John Robb: Occupy Resilience – Condemn the Regional Power Companies and Then Municipalize Them

03 Economy, 05 Energy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Resilient Energy: Municipalization of Power

How can you help your community build a resilient energy system? One of the first steps is to buy back the energy system from the regional power company by condemning it and then municipalizing it (it can be run as a power co-op or as a standard company … The structure really depends on the community.). This moves provides you with the control of the local grid so that your community can:

Ensure higher levels of maintenance (tree trimming, etc.) and faster response to failure. During the two big power outages on the east coast this summer/fall, power was out for much of the region for nearly a week. In many cases, the municipal power companies get power back on to all of their customers in 1/2 the time of the big regional companies.
Cut rates and change energy mix. As a municipal company, you can select the different types of energy you will use locally.
Add advanced micro-grid features. Everything from community energy markets to local energy backup to power smoothing. Extra benefit of this approach: it will prevent the regional power company from using smart grid tech to snoop on everyone in the community by micro-analyzing energy use (which they will then resell to marketing companies or provide to the government w/o warrant for “signature” sniffing).

All of the benefits listed above will double or treble in importance as the global economy nose dives into depression over the next couple of years. So, it's better to get started early than later.

Here's a few links from the Boulder Colorado effort to condemn and municipalize it's power. A combo of bad service and a low level of renewables use prompted the effort (use whatever hooks you need to get it done, but get it done):

Renewablesyes.org The site of the citizens coalition. The astroturf site of the national power company.
Citizen groups do the hard work. A technical group does the modelling and analysis for a municipal grid. They compare rates, costs, and energy mix Here's an amazingly video of a member of that team, Sam Weaver.
Homer software. The software you need to model a municipal grid from rate analysis to energy mix. The numbers.

NOTE: Great article in the NYTimes today on how the big regional companies are so focused on acquisitions, regulatory gaming, and extractative finance; they are delivering terrible service.

NOTE: Great pushback in the comments on how tough it is to do this. Basically, crony capitalism (revolving door, bribes, etc.) + regulatory capture (same mindset) + gov't granted monopoly = lots of opposition.

2011/11/08

Chuck Spinney: Defense Lies, Big Lies, Super Lies

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, DoD, Government, Military

We Need the Money and we Need It Now [email]

he Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) is in panic city over what promises to be cosmetic cutbacks in the growth of the defense budget. The courtiers in Versailles on the Potomac, like the obedient editors of the Washington Post, are dutifully pumping out baloney about how dangerous it will be to cut the defense budget. The fact that the Pentagon cannot even account for all the money it receives is unimportant; after all, cutbacks in social security and medicare will pony up enough money to keep the MICC's party going, while the so-called deficit hawks impose austerity economics on the people (in the name of reducing federal debt — think of this as ‘not letting them eat cake') so the Federal Reserve can continue propping up the toxic private debt of the insolvent financial sector. And besides the Post needs the advertisement money from Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and Northrup-Grumman.

My good buddy Mike Lofgren, who just retired with his sanity intact after working on Capital Hill as a Republican staffer for 28 years — no small achievement I might add — does not think much of whining in the Georgetown salons. Here's why (see CP op-ed below):

Chuck Spinney

BTW … the war between the MICC and Social Security and Medicare that is now being joined has very little to do with the so-called War on Terror — In fact, it is occurring right on schedule, if you doubt this, read this Op-Ed I wrote on this subject, in Sept 2000, one year before 9-11.

The Washington Post Boards the Pentagon Gravy Train

Defense Cuts Hysteria

by MIKE LOFGREN

Counterpunch, November 08, 2011

Over the last five years, we’ve spent money on the military – in real, inflation adjusted dollars – at a higher rate than at any other time since World War II. That includes the late 1960s, when the United States simultaneously faced a competitor with 10,000 nuclear weapons and sent a half million troops to Vietnam. The Pentagon is spending recklessly at a time of fiscal crisis when America’s debt has been downgraded for the first time since formal credit ratings began in 1917.

