Category: Communities of Practice

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Mini-Mi: Top 5 Facts About America’s Richest 1%

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
Who? Mini-Me?

The Top 5 Facts About America’s Richest 1%

VIDEO

The American dream is alive and well for the wealthiest 1% of Americans, but unfortunately, if you are in the other 99% the jury is still out.

“America is obviously a country where you can go from being middle class to upper class, but right now class mobility has sort of collapsed in the United States,” says Zaid Jilani, senior reporter for the progressive think tank ThinkProgress.org. (See: America's Middle Class Crisis: The Sobering Facts)

This grim reality is in part the impetus for the Occupy Wall Street movement, which, now in its fourth week, will take to the streets of Manhattan's Upper East Side Tuesday in what it is calling the “Millionaire's March.” Demonstrators will rally outside the homes of some of the city's wealthiest, including News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon, to protest New York state's 2% millionaire tax set to expire at the end of the year.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, The Daily Ticker wanted to find out just how rich America's super-rich 1% really is. Jilani recently compiled the following research, entitled How Unequal We Are: The Top 5 Facts You Should Know About The Wealthiest One Percent of Americans.

As discussed in the accompanying interview, here's what Jilani outlined on his blog:

Continue reading “Mini-Mi: Top 5 Facts About America's Richest 1%”

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Koko: Participatory Budget Takes Root in USA

03 Economy, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Koko

Participatory Budgeting – A Method to Empower Local Citizens & Communities

“Participatory Budgeting” (PB) is a process that allows citizens to decide directly how to allocate all or part of a public budget, typically through a series of meetings, work by community “delegates” or representatives, and ultimately a final vote. It was first implemented in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1990, and has since spread.

PB has recently taken root in Canadian and American soils.

Chicago’s 49th Ward, for example, uses this process to distribute $1.3 million of annual discretionary funds. The ward’s residents have praised the opportunity to make meaningful decisions, take ownership over the budget process, and win concrete improvements for their neighborhood – community gardens and sidewalk repairs to street lights and public murals. The initiative proved so popular that the ward’s alderman, Joe Moore, credits PB with helping to reverse his political fortunes.

The wave is not stopping in Chicago, either. Elected officials and community leaders elsewhere – from New York City to San Francisco and from Greensboro, N.C. to Springfield, Mass. – are considering launching similar initiatives.

Sources:

“Government can’t solve budget battles? Let citizens do it.” Daniel Altschuler and Josh Lerner, The Christian Science Monitor, April 5, 2011.

“Chicago’s Participatory Budgeting Experiment” Nicole Summers, Shareable. April 6, 2011.

Student Researcher: Allison Holt, San Francisco State University

Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows, San Francisco State University

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#OWS #ElectoralReform Strategy Memorandum

11 Society, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Hacking, Memoranda

Restoring the Republic – One  People – One Voice – One Community

Grand Strategy is about combining means (inputs) and ways
to achieve ends (outcomes).

In very general terms, the strategic outcomes that appear to be sought by the mélange of participants in the emerging nation-wide—even global—rebellion against the existing system—center around social justice as in justice for society at large.  This is essentially a repudiation of the existing system in three parts: the electoral system that perpetuates a two-party tyranny; the governance system that trades 5% earmarks for 95% discounted disbursements of the public treasure; and a banking and corporate system that refuses to factor in both true costs to the public, or consider the public interest.  It is a rigged system of, by, and for the 1%.

There are at least three outcomes that can be considered and two ways.

Constitutional Amendment.  In the ideal, the corruption of the legislative and executive processes must be removed by enacting a Constitutional Amendment.  In the USA, enacting an amendment requires either passage by two thirds of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, followed by approval by three-fourths of all state legislatures.  Since the two-party tyranny owns both the federal and the state legislatures, it is virtually certain  that this will never come to pass in isolation.  It could, however, be made possible by first pursuing Electoral Reform.

Electoral Reform Act.  Over the past thirty years a number of very specific proposals have been made to expand the existing two-party electoral system rife with fraud at all levels.  Nine specific measures have been put together by a team drawing on best available sources.  Those nine measures include:

01  Open Ballot Access
02  Make It Easier to Vote
03  Honest Open Debates
04  Instant Run-Off/Paper Ballots
05  Expanded Debates (Cabinet)
06  Full and Balanced Representation
07  Tightly-Drawn Districts
08  Full Public Funding of Diverse Candidates
09  No Legislation without Consultation

A tenth provision would have an honest Congress and an honest Executive championing the Constitutional Amendment, but passing the Electoral Reform Act of 2012 in time for Phase I (provisions 01-05) to take effect for November 2012.  This objective is achievable!  A nation-wide demand presented by 6 November with a demand for resolution by 15 February—or face a General Strike—has a possibility for success such as has never existed here-to-fore.  This has the added advantage of opening the way for an Independent candidate for President, and for opening ballot access to the full spectrum of potential candidates, not just those approved by the two-party system, thereby cleansing the Senate and House of Representatives of corrupt partisans.

