Collaboration Zones – Page 936 – Public Intelligence Blog

Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University, was Chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. His most recent book is The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers our Future.

South Africa Breaks Out

NEW YORK – International investment agreements are once again in the news. The United States is trying to impose a strong investment pact within the two big so-called “partnership” agreements, one bridging the Atlantic, the other the Pacific, that are now being negotiated. But there is growing opposition to such moves.

South Africa has decided to stop the automatic renewal of investment agreements that it signed in the early post-apartheid period, and has announced that some will be terminated. Ecuador and Venezuela have already terminated theirs. India says that it will sign an investment agreement with the US only if the dispute-resolution mechanism is changed. For its part, Brazil has never had one at all.

There is good reason for the resistance. Even in the US, labor unions and environmental, health, development, and other nongovernmental organizations have objected to the agreements that the US is proposing.

Continue reading “Penguin: South Africa Opts Out of Predatory IMF/WTO System”

2013/11/09

Eagle: Google Testing Program To Track Everyone Everywhere

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption

300 Million Talons... — 300 Million Talons…

Google Is Testing A Program That Tracks You Everywhere You Go

Richard Feloni Nov 7 2013, 3:29 AM 41 2096

Google wants to know your every move

Google is beta-testing a program that tracks users’ purchasing habits by registering brick-and-mortar store visits via smartphones, according to a report from Digiday.

Google can access user data via Android apps or their Apple iOS apps, like Google search, Gmail, Chrome, or Google Maps.

If a customer is using these apps while he shops or has them still running in the background, Google’s new program pinpoints the origin of the user data and determines if the customer is in a place of business.

Google gets permission to do this kind of tracking when Android users opt in to the “location services” option in their smartphone’s options menu and when iOS users agree to allow “location services” for Google apps like Gmail and Google Maps.

The program was hinted at in an AdWords blog post from Oct. 1 regarding Google’s new “estimated total conversions” initiative. A “conversion” in this sense is a purchase, and Google is developing ways to track users across desktops, tablets, and smartphones. Google also mentioned that tracking conversions via phone calls is in the works, but has yet to release details.

Business Insider has reported on how Google is using cross-device conversion measurements in its war with Facebook for advertising supremacy. When advertisers are allowed to know as much as possible about users’ purchasing habits, they can target their ads more efficiently and reap the benefits. Measuring conversions is also important because it assures advertisers that their purchases are resulting in increased product sales.

Mobile users who search for products on their phones buy quickly after researching them, according to a Google/Nielsen report released on Tuesday. Consumers spend 15+ hours every week researching products, and more than half make their purchase within an hour after looking it up.

2013/11/09

SchwartzReport: Truths That Matter

Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

This is excellent news. The cost of solar is coming down like a skier on a slope. If we took the same money we have willingly been spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, to no good purpose whatever, and put it to work converting the entire country off of carbon energy, we would create enormous prosperity. Unemployment would drop to 3-4%. Every energy conversion — animals and wind to coal, coal to petroleum — has created enormous wealth from the top down. We should be embracing this transformation not resisting it. And that's without even considering the effect on climate change. The struggle is not going to be technological, but how old forms die.

First Solar Reports Largest Quarterly Decline In CdTe Module Cost Per-Watt Since 2007
Clean Technica

Click through and look at the geographical distribution of poverty in the U.S. You will see on the maps that persistent poverty exists overwhelmingly in Red value states. I think this is happening because the white minority has made their retaining power their first priority, easily trumping social wellness. These are also the most violent, and the most religious states. They are controlled by the Caucasian Theocratic Ri! ght. The failure of the Right's social policies is glaringly obvious by any social measure one chooses. Why is almost no one talking about this?

Geography of Poverty
USDA Economic Research Service

This is the latest on the Prison Privatization trend showing how it is creating the New American Slavery. I find it amazing that this is going on, and nobody talks about it. Two years ago when I first really saw this trend, and wrote about it, I thought people would be outraged. (See: The New American Slavery. http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2811%2900043-7/fulltext)! . They aren't however, and 2.4 million men and women are in prison. Change has been very hard.

Non-Violent Offenders Fill Jails in Prison Nation’s Worst State: Louisiana
STEVEN ROSENFELD – AlterNet (U.S.)

Once again: Water is destiny. This excellent report spells out just what we face. Click through to see the charts and maps.

