The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
I will not replicate all that is at www.oss.net and to a much lesser extent, www.earth-intelligence.net, but do want to recognize a handful of extraordinary individuals by isolating their especially meritorious contributiions to the long-running debate about national intelligence reform and re-invention.
The 10 Economic Commandments Of The Tea Party: 24/7 Wall Street
#1. Entitlements
#2. Taxes
#3. Health Care Reform
#4. Bailouts
#5. Government Spending
#6. Inflation
#7. Free Market Economy
#8. Budget Deficit & Federal Debt
#9. Energy/NO ‘Cap and Trade'
#10. Federal Reserve
Below the line: All ten with paragraphs and link back to source photo for each.
Continue reading “Reference: Tea Bag Party Ten Commandments”
I want to put this somewhat intellectual blog posting into perspective. Below is a quote from Matt Taibbi's new book, Griftopia-Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (Spiegel & Grau, 2 November 2010). Click on the title of the book to read my full review.
QUOTE (32): What has taken place over the last generation is a highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government. Far from taking care of the rest of us, the financial leaders of America and their political servants have seemingly reached the cynical conclusion that our society is not work saving and have taken on a new mission that involved not creating wealth for us all, but simply absconding with whatever wealth remains in our hollowed out economy. They don't feed us, we feed them.
In other words, nothing being discussed by any politician matters at all, because behind the scenes they have sold us out in such a total manner as to call into question why they are still in office. We have been stupid. That ends now, I hope.
My book, ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Earth Intelligence Network, 2008) is free online as well as on sale at Amazon as a very nice wire-bound color reference work. The below graphic opens the chapter in that book, “Candidates on the Issues”:
Here are links to each of the chapters in the book, in the aggregate they offer a context for national deliberative dialog by sane people.
Legitimate Grievances (US Internal)
Legitimate Grievances (Anti-US Global)
Candidates on the Issues
Balanced Budget 101
Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them
What I have realized over time is that candidates do not have positions, they have postures, and those postures are generally shaped by ideology and very narrow constituencies. Because of decades of corruption at the federal, state, and local levels, political districts have been so gerrymandered as to be representative of only one of the two extremes that monopolize power.
Continue reading “Reference: On the Issues from Abortion to War & Peace”
National Security will require Smarter Networks (Ali Fisher on June 1, 2010)
An Introduction to Using Network Maps in Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication (Ali Fisher on October 8, 2009)
Ali Fisher is Director of Mappa Mundi Consulting and a former Director of Counterpoint, the cultural relations think-tank of the British Council. Ali blogs on network mapping and Public Diplomacy at WandrenPD.com
Wikileaks as an exemplar of Now Media, Part 1 (Matt Armstrong on November 1, 2010)
This [above link] is the first in a series of posts that will explore our world of disappearing boundaries – from geographic to linguistic to time to organizational – that create new opportunities and challenges to agenda setting and influence. Wikileaks, as an exemplar non-state actor in this world of “now media,” requires analysis beyond the superficial and polarized debate common in today’s coverage of both the organization and the material it disseminates. The MountainRunner Institute is working to convene a series of discussions with experts across the spectrum, including (ideally) someone from Wikileaks, to discuss the role and impact of actors like Wikileaks and the evolving informational and human landscape. If you are interested in more information or in participating, email me at blog@mountainrunner.us.
Serial pioneer, hacking humanity…
Minister-Mentor Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore has said that demography, not democracy, is the defining element of the future, and I agree with him. This is important for two reasons:
First, if the projected population explosions occur in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and in Africa, then all ten of the high-level threats from poverty to infectious disease to environmental degradation and onwards will also explode, and these threats do not recognize artificial political boundaries. Starvation, plagues, deforestation, genocide and democide, and dis-organized crime will be wide-spread. The USA can expect to be over-run by illegal immigrants — vastly worse than today — just as Europe is being over-run from Africa and Russia is being severely encroached upon in the East, where global warming is making Siberia a “go to” place for many Chinese.
Second, we are now finding that there is not enough clean fresh water for those who are alive today, much less for the several billion more expected by 2020. While technology could certainly be developed that addresses this shortfall, it is unlikely to accomplish in a decade what the Earth's natural systems of systems accomplished over millennia — and in the absence of predatory human consumption. Fresh water can be considered the “touchstone” for both a convergence of all the limits to human prosperity that cannot be overcome without dramatic changes in our behavior and our practices; and for the emergence of a new appreciation for “wild law,” the rights of natural systems to be sustained, and in that context, the emergence of a humanity conscious of both its limits and its responsibilities.
Our Commons Future is Already Here
Maude Barlow gave this stirring plenary speech, full of hope even in the face of ecological disasters, to the Environmental Grantmakers Association annual retreat in Pacific Grove, California. Barlow, a former UN Senior Water Advisor, is National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and founder of the Blue Planet Project.
