Journal: Chuck Spinney Highlights Labor Day in a Kleptocracy

07 Health, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Reform
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

Where have All the broad Shoulders Gone? Or, Labor Day in a Kleptocracy

posted by Juan Cole
Sept 7, 2009
The unemployment rate as I write is inching toward 10 percent nationally, and that is only counting people who were still looking for a job recently. A vast bank robbery by the corrupt on Wall Street has deprived them of the credit that made the economy go. Labor Day was passed by Congress under Grover Cleveland to celebrate not only the individual American laborer but the labor movement– yes, unions, workers' parades, hard hats and blue jeans (before the youth movement of the 1960s appropriated them, blue jeans were working class clothing, and my working class relatives upbraided me for wearing them as an undergraduate). It is to celebrate all those icons that shills for the barracuda billionaires, such as Glenn Beck, now castigate as “fascist” and “communist.” It is to celebrate what Carl Sandberg did in his poem, “Chicago:”
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders;
And of course, the home-makers and retail workers who move the manufactured goods and the teachers are all doing the hard foundational work as well.
Who is not working are the Wall Street thieves who have largely gone unpunished or been actively rewarded for their peculation.
Now Americans have convinced themselves that we don't have a working class. Everybody is middle class, even those who make minimum wage in the fast food industry, or those who are kept as part-timers so that the store (I'm looking at you, Walmart) doesn't have to enroll them in a health care program.

Journal: Petition for Peace Engineering

02 Diplomacy, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Ethics, Peace Intelligence, Reform, Strategy, Worth A Look
Petition for Peace
Petition for Peace

The average American is now in motion.  The Independent movement has reached critical mass, and the public recognition that everything the government is doing lacks a strategic analytic rationale as well as–in many cases–a moral rationale, is gathering force.

The below message captured our attention.  Note the “social engineering” of the military-industrial complex that has labored for decades to connect jobs to war, patronage to war,  bribes to war, high crimes and midemeanors (betrayal of the public trust) to war.  The call for social engineering for peace is, in our view, a strong signal that public intelligence is now becoming more commonplace, but we make the observation that the “lag time” between Congressional and Executive high crimes and misdemeanors, and the public discovery, analytis, outrage, and action, is still too great.  Public intelligence is going to have to do something secret intelligence cannot do: develop global REAL-TIME and NEAR-REAL-TIME information-sharing and sense-making, and do this across all ten high-level threats and all twelve policies that must be harmonized across all boundaries.

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Journal: 9-11 Truth Movement–Hanging Fire, Still Explosive

09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Government, Media
Full Story Online
Full Story Online

THE STORY BEHIND 9/11: HIT OR MYTH? TAKING ON THE TRUTHERS

By MAXINE SHEN August 28, 2009

Read Full Story Online First.  Then below Response (provided here because original is behind a Facebook Password Access page).:

The 9/11 Official Story Runs Out of Steam?

NY Post's Best
NY Post's Best

by Sander Hicks (pictured in insert by Post at right)

(NEW YORK) You know the world is really coming to an end when the New York Post lets this reporter, a leading 9/11 Truth investigator, be the lead source in their review of the new anti-Truther documentary.  The National Geographic Channel’s “9/11: Science and Conspiracy” debuts tonight, Monday, August 31. It is so pathetic, it should be scored a victory for the truth movement.

“9/11 Science and Conspiracy” is fundamentally-misconceived, half hearted, poorly planned, slapped together, badly written, mis-cas, and self-defeating. It contains four scientific “experiments” pulled off in the New Mexico desert by a bunch of pyrotechnic geeks, the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center (EMRTC).

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Journal: Facebook Toys with Facsism

11 Society, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics
Full Story OnLine
Full Story OnLine

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Published: August 26, 2009
The Medium:Facebook Exodus

Leif Harmsen, once a Facebook user, now crusades against it. Having dismissed his mother’s snap judgment of the site (“Facebook is the devil”), Harmsen now passionately agrees. He says, not entirely in jest, that he considers it a repressive regime akin to North Korea, and sells T-shirts with the words “Shut Your Facebook.” What especially galls him is the commercialization and corporate regulation of personal and social life.

. . . . . . .

“The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook — and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent — the more Facebook can and does abuse us,” Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. “It is not ‘your’ Facebook profile. It is Facebook’s profile about you.”

Journal: Weak Signals–Social Dislocation Ahead

03 Economy, 11 Society, Civil Society, Government
Image Credit
Image Credit

From a source that must remain anonymous.

State governments are in serious trouble now and once the federally-provided Stimulus Funds are used up in FY10 many states willhave no choice but to cut significant numbers of staff as well as marginalize social & health services programs (not to mention Corrections,compliance programs like Environmental Protection) dislocating chunks of the American population. As you can imagine, the US has manydomestic problems ahead.

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Journal: America Is Fed Up: Two Wings, Same (Corrupt) Bird. ENOUGH!

Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics

Listen to Audio of Interview
Listen to Audio of Interview

Gerald Celente on Financial Newshour Aug 21 2009

The Republicans and the Democrats are the same club , People have had it and won't take it anymore

The people have had it and won't take it anymore, people are losing everything , they are losing their homes , they have lost their jobs , they have lost their pension, they can see and smell a crook when they can see and smell them, and the crooks are in Washington and Wall street , people are not that stupid when we bailout banks and give them hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars and then they scheme of the top and gave themselves bonuses after losing billions, this is about The People have had it and won't take it anymore….this is going to last and continue to build in momentum …the second American revolution has begun and the media is missing it  the first three shot have been fired, The Greatest depression is on hold for now , the democrats and republicans are the same club.

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