The US military is responsible for the most egregious and widespread pollution of the planet, yet this information and accompanying documentation goes almost entirely unreported. In spite of the evidence, the environmental impact of the US military goes largely unaddressed by environmental organizations and was not the focus of any discussions or proposed restrictions at the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. This impact includes uninhibited use of fossil fuels, massive creation of greenhouse gases, and extensive release of radioactive and chemical contaminants into the air, water, and soil.
Patrick Meier: Amplifying Somali Voices Here and Now
08 Wild Cards, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Methods & Process, Mobile, Technologies
Amplifying Somali Voices Using SMS and a Live Map: #SomaliaSpeaks
Posted on December 8, 2011 | Leave a comment
[Cross-posted from my post on the Ushahidi blog]
Somalia has been steadily slipping from global media attention over the past few months. The large scale crisis is no longer making headline news, which means that advocacy and lobbying groups are finding it increasingly difficult to place pressure on policymakers and humanitarian organizations to scale their intervention in the Horn of Africa. I recently discussed this issue with Al-jazeera’s Social Media Team whilst in Doha and pitched a project to them which has just gone live this hour.
The joint project combines the efforts of multiple partners including Al-Jazeera, Ushahidi, Souktel, Crowdflower, the African Diaspora Institute and the wider Somali Diaspora. The basis of my pitch to Al-jazeera was to let ordinary Somalis speak for themselves by using SMS to crowdsource their opinions on the unfolding crisis.
. . . . . . .
I am often reminded of what my friend Anand Giridharadasof the New York Times wrote last year vis-a-vis Ushahidi. To paraphrase:
They used to say that history is written by the victors. But today, before the victors win, if they win, there is a chance to scream out with a text message, a text message that will not vanish, a text message that will remain immortalized on a map for the world to bear witness. What would we know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, Germans and Jews, Hutus and Tutsis, if every one of them had had the chance, before the darkness, to declare for all time:
“I was here, and this is what happened to me”?
David Swanson: History of Corporate Personhood — How Lewis Powell & US Chamber of Commerce Bought the US Supreme Court
03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests
The real history of today's excessive corporate power starts with a tobacco lawyer appointed to the Supreme Court.
By Jeffrey Clements, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, AlterNet
The following is an excerpt of Jeffrey Clement's Corporations Are Not People: Why They Have More Rights Than You Do and What You Can Do About It.
In 1971, Lewis Powell, a mild-mannered, courtly, and shrewd corporate lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, soon to be appointed to the United States Supreme Court, wrote a memorandum to his client, the United States Chamber of Commerce. He outlined a critique and a plan that changed America.
Complete excerpt below the line — real history killing real people.
John Robb: Technology, Corruption, & Depressions
03 Economy, 09 Justice, Blog Wisdom, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Methods & Process, Technologies
Technology Shifts and Economic Depression
Joseph Stiglitz (the Nobel prize winning economist) has a great new article: “The Book of Jobs“(behind Vanity Fair's paywall, sorry). In it, he makes a convincing case that the first global depression was caused by a process similar to what we are seeing today (I'm very happy somebody in the social sciences is actually attempting to show how technological change was a driver of the first depression, it's about time). Here it is in a nutshell:first depression, it's about time).
- Technological change in the form of the internal combustion engine (cars, tractors, trucks) improved transportation and farm productivity. This led to an agricultural revolution that impacted a huge percentage of the US population.
- Farm productivity soared and prices dropped. This forced many farmers into bankruptcy and led to a steady migration of people from rural to urban locations driving down incomes/demand.
- The downward pressure on incomes this caused resulted in a protraced economic depression that only ended when the US and Europe mobilized/nationalized every segment of the economy during WW2 (put everyone to work, trained them, etc.).
At this point in the article Stiglitz stumbles.
