Civil Society – Page 239 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/04/152011/04/15

Serious (Honest) Thinking About US Budget

03 Economy, 07 Health, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Military

Dear friends,

The three articles below describe major approaches to addressing the deficit — for health care, taxes and the military — that would have a greater impact on America's budget woes than ANYTHING being currently negotiated by Congress and the Obama Administration. Even better, these three things would, if implemented, actually improve the quality of life in the U.S., instead of degrading it, as so many of the current proposals would do. They give a taste of some excellent thinking emerging from the fringes of this “budget crisis” debate.

[After I wrote this I was alerted to another very interesting “People's Budget” recently released with little coverage in the mainstream media, which I recommend to those interested in alternatives.]

When I imagine a Citizens Jury, a Citizens Assembly, or any other randomly selected body of citizens convened to deliberate about the “budget crisis”, this is the kind of information I believe they should be exposed to. We don't need to undermine public health to create affordable health care. We don't need to undermine the wealth of the nation to have a reasonable tax system. We don't need to endanger American security to have a strong, affordable military.

We just need to think a bit outside of the boxes that most mainstream media, pundits, politicians and partisan activists (intentionally) put our minds in, and ask ourselves “What's the REAL problem here — and what would ACTUALLY solve it?”

How to Save a Trillion Dollars

Taxes on the Wealthy: New Top Brackets Needed for the Have Mores

Want to improve US national security? Cut the defense budget.

Continue reading “Serious (Honest) Thinking About US Budget”

2011/04/152011/04/15

US Government Bails Out and Pardons Wall Street, Sends Barry Bonds to Jail–What’s the Difference?

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Barry Bonds Faces Jail Time While Wall Street Execs Sit Pretty

What’s the difference between Barry Bonds and Goldman Sachs executives? The later was fortunate enough to be questioned by incompetent lawmakers while Bonds ended up in a courthouse with an actual jury and prosecutors.

. . . . . .

“The Goldman guys may have worse batting average than Barry Bonds but they were better educated by their lawyers about they should shouldn’t say. They also had the benefit of being questioned by incompetent people who had no idea about the financial nomenclature at the heart of their allegations,” Singer says.

For more on why and how Wall Street has avoided criminal charges and jail time check out today’s story in the New York Times about how regulators have, in some cases, willingly protected banks and their executives.

Of course, Matt Taibbi’s Why Isn’t Wall Street In Jail? is also a must-read.

2011/04/15

Seth Godin on Education Bubble & Alternative

04 Education, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence

Buying an education or buying a brand?

It's reported that student debt in the USA is approaching a trillion dollars, five times what it was ten years ago.

Are those in debt buying more education or are they seeking better branding in the form of coveted diplomas?

Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper but no less rigorous self-generated approach assembled from less famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources?

If not, then the money is actually being spent on the value of the degree, on the doors it will open and the jobs it will snag. If this marketing strategy works big, it pays for itself in no time.

A marketing tactic might move the dial, but that doesn't mean it's always worth the money.

The question is whether a trillion dollars is the right amount for individuals to spend marketing themselves. What would happen if people spent it building up a work history instead? On becoming smarter, more flexible, more self-sufficient and yes, able to take more risk because they owe less money…

There's no doubt that we need smarter and more motivated people in our organizations. I'm not sure we need them to be better labeled or more accredited.

Phi Beta Iota: This is why we feel very strongly that a Vice President for Education, Intelligence, & Research is needed; the corollary of this is that Cyber/IO should be about EDUCATION, not about corporate vapor-ware pretending to do attack and defend of systems that are in the proverbial Stone Age.

2011/04/14

Reference: Emergent Democracy

11 Society, About the Idea, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process

EXTRACT from Google Group Next Net:

That made me think of the Emergent Democracy paper that Joi Ito authored collaboratively (2001-2003) with several other folks (including Ross Mayfield and I) a few years ago. Digging into my files I found the attached marked up version… it aligns pretty well with some of the discussions here.

There's been a lot of interesting thought about the Internet and the web as platform for enhanced social activity. That idea of “finding our tribes and ourselves” was a core aspect of FringeWare, the company/community that Paco Nathan and I started in 1991. We realized that like-minded fringe thinkers and doers were scattered everywhere, and the Internet gave us a platform where they could find each other and form community. All it took was an email list and a compelling concept (“fringeware”) to catalyze that community.

“Declaration of Interdependence” sounded familiar… I did some searching…

https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html – Barlow wrote this, and I think he referred to it (earlier or later, not sure which) as a declaration of interdependence).

http://notanmba.com/blog/2008/03/a-declaration-of-interdependence – This notes that the Whole Foods mission statement is called “declaration of interdependence” – http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/company/declaration.php. This also refers to the Barlow document and our 2008 EFF-Austin party.

