The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
A retired Marine colonel still serving in Afghanistan writes to recommend this YouTube short:
This is awesome!
This could be the next number one hit country song. It is written by a High School assistant football coach. Apparently the guy was fired over the song because some parents complained. Shameful if true. If you like it, help it go “viral” by passing it along to everyone you know.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block female employees from suing on behalf of as many as 1.5 million women in what would be the largest gender-bias suit against a private employer in U.S. history.
. . . . . . .
The company agreed in 2008 to pay as much as $640 million to settle 63 federal and state class actions claiming the company cheated hourly workers and forced them to work through breaks.
. . . . . .
The case is Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes.
Tip of the Hat to Monica Nixon at LinkedIn.
WAL-MART–Proud to be the Enron of the Retail Industry.
Review: Wal-Mart–The High Cost of Low Price (2005)
Review: An Atlas of Poverty in America–One Nation, Pulling Apart, 1960-2003
Review: Big-Box Swindle–The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses
Review: No Logo–No Space, No Choice, No Jobs (Paperback)
Review: The Global Class War –How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win it Back (Hardcover)
Review: The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order (Paperback)
Review: Nobodies–Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy
Review: Screwed–The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class — And What We Can Do About It
Review: The People’s Business–Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy The People’s Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy
Renewed instability in global food markets requires urgent response, UN expert said
An independent United Nations human rights expert today called on governments and the international community to promptly tackle the renewed instability of global food markets, noting the related social unrest that has hit some countries in recent weeks.
Tip of the Hat to Charles Rault at LinkedIn.
Continue reading “Journal: UN on Food Security, It's All Connected”
by Howard P. Hart
27 August 2010
Many years ago I attended a series of Headquarters briefings for out-going CIA Chiefs of Station. Our main speaker was Richard Helms, then the Agency’s Director and one of the lions of American foreign policy in the 1960’s and 70’s. A man who was subsequently crucified in the Nixon catastrophe. Dick was essentially giving us our instructions, and in my mind his most telling directive was the quiet statement: “Ring the Bell.” Telling us to sing out when we apprehended a major disaster in the offing.
It’s time to ring the bell on Iraq.
Briefly put, in a matter of months Iran will emerge the unchallenged military and economic power dominating the area from Lebanon to Pakistan. It will control Iraq, and be in a position to shut off all oil supplies from the Persian Gulf. It will be free to provide extensive assistance to the Taliban in Afghanistan, thus ensuring a NATO defeat in that country. It will be in a position to provide crucial support to radical Islamic elements in Pakistan – which may well result in the collapse of that already shaky nuclear-armed government. It will be free to radically increase its support to a variety of terrorist organizations targeting the US. And, in conjunction with well-armed radical Palestinian forces that already exist on Israel's borders, it will pose the greatest threat ever faced by Israel. A threat that I do not believe Israel could survive without direct US military intervention.
READ THE BALANCE OF THE PIECE BY THIS CIA VETERAN
Continue reading “Journal: CIA Veteran Rings Bell on Iraq–Way Too Late…”
(CNN) — Discrimination against women and girls takes a staggering toll around the world, says author Sheryl WuDunn. It leads to as many as 100 million fewer females than males in the world.
Ending the oppression of women is the great moral challenge of the 21st Century, a cause she compares to fighting slavery in the 19th century and totalitarianism in the 20th Century.
The solutions, she says, are education and economic opportunity. Overpopulation is one of the larger contributors to poverty, WuDunn said. “When you educate a girl, she has significantly fewer kids.” Girls who go to school get married later in life and educate their children “in a more enlightened way.”
“So let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women's power as economic catalysts.
Phi Beta Iota: It merits comment that micro-lending was a success because its founder recognized that women, not men, would be the more reliable and productive catalyst. It also merits comment that the best aid investment, dollar for dollar, is in the education of women. What is missing is the “giant leap forward” that would come from distributing free telephones and creating multi-lingual call centers that educate women–and men–one cell call at a time, while serving as catalysts for harnessing the distributed intelligence of the Whole Earth, creating smart neighborhoods to smart nations to a smart planet.
Joe Klein
Thursday, 2 September 2010
TIME Magazine
But what if there were a machine, a magical contraption that could take the process of making tough decisions in a democracy, shake it up, dramatize it and make it both credible and conclusive? As it happens, the ancient Athenians had one. It was called the kleroterion, and it worked something like a bingo-ball selector. Each citizen — free males only, of course — had an identity token; several hundred were picked randomly every day and delegated to make major decisions for the polis.
Actually, the Chinese coastal district of Zeguo (pop. 120,000) has its very own kleroterion, which makes all its budget decisions. The technology has been updated: the kleroterion is a team led by Stanford professor James Fishkin. Each year, 175 people are scientifically selected to reflect the general population.
Tom Atlee Comments:
I'm not yet up to diving in re this fascinating TIME article on participatory budgeting based on Deliberative Polling methodology but some of you might want to. Interesting that they don't cover Participatory Budgeting, which is becoming widespread in South America, or the experiments using Citizens Juries for budgeting in Canada… It is, of course, amazing that less-wise forms of deliberative democracy — like Fishkin's Deliberative Polls and AmericaSpeaks' 21st Century Town Meetings — are preferred by power-holders over more potent forms like Citizens Juries, Citizens Assemblies, Consensus Conferences, etc., to say nothing of Wisdom Councils (which aren't strictly deliberative). On second thought, it is not surprising.. 🙂 But Fishkin and Lukensmeyer have the political savvy to clear the way for more advanced forms of wise democracy to emerge into public awareness and use. It's up to us to use that space.
Coheartedly,
Tom
September 2, 2010
This detailed geo-statistical analysis entitled “The Fog of War: The Geography of the WikiLeaks Afghanistan War Logs 2004-2009″ has been published, not much more than a month after Wikileaks made available to the world six years of Afghanistan records and reports. The study was honestly, scientifically, and nimbly completed and published at no direct cost to the intelligence community. It was made possible by the decentralization, fluidity, and constant sharing and shifting of roles and responsibilities that comprise the Internet. As I read through this lucid analysis, I recalled the recently published Washington Post project, Top Secret America. Both the Post and the researchers in “Fog of War” tried to be careful not to step on government toes, but the very process and existence of these kinds of analyses are cause for great optimism, and provide a strong justification to radically slash government spending on intelligence that the state has proven to be unable to use effectively.
Phi Beta Iota: Michael Ostrolenk, our newest contributing editor, is a Libertarian with a very broad range of policy interests and an innate desire to use the taxpayer dollar wisely. The cited item leads to two different pdf files, each with multiple color-coded maps.
