The Associated Press Board of Directors today directed The Associated Press to create a news registry that will tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use. The system will register key identifying information about each piece of content that AP distributes as well as the terms of use of that content, and employ a built-in beacon to notify AP about how the content is used.
It won't work.
It removes value.
It's a waste of AP resources.
See the more detailed commentary by clicking on the logo above.
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Tom Atlee
Dear friends,
Paul Hawken is author of a number of remarkable books whose titles alone contribute to our thinking — titles like SEVEN TOMORROWS, THE ECOLOGY OF COMMERCE, NATURAL CAPITALISM and BLESSED UNREST. Several
years ago he founded a vast, remarkable, interactive database of, by, and for change agents — WISER Earth http://wiserearth.org. He has a uniquely potent clarity about what is happening in the world, what is
needed, and who can do the job (surprise: It's us!). His passionate clarity was called forth recently in a commencement address he gave in Portland, Oregon (see below).
I sometimes suggest that things are getting better and better and worse and worse faster and faster. Paul mirrors these thoughts: “When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.”
He identifies a biological fact that provides perhaps the most important guidance for our individual lives and the conscious evolution of civilization: “Life creates the conditions that are conducive to life.”
Wait a minute… “Life creates the conditions that are conducive to life.” That's a Really Big Idea. It goes by really fast, but it covers a LOT of ground.
Someday take this idea for a walk and see how many ways you can think of that we do (or don't) “create conditions that are conducive to life”. Then ponder all the ways we COULD create such conditions more wisely, for more of life. Then perhaps reflect on what this biological reality tells us about who and how we are in the world:
To the extent we “create conditions that are conducive to life”, we are alive, we are serving life, we are part of Life and the way Life is unfolding on this planet — a newly conscious part of the way Life has been evolving here for four billion years…
That takes me to the importance of system-level change — initiatives that seek to transform our cultural stories, institutions and practices… that create wiser measures of success, health and value… that develop forms of power, organization, and decision- making that tap into the best of who we are when we are most alive and connected, individually and collectively. Think about how profoundly such changes impact the conditions that are conducive to life — in our own lives and in the natural world. System conditions are the cultural equivalent of climate: They influence everything at once.
Hawken goes on to say that “Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich.” He wonders, “What we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years.” And imagines that “No one would sleep that night.” Then he suggests we are living in the midst of such a miraculous moment: “This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years.”
And he suggests that we — embodied in the hundreds of new college graduates sitting before him — wake up to “the most amazing, challenging, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation.” He invites all of us to grab this most amazing opportunity and run with it.
He invites a new “generation” to generate what's needed to create the world anew.
Blessings on the Journey.
Coheartedly,
Tom
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Paul Hawken
Click on the photograph to go to the commencement address.
Antiwar.com
July 21, 2009 by Kelley B. Vlahos Listen closely and you can hear the slow release of hot air. There’s a leak somewhere, and it appears to be coming from the giant red, white, and blue balloon set aloft some months ago by the counterinsurgency experts who convinced everyone in Washington that Afghanistan was one “graveyard of empires” that could be resurrected for the good of the world.
In fact, anxiety over the latest major U.S. offensive in Afghanistan is increasing among military officials and policymakers every day, sources tell us. News reports coming in from Helmand province and repeated public complaints from American and British leaders bear that out.
And the story is this: in order for so-called “population centric” counterinsurgency to work in a place as vast and geographically unrelenting as Afghanistan, there must be a lot of counterinsurgents (more than 600,000, according to the current Army counterinsurgency manual). Right now, there is a lid on the number of coalition forces approved for the mission, and worse, there are pathetically few Afghan troops and police available to do the most important work, which is to collaborate with the foreign forces to fight the Taliban and successfully hold areas on behalf of the Afghan government over the long term.
Even as 10,000 Marines pushed into the Hindu Kush bearing the talisman of David Petraeus and his patented COIN doctrine this month, it was clear to top U.S. commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal that something was amiss.
“The key to this is Afghan responsibility to the fight,” he told the New York Times on July 15. “As a team we are better.”
His anonymous lieutenants were much blunter. “There are not enough Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police for our forces to partner with in operations … and that gap will exist into the coming years even with the planned growth already budgeted for,” an unnamed U.S. military official told the Washington Post four days earlier.
Click on photo above for complete story. See also our reviews of:
Tech's inroads to a “global society” will influence its governance, Mr Brown said
By Jonathan Fildes
Technology reporter, BBC News, Oxford
Technology means that foreign policy will never be the same again, the prime minister said at a meeting of leading thinkers in Oxford.
The power of technology – such as blogs – meant that the world could no longer be run by “elites”, Mr Brown said.
Policies must instead be formed by listening to the opinions of people “who are blogging and communicating with people around the world”, he said.
Mr Brown's comments came during a surprise appearance at TED Global.
“That in my view gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world,” he told the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.
“Foreign policy can never be the same again.”
Global change
The prime minister talked about the power of technology to unite the world and offer ways to solve some of its most pressing problems.
He said that issues such as climate change could not be solved alone, adding that digital technology offered a way to create a “global society”.
“ You can't deal with environmental problems through the existing institutions ”
Gordon Brown
“Massive changes in technology have allowed the possibility of people linking up around the world,” he said.
In particular, he said, digital communications offered the possibility of finding common ground “with people we will never meet”.
“We have the means to take collective action and take collective action together.”
He talked about recent events in Iran and Burma and how the global community – using blogs and technologies such as Twitter – was able to bring events to widespread attention.
He also highlighted the role of technology in recent elections in Zimbabwe.
“Because people were able to take mobile phone photographs of what was happening at polling stations, it was impossible for [Robert Mugabe] to fix that election in the way that he wanted to do.”
But Mr Brown also stressed the need to create new organisations to tackle environmental, financial, development and security problems.
“We are the first generation to be able to do this,” he told the conference. “We shouldn't lose the chance.”
He said that older institutions founded after the Second World War, such as the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund, were now “out of date”.
“You can't deal with environmental problems through the existing institutions,” he told the conference.
The full article [click on AltNet] should be must reading to any one interested in understanding the Federal Reserve Board's sinister relationship with the Banksters who, after having done such great damage to the economy, are now laying the long-term foundation for a corporatist — purists might say neo-fascist — state which, if left unchecked, might even evolve into an American variant of the zaibatsu that controlled the economic and foreign policy of the Empire of Japan. CS
The financial crisis has propelled the Federal Reserve into an excruciating political dilemma. The Fed is at the zenith of its influence, using its extraordinary powers to rescue the economy. Yet the extreme irregularity of its behavior is producing a legitimacy crisis for the central bank. The remote technocrats at the Fed who decide money and credit policy for the nation are deliberately opaque and little understood by most Americans. For the first time in generations, they are now threatened with popular rebellion.
During the past year, the Fed has flooded the streets with money — distributing trillions of dollars to banks, financial markets and commercial interests — in an attempt to revive the credit system and get the economy growing again. As a result, the awesome authority of this cloistered institution is visible to many ordinary Americans for the first time. People and politicians are shocked and confused, and also angered, by what they see. They are beginning to ask some hard questions for which Federal Reserve governors do not have satisfactory answers.
Where did the central bank get all the money it is handing out? Basically, the Fed printed it, out of thin air. That is what central banks do. Who told the Fed governors they could do this? Nobody, really — not Congress or the president. The Federal Reserve Board, alone among government agencies, does not submit its budgets to Congress for authorization and appropriation. It raises its own money, sets its own priorities.
Representative Wright Patman, the Texas populist who was a scourge of central bankers, once described the Federal Reserve as “a pretty queer duck.”Congress created the Fed in 1913 with the presumption that it would be “independent” from the rest of government, aloof from regular politics and deliberately shielded from the hot breath of voters or the grasping appetites of private interests — with one powerful exception: the bankers.
The Fed was designed as a unique hybrid in which government would share its powers with the private banking industry. Bankers collaborate closely on Fed policy. Banks are the “shareholders” who ostensibly own the twelve regional Federal Reserve banks. Bankers sit on the boards of directors, proposing interest-rate changes for Fed governors in Washington to decide. Bankers also have a special advisory council that meets privately with governors to critique monetary policy and management of the economy. Sometimes, the Fed pretends to be a private organization. Other times, it admits to being part of the government.
The antiquated quality of this institution is reflected in the map of the Fed's twelve regional banks.
Five of them are located in the Midwest (better known today as the industrial Rust Belt).
Missouri has two Federal Reserve banks (St. Louis and Kansas City), while
the entire West Coast has only one (located in San Francisco, not Los Angeles or Seattle).
Virginia has one; Florida does not.
