The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
The following four publications by Michael Vlahos were overlooked when they first came out. They continue his brilliant track record of deep cultural analysis of both the home front and the real world.
Colonial Britain, Neocolonial America?
Why America Is Like Imperial Spain (Part I)
Three new potent Occupy Together resources
Three new exciting resources have just showed up.
1. OccupyCafe.org – a linked phone and online forum space for conversations among everyone “who cares about what is happening on Wall Street and around the world.” Its phone mode uses the advanced MaestroConferencing system that enables activities like breakout groups and hand-raising. Topic conversations begun on the phone can be continued in the online forum, and vice versa. The first phone call is Monday morning. See details below.
2. Organizational consultants study grassroots activist communities – This article didn't exist online, so I got a blurry scanned copy from one of the co-authors and typed it up over a couple of days so I could post it and send it to you. The next day the other co-author posted a clear pdf online, so that's what you get below. I think it is applicable and potentially useful to the Occupy movement.
3. Some very clear advice from nonviolent activist Sharif Abdullah of Commonway in Portland Oregon. Sharif's the fellow who spread the phrase “create a world that works for all” into movement circles. Taking lessons from Gandhi, King, Argentinian activists, and his own work in Sri Lanka, he offers guidelines to help the folks in the Occupy Together movement sustain their transformational impact.
Bit by bit, action by action, conversation by conversation, we develop the collective knowledge we need to make a world that works for all…
Coheartedly,
Tom
Read full post with more detail about each and additional links.
This is very old news, but thought it interesting to highlight lag time between FBI and the original reports.
The FBI Announces Gangs Have Infiltrated Every Branch Of The Military
The FBI has released a new gang assessment announcing that there are 1.4 million gang members in the US, a 40 percent increase since 2009, and that many of these members are getting inside the military (via Stars and Stripes).
The report says the military has seen members from 53 gangs and 100 regions in the U.S. enlist in every branch of the armed forces. Members of every major street gang, some prison gangs, and outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMGs) have been reported on both U.S. and international military installations.
Read full story with link to report.
Phi Beta Iota: One can only marvel at the ability of the US Government (both political leaders and senior civil servants) to carry on without intelligence or integrity for decades. The USA remains the top proliferator of nuclear, biological, chemical, radiological, and small arms as well as cyber-weaponry. The USA remains locked into elective wars that have nothing to do with national interests and everything to do with special interests. And now we learn again (DHS published first, in 2007) that we are also training tens of thousands of gang members who are at the same time gaining access to weapons and munitions that we cannot account for…
See Also:
2007 Reference: Gangs in the US Military
My friend Andrew Cockburn is on a roll. One week after his brilliant article on IEDs in Harpers, he has produced another hard-hitting tubesteak, this time in Counterpunch. Andrew's targets are the Banksters, whose looting continues to push the middle class into poverty and the lower income classes into a kind of debt servitude that is reminiscent of that imposed by company stores in the West Virginia coal towns in what we had hoped was a bygone era.
Andrew's essay is important, because the problem he is describing exists against the backdrop of the Great Recession, which now, three years after the banking system started to collapse, may be on the cusp of a full blown debt deflation, triggered by another, even more catastrophic banking collapse. My introductory comments are intended to help you understand that magnitude of that danger that Andrew is describing.
The following charts (Figures 1 & 2), based on the most recent data released by the Federal Reserve,
portray ratio of debt to gross domestic product over time. Figure 1 shows how the cumulative debt changed in the entire system, with debt expressed as a percentage of the GDP produced by the economy. The debt ratio for the entire economy should not be thought of as an absolute measure of debt burden but as an indexof that burden, and is an indicator of the comparative pressure of that debt regardless of the overall size of the economy.[1] Thus, one can compare
changes in earlier years to those in later years. Figure 2 plots the sector burdens separately for the components in the private sector (note: since Federal Debt is arranged in bottom position in Figure 1 it is also the same shape that would be plotted in Figure 2; other categories, like state and local debt have been ignored because over time their ratio changes have not been significant enough to the alter the pattern in the figures). What do these figures tell us?
