The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Phi Beta Iota: We cannot say enough good things about these folks. This is righteous good stuff–eight times cheaper than industrial offerings, virtually no “true cost” externalities, interchangeable parts, human scale, the whole enchilada.
Tip of the Hat to Brandin Watson at Facebook.
Venezuela- US: For the record. The Caracas government seized two factories owned by U.S.-based glass maker Owens Illinois, because it caused “environmental damage and exploited workers,” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on 25 October. Today Venezuelan soldiers took possession of the factories.
Venezuela-Middle East: President Chavez said his government and Libya are creating a $1 billion joint investment fund to pay for projects the two countries will pursue together, according to a report by The Associated Press. Chavez also announced a $100 million joint fund with Syria, which will be used on projects such as aid in the construction of an oil refinery and to establish an olive oil processing plant.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: Chavez invariably goes out of his way to make questionable deals with countries that tend to have strained relations with the US. None of his new allies are in a position to help Venezuela in the event of trouble, which calls into question the wisdom of the investments, the utility of the associations and the soundness of Chavez' judgment.
Phi Beta Iota: We beg to differ with our esteemed colleague. The US is so over-extended in its elective wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq as to call into question its ability to be effective anywhere else, including against Somali pirates. Furthermore, the passing of time and the accumulation of public knowledge has a “truth” effect that may not lead to reconciliation but will lead to more and more expropriation of ill-gotten gains by predatory capitalists who in the past were able to call in the US Marines to enforce unethical, illegal, and unjust seizures of property. Just as Australia is now getting serious about Native Title, so also is the rest of the Southern Hemisphere going to get serious about expropriating back into indigenous possession those lands acquired through illicit or unethical means.
The next President, and the next Director of National Intelligence (DNI), are going to have to lead a 180 degree change in how the US “does” intelligence. Instead of producing 4% “at best,” the DNI is going to have to lead the integration of education, intelligence, and research so as to meet 96% “at worst” of the needs of the Nation in both restoring domestic prosperity and in achieving truth & reconciliation abroad. Absent such a redirection, the US will not survive in its present form to 2025…in our always humble opinion. This will require leaders with integrity who place the public interest foremost.
Review: War is a Racket–The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier
Review: Open Veins of Latin America–Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
Review: SAVAGE CAPITALISM AND THE MYTH OF DEMOCRACY–Latin America in the Third Millennium
Review: Killing Hope–U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II-Updated Through 2003
Review: Overthrow–America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (Hardcover)
Poor Goebbels, if only he had access to DVDs and the internet, he could have run a fear mongering operation as effective as the one described so brilliantly by Pam Martens here (also attached below) — a thought which suggests a question: Is 21st Century American Crony Capitalism merely a way station on the road to real fascism (as distinguished from the oxymoronic soundbyte of Islamofascism)? After all, in addition to fear mongering, Mussolini and Hitler enlisted the corporate class to weaken the working class to gain and retain power. To wit, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica:
Mussolini, banned all Marxist organizations and replaced their trade unions with government-controlled corporatist unions. Until he instituted a war economy in the mid-1930s, Mussolini allowed industrialists to run their companies with a minimum of government interference. Despite his former anticapitalist rhetoric, he cut taxes on business, permitted cartel growth, decreed wage reduction, and rescinded the eight-hour-workday law. Between 1928 and 1932 real wages in Italy dropped by almost half. Mussolini admitted that the standard of living had fallen but stated that “fortunately the Italian people were not accustomed to eating much and therefore feel the privation less acutely than others.”
Although Hitler claimed that the Nazi Party was more “socialist” than its conservative rivals, he opposed any Marxist-inspired nationalization of major industries. On May 2, 1933, he abolished all free trade unions in Germany, and his minister of labour, Robert Ley, later declared that it was necessary “to restore absolute leadership to the natural leader of the factory, that is, the employer.” Nazi “anticapitalism,” such as it was, was aimed primarily at Jewish capitalism; non-Jewish capitalists were allowed to keep their companies and their wealth, a distinction that was made in the Nazi Party's original program and never changed. Although Hitler reduced unemployment in Germany, most German workers were forced to toil for lower wages and longer hours and under worse conditions than had been the case during the Weimar Republic. His solution to the unemployment problem also depended on the recruitment of thousands of men into the military.
But of course any analogy to the United States is absurd. After all, since 1980, deregulation, union busting, a lower standard of living, lower wages, longer working hours, and using of the military and its industrial complex as a jobs program have not been accompanied by a rise in the politics of fear in the United States. … Oops.
There is one difference however, given Congress's and the Supreme Court's supine complicity in promoting these trends (by representing the interests of the Crony Capitalists at the expense of the masses), the President will not need a Reichstag Fire to keep the program moving.
October 26, 2010
Koch Footprints Lead to Political Powder Keg
The Far Right's Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive
By PAM MARTENS
Counterpunch
A secretive libertarian nonprofit with ties to Charles Koch bankrolled what was widely perceived to be a fear mongering effort to throw the Presidential election to Senator John McCain in 2008. Until now, where the money came from has been a hotly debated mystery.