– – – – – –
Half the tropical forests in the world – the lungs of our ecosystems – are gone; by 2030, at the current rate of harvest, only 10% will be left standing. Ninety percent of the big fish in the sea are gone, victim to wanton predatory fishing practices. Says a prominent scientist studying their demise “there is no blue frontier left.” Half the world’s wetlands – the kidneys of our ecosystems – were destroyed in the 20th century. Species extinction is taking place at a rate one thousand times greater than before humans existed. According to a Smithsonian scientist, we are headed toward a “biodiversity deficit” in which species and ecosystems will be destroyed at a rate faster than Nature can create new ones.
We are polluting our lakes, rivers and streams to death. Every day, 2 million tons of sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water, the equivalent of the weight of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people. The amount of wastewater produced annually is about six times more water than exists in all the rivers of the world. A comprehensive new global study recently reported that 80% of the world’s rivers are now in peril, affecting 5 billion people on the planet. We are also mining our groundwater far faster than nature can replenish it, sucking it up to grow water-guzzling chemical-fed crops in deserts or to water thirsty cities that dump an astounding 200 trillion gallons of land-based water as waste in the oceans every year. The global mining industry sucks up another 200 trillion gallons, which it leaves behind as poison. Fully one third of global water withdrawals are now used to produce biofuels, enough water to feed the world. A recent global survey of groundwater found that the rate of depletion more than doubled in the last half century. If water was drained as rapidly from the Great Lakes, they would be bone dry in 80 years.
The global water crisis is the greatest ecological and human threat humanity has ever faced.
Serial pioneer, hacking humanity…
Posted: October 27, 2010 05:16 PM
For those seeing this Blog for the first time, this is the 12th in a 24-part series appointing a Virtual Cabinet and creating a balanced sane intelligence-driven budget as a baseline for evaluating any candidate for public office.
There are twelve policies that must be managed together. Inspired by the High-Level Threat Panel's identification and prioritization of the ten high-level threats to humanity addressed in my Tuesday blog (see 10 High-Level Threats to Humanity), I pulled out my copies of the “Mandate for Change” books from the last four presidential campaigns, and came up with this list. Of course there are many policies and sub-policies, from infrastructure to labor to population, but this is my best effort and I hope you find it helpful.
Here's the important part: what might be good for one policy domain is often very bad for other policy domains. A proper government must understand the true costs of all policy options, not only in and of themselves, but in relation to all other policy domains.
By way of example for why we must address all policies together: it makes no sense to allow landowners to sell water aquifers that are part of our national commonwealth, or to allow soda pop companies to empty aquifers for export, or to use water we don't have to grow grain we cannot eat to create fuel when we have natural gas right here, right now. Above all, it makes no sense to subsidize elements of the food industry that are very bad for all of us — animals for food come with huge water, disease, and fuel costs that have yet to be understood by the public. [For a video on the “true cost” of meat as food, check out The Secret Life of Beef; see also this Duck Duck Go listing of top hits on the true cost of meat.
Below are snapshots of each of the twelve policies and why they matter. In celebration of the new HEALTH section here at the Huffington Post, I am posting this Blog under Health instead of Politics, and below I provide a graphic of how Health Policy must be central to, and in relation to, all ten threats and the other eleven policies, as well as a graphic unique to Health Policy.
… are real, if unappreciated. Chuck
 |
David Cay Johnston | Oct. 25, 2010 04:35 AM EDT
Now for some really scary breaking news, from the latest payroll tax data.
Every 34th wage earner in America in 2008 went all of 2009 without earning a single dollar, new data from the Social Security Administration show. Total wages, median wages, and average wages all declined, but at the very top, salaries grew more than fivefold.
Not a single news organization reported this data when it was released October 15, searches of Google and the Nexis databases show. Nor did any blog, so the citizen journalists and professional economists did no better than the newsroom pros in reporting this basic information about our economy.
The new data hold important lessons for economic growth and tax policy and take on added meaning when examined in light of tax return data back to 1950.
The story the numbers tell is one of a strengthening economic base with income growing fastest at the bottom until, in 1981, we made an abrupt change in tax and economic policy. Since then the base has fared poorly while huge economic gains piled up at the very top, along with much lower tax burdens.
A weak foundation cannot properly support a massive superstructure, as the leaning Tower of Pisa shows. The latest wage data show the disastrous results some of us warned about, although like the famous tower, the economy only lists badly and has not collapsed.
Measured in 2009 dollars, total wages fell to just above $5.9 trillion, down $215 billion from the previous year. Compared with 2007, when the economy peaked, total wages were down $313 billion or 5 percent in real terms.
The number of Americans with any wages in 2009 fell by more than 4.5 million compared with the previous year. Because the population grew by about 1 percent, the number of idle hands and minds grew by 6 million.
These figures show, far more powerfully than the official unemployment measure known as U3, how both widespread and deep the loss of jobs was in 2009. While the official unemployment rate is just under 10 percent, deeper analysis of the data by economist John Williams at http://www.shadowstats.com shows a real under- and unemployment rate of more than 22 percent.
Balance of article below the line…
Continue reading “Reference: SCREWED–The Roots of Populist Rage…”
