The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The Libyan War, American Power and the Decline of the Petrodollar System
by Prof. Peter Dale Scott
Centre for Research on Globalization, 29 April 2011
EXTRACT:
As Ellen Brown has pointed out, first Iraq and then Libya decided to challenge the petrodollar system and stop selling all their oil for dollars, shortly before each country was attacked.
Continue reading “Looting Libya: Insider View of Reasons for War….”
Just got fired from Wells Fargo. RE: the following email
So…here's what I wrote. It's missing a handy chart where it depicts the average Wells employee's hourly salary vs. the CEO's salary, but you get the gist.
Full disclosure, I had been working here for a few months and this was to be my last week. I wouldn't recommend anyone else do this, but I gotta admit, it felt damn good and maybe someone will step up and do something about it.
Good Morning All,
Last week a friend of mine was fired for sending an inappropriate email to pretty much the whole building. Despite the fact that it was harmless, accidental, and largely ignored message, she will now join the ranks of the unemployed. If she is your average unemployed Oregonian she will remain unemployed for at least 18 months and when/if she gets rehired somewhere it will be for less money than she was making here.
Now my friend was definitely in the wrong, and I’m not writing this email to argue her situation. However, in an attempt to hold our company to a similar standard consider the following:
We work for one of the largest financial institutions in the world, we are essential to its operations, yet economic security is completely at the mercy of its senior executives. They are squeezing our salaries, reducing our benefits, and lobbying our politicians to make it harder for us to improve our financial positions despite our contributions to Wells Fargo’s successes. It means more profits for them, but less choice, less freedom and more importantly, less money for us.
In 2010, our CEO, John G. Stumpf received $18,973,722 in total compensation. By comparison, the median worker made $33,190 in 2010. John G. Stumpf made 571 times the median worker's pay.
Tip of the Hat to George Donnelly at Facebook.
See Also:
Wells Fargo Standard Poverty Salaries
Phi Beta Iota: We note with interest that this executive is only 220th on the Forbes executive pay rankings. We hold the corporations blameless in one sense: they get to do this because the US Government has lost its integrity and has not been in the business of the public for decades, Grover Cleveland may have been the last truly honest holistic President. What that says about the American public is for reflection. At the same time, we point to William Greider's book Come Home, America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country in which he discusses the documentations on how the financial industry (Mr. Stumpf's industry) inflated by 17 times base value while the “real” asset-based economy inflated by five times. This means that Mr. Stumpf and his colleagues cheated the US and global customers by 12 times….and for this, the government bails them out and nobody goes to jail. See also Matt Taibbi's Griftopia–Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America.
‘Concrete Canvas' Makes Erecting Permanent Buildings As Easy as Pitching a Tent
Drapeable fabric turns into solid concrete when it gets wet
popsi.com, Clay Dillow, 18 May 2011
When disaster strikes and permanent structures are leveled, as they were recently by earthquakes in Japan and New Zealand (and more distantly in Haiti), they are usually replaced in the short term by tent cities. Two engineering students thought they could do better and invented Concrete Canvas, a fabric impregnated with concrete that can turn a tent into a hardy, permanent structure in 24 hours. Just add water.
Read full article (includes link to very impressive video)
Phi Beta Iota: This has even more potential if combined with the use of cement from carbon, and non-potable water.
Note buried within the report about classification of documents……..
$1bn fraud at Kabul Bank puts UK's Afghan pull-out in peril
IMF and Britain's foreign aid department both withhold money for reconstruction
By Jonathan Owen and Brian Brady
Sunday, 22 May 2011
EXTRACT:
The Department for International Development (DfID) confirmed last night that it had followed the lead of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in withholding contributions to bankroll hundreds of “nation-building” projects in Afghanistan.
The move, to “protect taxpayers' money”, came as the full extent of the scandal at Kabul Bank – described as the biggest fraud in modern times – became clear. A secret US government report into the debacle “indicates that insiders at Kabul Bank used fraudulent loans to misappropriate $850m (£525m), representing 94 per cent of outstanding loans”.
. . . . . . .
And it notes that, in addition to oversights by Deloitte, which failed to spot and report warning signs of fraud, a team from PwC didn't identify any fraud at Kabul Bank and gave it “a clean bill of health” – something
that “may have acted to delay understanding of the gravity of Kabul Bank's true financial condition both among the examination staff and the international community”, according to the document.
Networked tribes, systems disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence. Resilient Communities, decentralized platforms, and self-organizing futures.
By John Robb
HOW TO THRIVE (ECONOMICALLY) AS THINGS FALL APART
Posted: 20 May 2011 11:30 AM PDT
The most likely scenario for the next decade starts with the resumption of global economic depression (D2). Economies shrink. Wealth evaporates as former “assets” become worthless. Commodities fall (even energy) due to declines in economic activity. Currencies gyrate, explode, and/or evaporate.
In this environment, sovereigns will begin to default as the industrial nation-state model runs out of gas. Developed nation-states will find themselves crushed between bailouts of their cronies and excess spending (i.e. social spending (EU), national security spending (US), or mercantilist over-investment (China). Developing nations will just implode.
Things will continue on this track until one of two things happen:
I'm betting on new economic and social systems. Part of that bet, and something many people now get, is accomplished through the establishment of self-reliant resilient communities. However, resilient communities aren't a sufficient replacement, in and of themselves (unless you want to turn back the clock to the 1800s). By themselves, they don't represent a superior alternative to a failing and flailing global system. Something else is needed, but what?
It's simple. What's needed are (note the plural here), virtual global economic systems built on a sound footing (i.e. better and more sensible rules than we currently have), prosperous participants, and a hard currency. Systems that people can flee to when currencies become scarce (deflation) or worthless (inflation) or nation-state political systems fail (corruption/crime) or flail (repression).
My advice to you: when you see a system that looks like the one outlined above, start to diversify your economic activity into it as soon as is practicable.
The World Economic Order, Circa 2025
By MOTOKO RICH, May 17, 2011
New York Times
With China overtaking Japan as the world’s second-largest economy last year, there can be no doubt that emerging markets are becoming increasingly powerful.
A new report from the World Bank predicts that by 2025, China, along with five other emerging economies — Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Korea and Russia — will account for more than half of all global growth, up from one-third now.
The report, “Global Development Horizons 2011 — Multipolarity: The New Global Economy,” also anticipates that the dollar will be joined by the euro and the renminbi as dominant international currencies. The Chinese government is already easing currency controls and has taken other steps to help the renminbi become a fully convertible reserve currency, which would make it easier for foreign companies to finance projects in China.
Doc Searls has posted a slideshow explaining how Amazon’s user experience is broken, in the context of a discussion about vendor relationship management (VRM), which is about evolving a world where customers have at least symmetry in the power relationship of customer and vendor. The slides are old (January 2010) and things might have changed, but I don’t think they’ve changed as much as they should’ve, because I still experience similar frustrations when I visit Amazon.
Phi Beta Iota: Amazon is a great company with an extraordinary cloud offering and enormous potential they have chosen to leave unattended. They rejected a 2007 proposition (Amazon as the Hub of the World Brain) that would have seen them create a markeplace for informed relationships and knowledge by the call or page, and they have rejected all suggestions for enabling buyers, readers, and reviewers to “co-create” the Amazon experience. It's a pity mostly because the world need multiple forms of M4IS2 hybrids, and this is something Amazon could have provided as a service of common concern, with both the cloud for melded shared information and the authors and their readers as the human intelligence component.