No Water, No Life
VL BAKER – Daily Kos

2013/11/092013/11/09

Chuck Spinney: Bill Polk Primer on Syria

Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

Below is an excellent primer on Syria — its history, culture, and the ongoing civil war. It is written by my friend and historian William R. Polk. He has given his correspondents permission to distribute it … I strongly recommend it.

PDF (21 Pages): UNDERSTANDING SYRIA -PART I – POLK

William R. Polk was a Member of the Policy Planning Council, responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and West Asia, for 4 years under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Professor of History at the University of Chicago and President of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs. He is the author of some 17 books on world affairs, including The United States and the Arab World; The Elusive Peace, the Middle East in the Twentieth Century; Understanding Iraq; Understanding Iran; Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency and Terrorism; Neighbors and Strangers: The Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs and numerous articles in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, Harpers, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Le Monde Diplomatique . He has lectured at many universities and at the Council on Foreign Relations, Chatham House, Sciences Po, the Soviet Academy of Sciences and has appeared frequently on NPR, the BBC, CBS and other networks.

2013/11/092013/11/09

NIGHTWATCH: Syria-Saudi Arabia – New “Fighting Force” Funded by Saudis, Trained by Pakistanis

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, Peace Intelligence

Syria-Saudi Arabia: Two western news services reported this week that Saudi Arabia is preparing to finance the training and arming of a new Syrian non-jihadi rebel force. The force is to be built around the Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam) which was created in September 2013 by a merger of 43 fighting groups.

According to the news services, Saudi Arabia reportedly has hired Pakistan to help train the re-purposed force. It supposedly would start as two brigades and would be supplied through Jordan. It would not be jihadist, but also would not be a secular force.

Comment: If this information is accurate, it implies that the Saudis judge the fighting will go one for two more years because that is about how long it would take to develop an effective fighting force. By that time, the Syrian government is likely to have stabilized the security situation or, less likely, to have fallen to the jihadists.

The amount of time, energy and multi-national coordination required in this effort, with highly uncertain prospects for a return on the investment, plus the direct involvement of Jordan as pivotal to the logistics raise suspicions that this is not a serious initiative. Rather it looks like a perception management stratagem to prompt more US assistance, if not intervention.

2013/11/08

Berto Jongman: Foreign Affairs on Causes of Civil War

Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

States of War

How the Nation-State Made Modern Conflict

Andreas Wimmer

Foreign Affairs, 7 November 2014

To explain recent conflicts in countries such as Syria or Sudan, observers have been quick to point their fingers at proximate causes specific to our times: the power vacuum created by the end of the Cold War offered opportunities for rebels to fill the void; the recent globalization of trade flooded the developing world with cheap arms; rising global consumer demand generated new struggles over oil and minerals; jihadist groups spread using networks of fighters trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Yet such explanations miss a bigger picture. If we extend the time horizon beyond the Cold War to include the entire modern period — from the American and French revolutions to today — we can see repeating patterns of war and conflict. These patterns are related to the formation and development of independent nation-states.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Foreign Affairs on Causes of Civil War”

2013/11/082013/11/08

Marcus Aurelius: Five Takeaways from a Decade of War [Defense One] Plus Blistering Alternative View from Phi Beta Iota Editors

Ethics, Military, Peace Intelligence, Strategy

Five Takeaways from a Decade of War

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, in a keynote address at the Center for Strategic and International Studies this week, signaled to military commanders that they should assume the across-the-board, automatic spending cuts imposed by sequester over the next decade will remain in place indefinitely. “We do not have the option of ignoring reality, or assuming something will change.” Before they decide how to shrink U.S. military forces and allocate scarce resources, however, uniformed leaders will have to decipher the lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to apply them to the coming era of austerity and global instability.

Hagel gave a preview of his own thinking when he argued that the Pentagon should protect investments in cutting edge technologies that are central to the evolving, network-centric model of warfare honed in those conflicts — to include space systems, cyber capabilities, “ISR” (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), and special operations forces (SOF).

Following Hagel’s speech, three senior retired generals offered their own thoughts on battlefield lessons. Here are five takeaways from the discussion by Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. Peter Chiarelli, former vice chief of the Army; and Gen. Ronald Fogleman, former chief of staff of the Air Force.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Five Takeaways from a Decade of War [Defense One] Plus Blistering Alternative View from Phi Beta Iota Editors”