.
If you have additional ideas, add them below. Good training in tactical thinking.
Hoisted from the comments:
The flashmob tactic was tried here in Panama couple of years ago by the SUNTRACS construction workers union, and with very small groups pre-planted all over the city they drove the police absolutely crazy. Police would show up at location A, mob would disperse immediately, two text messages and now TWO flashmobs would block streets at different locations. They never followed up with it (preferring massive marches to display force) but it worked very well and with much less people than #ows has available. [courtesy: Okke]
This was mis-named. It actually seeks help working through and around the occupying force. Evidently the company has not actually approached the occupants themselves about sweeping through the area without confrontation.
Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly
New York City Police Department
One Police Plaza
Room 1400
New York, New York 10038
Facsimile: (646) 610-5865
Dear Commissioner Kelly:
As you know, for over three weeks, Zuccotti Park (the “Park”) has been used by “Occupy Wall Street” and other protesters as their home base. The Park is owned by a Brookfield affiliate and was recently renovated at Brookfield’s considerable expense as an amenity for the general public. It is intended to be a relaxing tree-filled oasis in the midst of the hustle and bustle of Lower Manhattan. We fully support the rights of free speech and assembly, but the manner in which the protesters are occupying the Park violates the law, violates the rules of the Park, deprives the community of its rights of quiet enjoyment to the Park, and creates health and public safety issues that need to be addressed immediately.
Here is some thinking that you might find interesting. Remember, history rhymes but doesn't repeat.
Here's a simplification of the historical pattern of Reformation. Think of it in terms of the global Capitalist system:
Universal system.
Compliance and participation enforced by violence.
Bureaucratic and lethargic. Corrupt and unfair. Hardship and misery.
Loss of legitimacy.
Challenged by reformers. Corruption exposed.
New technology unleashes a cacophony of criticism.
Reforms are rejected by the existing bureaucracy.
New, competitive systems are launched.
An exodus begins. People leave the old system to join the new.
The old system fights back. It reforms itself.
A fight ensues between the old and the new.
Eventually a peace is achieved and a new era begins.
Note that a Reformation doesn't mean complete rejection of the current system. It means a rejection of the existing implementation/hierarchy/rules due to corruption, failure, and injustice.
