Collective decision making began in the Americas long before the deliberations that produced the Mayflower Compact. In research done for the Kettering Foundation, Ruth Yellowhawk showed that a legacy of tribal deliberation has carried over into modern day decision making.
The foundation wishes to delve more deeply into this legacy and its contemporary applications as part of its study of citizen decision making worldwide. To continue their research, Kettering has established the Ruth Yellowhawk fellowship.
Fellows are selected on the basis of proposals to tell the stories of either historical or contemporary decision making that includes accounts of how problems were identified, issues were framed, decisions were made, and actions taken.
Every now and then potentially game changing innovations show up. Wikileaks is one of them, something that shifts the relationship between centralized power and broader national and international populations. We don't know what exactly will happen with it, but we do know that we're on a different playing field now.
I want to highlight two other potential game changers.
Robert Redford's son Jamie and film co-director Micah Fink on their documentary, premiering July 18 on HBO, about one of the largest toxic-waste cases in U.S. history. (July 15)
Phi Beta Iota: This is complete documentation of a massive atrocity to which the US Government is a co-conspirator. There is absolutely no question but that Ford Motor Company executives–including the Board of Directors–should be indicted and investigated. There is also no question but that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “leadership” then and now should be investigated. Sadly, Congress is itself impeachable. The US Government (and the two parties that front for Wall Street) are NOT the public's friend–they are bought and paid for–CORRUPT. We are long overdue for “The Virgin Truth” as a brand able to provide intelligence with integrity in the public interest.
“I have 21 years of Army service going back to the Vietnam War. My loyalty to the government should be a given. It is gone. I am certain it will never return regardless of how long I might have lived.”
How Big Pharma got Americans hooked on anti-psychotic drugs.
James Ridgeway, 12 July 2011
Al Jazeera
Has America become a nation of psychotics? You would certainly think so, based on the explosion in the use of antipsychotic medications. In 2008, with over $14 billion in sales, antipsychotics became the single top-selling therapeutic class of prescription drugs in the United States, surpassing drugs used to treat high cholesterol and acid reflux.
Phi Beta Iota: The industrialization of agriculture, and the industrialization of “medicine,” have poisoned the Western population, the USA most of all. The degree to which toxins and other poisons are allowed by law is now criminally insane.
A longtime CIA officer who spent 21 years in the Middle East is predicting that Israel will bomb Iran in fall, dragging the United States into another major war and endangering U.S. military and civilian personnel (and other interests) throughout the Middle East and beyond.
Earlier this week, Robert Baer appeared on the provocative KPFK Los Angeles show Background Briefing, hosted by Ian Masters. It was there that he predicted that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is likely to ignite a war with Iran in the very near future.
Phi Beta Iota: We know and admire Bob Baer, one of the greats in clandestine case officering, whose books, Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude and See No Evil–The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism correctly observe that no amount of professionalism in the intelligence ranks can make up for massive ideology, corruption, and impeachable malfeasance in the White House, Congress, and the military-industrial cabal. War is how the unethical elite deal with unrest at home–it syphons the poor angry young men out of the system and distracts the booboisee. Israel, like the USA, has multiple governments, and right now the two extremist versions are nominally in charge and think they can get away with bombing Iran and then redirecting the US military against Iran. The Israeli attack on the USS Liberty is the best “truth-teller” on how crazy they can get, and how much they disrespect the USA. They give no thought at all to the five front war that George Bush started with the Islamic virtual caliphate, or the consequences of “burning” the young seeking reform, turning them all against Israel and the USA.
