Very inspiring talk, i listened in silence to him and that doesn’t happen often.
As an ex VN soldier i fully support the generals opinion.
Even after losing his own son in Afghanistan he still firmly believes in his ideals and knows how to express them on a way that is understandable and inspiring to allot of people, i can only say general van Uhm made me proud to be Dutch today, and proud i served in the Dutch armed forces.
Feminist and anti-oppression activists, the human potential movement, and other ongoing organizers and movements for human betterment have played important roles in the emergence and nature of the Occupy movement. (The articles below are just a few examples.) Such movements have been organizing demonstrations, communities and networks and transforming people's consciousness and behavior in one form or another for hundreds of years. They've been training and empowering people and exposing them to the dark side of the social systems they live in and the possibilities for a better world, even as they themselves have become more experienced, aware, and skilled at new ways of living and being together.
Many people became leaders and practitioners of these organizing and transformational skills, forming a dispersed pool of resources for disparate transformational activities over the last many decades. The high purpose, tremendous passion, propitious timing, evocative non-specificity and intense community of OWS attracted a wide variety of these folks to its various centers of activity – the Occupations themselves – and into diverse support, leadership, and teaching roles. And then much was learned, experienced, created, modified… Had there been no past movement activities generating this pool of experience and skill, the Occupy movement would have looked very different indeed. And now the Occupy movement itself has become part of that ongoing learning, deepening, evolving collective experience…
As Occupy encampments are broken up by authorities, various commentators wonder if the movement is falling apart. They forget that through the activities of OWS in the last several months, tens of thousands of people have not only been inspired but have also taken leaps in awareness, experience and skill and that new leaders have emerged and new networks and groups have formed and new questions are being asked by newly focused and empowered citizens. The fact that this development is diffuse and nonlinear does not mean it does not exist. It only means that mainstream eyes will not necessarily recognize the new forms in which it will surface, over and over and over, expanding and adapting as it goes.
As one OWS sign insightfully said – in words whose significance not everyone will grasp – “This is a movement, not a protest.”
I have a feeling we ain't seen nothin' yet…
Blessings on the Journey. It has been a long time.
Here's a scenario from William Buiter (the chief economist at Citi) on what could happen if the EU collapses:
Disorderly sovereign defaults and eurozone exits by all five periphery states would drag down not just the European banking system but also the north Atlantic financial system and the internationally exposed parts of the rest of the global banking system. The resulting financial crisis would trigger a global depression that would last for years, with GDP likely falling by more than 10 per cent and unemployment in the West reaching 20 per cent or more. Emerging markets would be dragged down too.
I have a couple of additions to William's scenario:
We are seeing crisis and depression scenarios like this with regularity now. They are all presented as being on the cusp of occurring. It should be very clear to everyone by now, that something fundamental is wrong with the global system and the crisis de jour is just its symptom. Nobody “in charge” seems to be able to diagnose the real problems with our system.
The solutions being proposed are either a) more confidence (through bailouts) and b) more confidence (through more deficit spending). In other words: the problem is merely psychological and all you and I need to do is take some anti-depressants to eradicate any lingering pessimism (why worry, let's party!). In short: there aren't any real solutions being offered.
None of the bad actors that profit from the behavior that led us into this crisis, either in government or in the financial sector, are held to account. The moral hazard here is so vast, it can (and likely will) swallow the current economic system.
WIM: What does it Mean?
It's very simple. It is almost a certainty that a global economic depression is on its way and there is absolutely nothing you or I can do to stop it (a ballot box solution now would be as effective as replacing the Captain of the Titanic after the ship hit the iceberg). So, what can you and I do? We can take control of our environment. Our objective is to build or buy access to a community that has the resilience to not only help us survive a global depression, but thrive during it. A resilient community that:
Negates the impact of inevitable supply disruptions, rationing, and price spikes.
Protects you from the political violence that will erupt (mobs and police states).
Has a functional local economy that has the potential to network with other functional local economies.
Our veterans in particular, but all citizens generally, are beginning to realize that the US Government as well as State and local governments, are in violation of their constitutional charters more often than might be imagined. Today we begin a new Rolling Update focused on the Constitution of the United States of America, and also start a new Twitter tag. It is our view that respect for the Constitution, and the demand for Electoral Reform, go together.
“A new concept is coming out from the fogs of the present situation: a right to insolvency. We’ll not pay the debt.
The European countries have been obliged to accept the blackmail of debt, but people are refusing the concept that we have to pay for a debt that we have not taken. Anthropologist David Graeber, in his book Debt the first 5000 years, (Melville House, 2011), and philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato, in La fabrique de l’homme endetté (editions Amsterdam, 2011), have started an interesting reflection on the cultural origin of the notion of debt, and the psychic implications of the sense of guilt that the notion of debt brings in itself. And, in his essay, Recurring Dreams The Red Heart of Fascism, the Anglo-Italian young thinker Federico Campagna locates the analogy between the post Versailles Congress years and the present in the debt-obsession:
Phi Beta Iota: Gripping. Mankind is at a philosophical turning point. Organized people are confronting organized money, and the integrity of humanity is in the balance.
Forgoing the plan to build independent floating cities away from chafing laws, some libertarians—led by Milton Friedman’s grandson, no less—have found something better: desperate countries willing to allow the founding of autonomous libertarian cities within their borders.
The seasteader-in-chief is headed ashore. Patri Friedman (that’s Milton Friedman‘s grandson to you), who stepped down as the chief executive of the Peter Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute in August, has resurfaced as the CEO of a new for-profit enterprise named Future Cities Development Inc., which aims to create new cities from scratch (on land this time) governed by “cutting-edge legal systems.” The startup may have found its first taker in Honduras, whose government amended its constitution in January to permit the creation of special autonomous zones exempt from local and federal laws. Future Cities has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to build a city in one such zone starting next year.
. . . . . . .
The brainchild of New York University economist Paul Romer (read his thoughts on FCI here), a charter city combines a host nation’s vacant land (in this case, Honduras) with the legal system and institutions of another (e.g. Canada) and residents drawn from anywhere. Romer’s central insight is that good governance is transplantable—rather than wait for a basket case nation to come around begging, a charter city could help show it the way, as Hong Kong did for Deng Xiaoping.
Phi Beta Iota: The focus on eradicating corruption from day one is most interesting. While the group does not appear to have fully thought through their role as a magnet for criminals, there are regions of Africa, Latin America, and even the now warming Arctic North that could permit this kind of innovation to test its premises.
The Internet isn’t really a technology. It’s a belief system, a philosophy about the effectiveness of decentralized, bottom-up innovation. And it’s a philosophy that has begun to change how we think about creativity itself.
. . . . . .
The ethos of the Internet is that everyone should have the freedom to connect, to innovate, to program, without asking permission. No one can know the whole of the network, and by design it cannot be centrally controlled. This network was intended to be decentralized, its assets widely distributed. Today most innovation springs from small groups at its “edges.”
. . . . . . .
I don’t think education is about centralized instruction anymore; rather, it is the process establishing oneself as a node in a broad network of distributed creativity.