“If the Occupiers start chanting ‘Mark to Market,’” an attorney highly conversant with the darker workings of the Wall Street-Washington complex told me, “we’ll know they’re serious.” Such a call would quickly presage the collapse of our “too big to fail” banks, for it would highlight the fact that a huge proportion of the assets of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, and Citigroup consist of loans that will never be paid back and are therefore essentially worthless. The so called “recovery” of our leading financial institutions from the post-Lehman abyss has depended on a fraudulent valuation of these assets, but stripped of the fiction, the banks are insolvent.
Phi Beta Iota: The banks are on the brink–wildly fearful of a run on stocks and deposits–and the US Government knows they are on the brink–and is wildly fearful of nation-wide violence. Pissed off white people will make the Watts Riots looks like an effete tea party. There is good news. The close OccupyWallStreet gets to understanding the depth of the depravity of the government that enabled and enables Wall Street, the lack of intelligence and integrity within that government, the closer we get to being able to demand and secure the Electoral Reform Act of 2012, in our view the sole means by which a non-violent revolution might restore the integrity of the U.S. Government.
Things are still wildly bubbling in and around the Occupy movement, which is still radically expanding and evolving. Despite many growing pains, the co-creative, committed engagement of the participants is inspiring. So many among them are using the disturbances in and around them as a motivation for personal growth and collective innovation.
Occupy Together is, as they say, a phenomenon. It is such a passionate, complex, self-organizing initiative that even chaos and complexity theories have a hard time adequately explaining it. It is ALIVE!
The word “occupy” – as a connotation-rich idea or meme – is itself a fascinating part of the movement's impact. It invites everyone who wants a new and better world, to claim a space where they can work together to co-create that world. So far, that space is usually a public park. But that's expanding and morphing: More people are talking about occupying a school, a workplace, a bank, a heart, a profession, an industry, a government office, the airwaves, our minds – any “place” where some piece of the new world needs to evolve and replicate itself to become the actual New World. And the word “occupy” suggests commitment to that place, persistence in it, putting down some roots, claiming and owning and taking responsibility for holding it and making it good.
The Rise And Rise Of Western Covert Ops
By Peter Apps, Political Risk Correspondent
Reuters.com, October 18, 2011
WASHINGTON — Four months ago, Admiral William McRaven commanded the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. Now, as the new head of U.S. special forces, he argues that his shadowy, secretive warriors are increasingly central to how America and its allies fight.
When the suntanned, towering SEAL testified to the Congressional House Armed Services Committee in September, just a few weeks after he took over his new role, he used posters detailing the growth of his forces. In the decade since September 11 2001, U.S. Special Operations Command personnel numbers have doubled, its budget tripled and deployments quadrupled.
Phi Beta Iota: In a debt-based secrecy-enabled government, there is no scrutiny of such programs, neither in relation to return on investment or in relation to moral engagement. The US Government lacks intelligence and integrity and is OUT OF CONTROL.
Darpa Wants to Master the Science of Propaganda
Dawn Lim
WIRED, 18 October 2011
Mark Twain once tried to distinguish between the storyteller’s art and tales that a machine could generate. He observed that stringing “incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities,” was the province of the American storyteller. A machine might imitate simple formulas behind yarns, but never quite master them.
The Pentagon’s freewheeling research arm is hoping to prove Twain wrong. Darpa is asking scientists to “take narratives and make them quantitatively analyzable in a rigorous, transparent and repeatable fashion.” The idea is to detect terrorists who have been indoctrinated by propaganda. Then, the Pentagon can respond with some messages of its own.
The program is called “Narrative Networks.” By understanding how stories have shaped your mind, the Pentagon hopes to sniff out who has fallen prey to dangerous ideas, a neuroscience researcher involved in the project tells Danger Room. With this knowledge, the military can also target groups vulnerable to terrorists’ recruiting tactics with its own counter-messaging.
Continue reading “DefDog: DARPA Fine-Tuning Propaganda a la 1984?”
