The world is riveting toward a possible turning point and we hope that you are able to stand with us in this call to action.
We, the undersigned, have co-authored the document noted below. We are now writing to seek your endorsement. Please if you wish to support our statement and are willing to stand in solidarity with us, then, by return of this email, add your name and affiliation to the signatories. As the current global crises have clearly shown, the whole world is waking up to the value of co-creation and harnessing of knowledge from diverse sources, disciplines, experience and expertise.
We plan to publicise this document widely and forward it to many relevant national and international agencies and bodies tasked with formulating new policies for a new type of world economy.
Introduction to P2P and the Commons as the new paradigm of change
When: Sat, December 10, 10am – 11am
To succeed in social change, I believe we need 3 things.
* a genuine mass movement. As the first native movement and great hope of the digital age that is what #ows is all about.
* concrete alternatives that can change our lives and allow us to live our values right now. This is what commons-based peer production provides – a new way of producing value.
* the ability to be able to stop bad policies, and propose new ones that allow alternatives to survive and thrive, for which we need true democratic processes.
A ‘commons’ rather than ‘market state’ orientation is a fruitful way to think about solving humanity’s problems in a new way.
Michel Bauwens is founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives , a global collaborative researching peer production that maps the thousands of p2p projects being created to achieve mutual alignment and a growing counter economy that can co-exist and perhaps even supersede the today’s dysfunctional one. He is also a partner of the Commons Strategies Group which seeks to seed conversations around the new commons paradigm.
US officials confessed on Tuesday that Iranian intelligence forces and Hezbollah have unraveled the CIA’s spy network in Iran and Lebanon and arrested dozens of informants, severely damaging the intelligence agency’s reputation and ability to gather vital information on the two countries at a sensitive time in the region.
A CIA-led program in the Middle East is up in the air after officials confirmed to news organizations today that paid informants in Iran and Lebanon working for the US government have disappeared while attempting to infiltrate Hezbollah.
Steele Sends: For DECADES I and others have been pointing out, in legal, ethical, public terms, the incapacity of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) across all fronts – clandestine operations, covert operations, analysis, administration, and what passes for management, which is merely a conventionally-dressed clown show. We have been called “lunatic fringe,” disgruntled, and worse. The fact of the matter is that I am probably more loyal to the Constitution and more loyal to the Republic and more loyal to the TRUE mission of US Intelligence than anyone now serving. CIA lives immunity, not cover, and that immunity is now over. CIA is incapable of conducting more than a handful of “denied area” clandestine operations, and they are now being confronted with the reality that the entire world is a denied area where they will be held accountable for being inept and where they might even be held accountable for crimes against humanity. Without intelligence and integrity, the US government is nothing more than a front for Congressional looting, and everyone now serving should be deeply ashamed of their role in perpetuating Versailles on the Potomac.
In Passing: I did not want to do a separate post on the reprehensible manner in which CIA is exploiting the death of Mike Spann in Afghanistan. He was totally unqualified to be doing what he was sent to do, and inept CIA managers sent him to his death. When you combine that with Khost Kathy, you get a better appreciation of the utter incompetence, arrogance, hubris, and general pasty-faced bloated psychopathology of CIA management, nowhere more ingained and out of control than in the Directorate of Operations. CIA never had a strong bench to begin with. Today they are, in my view, a danger to themselves and a danger to the Republic.
Footnote: Mike Spann's widow has been in dire financial straits in part because of the self-serving idiocy of CIA managers more interested in putting on a show hiding behind the flag, than in helping her remain employed and sustain her family.
It is becoming increasingly clear that the AF-PAK war will end in yet another grand strategic defeat for the United States. To date, President Obama, has been able to distract attention from this issue, but given the stakes in 2012, that dodge is unlikely to last. Get ready for an ugly debate over “who lost the Afghan War.”
Now compare Cordesman’s systematic, detailed, and workmanlike analysis to the bizarre obscurantism peddled one week later, on 22 November, co-authored by Michael O’Hanlon (Brookings Institution) and former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (American Enterprise Institute) in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, entitled Defining Victory in Afghanistan.
O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz posit the bizarre thesis that the admittedly less than successful outcome against the FARC guerrillas in Columbia is a favorable model for justifying continuing business as usual in Afghanistan. Viewed through the refractions of their Columbian lens, O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz conclude, “Our current exit strategy of reducing American troops to 68,000 by the end of next summer and transferring full security responsibility to Afghan forces by 2014 is working. In a war where the U.S. has demonstrated remarkable strategic patience, we need to stay patient and resolute.”
Are O’Hanlon and Wolfowitz living on the same planet as Cordesman or do they live in some kind of parallel universe?
Invite your attention to pages 5 thru 7 of attached which outlines in very clear terms the likely FY 2013 and longer term impacts on the Department of Defense and the Joint Force of the impending sequester brought about by this week's dereliction of duty on the part of the Senators and Representatives making up the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.
Phi Beta Iota: Panetta-McCain may be the toxic replacment to Cheney-Warner. The letter is without merit. The acquisition system is so broken now the Navy and Army cannot build anything coherently–the Navy still lacks Naval Gun Fire and the Army still lacks an infantry weapon able to out-gun the Taliban, while the Air Force continues to stink at close air support and lack both an intra-theater adequacy of lift and a long-haul heavy lift capability (or the ability to be effective above 6,000 ft). DoD, in short, is a mis-managed mess and Panetta has no idea how to go about fixing that, nor does he want to. Lockheed Martin and others are quite happy with the way things are, where 50% of every dollar is waste but that waste is profit for them because it includes their overhead. It is true that the current laws mandated by Congress make it difficult for any Cabinet Secretary to cut waste–this is the same Congress that mandated we pay 100% asking price for Medicare drugs instead of the more common global standard of 2% for generic wholesale. As long as Congress remains corrupt, and the SecDef remains corrupt, there is no fixing this problem. The FACT is that we have to cut one trillion a year (what we are borrowing), not one trillion over ten years. The FACT is that DoD would be much stronger if it could combine both intelligence and integrity and actually create the four forces after next, at a much reduced cost, that those with intelligence and integrity have been discussing for decades, and with greater intensity, since the mid-1990's.
After today’s column by Justin Raimondo, in “Notes in the Margin,” he recounts some unusual happenings regarding a soldier policeman charged with espionage. But the story gets much stranger with the mention of the Northcomm connection during the recent US Emergency Alert System testing.
Raimondo’s says:
“The strange case of Army Specialist William Millay, a 22-year-old military policeman from Owensboro, Ky., continues to mystify. Millay was arrested and charged with espionage, but the military and the DOJ are keeping their cards pretty close: reports indicate he gave military secrets to a “foreign power,” but the country is not specified. Now we learn that he was nabbed because of emails scooped up by NSA snoops that warned his mother to “prepare for the end of the world.” Associated Content reports:
“Millay had growing concerns over a massive military buildup of NorthCom. This buildup is said to include troops and equipment being shipped in from Afghanistan, Japan and South Korea through the Alaskan base and then to “staging areas” in the US. NorthCom was created on October 1, 2002 after 9/11. NorthCom is charged with protecting the United States homeland in support of local, state, and federal authorities. This support is limited by the Posse Comitatus Act . AFNORTH would take charge of the situation or event in the case of national emergencies, natural or man-made.
“Specialist Millay believed that the redeployment of these tens of thousands of US troops to America was “somehow” related to the November 9 testing of the United States Emergency Alert System (EAS) that is occurring “coincidentally” with a vast number of disaster drills and exercises being planned for the same time period.”
