Commercial Intelligence – Page 211 – Public Intelligence Blog

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2010/01/072010/01/07

Journal: Weak Signals–Global Middle Class Populism

03 Economy, 08 Wild Cards, Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence

A Call to the People of the World to Support Iceland Against Financial Blackmail

Birgitta Jónsdóttir
Infowars.com
January 6, 2009

InfoWar Editor’s note: Birgitta Jónsdóttir is the leader of The Movement, a group within the Icelandic Parliament which has emerged from the mass struggle of Icelanders against the financial blackmail brought to bear against their country by the governments in London and The Hague, with the backing of the IMF, in the wake of the insolvency of three large Icelandic banks in the midst of the Lehman Brothers-AIG world financial panic of September-October2008. Birgitta Jonsdottir is a courageous leader in the fight for national sovereignty, independence, dignity, and the economic well-being and future of her country.

Phi Beta Iota: This story is being ignored in the mainstream media, which is a mistake. This is an early signal of the populism that will come like a tsunami over the next few yeras. People of good will and common sense are beginning to recognize that governments are no longer working in their interests, and are making decisions that may be legally binding under the old paradigm, but are questionable in terms of sustainability of the commonwealths the governments are supposed to be protecting and nurturing. In the end, as both Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew and Howard Zinn and Joanathan Schell all agree, demography rules.

2010/01/062010/01/06

Journal: Reflections on the US National Debt

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Ethics, Policies

In the coming months, we are going to be inundated by the rhetoric surrounding an economic policy debate over the question of whether or not the Federal Government ought to begin to reduce the fiscal imbalances in its budget. The ideology of Joseph Schumpeter's Creative Destruction will be pitted against ideology of John Maynard Keynes, and the dominant issue will be the question of retrenchment: Should the Federal Government retrench? … or .. Will consumers and businesses continue to retrench?

The chart, which I have used before. It portrays the buildup of debt as a percentage of GDP for the different categories indebtedness that are at the center of the retrenchment question. All of the data from 1946 forward was compiled by the Federal Reserve. Earlier data is from a mixture of sources including the Census, Fed, GAO, and Morgan Stanley. I believe , it shows why some kind of retrenchment is now inevitable.

Although most economists and policy makers like to think of an economic system in mechanistic terms, the economy is in fact an unpredictable living thing made up of millions of players who move forward on a one-way trip through time along a pathway shaped by an interplay between chance and necessity. In this sense, you can think of the figure above is an outward manifestation of the historical behaviour of a complex living organism. When we hear pundits speak of the interplay of fear and greed, Greenspan's “irrational exuberance, or Keynes' “animal spirits” they are talking about the living aspects of this system (to which they immediately slip backward in to applying mechanistic diagnostics). When they do so, they forget that all living systems are complex open systems that use an ever-changing homeostatic mix of positive and negative feedback loops to maintain stability, while they maintain their structure by feeding on and expelling waste into their environment. When these internal control loops get out of balance, the homeostatic regulating system breaks down, and the entire organism goes out of control in a form of runaway behavior, like cancer cells in living tissue.

Continue reading “Journal: Reflections on the US National Debt”

2010/01/062010/01/06

Journal: Debtor’s Revolt

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence

Debtor's Revolt: Woman Refuses To Pay Off Bank Of America Credit Card (VIDEO)

Ann Minch Triumphs In Credit Card Fight (VIDEO)

Ben Pavone, California Lawyer, Refuses To Pay Bank Of America Credit Card, Threatens To Sue

Phi Beta Iota: Senator Phi Gramm (R-TX), then Chairman of the Banking Committee, will go down in history as the most impeachable Senator of all time who destroyed the American economy by putting 200 pages of lobbyist legislation into a bill 5-minues before the vote–and all those Senators then serving are impeachable for failing to read the bill (as they failed to read the Patriot Act). There were two criminal outcomes: derivatives, and credit card ursury to 29.9%.

Continue reading “Journal: Debtor's Revolt”

2010/01/062011/10/22

Journal: Move Your Money–and Use Your Vote

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence

Strengthening Banking in the Public Interest

Sunday 03 January 2010

Returning our business to community banks is a great start. However, community banks are not suffering from a lack of customers so much as from a lack of the capital they need to make new loans, and investment capital today is scarce. There is a way out of this dilemma, demonstrated for more than 90 years by the innovative state of North Dakota – a partnership in which community banks are backed by the deep pockets of a state-owned bank.

Arianna Huffington just posted an article that has sparked a remarkable wave of interest, evoking over 4,500 comments in a mere three days. Called “Move Your Money,” the article maintains that we can get credit flowing again on Main Street by moving our money out of the Wall Street behemoths and into our local community banks.

Use Your Vote

Ralph Nader has spent decades seeking to restore both government and corporate accountability. Eight electoral reforms were drawn from his book Crashing the Party–Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender and are available for any citizen to use in order to agitate for non-violent legal ethical reform at the local, state, and national levels.

Continue reading “Journal: Move Your Money–and Use Your Vote”

2010/01/02

Worth a Look: Free Credit Reports

Collective Intelligence, Commercial Intelligence, Worth A Look

Free Credit Reports for Virginia Residents (and some others).

Consumers, it’s time to get your free annual credit reports. You can order a free report annually from each of the three major credit-reporting agencies.

“Basically, Congress gave you the right to look at your credit report for two reasons,” said Ed Mierzwinski of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington. “First, to see if you’ve been the victim of identity theft and, second, to see if mistakes are dragging down your credit score and causing you to pay more for, or be denied, credit opportunities,” he said. “So look at your free credit reports and avoid the trap of paying the credit bureaus for extra credit-monitoring services, which no consumer advocate recommends.”

Here are three ways to do it:

• Order by phone. Call (877) 322-8228 and follow the prompts. Be prepared to say your Social Security number and other personal information, so be sure no stranger is around to overhear.

• Order by mail. Print out the form online at < www.annualcreditreport.com > — the only official site to obtain the
free reports. Click “request form.” Fill it out and mail it back. It will be processed within a few weeks.

• View it instantly online. Go to www.annualcreditreport.com. Select and click your state from the drop-down menu (Virginia, for us) and follow the instructions. You can buy your credit score, too.

Once you get your free report, dispute any errors that you can identify.

Also, instead of ordering three reports now, consider ordering one from a different agency each quarter.

It’s a way of monitoring your credit for free throughout the year.

2010/01/022010/01/02

Journal: Rural; Cooperative; Wind; Fast–Any Questions?

05 Energy, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

Full Story Online

Rural Electric Cooperative Completes $240 Million Wind Farm in 4 Months

A North Dakota rural electric cooperative made history on New Year’s Eve, in completing the nation’s largest wind project to be entirely owned by a consumer cooperative.

The $240 million, 115.5 MW wind farm was begun in August and completed a mere four months later; three and a half hours before midnight on the last night of 2009. GE supplied the 77 1.5 MW turbines.

. . . . . . .

By the end of 2010 the cooperative hopes that it will produce 20% of its electricity from wind power for its 2.8 million rural consumers in parts of rural Colorado, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming.

. . . . . . .

1. Rural empty states are where the wind is.
2. Rural empty states are where electricity cooperatives are.
3. Rural empty state’s cooperatives are beating national averages in bringing the most renewable energy online the fastest.

Renewable capacity among rural electricity cooperatives grew 65% in 2008. The rest of us: 25%

Category: Commercial Intelligence

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