Seven weeks before the Presidential election of 2008, approximately 100 newspapers and magazines in the U.S., including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, and St. Petersburg Times, distributed millions of DVDs of the documentary, “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West.” The DVDs were included in the Sunday editions. Altogether, including a separate direct mail campaign, 28 million DVDs flooded households in the swing voter states.
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CounterPunch can now report what this race-baiting, fear-mongering campaign cost and where the money, at least nominally, came from…..
The author of attached article in the Guardian, George Monbiot is a pious Global Warming enthusiast. He probably despises the Koch brothers because they are funding anti-global warming efforts. But setting the writer's biases aside, as well as his somewhat condescending tone, his report (which is based primarily on the New Yorker’s brilliant expose of the Koch brothers and the new documentary “(Astro)Turf Wars,”) is an excellent summary of how behind-the-scene manipulators are funding the Tea Party movement and are shaping and energizing the Orientation of Tea Party’s collective OODA loop — i.e., the lens thru which its members Observe the world, interpret their all-to-real problems, provides focus to their anger, and thereby shapes the Decisions guiding their Actions.
The strategic leverage gained by shaping a group's Orientation ought be self-evident at this point: it unleashes and focuses the free-wheeling energy of the individuals to enthusiastically work together for the well being of others without requiring the coercive and ultimately revealing and self-defeating effects of top-down control.
The following quote (near end of article) provides an excellent statement of the strategic aim guiding those shaping efforts.
“Most of these bodies call themselves “free-market thinktanks”, but their trick – as (Astro)Turf Wars points out – is to conflate crony capitalism with free enterprise, and free enterprise with personal liberty. Between them they have constructed the philosophy that informs the Tea Party movement: its members mobilise for freedom, unaware that the freedom they demand is freedom for corporations to trample them into the dirt.”
On the other hand, any strategy grounded in deception must be wrapped in a protective cloak of ambiguity, because a deception builds into the OODA loops of the ‘deceived' the seeds of a crucial vulnerability: Once the ambiguity is penetrated, and the scam is exposed and its effects appreciated, the Orientation of the ‘deceived' will flip and their rage will be energized and focused on the deceivers by the desire for vengeance. Which is why the passive or active connivance of the mainstream media in the US (most of which is owned by crony capitalists) in supporting the manipulation is central to keeping the game going.
The Tea Party movement: deluded and inspired by billionaires
By funding numerous rightwing organisations, the mega-rich Koch brothers have duped millions into supporting big business
guardian.co.uk, Monday 25 October 2010 20.15 BST
The Tea Party movement is remarkable in two respects. It is one of the biggest exercises in false consciousness the world has seen – and the biggest Astroturf operation in history. These accomplishments are closely related.
A “must read” piece of solid British analysis….
Phi Beta Iota: A new set of unwitting fools–no offense intended, but that's the story….those elected under the Tea Party banner will caucus with the Republicans, and that is the truth-teller.
Journal: Tea Party “Booboisie”
Review: The Best Democracy Money Can Buy
2008 ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig
Review: Shooting the Truth–The Rise of American Political Documentaries
Review: Grand Illusion–The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
by jonl on October 25, 2010
On October 20, I caught Steven Johnson’s talk at Book People in Austin. I’ve known Steven since the 90s – we met when he was operating Feed Magazine, one of the early web content sites. After Feed, Steven created a second content site, actually more of a web forum, called Plastic.com.
Starting with Interface Culture, Steven has mostly written books, and is generally thought of as a science writer, though I think of him as a writer about culture as well. His book Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software was a major influence for those of us who were into social software and the percolation of “Web 2.0.” I related it to my earlier “nodal politics” thinking, and it influenced the collaborative paper created by Joi Ito et al., called “Emergent Democracy.” Steven wrote an analysis of the Howard Dean Presidential Campaign for the book I edited with Mitch Ratcliffe, Extreme Democracy.
Daniel Pink has a smart article on flip thinking, a trend in innovation. It’s a matter of rethinking sequence logic: for instance, a math instructor finds that it makes more sense to work on problems in class, and follow with the lecture (uploaded to YouTube, where students watch as homework). You experience the tension of the problem first, and get hands-on guidance from the instructor. Having learned your way around the problem, you see the lecture that contextualizes that learning.
While the idea is great, and Pink offers excellent examples where turning sequences around might work, the more compelling lesson is about creativity: we should rethink our habits and routines, and consider re-engineering our processes, as a matter of course. It’s too easy for ruts to form. We avoid disruptive innovation because it can be painful, but it’s productive pain.
Program Director, Meatless Monday
Posted: October 25, 2010 10:13 AM
Short Film Reveals The Secret Life of Beef
Livestock today consume 5 times as much grain as the entire American population, the average meal travels 1,500 miles from farm to fork, and seven football fields' worth of land is bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals and the crops that feed them.
But it doesn't have to be all doom-and-gloom. We as consumers still have options, which, over time, can change our economy. It's this idea that drives INFORM — the educational and advocacy nonprofit that raises environmental consciousness for the general public through visual media. Its “Secret Life” film series, seen by over 2 million viewers in 80 countries, examines the lifecycle environmental impact of everyday objects we all consume.
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Read rest of article (includes link to YouTube short)
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Bio-Economics
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Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Civilization-Building
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Collective Intelligence
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Common Wealth
Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Conscious, Evolutionary, Integral Activism & Goodness
Chris Elam