Among its functions, the Federal Reserve directlyregulates the largest banks, but it also looks out for their well-being — providing regular liquidity loans for those caught short and bailing out endangered banks it deems “too big to fail.” Critics look askance at these peculiar arrangements and see “conspiracy.” But it's not really secret. This duck was created by an act of Congress. The Fed's favoritism toward bankers is embedded in its DNA.
This awkward reality explains the dilemma facing the Fed. It cannot stand too much visibility, nor can it easily explain or justify its peculiar status.
Fed chair Ben Bernanke responded with the usual aloofness. An audit, he insisted, would amount to “a takeover of monetary policy by the Congress.” He did not appear to recognize how arrogant that sounded. Congress created the Fed, but it must not look too deeply into the Fed's private business. The mystique intimidates many politicians. The Fed's power depends crucially upon the people not knowing exactly what it does.
President Obama inadvertently made the political problem worse for the Fed in June, when he proposed to make the central bank the supercop to guard against “systemic risk” and decide the terms for regulating the largest commercial banks and some heavyweight industrial corporations engaged in finance. The House Financial Services Committee intends to draft the legislation quickly, but many members want to learn more first. Obama's proposal gives the central bank even greater power, including broad power to pick winners and losers in the private economy and behind closed doors.Yet Obama did not propose any changes in the Fed's privileged status. Instead, he asked Fed governors to consider the matter. But perhaps it is the Federal Reserve that needs to be reformed.
Six reasons why granting the Fed even more power is a really bad idea:
1. It would reward failure. Like the largest banks that have been bailed out, the Fed was a co-author of the destruction.
2. Cumulatively, Fed policy was a central force in destabilizing the US economy.
3. The Fed cannot possibly examine “systemic risk” objectively because it helped to create the very structural flaws that led to breakdown.
4. The Fed can't be trusted to defend the public in its private deal-making with bank executives. The numerous revelations ofcollusion have shocked the public, and more scandals are certain if Congress conducts a thorough investigation.
5. Instead of disowning the notorious policy of “too big to fail,” the Fed will be bound to embrace the doctrine more explicitly as “systemic risk” regulator.
6. This road leads to the corporate state — a fusion of private and public power, a privileged club that dominates everything else from the top down.
Whatever good intentions the central bank enunciates, it will be deeply conflicted in its actions, always pulled in opposite directions.
Obama's reform might prevail in the short run. The biggest banks, after all, will be lobbying alongside him in favor of the Fed, and Congress may not have the backbone to resist.The Fed, however, is sure to remain in the cross hairs. Too many different interests will be damaged —
thousands of smaller banks,
all the companies left out of the club,
organized labor,
consumers and
other sectors,
not to mention libertarian conservatives like Texas Representative Ron Paul.
The obstacles to democratizing the Fed are obviously formidable. Tampering with the temple is politically taboo. But this crisis has demonstrated that the present arrangement no longer works for the public interest. The society of 1913 no longer exists, nor does the New Deal economic order that carried us to twentieth-century prosperity. The country thus has a rare opportunity to reconstitute the Federal Reserve as a normal government agency, shorn of the bankers' preferential trappings and the fallacious claim to “independent” status as well as the claustrophobic demand for secrecy.
Progressives in the early twentieth century, drawn from the growing ranks of managerial professionals, believed “good government” required technocratic experts who would be shielded from the unruly populace and especially from radical voices of organized labor, populism, socialism and other upstart movements. The pretensions of “scientific” decision-making by remote governing elites — both the mysterious wisdom of central bankers and the inventive wizardry of financial titans — failed spectacularly in our current catastrophe. The Fed was never independent in any real sense. Its power depended on taking care of its one true constituency in banking and finance.
The reform of monetary policy, in other words, has promising possibilities for revitalizing democracy. Congress is a human institution and therefore fallible. Mistakes will be made, for sure. But we might ask ourselves, If Congress were empowered to manage monetary policy, could it do any worse than those experts who brought us to ruin?
Its Afghan war spelt disaster for the USSR and now Nato is making the same mistakes
Victor Sebestyen
The Sunday Times [UK]
July 19, 2009
“There is barely an important piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another,” the commander said. “Nevertheless, much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centres, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory that we seize.”
He added: “Our soldiers are not to blame. They’ve fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land, where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills.”
