Announcing a new Rheingold U course: Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation
For the past ten years, I've worked with Institute for the Future to track the emergence of a new story about how humans get things done together. The old story of survival of the fittest, competition, rational self-interest is changing as new knowledge comes to light about cooperative arrangements and complex interdependencies in cells, ecosystems, economies, and humans. In 2005, I delivered a TED talk about this subject; the video has been viewed more than 182,000 times. In the same year, I co-taught a seminar at Stanford with Andrea Saveri of Institute for the Future, “Toward a Literacy of Cooperation.” This six week Rheingold U course builds on the texts, videos, and other materials developed over the past ten years. Under my direction, co-learners will inquire, collaborate, discuss, co-construct knowledge about the building blocks and conceptual frames of a new literacy of cooperation. The course will run September 30 – November 11
This statement is ours, and for anyone who will get behind it. Representing ourselves, we bring this call for revolution.
We want freedom for all, without regards for identity, because we are all people, and because no other reason should be needed. However, this freedom has been largely taken from the people, and slowly made to trickle down, whenever we get angry.
Money, it has been said, has taken over politics. In truth, we say, money has always been part of the capitalist political system. A system based on the existence of have and have nots, where inequality is inherent to the system, will inevitably lead to a situation where the haves find a way to rule, whether by the sword or by the dollar.
We agree that we need to see election reform. However, the election reform proposed ignores the causes which allowed such a system to happen. Some will readily blame the federal reserve, but the political system has been beholden to political machinations of the wealthy well before its founding.
We need to address the core facts: these corporations, even if they were unable to compete in the electoral arena, would still remain control of society. They would retain economic control, which would allow them to retain political control. Term limits would, again, not solve this, as many in the political class already leave politics to find themselves as part of the corporate elites.
We need to retake the freedom that has been stolen from the people, altogether.
If you agree that freedom is the right to communicate, to live, to be, to go, to love, to do what you will without the impositions of others, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that a person is entitled to the sweat of their brows, that being talented at management should not entitle others to act like overseers and overlords, that all workers should have the right to engage in decisions, democratically, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that freedom for some is not the same as freedom for all, and that freedom for all is the only true freedom, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that power is not right, that life trumps property, then you might be one of us.
If you agree that state and corporation are merely two sides of the same oppressive power structure, if you realize how media distorts things to preserve it, how it pits the people against the people to remain in power, then you might be one of us.
And so we call on people to act
We call for protests to remain active in the cities. Those already there, to grow, to organize, to raise consciousnesses, for those cities where there are no protests, for protests to organize and disrupt the system.
We call for workers to not only strike, but seize their workplaces collectively, and to organize them democratically. We call for students and teachers to act together, to teach democracy, not merely the teachers to the students, but the students to the teachers. To seize the classrooms and free minds together.
We call for the unemployed to volunteer, to learn, to teach, to use what skills they have to support themselves as part of the revolting people as a community.
We call for the organization of people's assemblies in every city, every public square, every township.
We call for the seizure and use of abandoned buildings, of abandoned land, of every property seized and abandoned by speculators, for the people, for every group that will organize them.
We call for a revolution of the mind as well as the body politic.
I've been driving the 1964 MGB (my last remaining possession, it needs $5,000 of underbody work to survive the winter) around New England and am in New York now. I've been following the US Day of Rage plans (they were also announced here) but have been surprised to find a number of normally intelligent middle-class men I have met along the way to be timid about the US Day of Rage movement. They cannot get past the name and of course never get to the part about non-violent demands for electoral reform and integrity.
So here is my short brief on US Day of Rage, perhaps it can help get past these perceptual barriers. I do recommend that US Day of Rage create an alternative web site, American for Electoral Integrity–kind of like the Silicon Valley Hackers Conference also calls itself the THINK Conference for the green eyeshade types without a clue. I'll be attending this year, 4-6 November in San Francisco area.
MEMORANDUM
Subject: US Day of Rage for the USA—Who, Why, What, When, Where, How
Date: 17 September 2011
IMPORTANCE: Understanding the US Day of Rage is vital to understanding the deeper mood of the public.