Continue reading “John Robb: Technology, Corruption, & Depressions”
Penguin: The Heart of Darkness is Empire
01 Poverty, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 10 Transnational Crime, 11 Society, Book Lists, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Military, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy
Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt by Richard Gott – review
The violence at the heart of colonialism is exposed in Richard Gott's history
Richard Drayton
Guardian, 7 December 2011
Amazon Page for Reviewer's Book Nature's Government
“We insisted on reserving the right to bomb niggers.” So David Lloyd George explained the British government's demand at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference to keep the right to bomb for “police purposes in outlying places”. Airpower had shown its value in spreading what Winston Churchill, when defending in 1919 the use of poison gas against “uncivilised tribes”, had called “a lively terror”. Richard Gott shows how a hundred years earlier more hands-on means were used to similar ends: the heads of rebel slaves in Demerara in 1823 and Jamaica in 1831 were cut from their bodies and placed on poles beside the roads. The mutilation of the corpses of the defeated never quite goes out of fashion.
Empires have always depended on violence. Killing, torture and the destruction of property are essential to those tasks of destroying resistance, extracting information and collaboration, and demonstrating dominance that underly all conquest. But it is the privilege of conquerors to tell stories that flatter their own past. It is, thus, rare to find the historians of any imperial power describing the ugly business of the frontier as more than unfortunate exceptions to an otherwise honourable enterprise. Britain is no exception: from the Victorians until the 1950s, its historians mainly saw in the British empire a great engine for diffusing liberty and civilisation to the world. If such Whig piety declined in the era after Suez, later scholars, studying particular places and times, never connected all the episodes of massacres, rebellions and atrocities. Popular historians continued profitably to sell happy stories of the empire to the British public – always marketed as daring revisionist accounts.
Gott's achievement is to show, as no historian has done before, that violence was a central, constant and ubiquitous part of the making and keeping of the British empire.
. . . . . . .
What Gott loses by this focus on resistance, however, is any subtlety in understanding the meanings of collaboration. He repeatedly imposes the lens of 20th-century nationalism, and even anti-fascism, so that those who did not rebel become traitors or “fifth columnists”. He does not examine with care or sympathy the varieties of loyalism, and the motives and experiences of those who chose, however mistakenly, to throw in their lot with the British. Neither does he explore how the economic and technological bases of British power changed between 1750 and 1850. For the revolution that science and industry brought to production, transport, communication and war made Britain able to attract and to extort indigenous collaboration more easily, and changed how the British understood themselves as a nation and their rights in the wider world. The empire was made by more than violence.
See Also:
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Class War (Global)
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Corporate & Transnational Crime
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Empire as Cancer Including Betrayal & Deceit
Mini-Mi: Why is Google Evil? One Blogger’s View
Corruption, IO Impotency
Found and then lost again in cyberspace….a blogger responds to the question, “Why is Google evil?”
1) They are actively collaborating with NSA and CIA
2) They are focused on exploiting all information with zero privacy controls
3) They are a variation of the Microsoft error–they focus on hacking digital trash instead of empowering humans to make sense–Microsoft focused on “owning” the desktop while shutting out all third party vendors of sense-making through Application Program Interfaces (API) that served as toll booths.
4) They are not open source. I cannot stress this enough. Entire governments (Norway, China) are understanding this now. If it is not open source, it is not suitable for the public domain.
Josh Kilbourn: Trampling the Bill of Rights
09 Justice, 11 Society, Corruption, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement
Found this provocative in its detail.
Guest Post – “Trampling The Bill of Rights”
Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 4:19 pm
I think we can all agree that this best thing about this site is the collective knowledge and wisdom of its members. As such, last week I commissioned “CaliforniaLawyer” to research and author a “guest post” that would deal with the travesty and threat that is the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Fortunately for us, he obliged and his work is presented below.
“All Hail King Obama [Gingrich, Romney, et al.] – New National Defense Authorization Act Renders Constitutional Bill of Rights Mere “Tradition”
Is anyone concerned about the lawlessness and unconstitutionality of the movement to grant the President the power to detain, without trial or representation or due process of law, any citizen that is capriciously perceived to represent a threat to the United States?
Mr. Ferguson is. I am. I know you are, too.
Let’s get right to the issue. The authors of this bill claim that the bill would not enlarge the universe of detainees eligible for indefinite detention in military custody. FALSE. The current Authorization for Use of Military Force, that is, the OLD LAW, confines the universe to persons implicated in the 9/11 attacks or who harbored those who were. The detainee provision in the NEW LAW would expand the universe to include any person said to be “part of” or “substantially” supportive of al-Qaida or Taliban.
Read full analysis with many links.
See Also:
