Threats – Page 616 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/02/012011/02/01

Highlights on the Democracy Front

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Officers Call

Dear friends,

There is need for bright news on the democracy front — and, luckily, there is some. (I'm also working to create some in the background, but I've got nothing to announce yet. Cross your fingers.) So I thought I'd share a bit of it the good stuff I've seen.

The first article is an announcement that the Vermont legislature is planning to become the first state to ban corporate personhood statewide. This is a move in the right direction to balance social power — a topic specifically addressed by the most popular article on the Co-Intelligence Institute website, “Democracy: A Social Power Analysis“, written by my father, John Atlee. (Perhaps you'll get a sense of how my upbringing influenced my choice of career when you read it.)

Vermont Is Gearing Up to Strike a Major Blow to Corporate Personhood, Ban It Statewide

AlterNet by Christopher KetchamJanuary 22, 2011

The second article below is an interview with Frances Moore Lappé, one of my early mentors (see “Living Democracy“) exploring themes in her new book GET A GRIP 2. She invites us to both work wholeheartedly on the issues that concern us AND to work on changing the systems (such as money's influence in politics) that create the problems we are trying to solve.

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2011/02/012011/02/01

BLOWBACK, Legitimate Grievances, & Integrity Lost

08 Wild Cards, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Officers Call, Policies, Real Time, Threats

Phi Beta Iota: The announcement of the Egyptian Army that it recognizes the “legitimate grievances” of the public and that it will not use force is in fact a recognition of both the substance of the public grievances, and the fact that force would backfire–there are not enough guns on the planet to repress the public, that cat is out of the bag forever. Morality is a priceless strategic asset–individual integrity is a priceless enabler of a government's legitimacy. From Hawaii to Vermont, the USA is facing domestic demands for secession that reflect the lack of legitimacy of the financial crime families that “own” the two-party system to the detriment of the public interest. It's time to get right with God and our own Humanity. There is much that is right with America–none of it to be found on Wall Street or in Washington, D.C.

In Sorrows of Empire, Johnson discusses the roots of American militarism, the rise and extent of the military-industrial complex, and the close ties between arms industry executives and high-level politicians. He also looks closely at how the military has extended the boundaries of what constitutes national security in order to centralize intelligence agencies under their control and how statesmen have been replaced by career soldiers on the front lines of foreign policy–a shift that naturally increases the frequency with which we go to war.

Three More Covers & See Also Below the Line…

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2011/01/312011/02/01

Video: Jesse Ventura Rips Wall St & Goldman Sachs

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Ethics, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Videos/Movies/Documentaries

The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
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2011/01/31

Food speculation: ‘People die from hunger while banks make a killing on food’

01 Agriculture, 01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 07 Health, Civil Society, Commerce, Ethics, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, True Cost

It's not just bad harvests and climate change – it's also speculators that are behind record prices. And it's the planet's poorest who pay
John Vidal Sunday 23 January 2011

article

Just under three years ago, people in the village of Gumbi in western Malawi went unexpectedly hungry. Not like Europeans do if they miss a meal or two, but that deep, gnawing hunger that prevents sleep and dulls the senses when there has been no food for weeks.

Oddly, there had been no drought, the usual cause of malnutrition and hunger in southern Africa, and there was plenty of food in the markets. For no obvious reason the price of staple foods such as maize and rice nearly doubled in a few months. Unusually, too, there was no evidence that the local merchants were hoarding food. It was the same story in 100 other developing countries. There were food riots in more than 20 countries and governments had to ban food exports and subsidise staples heavily.

The explanation offered by the UN and food experts was that a “perfect storm” of natural and human factors had combined to hyper-inflate prices. US farmers, UN agencies said, had taken millions of acres of land out of production to grow biofuels for vehicles, oil and fertiliser prices had risen steeply, the Chinese were shifting to meat-eating from a vegetarian diet, and climate-change linked droughts were affecting major crop-growing areas. The UN said that an extra 75m people became malnourished because of the price rises.

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2011/01/312011/01/31

End of Hegemony, Deceit, & Despots

Advanced Cyber/IO, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Intelligence (government), Key Players, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Strategy, Threats

Analysis: The US moral conundrum in Egypt

(AP) – 2 hours ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — As with Iran 30 years ago, American leaders again are wrestling with the moral conflict between Washington's demands for democracy among its friends and strategic coziness with dictatorial regimes seen as key to stability in an increasingly complex world, particularly the Middle East.

The turmoil in Egypt — and its potential for grave consequences for U.S. policy throughout the region — was inevitable. The recent WikiLeaks release of U.S. diplomatic reports showed that Washington knew what problems it increasingly faced with the regime of President Hosni Mubarak and his three decades of iron-fisted rule.

Read article and view five photos….

