There’s an election Tuesday, and you’re probably going to vote – whether your vote is meaningful or not. Some call voting a “ritual,” which is not at all to say that it’s not meaningful – rituals do have meaning. But the word is that it’s a symbolic rather than functional, practical event. The actual eddies and currents of power feel little or no impact from your single vote.
Where can you have a real impact? Doc Searls and colleagues working through Project VRM and the Internet Identity Workshop are catalyzing a redefinition of the computer-mediated vendor/consumer relationship, with the potential to transform power relationships in markets rather than in the political sphere. However market experiences dominate so much of our daily commitment of attention and thinking, a redefinition of marketplace relationships could be a redefinition of relationship and power more broadly. If we assume symmetry in vendor/consumer relationshiops, we will also assume that the relationship of an elected official to her constituents will be more symmetrical.
I’m reading Doc Searls’ “The Data Bubble II,” which includes a lot of homework – links to other articles and posts I might read to get deeper into the subjects of online identity and relationship as they pertain to marketing and the redefinition of vendor/consumer relationships. Doc quotes John Battelle, who discusses how emerging conversational media inspired an economic model he calls conversational marketing, “simply the tip of a very large iceberg, representative of a sea change in how all businesses converse with their constituents – be they customers, partners, or employees.” Battelle calls it “The Conversation Economy,” for which Doc says “we’re going to need individuals who are independent and self-empowered.”
Back to voting: the vote is symbolic of your share as a citizen within a power structure that is supposedly of, for, and by the people, though it’s increasingly obvious that votes and voters are manipulable and nodes within power structures are corruptible. In arguing for a more participatory or democratic set of structures, it’s important to know that supposed majorities are also corruptible and can be crazy as hell. We need structures that empower and that also include checks and balances on those empowered. We want to build sanity into the architecture of power, and ease dependence on the ethics and logic of mere mortals. If we build such structures for markets, they will have an impact on governance as well.
(Also interesting: Doc refers to David Siegel on “The Social Networking Bubble.” Siegel says “We’ve overstated and overemphasized the utility of social networking and are now in a marketer’s ‘greater fool’ territory.”)
Phi Beta Iota: Jim Turner coined the term “buycott.” Thomas Jefferson and James Madison understood that an informed public was a nation's best defense against enemies both domestic and foreign. Brother Lebrowsky was a contributing editor to Extreme Democracy, and lives on the bleeding edge where democracy, information, and public minds converge.
Phi Beta Iota: The Editorial Board reviewed this. This site is strictly non-partisan; political propaganda is pointed out not to endorse it, but to highlight the depth of what one author calls Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. This short film demonizes the Democratic incumbent majority while avoiding any reference to the Republican era in which the economy was destroyed (1981 forward), elective wars were started, Dick Cheney performed 23 unnatural impeachable acts and led the telling of 935 lies to the public, and the Wall Street bail-out was foisted on the public, first by the Republicans then by their look-alike lite Democratic partners in crime. BOTH parties are antithetical to the public interest; BOTH parties must be “put down” by an informed public as NEITHER party has the integrity to represent the public interest.
Does a Green Speed Bump Block the Road to Energy Independence?????? In this remarkable and remarkably unwelcome opinion piece, my good friend Robert Bryce, author of Power Hungry, explains why the subsidization of green technologies that are dependent on rare earth elements should not be justified as pathway toward energy independence, and in fact, could actually make the US more dependent on foreign energy related imports.
Over the past few months, industry and government officials in the U.S. and Japan have been increasingly alarmed as China, which has a near-monopoly on rare earths, has reduced its exports of those elements by some 40 percent. Adding yet more anxiety to the situation are projections about a possible shortfall in the supply of these elements. London-based Roskill Consulting Group, a research firm that specializes in metals and minerals, recently predicted that demand for rare earths could outstrip supply as soon as 2014. Rare earths are important because they have special features at the quantum mechanics level that allow them to have unique magnetic interactions with other elements. A myriad of “green” technologies — from electric and hybrid-electric cars to wind turbines and compact fluorescent light bulbs – depend on rare earths. And there are no cost-effective substitutes for them.
Clinton’s willingness to question China about rare earths is indicative of just how seriously the U.S. is taking the rare earths issue. But it also underscores a fundamental miscalculation by the U.S. and other countries when it comes the reconfiguration of their automotive fleets.
Over the last few years, a growing number of environmentalists and national security hawks have teamed up to denounce America’s dependence on foreign oil. Their solution: all-electric and hybrid-electric vehicles. Those vehicles, they insist, will help the environment while reducing oil imports from countries in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere.
While that vision appeals to certain segments of the political class and to a myriad of subsidy-seeking corporations, the push to build more electric and hybrid cars will simply result in the U.S. trading one type of import dependence for another.
Those vehicles might cut oil consumption but they will dramatically increase America’s thirst for rare earth elements. And therein lies a crucial choice: We can continue to rely on the liquidity, price transparency, and diversity of the global oil market, the biggest market in human history. Or we can choose the “green” route. And in doing so, we will have no choice but to rely on the market for lanthanides, which is rife with smuggling, has no price transparency, and depends almost wholly on a single producer, China.
The Chinese control about 95 percent of the global market in rare earths, a group of 17 elements that includes scandium, yttrium, and the 15 lanthanides, the elements that occupy the second-to-last row of the Periodic Table. The most famous of the lanthanides is probably neodymium, a critical ingredient in the high-strength magnets used in motor-generators in hybrid cars and wind turbines.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a perfect example of what happens when a government is both ideologically driven and therefore not intelligence-driven, and when a government lacks a strategic analytic model that can clearly demonstrate how what might be good for one part of the system is bad for other parts of the system. This is called system INTEGRITY. Not only is the US bankrupt, according to the last Comptroller General to brief Congress on the subject in 2007, David Walker, but what the US government is borrowing and spending on in our name makes no sense at all from a public interest point of view.