They could have been the words of a Nato general in the past few days. In fact they were spoken by Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, commander of Soviet armed forces, to the USSR’s politburo in the Kremlin on November 13, 1986.
The Soviet forces were in the seventh year of their nine-year war in Afghanistan and had lost about 12,000 men.Akhromeyev, a hero of the siege of Leningrad in the second world war, had been summoned to explain why a force of 109,000 troops from the world’s second superpower appeared to be humiliated, year after year, by a band of terrorists.
Akhromeyev explained about the rough terrain, insisted the army needed more resources – including additional helicopters – and warned that without more men and equipment “this war will continue for a very long time”.
He concluded with words that sound uncannily resonant today, in the eighth year of Nato’s war: “About 99% of the battles and skirmishes that we fought in Afghanistan were won by our side. The problem is that the next morning there is the same situation as if there had been no battle. The terrorists are again in the village where they were – or we thought they were – destroyed a day or so before.”
The Soviet campaign in Afghanistan is a largely forgotten war. Few strategists from Russia or the West seem to think anything can be learnt from it. But study Soviet archives and many lessons become clear.
As the world was not watching, the Soviet troops could be brutal, yet massive air raids and the destruction of villages, which killed 800,000 Afghans, did not work. Tactics changed over the years, each time accompanied by a “surge” of new troops that temporarily improved security for the Russian-backed communist government in Kabul.
Much of the fighting was in places that have become familiar to us. Soviet troops were sent on sweeps in the most troublesome areas on the border with Pakistan, through which most of the guerrillas’ weapons flowed, and the southern provinces of the country, such as Helmand. As soon as they left their fortified bases, the troops were in danger of ambush from bands of mujaheddin – the army of God.
That war, like today’s, was characterised by disputes between soldiers and politicians. As newly revealed Russian documents show, the Communist party bosses ordered the invasion against the advice of senior commanders. This caused continual friction in Moscow for many years.
Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, the chief of the Soviet defence staff, and Akhromeyev, his number two, raised doubts shortly before Soviet forces were dispatched on Christmas Day 1979. They suggested to Dmitri Ustinov, the defence minister, that the experiences of the British and tsarist armies in the 19th century should encourage caution.
Ustinov told them to “shut up and obey orders”, according to politburo minutes.
Ogarkov went further up the chain of command to Leonid Brezhnev, the party boss. He warned that an invasion “could mire us in unfamiliar, difficult conditions and would align the entire Islamic East against us”. He was cut off in mid-sentence.
“Focus on military matters,” he was told. “Leave the policy making to us and to the party.” Not long afterwards the marshal was fired.
The Soviet troops realised soon after they entered Afghanistan that they had blundered, but Kremlin officials felt trapped. When Mikhail Gorbachev became leader in March 1985 he declared privately that ending the war – “our bleeding wound” – was his priority. But he could not do so for fear of losing too much face. Withdrawing the troops took a further four years as they searched for that difficult prize for armies on the run: peace with honour.
It was an agonising process that marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire and eventually the USSR itself. “How to get out of this racks one’s brains,” Gorbachev despaired to his fellow Soviet magnates in the spring of 1986. He told his generals later that year: “After all this time we have not learnt how to wage war there.”
When the last troops left on February 15, 1989, about 15,000 of their comrades had been killed. It was the only war the USSR lost. To Gorbachev, one vital issue was how to “spin” it correctly. As he wrote to his key aides during the last phase of the retreat, presentation was key: “We must say that our people have not given their lives in vain,” he said.
– Victor Sebestyen is the author of Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, to be published on July 30 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Tom Atlee's research and thought innovations span from the conscious evolution of social systems to collaborative dynamics to a host of other ideas centering on group, social and political dynamics. He has worked with a number of leading authors on their books including ‘Awakening: The Upside of Y2K'. More recently Tom Atlee has been exploring and writing about collective dynamics.
Tom is one of the 8 US Collective Intelligence leaders, one of 25 (or more) global leaders of collective intelligence and bottom-up deliberative dialog democracy. He received the Golden Candle Award at OSS'04.
OSS '04: To Tom Atlee, founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute, for his sustained leadership in the vanguard of an informed democracy.His book, The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World that Worlds for All is in the best traditions of Thomas Jefferson, who said “A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry.”
It can safely be said that he has had more influence than any other person on the migration of the original Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) movement away from serving governments and toward achieving its righteous role as public intelligence in the public interest.
