Category: Cultural Intelligence

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Breaking News: The Shift Hits the Fan

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

Kenny AusubelKenny Ausubel

Posted: October 15, 2010 10:56 AM

The Revolution Has Begun – “The Shift Hits the Fan”

The Bottleneck. The Great Disruption. Peak Everything. The Great Turning.

Whatever you call it, it's the big enchilada.

In the words of filmmaker Tom Shadyac, “The shift is hitting the fan.” We're experiencing the dawn of a revolutionary transformation. This awkward ‘tween state marks the end of pre-history – the sunset of an ecologically illiterate civilization. Like a baby being born, a new world is crowning.

The revolution has begun. But in fits and starts. The challenge is it's one minute to midnight – too late to avoid large-scale destruction. We have to fan the shift to ecoliterate societies at sufficient scale and speed to dodge irretrievable cataclysm.

From breakdown to breakthrough, it's a revolution from the heart of nature and the human heart. It leads with a basic shift in our relationship with nature from resource and object to mentor, model and partner. Game-changing breakthroughs in science, technology and design such as biomimicry are revolutionizing our very ways of knowing. The Rights of Nature movement is recognizing the inalienable rights of the non-human world of ecosystems and critters, widening our circle of compassion and kinship. Greater decentralization and localization are building resilience from the ground up – shaped by ancient indigenous wisdom of becoming native to our place.

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A major barrier in the U.S. is the annual military budget of over a trillion dollars. Although the Defense Department has embraced climate change as a top national security issue, national sustainability must move front and center. As David Orr observes, “The concept of sustainability should be the new organizing principle for both domestic and foreign policy. Sustainability is the core of a national development strategy designed to enhance our security, build prosperity from the ground up, and reduce ecological damage, risks of climate destabilization and the necessity of fighting endless wars over dwindling resources.”

What's needed is the national and global equivalent of a wartime mobilization with sustainability as magnetic north. Many say only catastrophe will precipitate such a shift and are readying plans for that turning point. Paul Gilding's One Degree War Plan forecasts a “Coalition of the Cooling” anchored by the U.S., China and the EU, who produce 50 percent of emissions – and who could then engage Russia, India, Japan and Brazil to hit 67 percent.

Read entire article online….

Phi Beta Iota: This is a world-class public oration worthy of Oxford or Cambridge or a Nobel acceptance.  A little known aspect of revolution is that it can occur in isolation across each of the dimensions (political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic), but when it occurs in two or three of the dimensions at the same time, it has the potential to “explode” into a Great Revolution that leaves no stone unturned.  It is possible that 2012 will see a Great Revolution in the United STATES of America.

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Bravo Oscar–RESTRICTED–Authorized Viewers ONLY

Cultural Intelligence

You know who you are.  Only authorized viewers allowed.  This is a short film/cartoon followed by an interesting advertisement for the maker that is going viral.  RESTRICTED.  Do NOT click on this list if you are not one of the 5 billion people authorized to do so….

Very Short Film

Phi Beta Iota: We frown on frivolity in public intelligence, it is certainly NOT in the public interest to be funny, but in this one instance we felt it should be shared to increase inside the beltway understanding–and beyond the water's edge understanding–of what is rocketing around both military email and in the heartland.  It is entirely possible that these mischief-makers were funded by Iran or Venezuela, or the Koch Brothers out of Wall Street.  Approach with caution, they may be armed with pencils and erasers.

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2010 Reference: The Pentagon, Information Operations, and Media Development

02 Diplomacy, 10 Security, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO), IO Multinational, IO Secrets, Media, Media Reports, Military, Peace Intelligence, White Papers
Report Online

CIMA is pleased to release a new report, The Pentagon, Information Operations, and Media Development, by Peter Cary, a veteran journalist with extensive experience reporting about the U.S. military. As part of its post-9/11 strategy, the Department of Defense has launched a multi-front information war, both to support its troops on the ground and to counter the propaganda of radical Muslim extremists. The DoD’s global public relations war, however, has fostered criticism that the department has over-reached and tarred the efforts of non-DoD Americans doing media development work abroad.

While the DoD cannot be criticized for trying to protect the lives of its soldiers, it has spent vast amounts of money on media operations–which can tend to be conducted in secrecy and whose effectiveness often cannot be measured. This report examines the impact of DoD information operations on international media development efforts and offers recommendations – including that the DoD leave media activities that could be considered public diplomacy to the State Department.

Tip of the Hat to Niels Groeneveld at LinkedIn.