1. Who. US Day of Rage is an informal, social network based movement that started as a protest against Wall Street with a planned occupation today, and rapidly morphed into a cross-country network of mini-demonstrations. The “US Day of Rage” is being supported by internet groups who oppose corruption in the government such as Adbusters, Culture Jammers, and Anonymous. The original call to occupy Wall Street was put out by Adbusters, and the US Day of Rage and NYC General Assembly have since joined.
2. Why. Their capital demand is fair and free elections to overcome the special interest takeover of Congress and the Executive. Please note that there is real convergence and resonance between the Day of Rage network and the Tea Party/Sarah Palin remonstrations against “crony capitalism.”
Thousands of people from across the country are planning to converge on Wall Street this Saturday to protest America’s “corrupt democratic process” and the use of corporate moneyin American elections.
The day has already seen support from hactivist group Anti Sec, which wrote on Twitter Thursday: “Americans it is now our time. The Tunisians did it, then the Egyptians. It is OUR time. It is OUR America.” Anti-consumerist magazine AdBusters asked on its site: “Is American ripe for a Tahrir moment?”
Phi Beta Iota: There isn't a single politician out there that “gets” this, with one possible exception we will identify if and when he makes reference to the connection between the USA Day of Rage, his campaign, and the need for Electoral Reform–there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed relatively quickly and simply via the restoration of the integrity of our electoral process and our government.
Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson isn’t going to be the next president of the United States … but the fact that he’s polling in the low single digits among the 2012 GOP field doesn’t mean his candidacy should be ignored.
That’s exactly what’s happening, though … despite the fact that Johnson is out-performing several of his better-known rivals.
In a CNN/ORC poll released in late August, Johnson out-polled former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman – and was tied with former Godfathers’ Pizza CEO Herman Cain. Nonetheless, Johnson was not allowed to participate in a CNN debate held earlier this week that featured … you guessed it … Santorum, Huntsman and Cain.
Adding insult to injury, the most recent CNN/ORC survey – released earlier this week – didn’t even list Johnson’s name among the candidates being polled.
Phi Beta Iota: We disagree with the view that Gary Johnson cannot be President. Right now he is the only Republican who is a) telling the truth and nothing but the truth; b) open to legalizing marijuana, the #1 demand of the young left; c) electable. Keep an eye on New Hampshire. We are.
For the past week, a secret meeting of 57 finance ministers aimed at setting up a new international financial system took place in a large ship on international waters near Europe, according to White Dragon Society representatives who were there.
The meeting, hosted by Switzerland, deliberately excluded representatives from the U.S. Federal Reserve Board and its Washington D.C. subsidiary, France, Italy, the UK, Germany and Japan.
Countries like Russia, China and the Netherlands were among the 57 represented.
Representatives from the Pentagon and the U.S. agencies at the meeting promised to bypass the Federal Reserve board and use their access to codes for the international collateral accounts to finance the U.S. military industrial complex in conjunction with the new system.
The Swiss used their financial intelligence to refuse would-be participants who were in any way associated with either,
the Bilderberg Group
the Council on Foreign Relations
or the Trilateral Commission
Among those refused entry were Naoto Kan (still Prime Minister of Japan as of last week), IMF head Christine Lagarde and U.S. Senator J. Rockefeller.
Rockefeller was actually physically prevented from boarding the ship, according to two eye-witnesses.
And here are a film and a book that expand and deepen the view that economics can and should be about generating good lives in a good society in a good world – in ways that speak to the cultures, realities and daily lives that most of us live in.
The film is the upcoming movie “Money and Life” – see especially the “extended trailer”, clip #2 at the bottom of the page
Phi Beta Iota: Tom Atlee and the Co-Intelligence Institute are the ONLY cause we endorse on a recurring basis. Tom Atlee himself is a national asset of the most precious sort–the people, the knowledge, and the spirit that are embodied in the Co-Intelligence Institute represent the ideals of America–and of the great religions and philosophies–in active practice.
