What an interesting search, thank you. Here are some links that came up in a broader search that we import to Phi Beta Iota with a tip of the hat to the anonymous searcher.
The article I wrote on Google was killed by Rolling Stone, but I’m now publishing it at CounterPunch.org, with help from the Nation Institute Investigative Fund.
Still on the secession book. About halfway done. Concentrating on the Vermonter secessionists, whose credo is Food-Fuel-Finance Sovereignty.
Orion Magazine “The Curse of Bigness,” is about human scale in government and business and social groups…the kind of human scale that corporatist America is doing everything to eradicate.
For those who missed the investigation in GQ about how cell phone radiation is burning out our brains and bodies – and how the telecom industry and the US military have together covered up the science showing a risk – see this op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, which gives the short answer to the question: Should I smash my cell phone with a hammer today, or should I wait a day?
Three pieces in CounterPunch touching on similar themes:
— an article about the disease of technophilia and our mind-destroying obsession with digital gadgetry.
— an article about Joe Stack, the Texas suicide-terrorist pilot who last month crashed his plane into the IRS building in Austin. He left behind a manifesto of sorts that makes wonderful sense…except for the part where he goes crazy and flies his plane into the IRS building.
— a piece titled “Freedom of Speech for a Fiction,” about the curse of corporate personhood and the recent Supreme Court decision freeing up these sociopathic “persons” to pollute electoral politics with ever more money.
Finally, for those readers/fans of Harper’s, keep an eye out for a piece of mine coming out in the May issue. It’s about how New York State government perfects what political scientist Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism,” where the forms of democracy are preserved with none of the substance. Leave it to the “progressive” Empire State to show the way to ruin…
The Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax is rapidly gathering momentum thanks to a bid by British Labour Party MPs to save themselves from looming defeat at the hands of the Tories by playing this great economic populist card. If the Labour Party succeeds with this gambit, it will tend to transform the situation in the US as well, with desperate Democrats embracing the Tobin tax as a means of getting some populist credibility. The Republicans, by contrast, will be forced to line up in defense of their Wall Street backers, stripping away all their Tea Party camouflage. Obama-Summers-Geithner will also be put into a bind. I have been campaigning for the Tobin tax for a number of years, and it is an idea whose time has come.
If a sales tax on financial transactions (Tobin tax, trading tax, securities transfer tax, Robin Hood tax) can bring the British Labour Party back from the dead, it can defeat Geithner, Summers, Bernanke, Wall Street, and the reactionary Republicans here in the US. It is time to make this a world-wide campaign to force the bankers to pay for the world economic depression they have created.
Webster Tarpley
Home Page
A tiny tax on bankers that would give billions to tackle poverty and climate change, here and abroad.
This tax on banks – not you or I – has the power to raise hundreds of billions every year. It could give a vital boost to the NHS, our schools, and the fight against child poverty in the UK – as well as tackling poverty and climate change around the world.
Not complicated. Just brilliant.
Phi Beta Iota: We support the elimination of the Federal income tax as being unconstitutional in the Unted STATES of America. Individuals should pay taxes to localities; businesses should pay taxes to all states where they do business; and federal operations should be based on the Tobin tax and strictly limited to the narrow administrative services of common concern that are consistently authorized and approved by Congress acting on behalf of the STATES.
Thursday evening's shootout between Pentagon police officers and a gunman apparently motivated by anti-government sentiment was the latest in a spate of attacks on federal employees and facilities and serves as a stark reminder that public servants too often find themselves unexpectedly in harm's way. The following timeline reviews major attacks during the past two decades.
Feb. 18, 2010. A small jet is flown into a building housing a federal tax office in Austin, Texas, injuring 13 and killing two. The pilot, Joseph Andrew Stack, was angry with the Internal Revenue Service.
Nov. 5, 2009. An Army psychiatrist goes on a rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and wounding dozens. The alleged gunman, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, was a Muslim who had been in contact with a radical Imam and was about to be deployed overseas.
June 1, 2009. A gunman opens fire on a U.S. military recruiting office in Little Rock, Ark., killing one soldier and wounding another. The suspect, a Muslim convert, opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but was not affiliated with a larger terrorist network.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the month's good news story–the silver lining in the cloud over America resulting from the loss of political integrity within both political parties. We continue to support both universal service (to bond the public and keep Congress honest), and military service as the finest possible coming of age experience. The crucible of Iraq and Afghanistan have hurt America as an international political and economic entity, but they have also raised a new generation of young leaders–not just officers, but non-commissioned officers down to the “strategic corporal,” that could be the Greatest Generation of our era.
Battle-tested: From soldier to business leader
“The thinking was that we could bring in world-class leadership talent that was already trained and ready to go,” says Jennifer Seidner, a senior recruiting manager at Wal- Mart. “And then we could teach them retail, because we know that pretty well.”
Meme 1: Separate Agency Budget Intelligence (SABI). The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) may be within a year of a huge management advance, understanding, with decision-support, the relative return on investment (ROI) of its investments in relation to the ten high-level threats, many of which it is uniquely positioned to address. Understanding that clean water and sanitation is the most important medical advancement since 1840, UNESCO is poised to call into question its excessive investments in vaccinations that yield little return and often create broader health issues, as opposed to focusing on micro-education (see meme 3) and micro-financiing of clean water initiatives.
Meme 2: integrated missions’ assessment and planning. This is the United Nations (UN) equivalent of Whole of Government planning, programming. and budgeting. While non-existent within most governments, the UN appears to be realizing that with its back to the fall and the fate of over 175 “failed states” on the table, it might be time to add intelligence (decision-support) to how it does business. This means understanding that all threats and all policies have to be evaluated together and in relation (the Eastern way), and that all budgets and behaviors must be planned–harmonized–so as to achieve integrated outcomes, not outcomes in isolation that undermine “rest of system” stability.
Meme 3: micro-education. This is a brand new meme but it defines practices that already exist and could be brought together. With the vast majority of subsistence farmers still using ancient methods such as furrow irrigation, and many not recognizing the value of rain harvesting, there is a route opening for UNESCO by which it can leverage Alvin Toffler's insight and substitute information for capital, labor, time, and space. Put bluntly, some micro-education is vastly more important than a complete (albeit mediocre) elementary education. Micro-education on water and health appears to be the center of gravity for jump-starting the entrepreneurial possibilities among the extreme poor. What no one has done is create a stacked list of “Essential Elements of Information” (EEI) that should be taught to the poor in priority order as part of “any and all” encounters.