Interestingly, Will Durant made a “declaration of interdependence” in 1945. http://www.willdurant.com/interdependence.htm

Review: Evolutionary Activism by Tom Atlee

Review: Philosophy and the Social Problem–The Annotated Edition

2011/04/142011/04/14

Next Net, Transitional Net, Autonomous Net

11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics

Transitional Internet

by jonl on April 13, 2011

I continue to be focused on the future of the Internet and aware of divergent paths. In the later 2000s, following a period of digital and media convergence and given broad adoption of evolving high speed (broadband) network connectivity, the Internet has become an environment for mixed media and marketing. The Internet is increasingly centralized as a platform that serves a global business engine. It’s a mashup of business to business services and business to consumer connections, a mashup of all the forms of audio, text, and video communication and media in a new, more social/participatory context: the faceless consumer now has an avatar, an email address, and a feedback loop.

The sense of the Internet as a decentralized free and open space has changed, but there are still many advocates and strong arguments for approaches that are bottom-up, network-centric, free as in freedom (and sometimes as in beer), open, collaborative, decentralized. It’s tempting to see top-down corporate approaches vs bottom-up “free culture” approaches as mutually exclusive, but I think they can and will coexist. Rather than make value judgements about the different approaches, I want to support education and thinking about ethics, something I should discuss later.

Right now I want to point to a collaboration forming around the work of Venessa Miemis, who’s been curating trends, models, and projects associated with the decentralized Internet model. Venessa and her colleagues (including myself) have been discussing how to build a decentralized network that is broadly and cheaply accessible and that is more of a cooperative, serving the public interest rather than a narrower set of economic interests.

I’ll be focusing on these sorts of projects here and in my talks on the future of the Internet. Meanwhile, here are pointers to a couple of Venessa’s posts that are good overviews for what I’m talking about. I appreciate her clarity and focus.

There’s also the work of Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation, which I’ve followed for several years. The P2P Wiki has relevant pages:

Phi Beta Iota: A great deal of the credit goes to Doug Rushkoff, the originator of ContactCon, for whom Venessa Miemis (also a contributing editor here at Phi Beta Iota) works. Using Doug Rushkoff's social capital, and Venessa Miemi's inspired scouting on emergence, they have quickly become a hub for innovation and information sharing about the needed Autonomous Internet.

Reference: Emergent Democracy

Reference: Internet Censorship Circumvention

Peter Thiel (PayPal) on Education Bubble

2011/04/122011/04/13

UN Secretary General and Ambassador Susan Rice Violate Public Intelligence–We Stand with Richard Falk

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, 9/11 research, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Law Enforcement, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Non-Governmental, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Waste (materials, food, etc)

Willful Ignorance

April 12th, 2011

By Paul Carline

thepeoplesvoice.org

Cards on the table. I’ve been a “truther” since early 2002 when I came across the first major challenge to the official 9/11 story in the shape of the wonderful “Hunt the Boeing” site created by French researcher Thierry Meyssan. Until then I’d accepted the standard “Left” version of the government account – that a group of daring Muslims acting on behalf of the victims of US foreign policy had struck back at the great tyrant. The photographic and other evidence presented by Meyssan demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that whatever it was that had caused the damage to the Pentagon, it certainly wasn’t a large Boeing jet. If the government’s story was a lie on that major point, then the whole story was brought into question. I knew at once that I had to find out as much as I could about the event which everyone was saying had “changed the world”.

. . . . . .

Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories, hit the headlines just recently. He’d committed the cardinal sin of expressing doubts about the official story of 9/11 in a personal blog. The US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, rushed to condemn him and demanded he be sacked. UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, joined in, saying that Falk’s remarks were “an affront to the memory of the more than 3000 people who died in that tragic attack”. Someone needs to remind the Secretary-General of the affront which gullible acceptance and repetition of the official lie of 9/11 causes to the memory of the more than 3 million dead and mutilated Afghan, Iraqi and now Pakistani men, women and children sacrificed on the altar of neo-imperialism as a direct consequence of the phoney ‘war on terror’ – based on the lie of 9/11 and the other false-flag crimes perpetrated for and/or by agencies of western governments.

Read entire article….

SHORT URL This Post: http://tinyurl.com/PBI-911-Falk

Strong Comments and Multiple References Below the Line

Continue reading “UN Secretary General and Ambassador Susan Rice Violate Public Intelligence–We Stand with Richard Falk”

2011/04/122011/04/12

EFF Rates Digital Services on Privacy–ALL FAIL

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Law Enforcement

FROM Electronic Frontier Foundation: On Monday, April 11, 2011, we launched a petition to the largest Internet companies asking them to stand with their users and be transparent in their practices. Here's a chart showing how we think each of the companies is doing right now — a gold star indicates that the company is doing a stellar job, a half-star indicates they are taking steps in the right direction. This page will be updated as companies change their practices in response to public demand.

Click on Image to Enlarge

Phi Beta Iota: Visit the EFF page to view a rather extraordinary chart that shows NONE of the major digital service providers to be anywhere near an acceptable standard of privacy before a government that has used the false war on terrorism as an excuse to both grow in unwarranted size and corporate vapor ware services, and to set aside centuries of legal protections rooted in the Constitution. We recommend regular visits to the EFF page to see how, if at all, these services of common concern respond to public interest. This could be a dry run for Electoral Reform!