Yet the Washington Post has joined the hucksters of the military-industrial complex in forecasting imminent doom if one cent is cut from Pentagon budgets. Supposedly, the Defense Department has already cut $465 billion from its budget, and further cuts would be ruinous. But those $465 billion in cuts are fake, mostly paper “savings” pocketed by the president from adjustments to unrealistic past projections of the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and from other baseline manipulations.

Read full article.

2011/11/082011/11/08

Winslow Wheeler: Military Spending versus Competence

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

WinslowWheeler Cropped — Winslow Wheeler

Washington Post Joins Hysterical Defense Budget Rhetoric

Center for Defense Information, 7 November 2011

Monday, November 7, the Washington Post editorial board published its take on the extreme rhetoric the country has been hearing on the defense budget since Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta starting talking about the “doomsday mechanism” that would reduce defense spending. Quoting the newer extreme rhetoric of several members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff defending their budget ambitions to the eager-to-listen House Armed services Committee, the Washington Post positioned itself foursquare in favor of hysterics. It was with an editorial titled “Defense on the Rocks: Mandated spending cuts could decimate U.S. military might.” Find it here (although at the web link they toned down the title with the more sympathetic “US Defense on the defensive.”)
Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Military Spending versus Competence”

2011/11/052011/11/05

John Robb: Micro Drones Threaten US Citizens at Home

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Civil Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Military

DRONES and US Internal Security

Signature strikes target groups of men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren't always known. The bulk of CIA's drone strikes are signature strikes. Wall Street Journal.

Drones are changing the dynamics of warfare in very scary ways. They make oppression much easier (and cost-effective).

To recap: Drones are extremely cost effective vs. ground/air assets (particularly in that with drones, operators aren't put at risk). They also enable extremely centralized command and control (as in: operations can be micro-manged in Washington, down to the decision to kill). In sum, a small number of people in Washington DC can control/operate a vast 24×7 killing field for very few $$.

Here's how they are changing warfare:

An Assassination List. Drones, in combination with other forms of electronic surveillance, make it easy to rapidly find and kill people (even in non-permissive areas). As a result, assassination of threats has become the easy solution to many problems. It has become so popular that the process has become bureaucratized and automated through the development of an assassination list. The US President has one, and he can put US citizens on it via a simple, non-judicial, bureaucratic process.
Signature Strikes. The current practice of the CIA in Pakistan is to kill groups of people that “look” like terrorists or guerrillas. Exactly what a group of people needs to do, wear, or be to trigger the signature of a terrorist/guerrilla group is unknown. The Pakistani authorities are only told about strikes that kill more than 20 people. While these strikes have generated some push-back from Pakistani press/politicians, it's relatively small given the number of people killed.
Borders melt. Nearly every country in the world, except a few key allies, can be penetrated with drones. In most cases, they don't know they've been penetrated. In others, there's nothing they can do to prevent it. The big barrier to cross border special ops or air force hits/strikes in the past was the chance that operators would be captured. That's not true anymore. So, in effect, anybody can be killed nearly anywhere at anytime by a flip of a switch.

What's Next?

It's a pretty slippery slope from here. The simple answer is that US practice we see at work in Pakistan will eventually become common place in Mexico, Central America, and Northern Africa. However, the more interesting answer is how it gets applied to US internal security when the US/global economy crumps into depression, the US government goes bankrupt, and the current system loses much of its remaining legitimacy. In that scenario:

any armed group would instantly fit the signature of terrorists/guerrillas (the further you are away from an urban zone, the easier a target you will be),
even a mildly radical post to a blog, Facebook or Twitter ( particularly if it could lead to a flashmob or an occupy style protest) would invite inclusion on the drone assassination list (in that case, the occasional flash of a car being blown up by a drone patrolling a highway and IDing a listed driver, will become common),
drone to citizen ratios will rise to 100:1 as new micro-drones cut cost and new software allows DHS control centers to manage large region wide “drone clouds.”

