Communities of Practice – Page 729 – Public Intelligence Blog

300 Million Talons... — 300 Million Talons…

Why We're Stuck with a Bubble Economy (December 9, 2013)

Inflating serial asset bubbles is no substitute for rising real incomes.

Why are we stuck with an economy that only generates serial credit/asset bubbles that crash with catastrophic consequences? Ths answer is actually fairly straightforward.

Let's start with the ideal conditions for an economy that depends on consumer spending.

1. Rising real income, i.e. after adjusting for inflation/currency depreciation, wages/salaries have more purchasing power every year.

2. An expanding pool of new households, i.e. young people who move away from home or graduate from college, get a job and start their own household. New households buy homes, vehicles, furniture, appliances, kitchenware, tools, etc., driving consumption far more than established households.

Neither of these conditions apply to today's economy. Income for the bottom 90% has been stagnant for forty years, and has declined 7% in real terms since 2000.

Read full article with more graphics.

Continue reading “Eagle: Charles Hugh Smith on Bubble Economy – Starting with the Assassination of JFK”

2013/12/10

4th Media: Group of Thirty created in 1913 as a response to “the Populist assault on the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of few.”

03 Economy, 11 Society, Commerce, Corruption

Global Power Project: The Group of Thirty and the “Good Discussion” They’re Still Having

Dec 9th, 2013 @ 12:57 pm › Kiyul Chung

The Group of Thirty (or G-30) describes itself as “a private, nonprofit, international body composed of very senior representatives of the private and public sectors and academia,” which “aims to deepen understanding of international economic and financial issues, to explore the international repercussions of decisions taken in the public and private sectors, and to examine the choices available to market practitioners and policymakers.”

Its membership consists of roughly thirty major figures in the global financial world, from central banks, academia, international institutions and major private financial institutions. These figures hold regular meetings, conduct research and produce highly-influential reports through various “working groups,” providing a forum for top policy makers and private sector market “actors” to meet and hold discussions, while helping shape consensus and give recommendations to policy makers on issues of finance and governance.

This institution, though not widely discussed, is enormously influential. And here’s why.

The history of the Group of Thirty goes back to the Rockefeller Foundation, which provided the organization’s initial funding. In its 1978 annual report, the Rockefeller Foundation – which represents the interests of highly centralized corporate and financial power – recalled that it was created in 1913 as a response to “the Populist assault on the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of few.” (Annual Report, 1978, Rockefeller Foundation.)

Continue reading “4th Media: Group of Thirty created in 1913 as a response to “the Populist assault on the massive concentration of wealth in the hands of few.””

2013/12/092013/12/09

Stephen Lendman: Mandela’s Disturbing Legacy

01 Poverty, 02 Infectious Disease, 03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Government

On December 5, Mandela died peacefully at home in Johannesburg. Cause of death was respiratory failure. He was 95.

Supporters called him a dreamer of big dreams. His legacy fell woefully short. More on that below.

“The ANC has never at any period of its history advocated a revolutionary change in the economic structure of the country, nor has it, to the best of my recollection, ever condemned capitalist society.”

In 1964, he was sentenced to life in prison. He was mostly incarcerated on Robben Island. It’s in Table Bay. It’s around 7km offshore from Cape Town.

In February 1990, he was released. In 1993, he received the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with South African President FW de Klerk.

Nobel Committee members said it was “for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa.”

De Klerk enforced the worst of apartheid ruthlessness. In 1994, Mandela was elected president. He served from May 1994 – June 1999.

He exacerbated longstanding economic unfairness. He deserves condemnation, not praise.

John Pilger’s work exposed South African apartheid harshness. Doing so got him banned. Thirty years later he returned.

He wanted to see firsthand what changed. He interviewed Mandela in retirement. His “Apartheid Did Not Die” documentary followed.

Continue reading “Stephen Lendman: Mandela's Disturbing Legacy”

2013/12/082013/12/09

Marcus Aurelius: Tom Ricks on Shrinking the US Military

Ethics, Military, Peace Intelligence

In article below, Ricks is oversimplistic. Quality may be more important than quantity, but a certain amount of quantity is essential. We may not have months available for a buildup as in ODS/S and OIF. Capability and capacity are both required.)

To improve the U.S. military, shrink it

By Thomas E. Ricks

Washington Post, December 6, 2013

Thomas E. Ricks is an adviser on national security at the New America Foundation, where he participates in its “Future of War” project. A former Post reporter, he has written five books about the U.S. military, most recently “The Generals: American Military Command From World War II to Today.”

Want a better U.S. military? Make it smaller. The bigger the military, the more time it must spend taking care of itself and maintaining its structure as it is, instead of changing with the times. And changing is what the U.S. military must begin to do as it recovers from the past decade’s two wars.

