Budgets & Funding – Page 9 – Public Intelligence Blog

2011/10/142011/10/17

Mini-Me: Army of Unemployed Persistent Structural Issue

01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 04 Education, 06 Family, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, DoD, Ethics, Government, Legislation, Methods & Process, Military, Policy, Reform

Army of unemployed is now entrenched in U.S.

Commentary: Structural woes in economy creating ‘permanent underclass’

Howard Gold

Wall Street Journal, 14 October 2011

The public knew this much earlier than economists or pundits did, and as for politicians — don’t ask!

. . . . .

Listen to Charles Plosser, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, in a speech a couple of weeks ago.

“These numbers are troubling, especially when more than 40% of the unemployed, or some six million people, have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer,” he said.

“Millions of unemployed workers may take longer to find jobs because their skills have depreciated or they may need to seek employment in other sectors. These structural issues will take time to resolve. Jobs and workers will need to be reallocated across the economy, which is a long and slow process.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The US Government is in grid-lock, with 1950's mind-sets, 1970's technologies, and 1990's spendthrift ways–in other words, it is completely out of touch with reality and has no idea how to cope with the need to retrain a quarter of the population across all age groups in a year or two. Hint: bail out the public, not the banks and certainly not the multiple complexes of corruption. Start by using military to ingest the entire unemployed population into receiving and retraining centers with full salary for each individual committing to retraining.

2011/10/142011/10/17

Anne Kadet: A Day in the Life of Occupy Wall Street

03 Economy, 11 Society, Articles & Chapters, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, IO Deeds of Peace, Methods & Process, Uncategorized

The Occupy Economy

Anne Kadet

Wall Street Journal, 15 October 2011

Say what you want about the assorted professionals, philosophers, bums, radicals, students and wage slaves comprising Occupy Wall Street, but they've managed to pull off the impossible. In the center of one of the world's most expensive cities, a place where the average tourist family of four spends roughly $3,500 per visit, they've accomplished something even the guidebooks wouldn't dare promise: New York living on less than $10 a day.

. . . . . .

In less than four weeks, Occupy Wall Street managed to erect what looks and functions like a cross between a high-tech folk festival and a Canadian logging camp. At least for now, there's a lending library on one end and a man doling out cigarettes on the other. There are stations for first aid, phone charging and poster-making. There's even a guy who walks around handing out, yes, free money.

. . . . . .

The whole operation runs on donations, of course. More than $5,000 in cash comes in every day through the park's contribution boxes, and supplies flow in from around the country. Kim Heines, a Bensonhurst office manager volunteering on the storage committee, opened her composition notebook to display records of the morning's 90-odd shipments: soap from Winnipeg; rain ponchos from Keller, Texas; sleeping bags from Indiana; gluten-free snack bars from Santa Monica.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: This is a stellar piece of work, riveting detail, economy of words, just an utterly spectacular communication of the logistical essence of Occupy Wall Street.

2011/10/122011/10/12

Mini-Mi: Top 5 Facts About America’s Richest 1%

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests

The Top 5 Facts About America’s Richest 1%

VIDEO

The American dream is alive and well for the wealthiest 1% of Americans, but unfortunately, if you are in the other 99% the jury is still out.

“America is obviously a country where you can go from being middle class to upper class, but right now class mobility has sort of collapsed in the United States,” says Zaid Jilani, senior reporter for the progressive think tank ThinkProgress.org. (See: America's Middle Class Crisis: The Sobering Facts)

This grim reality is in part the impetus for the Occupy Wall Street movement, which, now in its fourth week, will take to the streets of Manhattan's Upper East Side Tuesday in what it is calling the “Millionaire's March.” Demonstrators will rally outside the homes of some of the city's wealthiest, including News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon, to protest New York state's 2% millionaire tax set to expire at the end of the year.

As the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow, The Daily Ticker wanted to find out just how rich America's super-rich 1% really is. Jilani recently compiled the following research, entitled How Unequal We Are: The Top 5 Facts You Should Know About The Wealthiest One Percent of Americans.

As discussed in the accompanying interview, here's what Jilani outlined on his blog:

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2011/10/122011/10/12

Koko: Participatory Budget Takes Root in USA

03 Economy, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, Government

Participatory Budgeting – A Method to Empower Local Citizens & Communities

“Participatory Budgeting” (PB) is a process that allows citizens to decide directly how to allocate all or part of a public budget, typically through a series of meetings, work by community “delegates” or representatives, and ultimately a final vote. It was first implemented in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1990, and has since spread.

PB has recently taken root in Canadian and American soils.

Chicago’s 49th Ward, for example, uses this process to distribute $1.3 million of annual discretionary funds. The ward’s residents have praised the opportunity to make meaningful decisions, take ownership over the budget process, and win concrete improvements for their neighborhood – community gardens and sidewalk repairs to street lights and public murals. The initiative proved so popular that the ward’s alderman, Joe Moore, credits PB with helping to reverse his political fortunes.

