Collaboration Zones – Page 1380 – Public Intelligence Blog

2010/10/302011/10/22

Reference: Obama, Populism, and 2012

03 Economy, 04 Education, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government

Lawrence Goodwyn: The Great Predicament Facing Obama

An interview with legendary historian Lawrence Goodwyn on Obama, the larger currents in our political life, and the possibility of a rebirth in our democratic culture.

AlterNet / By Jan Frel and Lawrence Goodwyn

October 30, 2010

What happened to the dream of Barack Obama's transformational politics? There's been very little deviation from the disastrous Bush years on the key issues of war, empire and the distribution of wealth in the country.

I turned to Lawrence Goodwyn, historian of social movements whose books and methods of explaining history have had a profound influence on many of the best known authors, activists and social theorists of our time. Goodwyn's account of the Populist movement, Democratic Promise, is quoted extensively by Howard Zinn in People's History of the United States, and also in William Greider's masterpiece on the Federal Reserve, Secrets of the Temple. You can find Goodwyn quoted in the first paragraph of Bill Moyers' recent book, On Democracy, and cited in just the same way in countless other books and essays.

I interviewed Goodwyn from his home in Durham, North Carolina about the pitfalls of recording American history, Obama's presidency in light of previous presidents, and portents of change in our political culture.

Read Full Long Interview Online….

Contributor John Steiner says:

This is a remarkable, long, worth reading every word interview, in which Goodwyn compares Obama favorably with Lincoln and recounts the history of the financial elites in America. His concluding sentences: ³Strap on your
seat belts, Jan (Frel). The election in 2012 is going to define the meaning of the American idea.

Phi Beta Iota: There are two major flaws with this Democratic Party love-fest: 1) the Democrats are just as corrupt as the Republicans, just more inept; and 2) Obama will not get a second term because he sold out–anyone who had Rahm Emanuel as his “enforcer” and that still has Axelrod as his advisor,while also installing a Goldman Sachs lobbyist as “national security advisor,” is part of the existing system, not its antithesis. Independents and Electoral Reform (13 Steps) will produce the outcome Goodwyn posits, not Obama and not the Democratic Party.

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)

2010/10/29

Journal: The Aging of Humanity

11 Society, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

Think Again: Global Aging

A gray tsunami is sweeping the planet — and not just in the places you expect. How did the world get so old, so fast?

Foreign Policy BY PHILLIP LONGMAN | NOVEMBER 2010

Yes, but of old people. Not so long ago, we were warned that rising global population would inevitably bring world famine. As Paul Ehrlich wrote apocalyptically in his 1968 worldwide bestseller, The Population Bomb, “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date, nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Obviously, Ehrlich's predicted holocaust, which assumed that the 1960s global baby boom would continue until the world faced mass famine, didn't happen. Instead, the global growth rate dropped from 2 percent in the mid-1960s to roughly half that today, with many countries no longer producing enough babies to avoid falling populations. Having too many people on the planet is no longer demographers' chief worry; now, having too few is.

2010/10/292010/10/29

NIGHTWATCH Extract: China-Pakistan & Kashmir Terror, Regional Water…and Palestine

09 Terrorism, 12 Water, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

China-Pakistan: Chinese Major General Yang Hui, director general of the Intelligence Directorate, visited Chief of Army Staff General Kayani at General Headquarters on 28 October, Associated Press of Pakistan reported. The two discussed matters of professional interest, according to Pakistan's Inter Services Public Relations.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: A visit by a Chinese intelligence general to Pakistan usually signifies a problem. The usual problem is that Pakistan is harboring, aiding, training and abetting anti-Han Chinese Islamic terrorists in the 42 terrorist camps that Pakistani intelligence sustains in Pakistani Kashmir.

Chinese intelligence officials seldom visit unless there is a problem. The Chinese do not seem concerned that Pakistani-trained terrorists kill Indians or Americans, but they do object to Pakistan providing or tolerating training of Xinjiang Uighurs who want to kill Han Chinese.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: This is interesting at multiple levels–it suggests among other things that the US and China could be constructively discussing an international solution to Kashmir and to regional water issues (what really underlies Kashmir). That in turn could be tied to an international solution and regional water issue around Palestine.

2010/10/282010/10/29

Journal: US BODY COUNT–What Price Lost Jobs?

