Civil Society – Page 110 – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/08/192014/08/18

Berto Jongman: World War III — Weapons of Mass Monetization Coming Soon — Are ISIS and BRICS Part of the Shell Game?

Civil Society, Commerce, Earth Intelligence, Government, Peace Intelligence

Order Out Of Chaos: The Doctrine That Runs The World

EXTRACT

The end result of World War I was the creation of the League of Nations and the argument that sovereignty leads to disunion and catastrophe. World War II led to the creation of the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. I believe that a third world war is nearly upon us, one that may involve weapons of monetary destruction more so than weapons of mass destruction. Each supposed disintegration of global unity has eventually led to greater centralization, and this is something the skeptics seem to forget. The progression of crises suggests that the next war will lead to total globalization under the dominance of a minority of elitists posing as “wise men” who only wish to bring peace and harmony to the masses. In the meantime, the skeptics will continue to mindlessly debate in the face of all reason that the whole thing was a fluke, an act of random mathematical chance, leading coincidentally to the one thing the establishment rulers crave: total global totalitarian micromanagement.

Read full article.

2014/08/182014/08/17

Jean Lievens: Sharing Economy Precariat — Brokering Labor to the Bone — While Neglecting True Costs and Redesign

03 Economy, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce

Check App. Accept Job. Repeat.

In the Sharing Economy, Workers Find Both Freedom and Uncertainty

EXTRACT

Ms. Guidry, 35, earns money by using her own car to ferry around strangers for Uber, Lyft and Sidecar, ride services that let people summon drivers on demand via apps. She also assembles furniture and tends gardens for clients who find her on TaskRabbit, an online marketplace for chores.

Her goal is to earn at least $25 an hour, on average. Raising three children with her longtime partner, Jeffrey Bradbury, she depends on the income to help cover her family’s food and rent. That has become more unpredictable of late. Uber and Lyft, her driving mainstays, recently cut certain passenger fares. Last month, TaskRabbit overhauled the way its users select their helpers; immediately after the change, Ms. Guidry’s stream of new clients dried up.

“You don’t know day to day,” she said. “It’s very up in the air.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: Anything less than a dollar a mile (50 cents for wear and gas, 50 cents for labor, home base door and return) is a losing proposition — to clear $25 an hour one must drive at least 50 billable miles in that hour. To make the $50,000 a year that $25 an hour would normally add up, one must have eight full revenue hours. Very few people achieve this, dog walkers being a possible exception. There are two sharing economies — perhaps many more. The first leverages existing assets and created variable income increases. The second leverages labor, and appears to be a losing proposition for most. What we see is a dearth of analytic models and a dearth of data — we see a desperate need for the rethinking and redesign of entire communities and cities to achieve cost of living reductions on the order of 50%, while optimizing the time-energy composition of the constituent individuals in any given community.

2014/08/182014/08/17

SchwartzReport: App Five-O Helps Citizens Hold Police Accountable

Civil Society, Ethics, Law Enforcement

Something very interesting is happening with social media. It is becoming a sharing venue where people otherwise unconnected can share common experiences of police violence. If this trend takes off, as I think it will, hundreds if not thousands of these confrontation episodes, that normally go largely unremarked except locally, will get posted online where they can be picked up and passed around. This will make it impossible f! or media to ignore them.

These 3 Teenagers Created An App To Hold Police Accountable
CARIMAH TOWNES – Think Progress

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: App Five-O Helps Citizens Hold Police Accountable”

2014/08/132014/08/13

Edward Snowden with Jim Bamford in WIRED: Next NSA Revelations “Would Be the Death of All of Them Politically”

02 China, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Government, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military

The most wanted man in the world

Jim Bamford

WIRED, 13 August 2014

EXTRACTS

“It’s like the boiling frog,” Snowden tells me. “You get exposed to a little bit of evil, a little bit of rule-breaking, a little bit of dishonesty, a little bit of deceptiveness, a little bit of disservice to the public interest, and you can brush it off, you can come to justify it. But if you do that, it creates a slippery slope that just increases over time, and by the time you’ve been in 15 years, 20 years, 25 years, you’ve seen it all and it doesn’t shock you. And so you see it as normal. And that’s the problem, that’s what the Clapper event was all about. He saw deceiving the American people as what he does, as his job, as something completely ordinary. And he was right that he wouldn’t be punished for it, because he was revealed as having lied under oath and he didn’t even get a slap on the wrist for it. It says a lot about the system and a lot about our leaders.”

Read full article with many new revelations.

2014/08/112014/08/09

Worth a Look: Fusion Economics by Laurence Brahm

Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Peace Intelligence

AMAZON PAGE: Fusion Economics: How Pragmatism Is Changing the World

Hardcover Pre-Order Now for 21 October 2014 Delivery

Phi Beta Iota: Below is Robert Steele's jacket blurb:

Laurence Brahm is one of those unsung heroes who was changing the world for the better, and influencing various governments in most positive ways, long before ecological economics and social enterprise became fashionable turns of phrase. I regard him as the anti-thesis to the predatory capitalism mantras and methods of our time. His proven focus on community development and evolutionary blends of state planning and market incentives is precisely what we need now that everyone understands that Western governments have been corrupted and Western economies destroyed by financial interests devoted to extracting value instead of creating value. This is a practical book, a spiritual book, and one that should be required reading among those intent on creating collaborative economies and social enterprises.

Robert David Steele
CEO, Earth Intelligence Network

Below is the book description from the publisher:

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Fusion Economics by Laurence Brahm”

2014/08/112014/08/09

Jean Lievens: P2P on Cooperativa Integral Catalana

03 Economy, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Liberation Technology

Enric Duran of the Catalan Integrated Cooperative has taken the time to comment on Michel Bauwens’ recent article on Open Coops, contrasting Bauwens’ proposals with the practical realities already under way in the CIC’s own forward thinking cooperativist environment.

Bauwens’ summary of these proposals include four key proposals which Duran addresses below. To give some context, the four proposals are:

That coops need to be statutorily (internally) oriented towards the common good
That coops need to have governance models including all stakeholders
That coops need to actively co-produce the creation of immaterial and material commons
That coops need to be organized socially and politically on a global basis, even as they produce locally.

Here are Duran’s comments to each proposal.

Read full post.

2014/08/112014/08/09

Yoda: Are Islamic Finance and Ethical Economics the Same?

Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics

Think, we do.

How Islamic finance and a more ethical capitalism go hand-in-hand

In first place, the most-read article on the Guardian Social Enterprise Network for 2013, was Sheeza Ahmad's thoughts on how Islamic finance and a more ethical capitalism go hand-in-hand. As the founder of social enterprise HelpingB, he argued that the Qur'an's teachings of business reflect objectives of the worldwide social enterprise movement.

See Also:

Welby 'embarrassed' by Wonga link

EXTRACT

Linking financing to real assets, as opposed to ‘virtual' money, is what distinguishes Islamic banking from conventional finance. So what would the current financial landscape look like if the attitude towards money lending and interest shifted towards the Islamic model?