For example, the Navy recently christened the USS Gerald R. Ford , an aircraft carrier that cost perhaps $13.5 billion. Its modern aspects include a smaller crew, better radar and a different means of launching aircraft, but it basically looks like the carriers the United States has built for the past half-century. And that means it has a huge “radar signature,” making it highly visible. That could be dangerous in an era of global satellite imagery and long-range precision missiles, neither of which existed when the Ford’s first predecessors were built. As Capt. Henry Hendrix, a naval historian and aviator, wrote this year, today’s carrier, like the massive battleships that preceded it, is “big, expensive, vulnerable — and surprisingly irrelevant to the conflicts of the time.” What use is a carrier if the missiles that can hit it have a range twice as long as that of the carrier’s aircraft?

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Tom Ricks on Shrinking the US Military”

2013/12/082013/12/09

Patrick Cockburn: Saudi Arabia Funds Terrorism & Mass Murder — USG Silent & Therefore Complicit [While Also Approving $4B to “Train & Equip” Saudi National Guard]

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Transnational Crime, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Peace Intelligence

Mass murder in the Middle East is funded by our friends the Saudis

World View: Everyone knows where al-Qa'ida gets its money, but while the violence is sectarian, the West does nothing

Patrick Cockburn

The Independent, Sunday 8 December 2013

Donors in Saudi Arabia have notoriously played a pivotal role in creating and maintaining Sunni jihadist groups over the past 30 years. But, for all the supposed determination of the United States and its allies since 9/11 to fight “the war on terror”, they have showed astonishing restraint when it comes to pressuring Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies to turn off the financial tap that keeps the jihadists in business.

Continue reading “Patrick Cockburn: Saudi Arabia Funds Terrorism & Mass Murder — USG Silent & Therefore Complicit [While Also Approving $4B to “Train & Equip” Saudi National Guard]”

2013/12/082013/12/08

Berto Jongman: David Ignatius Pimps “Fresh Approach” by Second String Prefects

Corruption, Government, Ineptitude

A fresh approach to looking at foreign threats

By David Ignatius,

Washington Post, December 6, 2013

The chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees stated last weekend that the world was getting more unsafe. A few days later, the Pew Research Center reported that 52 percent of Americans think the U.S. should “mind its own business internationally,” the highest such total in the nearly 50-year history of that query. Taken together, these two items symbolize a serious emerging national problem. The crackup ahead lies in the mismatch between the challenges facing America and the public’s willingness to support activist foreign policy to deal with them. Simply put: There is a splintering of the traditional consensus for global engagement at the very time that some big new problems are emerging

. . . . . . . .

A modest proposal is that Obama should convene a younger group of American leaders: strategists, technologists, professors. It would be a learning exercise — to understand how the country should deal with the problems of the next 10 years without making the mistakes of the past 10. What has America learned from its struggles with Islamic extremism? What lessons do we take from our painful expeditionary wars? How can Americans too young to remember the Iranian revolution of 1979 engage that country, but also set clear limits on its behavior?

Happily, a new generation of thinkers could form the bipartisan group I’m imagining. If you don’t know their names yet, you should: Marc Lynch of George Washington University, known to his online fans as “Abu Aardvark”; David Kilcullen, one of the architects of counterinsurgency success in Iraq and author of “Out of the Mountains,” an iconoclastic new book on future urban conflicts; Michèle Flournoy, a clear-eyed former undersecretary of defense; and Jared Cohen and Alec Ross, two technological wizards who advised the State Department under Hillary Clinton and are now with Google and Johns Hopkins University, respectively. I’d add the administration’s own Salman Ahmed , Tony Blinken , Ben Rhodes , Wendy Sherman and Jake Sullivan .

What encourages me is that the same American public that wants the United States to mind its own business internationally also registers a two-thirds majority in favor of greater U.S. involvement in the global economy, according to the Pew poll. Young respondents were even more internationalist on this issue than their elders.

Read full opinion.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: David Ignatius Pimps “Fresh Approach” by Second String Prefects”

2013/12/08

Penguin: Fabuius Maximus on Failure to Learn

Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Peace Intelligence

PART I: Keep fighting! We must not learn from our wars.

Summary: We were ejected from Iraq, gaining nothing we sought. No oil, no ally against Iran, no unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East. All but the mad hawks realize we gained nothing in Afghanistan. Now comes the post-game show, as our military’s boosters attempt to fog our vision and erase our memories, preparing us for more wars. The truth is out there, if only we would make an effort to see.

Contents

We lose because we’re ignorant of history and refuse to learn
Bitter fruit from our failure to learn
The history of counterinsurgency by foreign armies, a history of failure
A more detailed explanation of why foreign armies fail at COIN
For More Information
A closing note from Friedrich Schiller

PART II: Well-funded organizations inciting us to hate & fear, again. How gullible are we?

Summary: Today we examine yet another example of agitprop by well-funded organizations inciting hatred of Muslims in America. Will we fall for this, again? A divided and fearful people are an easily led flock, a gift to their rulers. Please push back against this propaganda, and those that believe it. Being sheep is a choice.

Continue reading “Penguin: Fabuius Maximus on Failure to Learn”