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Recommends

This is a really good argument

October 28, 2010

Globalism Comes Home to Roost

America's Jobs Losses are Permanent

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Counterpunch

Now that a few Democrats and the remnants of the AFL-CIO are waking up to the destructive impact of jobs offshoring on the US economy and millions of American lives, globalism’s advocates have resurrected Dartmouth economist Matthew Slaughter’s discredited finding of several years ago that jobs offshoring by US corporations increases employment and wages in the US.

At the time I exposed Slaughter’s mistakes, but economists dependent on corporate largess understood that it was more profitable to drink Slaughter’s kool-aid than to tell the truth. Recently the US Chamber of Commerce rolled out Slaughter’s false argument as a weapon against House Democrats Sandy Levin and Tim Ryan, and the Wall Street Journal had Bill Clinton’s Defense Secretary, William S. Cohen, regurgitate Slaughter’s claim on its op-ed page on October 12.

I sent a letter to the Wall Street Journal, but the editors were not interested in what a former associate editor and columnist for the paper and President Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy had to say. The facade of lies has to be maintained at all costs. There can be no questioning that globalism is good for us.

Cohen told the Journal’s readers that “the fact is that for every job outsourced to Bangalore, nearly two jobs are created in Buffalo and other American cities.” I bet Buffalo “and other American cities” would like to know where these jobs are. Maybe Slaughter, Cohen, and the Chamber of Commerce can tell them.

Last May I was in St. Louis and was struck by block after block of deserted and boarded up homes, deserted factories and office buildings, even vacant downtown storefronts.

Continue reading “Journal: US BODY COUNT–What Price Lost Jobs?”

2010/10/282010/10/28

Journal: AF BODY COUNT–$50 Million Per Body

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Government, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Its not like the disaster described below was not foreseeable.

Winning the War in Afghanistan at $50 Million per Kill

Fun With Arithmetic

By NICHOLAS C. ARGUIMBAU

CounterPunch 28/10/10

Michael Nasuti of Kabul Press recently published an article in which he calculated that killing each Taliban soldier in Afghanistan costs on average of $50 million to the US. The article, seemingly carefully. researched with all assumptions laid out so that anyone can examine them, is well worth reading. Nasuti, “Killing Each Taliban Soldier Costs $50 million.” He points out that at this rate, killing the entire Taliban forces (only 35,000) would cost $1.7 trillion, not a small amount for a country suffering from a severe economic downturn to spend on a war with no apparent purpose. And Nasuti's number, of course, assumes that they coud not be replaced faster than they are killed, but it appears that they can, easily.

Nasuti, who actually uses a “conservative” number (assuming that he has undercounted the number of Taliban casualties by one half), states that he had previously served “at a senior level” in the United States Air Force. He says,

The reason for these exorbitant costs is that United States has the world’s most mechanized, computerized, weaponized and synchronized military, not to mention the most pampered (at least at Forward Operating Bases). An estimated 150,000 civilian contractors support, protect, feed and cater to the American personnel in Afghanistan . . . The ponderous American war machine is a logistics nightmare and a maintenance train wreck.

Read rest of article…

2010/10/282010/10/28

Journal: Putin to Obama–Stay in Afghanistan + RECAP

02 China, 03 India, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Corporations, Government, History, Intelligence (government), Methods & Process, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace Intelligence, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy

Mikhail Gorbachev, who has been neutralized by the succession of Russian rulers, especially Putin) has just advised President Obama to get out of Afghanistan. Jonathan Steele suggests here (also attached below) that Obama ought to heed that advice, because Obama is in a similar albeit somewhat worse position than Gorbachev was in 1985-6.

Analogies are dangerous, because they can capture your thinking and take you off the cliff. But here goes.

If Steele's analogy is accurate, it suggests some pregnant ramifications that are not addressed directly by Steele: Russia (Putin and Medvedev) appear to be helping US/Nato in Afghanistan with training programs and by providing access routes for northern logistics lines of communication. This cooperation serve both parties by improving relations in the short term, but it also helps US/Nato stay on its disastrous course in Afghanistan. Are there other reasons why would Putin, an ardent nationalist, would what the US to remain stuck in Russia's backyard?

Russia needs help in staunching spillover of Sunni radicalism into its Moslem areas and its Central Asian sphere of influence (a variation of the original reason USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979). The US war on the Taliban serves that interest. So from Putin's point of view, keeping US/Nato bogged down in Afghanistan serves Russian national interests for free.