The wave is not stopping in Chicago, either. Elected officials and community leaders elsewhere – from New York City to San Francisco and from Greensboro, N.C. to Springfield, Mass. – are considering launching similar initiatives.

Sources:

“Government can’t solve budget battles? Let citizens do it.” Daniel Altschuler and Josh Lerner, The Christian Science Monitor, April 5, 2011.

“Chicago’s Participatory Budgeting Experiment” Nicole Summers, Shareable. April 6, 2011.

Student Researcher: Allison Holt, San Francisco State University

Faculty Evaluator: Kenn Burrows, San Francisco State University

2011/10/10

John Robb: Bitcoin is surging out of start-up status

03 Economy, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics

JOURNAL: Bitcoin is getting past start-up cruft

A Bitcoin wallet ID for me: 18YYkAMVyZVt6gzpZvBEF5RgsJ7aT7a8Yh

Bitcoin, the digital currency system, is starting to mature. As is always the case, maturity isn't based on age (weak correlation) or success level. It's based on experience. More specifically, maturity is based on how many difficulties the system overcomes. The greater or more fiendish the difficulties successfully navigated, the more maturation gained.

Few systems have been through meat grinder of experience as much as bitcoin. From the media to pundits/experts to (the) government to hackers to criminals. Even a bubble! Everyone has taken a shot at it. Despite all of this, it is still trading at around ~ $4. The software is getting better (there is encryption built into the desktop wallet now). The core system remains intact and unbroken despite a huge number of attacks.

Most importantly, people are starting to learn how to handle real/tangible digital cash. Handling digital cash, particularly lots of it, is serious business. It needs to be protected and you can't leave it in the care of anybody you don't trust.

Essentially, bitcoin has repeatedly proven that digital currencies can work in the wild.

NOTE: The most interesting us of bitcoin to me? If it was used as a PLATFORM for private currencies or publicly traded securities rather than as simply as a currency.

2011/10/09

Marcus Aurelius: WSJ on Viet-Nam War – Lack of Integrity

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, DoD, Intelligence (government), IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call, Policy, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Strategy

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius

Well, this is harsh w/r/t Westy…

Wall Street Journal
October 8, 2011
Pg. C5

Bookshelf

The War Over The Vietnam War

By Max Boot

Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam. By Lewis Sorley, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 416 pp., $30

September 2006. Violence levels are spiking in Iraq. Every day brings reports of more suicide bombings, more IEDs, more death and destruction. So bad has it gotten that the Washington Post reveals that a senior Marine intelligence officer has concluded “that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.”

This was the situation when I was among a dozen conservative pundits escorted into the Oval Office for a chat with President George W. Bush. I asked him why he didn't change a strategy that was clearly failing. He replied that he had no intention of micromanaging the war like Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have personally picked bombing targets in Vietnam. This commander in chief vowed to respect the judgment of his chain of command.

Phi Beta Iota: Full text with added links below the line. This review and the book are largely crap. Viet-Nam was lost for two reasons: because all historical and indigenous influences were for the residents and against the occupiers; and because the US Government was corrupt and was in direct support of a Catholic mandarin and his sister who took corruption, torture, and exploitation of a Buddhist et all land to new heights. The review misses two of the most important books on the matter, one, Triumph Foresaken that supports the “we could have won” argument, the other, Who the Hell Are We Fighting? that makes it clear that the corruption of intelligence and the corruption of military and political planning were at the heart of America's failure in Viet-Nam. Westmoreland was not a bad man, but he represented–as most Army leaders do today–the orthodox, the West Point Protective Association, the Army above Republic, the “go along to get along,” and of course the toxic brew of “leadership” that is arrogant, inattentive, poorly educated, and not at all concerned about the welfare or their troops. In the US Army today, “education” is for show or ticket punching, not to actually learn anything useful to the future.

Full Text and Links below the Line.

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2011/10/082011/10/19

Robert Steele: Trip Report – Occupy Wall Street 6 October 2011 – Second American Revolution is Real

11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Corporations, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Government, Hacking, InfoOps (IO), IO Deeds of Peace, IO Deeds of War, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Mobile, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Threats

steele smiling final — Robert David STEELE Vivas

I visited New York City 6-7 October 2011.

First I met with Alexa O'Brien, one of the brilliant minds behind U.S. Day of Rage and its focus on Electoral Reform and non-violence as an absolute. [My memo that Fox news still has not read is here.]

Although they are also focused on a Constitutional Convention, as Lawrence Lessig has been, I reiterated the point that Electoral Reform is the one thing that can be demanded today (no later than 6 November, one year prior to Election Day), with severe consequences for every elected person if Congress fails to pass Electoral Reform by President's Day (February 2012), to include recall or impeachment, and camp-outs at their offices and in public spaces near their homes through to Election Day 2012.

Photos and Additional Comments Below the Line

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