The two previous blasters on this subject forwarded op-ed's that in effect described the strategic aim and strategies of the hidden hands that are fomenting right wing rage. The grand strategic aim of these hidden hands is to lock in their vision of a neofascist New Normal political economy based on a foundation of a more unequal distribution of wealth cemented into place by a pattern of politics and propaganda that prey on the growing insecurities and fears of a diminishing middle class.
This op-ed (also attached below) by Frank Rich enriches the picture further by illuminating the same hologram with a slightly different, but equally valid laser. In the Pentagon, we would call Rich's description a grand tactical perspective of the Cape Job being perpetrated by the hidden hands. These grand tactics are as old as war itself. Sun Tzu called them Cheng and Ch'i, or in more modern parlance, the dazzle and stroke, or the direct and the indirect — hence the term cape job, which conjures an image of using the red cape to capture the attention of the raging bull to set it up for a skewering. Essentially, cheng ch'i operations aim to manipulate the mind (i.e., decision cycle or OODA loop) of one's adversaries (i.e., in this case the increasingly impoverished middle class) to direct their energies against themselves. Rich's analysis fits that description to a tee.
Make no mistake about it, the grand tactics described by Rich are a definitive signature of a war, in this case a class war being waged by an elite oligarchy on the mass of of the people. By its nature, it is a fight to the finish, unlikely to be conditioned by compromise or moderated by enlightened self interest, and in his last paragraph, Rich appears to sense this. Cape jobs may begin insensibly, but if they do not end the conflict quickly, with the victors offering magnanimous terms, the intensity of the conflict builds and eventually the game becomes unavoidably obvious. When that happens the cape job can sow the seeds of unpredictable blow back effects that mutate the form of and escalate the conflict beyond the control of the hidden hands stoking the cheng to stroke their victims — as it did for the German industrialists in the early 1930s (see Rich's last paragraph).
ONE dirty little secret of the 2010 election is that it won’t be a political tragedy for Democrats if a Tea Party icon like Sharron Angle or Joe Miller ends up in the United States Senate. Angle, now synonymous with racist ads sliming Hispanics, and Miller, already on record threatening a government shutdown, are fired up and ready to go as symbols of G.O.P. extremism for 2012 and beyond.
What’s not so secret is that some Republicans will be just as happy if some of these characters lose, and for the same reason.
Entire article below the line, provides deep insight into reality.
Spies-turned-authors say the agency's admitted ‘systemic failures' in an Afghanistan suicide attack prove their allegations of myriad problems. But one veteran is being sued over his unapproved book.
By Ken Dilanian
Reporting from Washington–When CIA Director Leon Panetta gathered reporters recently to discuss mistakes that allowed a suicide bomber to kill seven personnel in Afghanistan, he didn't mention a separate disclosure the agency made that day: that it had sued a retired officer who wrote an unapproved memoir.
To some CIA veterans, the developments are related in ways that do not reflect well on the agency. An internal investigation blamed the December attack by an Al Qaeda double agent on “systemic failures” in CIA training, management, information sharing and vetting of sources. Former agents have publicly pointed out some of those problems for years, without response by the CIA.
Phi Beta Iota: Any journalist referring to clandestine case officers or operations officers as “agents” is not familiar with the foreign intelligence world. In that world, “agents” commit treason and are generally not US citizens, while case officers (C/O) or operations officers (O/O) spot, assess, recruit, handle, and where necessary, terminate (bonused dismissals) “agents.” Over 300 books have been written critical of US Government secret intelligence, and from those this inexperienced journalists got two right, picked a lightweight drop-out for the third, and overlooked all the others. This journalist also did not do their homework, or they would quickly have found “The Truth on Khost Kathy.”
An interview with legendary historian Lawrence Goodwyn on Obama, the larger currents in our political life, and the possibility of a rebirth in our democratic culture.
What happened to the dream of Barack Obama's transformational politics? There's been very little deviation from the disastrous Bush years on the key issues of war, empire and the distribution of wealth in the country.
I turned to Lawrence Goodwyn, historian of social movements whose books and methods of explaining history have had a profound influence on many of the best known authors, activists and social theorists of our time. Goodwyn's account of the Populist movement, Democratic Promise, is quoted extensively by Howard Zinn in People's History of the United States, and also in William Greider's masterpiece on the Federal Reserve, Secrets of the Temple. You can find Goodwyn quoted in the first paragraph of Bill Moyers' recent book, On Democracy, and cited in just the same way in countless other books and essays.
I interviewed Goodwyn from his home in Durham, North Carolina about the pitfalls of recording American history, Obama's presidency in light of previous presidents, and portents of change in our political culture.
Read Full Long Interview Online….
Contributor John Steiner says:
This is a remarkable, long, worth reading every word interview, in which Goodwyn compares Obama favorably with Lincoln and recounts the history of the financial elites in America. His concluding sentences: ³Strap on your
seat belts, Jan (Frel). The election in 2012 is going to define the meaning of the American idea.
Phi Beta Iota: There are two major flaws with this Democratic Party love-fest: 1) the Democrats are just as corrupt as the Republicans, just more inept; and 2) Obama will not get a second term because he sold out–anyone who had Rahm Emanuel as his “enforcer” and that still has Axelrod as his advisor,while also installing a Goldman Sachs lobbyist as “national security advisor,” is part of the existing system, not its antithesis. Independents and Electoral Reform (13 Steps) will produce the outcome Goodwyn posits, not Obama and not the Democratic Party.