Putin, a former member of the KGB and an ardent nationalist, certainly knows the US fomented Sunni extremism in Afghanistan to sucker the Soviets into invading Afghanistan with the aimed of bogging the USSR down in its own VietNam-like quagmire (a policy proudly acknowledged by President Carter's National Security Advisor,Zbigniew Brzezinski in his notorious interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, January 1998). Putin must also know that the US/Nato engagement in Afghanistan, is (1) a huge resource drain that is weakening US economically and militarily, as well as (2) weakening the bonds giving the US political control over its Nato allies. From his point of view, these two outcomes would certainly improve Russia's relative power with respect to Europeans (especially Germany) and in the world, at the expense of the US. Moreover, in Putin's eyes, these outcomes might seem to be justified as payback to the US. After all, did not the US unleash the Islamic radicalism with its efforts to maneuver the USSR into Afghanistan in 1979 and did not the US humiliate Russia by the exploiting Russia's economic misery and military weaknesses, after Gorbachev had done the the US and the West a huge favor by precipitating collapse of the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War without bloodshed?

So, who should Obama and his advisors listen to? Putin the nationalist and go for a short term political gain at expense of remaining stuck in the quagmire that serves Russia's interests, or Gobachev the statesman who advises Obama to bite the bullet and absorb short-term political pain to gain long term benefits of exiting a quagmire that is weakening the US economically and militarily?

Of course the war advocate could counter by saying this is based on an analogy run amok. We are not making the gross mistakes the Soviets made in Afghanistan, and besides, it is cutting and running that weakens us. After all, Gobachev is just an old man who refuses to see that his time has past and is struggling futilely to remain relevant.

Russia's Afghan agenda | Jonathan Steele

guardian.co.uk 10/27/10 10:00 PM Jonathan Steele

Gorbachev has valuable advice for the US on the war in Afghanistan that Putin would rather he keep to himself

The surprise in this week's reports that Russia is planning to help Nato in Afghanistan by training Afghan helicopter pilots is that people are surprised. Memories are short, it seems, for the shift in Moscow's line came as early as July last year during Barack Obama's first summit in the Kremlin.

Designed to press the “reset” button after east-west tempers flared over the war in Georgia, the meeting ended with several agreements, the most dramatic of which was Russia's nod for the US to send military supplies across Russian territory to its forces in Afghanistan. Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin wanted to give Obama a reward for taking a calmer view of Russia than George Bush, in particular for accepting Georgia's share of blame in the South Ossetian crisis and for cancelling the most provocative aspects of Bush's missile defence scheme which Moscow viewed as a threat.

Read rest of Jonathan Steele's article….

See Also (RECAP)

Continue reading “Journal: Putin to Obama–Stay in Afghanistan + RECAP”

2010/10/282010/10/28

Journal: It Takes a Comic (or Two)…to Rebuild a Nation

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence

Thousands to Voice Frustrations at Stewart and Colbert Rally

Those Planning to Attend Fed Up By American Politics, Want to Laugh

By MAYA SRIKRISHNAN and JENNIFER SCHLESINGER

ABC News Oct. 28, 2010

From across the country – and Canada – thousands of supporters are expected in Washington to attend Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's “Rally to Restore Sanity” and “March to Keep Fear Alive” this Saturday.

More than 220,000 people have RVSP'd that they are attending on the event's official Facebook page. The National Park Service application, however, only estimated 25,000 people would attend the event, which is scheduled to last from noon to 3 p.m.

The rally is billed as a chance for people to voice their frustrations with American politics and the media, and, of course, be entertained.

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“I don't think people are going to the rally because they are liberal or conservative,” Wilford said. “It's not about political ideology, but about the way politics are being sold.”

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“Coming from an outsider, it sounds like Americans are constantly being told to be afraid, but they aren't being told what to be afraid of. Despite the fact that Jon Stewart is a TV host and the rally is based on a platform on comedy, I feel that Jon Stewart has more to say about politics than any pundit.”

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“I personally have been frustrated with what I view as a lot of hypocrisy in politics,” Miko Wilford, a 24-year-old psychology graduate student from Iowa State University said. “I feel ‘The Daily Show' and the ‘Colbert Report‘ do a good job of pointing out the hypocrisies.”

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“I think it's time we restored truth and civility in this country. Our politicians need to acknowledge that this generation is beyond right-left categories.”

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“The rally appeals to me because I agree with the underlying premise, that the tiny percentage of people screaming at each other on television should not be the only voices we're paying attention to,” said Alexis Sigger, a 32-year-old television producer who is coming from Brooklyn for the rally.

See full (three screen) article….