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Reference: How Goldman Sachs Looted America

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Transnational Crime, Analysis, Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Law Enforcement, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Amazon Page

Exclusive Excerpt: America on Sale, From Matt Taibbi's ‘Griftopia'

Matt Taibbi's unsparing and authoritative reporting on the financial crisis has produced a series of memorable Rolling Stone features. He showed us how Goldman Sachs, that “great vampire squid,” played a central role in creating not only the housing bubble but four other big speculative booms that filled its coffers while wrecking the American economy. He explained how Wall Street banks cooked up schemes that helped decimate municipal budgets and cost countless jobs, and how Wall Street lobbying led to a financial reform bill that won't prevent another meltdown. Taibbi builds on that eye-opening work in his new book, Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America , due out from Spiegel & Grau on November 2. In this exclusive excerpt, he describes how our cash-strapped country is auctioning off its highways, ports and even parking meters at fire sale prices — and finding eager buyers in the unregulated sovereign wealth funds of oil-rich Middle Eastern countries.

Read the exclusive Griftopia excerpt.

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Journal: The Death of Responsible Government

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement
Chuck Spinney Recommends

October 23, 2010

What Happened to Change We Can Believe In?

By FRANK RICH

The New York Times

Phi Beta Iota: Extracts are provided.  This is an important document that confirms the total abdication by Congress and the Executive of their Constitutional duties with respect to the public interest.  The USA is owned and operated by Wall Street for its benefit, and We the People have been completely disenfranchised at the same time that the Commonwealth has been looted.

EXTRACT:

No matter how much Obama talks about his “tough” new financial regulatory reforms or offers rote condemnations of Wall Street greed, few believe there’s been real change. That’s not just because so many have lost their jobs, their savings and their homes. It’s also because so many know that the loftiest perpetrators of this national devastation got get-out-of-jail-free cards, that too-big-to-fail banks have grown bigger and that the rich are still the only Americans getting richer.

This intractable status quo is being rubbed in our faces daily during the pre-election sprint by revelations of the latest banking industry outrage, its disregard for the rule of law as it cut every corner to process an avalanche of foreclosures. Clearly, these financial institutions have learned nothing in the few years since their contempt for fiscal and legal niceties led them to peddle these predatory mortgages (and the reckless financial “products” concocted from them) in the first place. And why should they have learned anything? They’ve often been rewarded, not punished, for bad behavior.

EXTRACT:

The much acclaimed new documentary about the global economic meltdown, “Inside Job,” has it right. As its narrator, Matt Damon, intones, our country has been robbed by insiders who “destroyed their own companies and plunged the world into crisis” — and then “walked away from the wreckage with their fortunes intact.” These insiders include Dick Fuld and four other executives at Lehman Brothers who “got to keep all the money” (more than $1 billion) after Lehman went bankrupt. And of course Robert Rubin, who encouraged Citigroup to step up its investment in high-risk bets like Countrywide’s mortgage-backed securities. Rubin, now back as a rainmaker on Wall Street, collected more than $115million in compensationduring roughly the same period Mozilo “earned” his half a billion. Citi, which required a $45 billiontaxpayers’ bailout, recently secured its own slap-on-the-wrist S.E.C. settlement — at $75 million, less than Rubin’s earnings and less than its 2003 penalty ($101 million) for its role in hiding Enron profits.

It should pain the White House that its departing economic guru, the Rubin protégé Lawrence Summers, is an even bigger heavy in “Inside Job” than in the hit movie of election season, “The Social Network.” Summers — like the former Goldman Sachs chief executive and Bush Treasury secretary Hank Paulson — is portrayed as just the latest in a procession of policy makers who keep rotating in and out of government and the financial industry, almost always to that industry’s advantage. As the star economist Nouriel Roubini tells the filmmaker, Charles Ferguson, the financial sector on Wall Street has “step by step captured the political system” on “the Democratic and the Republican side” alike. But it would be wrong to single out Summers or any individual official for the Obama administration’s image of being lax in pursuing finance’s bad actors. This tone is set at the top.

Asked in “Inside Job” why there’s been no systematic investigation of the 2008 crash, Roubini answers: “Because then you’d find the culprits.” With the aid of the “Manhattan Madam” (and current stunt New York gubernatorial candidate) Kristin Davis, the film also asks why federal prosecutors who were “perfectly happy to use Eliot Spitzer’s personal vices to force him to resign in 2008” have not used rampant sex-and-drug trade on Wall Street as a tool for flipping witnesses to pursue the culprits behind the financial crimes that devastated the nation.

EXTRACT:

Even as the G.O.P. benefits from unlimited corporate campaign money, it’s pulling off the remarkable feat of persuading a large swath of anxious voters that it will lead a populist charge against the rulers of our economic pyramid — the banks, energy companies, insurance giants and other special interests underwriting its own candidates. Should those forces prevail, an America that still hasn’t remotely recovered from the worst hard times in 70 years will end up handing over even more power to those who greased the skids.

We can blame much of this turn of events on the deep pockets of oil billionaires like the Koch brothers and on the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which freed corporations to try to buy any election they choose. But the Obama White House is hardly innocent. Its failure to hold the bust’s malefactors accountable has helped turn what should have been a clear-cut choice on Nov. 2 into a blurry contest between the party of big corporations and the party of business as usual.