Phi Beta Iota: For decades we have been citing Will and Ariel Durant, who state in Lessons of History that morality is a priceless strategic asset. Max Manwaring et al nailed it in The Search for Security, identifying legitimacy as the sole basis for stable effective governance. Ambassador Max Palmer nailed it in Breaking the Real Axis of Evil, addressing the fact that the US Government has consistently chosen to support 42 of 44 dictators over the public interest. To the best of our knowledge this is the only website that has consistently stated that morality, legitimacy, and integrity are the essential foundation for a prosperous world at peace.

1. The US Government has no strategy and no standing. Obama and Clinton are puffery without a clue. What has been done in this region and “in our name” has been a Web of Deceit and a Legacy of Ashes. Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.

2. Israel has lost all credibility as well as all practical power–Turkey and the publics will do to Israel what Gandhi did to the British. Israeli genocide (and Arab dictator neglect) of the Palestinians will stand as the modern Holocaust.

3. Saudi Arabia, not Jordan, should be the next regime to fall and fall hard. There are 60,000 “royal” perverts and thieves there that need to be exorcised, exiled or executed. Jordan is on the edge of the razor–our Queen Noor's Leap of Faith is central to the possibilities.

This is going to take a quarter century to play out. A fine beginning.

Marginalization Not Al Quada the Real Atrocity

Women of Washingtonian–The Lunacy Continues

Below the line: one paragraph from selected reviews, other book review links.

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2011/01/302011/01/30

Did Obama’s Promise Trigger Arab Revolt?

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Advanced Cyber/IO, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Officers Call

editor spinney time — Chuck Spinney Sounds Off...

My good friend Jim Fallows, national correspondent for the The Atlantic, asked me to be part of a team to publish guest blogs while he is using the ‘down time' to finish a book. I am assigned, with three other people, for this week. Attached is my first entry, which I am also distributing as a blaster.

Chuck

Did Obama’s Promise Trigger the Arab Revolt?

Chuck Spinney

During his brilliantly run campaign of 2008, Barack Obama electrified the world with vague promises of change in foreign policy as well as domestic policy. (My take on his campaign strategy can be found here.) Two and a half years later, those promises are ashes. Nowhere is that clearer in foreign policy than in the Arab world.

In contrast to the euphoria surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Arab Revolt of 2011 leaves one with a disquieting sense that we may be standing on the wrong side of history. People power and the promise of democracy worked spectacularly well for the United States when the tyrants in Eastern Europe collapsed twenty years ago, but I think it may be working against us in the Arab world of 2011.

Read entire article at The Atlantic….

Phi Beta Iota: Brother Chuck is at least half right. The Davies J-Curve shows how people revolt not when they are oppressed, but when they have enjoyed or tangibly seen within reach the state of non-oppression. What we have here is a convergence. Yes, the US is on the wrong side of history–it gave up its strategic integrity immediately after WWII when it joined the UK in reneging on all promises to the Arabs and then supporting a series of brutal dictators. Yes, Obama's broken promises had an effect, but not the effect Brother Chuck suggests: instead of raising hopes, Obama's promises, quickly broken, sidelined the US. It took the US off the table. All that was left was the example of the former Soviet Union states, what Vaclav Havel calls “the power of the powerless.” That memory lay dormant while the Internet and cellular telephones and social networks (including especially Facebook) created a new sense of social power independent of the state. The PRECIPITANT for Egypt was the fall of the despotic Tunisian government in less than a week IN COMBINATION WITH the visible collapse of the US and global economies and the food scarcities visible across the region. Paradigms of failure have been with us for some time, but the word ENOUGH!, first articulated in Egypt, will now be heard–and acted upon–around the world. Saudi Arabia is ripe. That's a good thing.

2011/01/302011/10/22

Marginalization Not Al Quada the Real Atrocity

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption

islam flag raising — Click on Image to Enlarge

The ‘bin Laden' of marginalisation

The real terror eating away at the Arab world is socio-economic marginalisation.

Larbi Sadiki 14 Jan 2011 Al-Jazeera

From Tunisia and Algeria in the Maghreb to Jordan and Egypt in the Arab east, the real terror that eats at self-worth, sabotages community and communal rites of passage, including marriage, is the terror of socio-economic marginalisation.

The armies of ‘khobzistes' (the unemployed of the Maghreb) – now marching for bread in the streets and slums of Algiers and Kasserine and who tomorrow may be in Amman, Rabat, San'aa, Ramallah, Cairo and southern Beirut – are not fighting the terror of unemployment with ideology. They do not need one. Unemployment is their ideology. The periphery is their geography. And for now, spontaneous peaceful protest and self-harm is their weaponry. They are ‘les misérables' of the modern world.

Read complete article….

Tip of the Hat to Jock Gill for the pointer.

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