Secession & Nullification.  There are no fewer than ten active secessionist movements in the USA:

01  Alaska
02  Florida
03  Georgia
04  Hawaii
05  League of the South
06  South Carolina
07  Texas
08  Vermont
09  Republic of Lakotah
10  Pacific Northwest/Cascadia

Among them, Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont are the most persistent.  States also have the right to nullify federal mandates, and in the future we may see the Western states and especially Alaska repossess state lands set aside as federal preserves.  A dissolution of the USA is unlikely at this time, but could become a reality if there is a total collapse of the economy and the government, at which point localized resilience movements will spring up and independence from federal taxation and federal regulation will become the norm.

Ways to the first two ends include a General Strike (massive absenteeism) and a General Boycott (of all corporate goods less true essentials, withdrawal of all funds from banks and stocks)—or both.

Electoral Reform as a capital demand, presented by 6 November and demanded by 15 February, is in my view the only means of avoiding secession and eventually securing a Constitutional Amendment.  St.

Original as Published

See Also:

#ElectoralReform #OWS Two-Sided Demand Hand-Out#OccupyWallStreet Rolling Update + US Revolution RECAP

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Mini-Me: OccupyWallStreet Entering Policy Phase?

11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Methods & Process, Strategy

Occupy Wall Street shifts from protest to policy phase

Protesters face the difficult and interesting task of leveraging their influence to achieve concrete policy changes addressing their concerns.

By Michael HiltzikLos Angeles Times, October 12, 2011

How do you know when a protest movement is starting to scare the pants off the establishment?

One clue is when the protesters are casually dismissed as hippies or rabble, or their principles redefined as class envy or as (that all-purpose insult) “un-American.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  This is the first mainstream media article we've seen with real intelligence.  What is actually happening is that the various groups that have structure to begin with (MoveOn, labor, issue NGOs) are trying desperately to force fit the kind of “demands” or “strategy” that media expects to be spoon-fed; push-back is coming from the original actors, who are reluctant to join anything that reeks of the old structure–and to be perfectly candid, MoveOn, labor, and the NGOs are all accustomed to feeding at the two-party trough and they are frightened out of their wits by a populist uprising they can neither understand nor control.  Our best guess is that the groups will generally refuse to engage in policy demands, and go for broke: electoral reform and a constitutional convention, which we rate right now as 55% and 15% probabilities.

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Katrina Heuvel: Reshaping US Politics with Moral Clarity

09 Justice, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government
Katrina vanden Heuvel

Will Occupy Wall Street's Spark Reshape Our Politics?

Katrina vanden Heuvel on October 11, 2011 – 2:21pm ET

Editor’s Note: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

When the organizers of Occupy Wall Street first gathered to discuss their plan of action, the strategy that resonated most came from those who had occupied squares in Madrid and Athens, Tunis and Cairo. According to David Graeber, one of Occupy Wall Street’s organizers, “they explained that the model that seemed to work was to take something that seemed to be public space, reclaim it, and build up an organization and headquarters around [it].”

Six weeks later, on September 17, the occupation in downtown New York began, with scant attention, minimal and often derisive media coverage, and little expectation that it would light a spark where others had not. Now, in its fourth week, Occupy Wall Street has the quality of an exploding star: It is gathering energy in enormous and potent quantities, and propelling it outward to all corners of the country.

The protesters in the nascent movement have been criticized for being too decentralized and lacking a clear list of demands. But they are bearing witness to the corruption of our politics; if they made demands to those in power, it would suggest those in power could do something about it. This contradicts what is, perhaps, their most compelling point: that our institutions and politicians serve the top 1 percent, not the other 99.

The movement doesn’t need a policy or legislative agenda to send its message. The thrust of what it seeks–fueled both by anger and deep principles–has moral clarity. It wants corporate money out of politics. It wants the widening gap of income inequality to be narrowed substantially. And it wants meaningful solutions to the jobless crisis. In short, it wants a system that works for the 99 percent. Already Occupy Wall Street has sparked a conversation about reforms far more substantial than the stunted debate in Washington. Its energy will supercharge the arduous work other organizations have been doing for years, amplifying their actions as well as their agendas.

Occupy Wall Street is now in more than 800 cities and counting. Each encampment has its own character, from thousands marching in San Francisco to a handful gathering in Boise. These are authentic grassroots operations, so each one will reflect the local culture of protest while reproducing what seems right from the original.

Republicans have reacted bitterly.

Editor’s Note: Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

See Also:

Mini-Me: Katrina vanden Heuvel on Electoral Reform

#ElectoralReform #OWS Two-Sided Demand Hand-Out

#OccupyWallStreet Rolling Update + US Revolution RECAP