Read Full Article….

Phi Beta Iota: The Tea Party is an unwitting circus act fully funded and controlled by the New York mandarins.  The lack of responsible alternatives on the left or the right, combined with the naivete of the public in thinking that the Tea Party is anything other than a side show, could lead–we never thought we would say this–to a new Administration and Congress even more ineffective than the last two.  The further American governance moves from the truth, the deeper our grave.

See Also:

Election 2008 Chapter: Paradigms of Failure

Election 2008 Chapter: The Substance of Governance

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Blog Wisdom: Over 50, Unemployable, What Next?

Blog Wisdom, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence

Julia MouldenJulia Moulden

Columnist

Posted: October 23, 2010 11:55 AM

Over 50 and at the Top of Your Game? Here's What's Next

EXTRACT:

Many boomers will answer the question, “What work, exactly?” with, “Start a business.” Some of us will do it because it's something we've always wanted to do, others because we can't find work and need to create it. But hanging out a shingle is suddenly on the upswing, especially among people over 50.

Just ask the folks at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the world's largest foundation dedicated to entrepreneurship. Their research shows that the average age of first-time entrepreneurs is now between 55 and 64. “The United States is on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom — not in spite of an aging population, but because of it.”

Read rest of this post….

Phi Beta Iota: This posting hit us like a thunderbolt.  Combine it with the literature on “Wealth of Networks” and the literature on “Cognitive Surplus” and you have a nation-wide “gold mine.  This is HUGE.

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When Karl Rove Makes Sense, Something Big is On…

Cultural Intelligence

SPIEGEL Interview with Karl Rove

‘Obama Has Turned Out to Be an Utter Disaster'

10/19/2010

SPIEGEL: In the approaching midterm elections, the Republican Party is putting forward several unusually radical candidates, some of whom are not even “qualified to be a dog catcher,” as one Republican said. What has happened with your party?

Rove: That's nothing unusual. In campaigns from both parties, people get nominated who are not typical, particularly in times of rapid change. For example, the Democrats in 1974, at the height of the Vietnam War, had a lot of very kooky candidates that they nominated.

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SPIEGEL: The Republican Party used to have a broad center. All of a sudden, we have this completely new phenomenon in which outsiders like Sarah Palin play a very large role in the party. She almost seems to dominate the party.

Rove: What's unusual about that? She's a rambunctious reformist former governor from the state of Alaska. Both parties have seen relative newcomers like this emerge before.

SPIEGEL: She wasn't, though, part of the Republican Party establishment.

Rove: Ronald Reagan wasn't in the establishment of the Republican Party either, nor was Richard Nixon.

SPIEGEL: It is nevertheless striking how little experience she has. That's new.

Rove: Oh really? I believe she was the chief executive of a state. She wasn't simply a newly elected senator from the state of Illinois who had absolutely no accomplishments whatsoever.

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SPIEGEL: Many would say that the Republican Party has moved continually further to the right. Now, the Tea Party is pulling the party even further in that direction. How much is too much?

Rove: I disagree with your assumption. It looks like it's moved because the Democrats have gone so far left. Name me one other instance in which the federal government increased discretionary domestic spending 25 percent in less than one year. There has been a bipartisan consensus since World War II that the size of the federal government would be roughly between 18 to 21 percent of GDP, floating around 20 percent. Obama is the first president to cross that line so dramatically.

SPIEGEL: Europeans see Obama as a middle of the road Democrat and don't understand the unending criticism.

Rove: He probably is a middle of the road social democrat, but remember America does not have a history of social democracy. We have been a country in which even the Democrats have been to the right of the left in Europe, and that's one of our strengths. A lot of people call him a socialist. I don't. He is a social democrat, though. He is somebody who says, “Okay, the state will regulate, the state will dictate. We will take an ever larger share of the GDP into the hands of government, and we will dictate to the private sector, but maintain ownership in private hands, subject to the regulatory state.”

SPIEGEL: But is he so different from other Democratic presidents? Take Lyndon B. Johnson. He introduced Medicare.

Rove: Even LBJ in Medicare insisted upon a robust private role. Obama is culturally and philosophically to the left of Johnson.

Read rest of article….

Phi Beta Iota: The Obama Administration has NOT been a disaster from the point of view of Goldman Sachs and the cabal that bought his Administration with $300 million in still unaccounted for dollars.  He's delivered.  What is interesting about Rove's comments are the virtual confirmation that Sarah Palin plans to campaign for President is 2012; and he provides more evidence that there is an underlying racism and class war embedded in the Tea Party.  His obliviousness or discretion with respect to the Tea Party being a fraudulent front from extreme rightists with money is to be expected, but SPIEGEL should have asked the question.