2011/11/05

Chuck Spinney: William Pfaff on USA Gone Awry

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Good summary of the American sickness.

One Nation, Gone Awry

William Pfaff – truthdig – 02/11/11

The theme of most political and social commentary is that things are more complicated than you think. For once, I wish to write that things are simpler than you think. This concerns two matters at the core of the present American political crisis.

The first is that control over the government has passed all but completely into the hands of business corporations. The country has become a plutocracy. This has occurred because corporations are the principal supplier of funds essential to the election of federal officials—the president and the members of the United States Senate and House of Representatives, and through them, the members of the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary, all of whom are nominated and confirmed by the elected officials of the executive and legislative branches of the government.

. . . . . . .

I spoke of a second source of American crisis to which there is a simple solution, an intellectual solution, which to impose would require conversion of the hard hearts and biased minds of a sizable part of the international economic community (at least that part of it educated at the University of Chicago since the Second World War), as well as a near-revolutionary change in how the American government presently functions (see above). The crisis is easily described as the 1 percent problem. One percent of the American population receives income equivalent to the other 99 percent put together.

This is caused by the consensus decision of the economists and business schools to define profit as the sole criterion of corporation efficiency and public (and civic) worth. The automatic consequence of this has been the de-industrialization of the United States, the export of its manufacturing capacity, unemployment in the U.S. comparable to that of the Great Depression, poverty levels with no modern American precedent, and the moral corruption of American politics.

Read full article.

2011/11/04

Matt Taibbi: Bloomberg’s Marie Antoinette Moment

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth

Mike Bloomberg's Marie Antoinette Moment

Rolling Stone, November 3, 11:00 AM ET

Last year I had a chance to see New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg up close at the Huffington Post’s “Game Changers” even t. I was standing right behind the guy when he was introduced by Nora Ephron, and watched as the would-be third party powerhouse wowed the liberal crowd with one zinger after another.

Includes short video.

EXTRACT:

The whole game was based on one new innovation: the derivative instruments like CDOs that allowed them to take junk-rated home loans and turn them into AAA-rated instruments. It was not Barney Frank who made it possible for Goldman, Sachs to sell the home loan of an occasionally-employed janitor in Oakland or Detroit as something just as safe as, and more profitable than, a United States Treasury Bill. This was something they cooked up entirely by themselves and developed solely with the aim of making more money.

Read full skewering of Mike Bloomberg.

Matt Taibbi: The Real Housewives Of Wall Street–How Morgan Stanley Wives Christy Mack & Susan Karches Ripped Off Taxpayers In Geithner-Bernanke Bailout Scheme

Why Isn’t Wall Street in Jail? + US Fraud RECAP

2011/11/032011/11/03

NIGHTWATCH: Drums of War Israel Iran USA

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Iran, 07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

Iran-Israel: Iran is on “full alert” and ready to retaliate for any strike against the Islamic Republic, Iranian military officials warned Wednesday amid Israeli media speculation of plans for an attack.

“We consider any threat — even those with low probability and distant — as a definite threat,” said General Hassan Firouzabadi, the armed forces' chief of staff. “We are ready to punish them.” The United States also “will suffer serious damages should there be a military attack by the Zionist regime against Iran,” the Iranian chief of staff warned.

Comment: The significance of this statement is that it represents feedback to the Israelis that their chest thumping and foot stomping is registering in Tehran. It also makes clear that if Israel ever attacks Iran, Iran will attack US installations in reach as well as Israel.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: We have learned not to underestimate the ideological idiocy of the neo-cons still entrenched across the US national security “regime,” nor the ineffectiveness of the White House is doing anything other than “going along.” Israel is out of control; the US Government is out of control; this does not bode well for anyone.