Money – Page 10 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/09/112012/09/13

Who’s Who in Public Intelligence: Mark Lombardi

Alpha I-L, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Economics/True Cost, Government, Knowledge, Money, P2P / Panarchy, Politics

Wikipedia Snap-Shot

Mark Lombardi (March 23, 1951 – March 22, 2000) was an American Neo-Conceptualist and an abstract artist who specialized in drawings attempting to document financial and political frauds by power brokers, and in general “the uses and abuses of power.

Lombardi called his diagrams Narrative Structures.. They are structurally similar to sociograms – a type of graph drawing used in the field of social network analysis, and to a lesser degree by earlier artists like Hans Haacke. Other important influences on Lombardi were philosopher Herbert Marcuse,, and visualization expert Edward Tufte

In Lombardi's historical diagrams, each node or connection was drawn from news stories from reputable media organizations, and his drawings document the purported financial and political frauds by power brokers. For instance, his 1999 drawing George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979–90 shows alleged connections between James Bath, the Bush and bin Laden families, and business deals in Texas and around the world.

The Essence of Lombardi's Work

The small circles in his drawings identified the main players — individuals, corporations and governments — along a time line. The arcing lines showed personal and professional links, conflicts of interest, malfeasance and fraud.

Solid lines traced influence, dotted lines traced assets and wavy lines traced frozen assets. Final denouements like court judgment, bankruptcy and death were noted in red.

Reading several newspapers a day, he culled his information entirely from published sources, keeping track of the articles with a card file that eventually held over 12,000 cards.

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2012/09/102012/09/10

Michel Bauwens: Sustainable Societies, True Cost Economics, and Appropriate Governance

Crowd-Sourcing, Economics/True Cost, Innovation, Knowledge, Money, P2P / Panarchy

220px-Michel_Bauwens_crop — Michel Bauwens

“The “Principled Societies” concept outlined in the book Creating Sustainable Societies is a blueprint for sustainable financial, economic, and governance systems, intended for local implementation. The book starts by pinpointing the central problems within our financial, economic, and governance systems that have lead to high unemployment, massive debt, environmental degradation, mistrust of Congress and big business, and hyper-inequities of wealth and political power. It then proposes a practical, bold plan for addressing these concerns and creating meaningful change.

EXTRACT: From the Foreword, by Bernard Lietaer:

“I have spent the past 30 years studying monetary systems, both conventional and innovative. During this time, I have written more than a dozen books, have spoken to thousands of audiences around the world, and have taught in half a dozen universities in the United States and Europe. Everywhere, I find dissatisfaction and hunger for a breakthrough to another way of working, of cooperating, of contributing. People are eager for change and are awake to the need for change, even if most public officials, constrained by politics or timidity, appear incapable of rising to the challenges of our time.

In distilling the results of my investigations, I arrived at the sad conclusion that the missing piece in all our monetary arrangements is appropriate governance. This is true for both the official money system (the Federal Reserve and all other central banks in the world) and innovative systems of complementary currencies. This missing piece is what John Boik brings to the table. At first glance, his proposal might appear to center on a complementary currency system, but more accurately it centers on appropriate governance. On the one hand, it proposes a means for collaborative direct democracy as applied to finance, corporate behavior, and social organization: the “Principled Society.” On the other, the very mechanics of the proposed monetary and corporate model, including its transparency, are a manifestation of democratic ideals.”

Wiki Outline of Book . Amazon Page for Book

2012/08/102012/08/10

Search: federal government spending osint

Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Corruption, IO Impotency, Key Players, Knowledge, Money, P2P / Panarchy, Policies, Politics, Reform, Resilience, Searches, Strategy, Threats

ROBERT STEELE: The IC, DoD, and oversight agencies such as OMB and GAO have not sought to audit government spending on OSINT and probably could not do so effectively with the combination of ignorance on the part of the auditors and recalcitrance on the part of those who should be audited. The closest anyone came to setting the stage for this was in 2000 when Sean O'Keefe, DD/OMB, established code M320 to tag all spending by the US Government on contractor provision of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). When O'Keffe moved to NASA, the impetus for getting OSINT right died. More recently, Joe Markowitz and Robert Steele met with senior civil servants at OMB and got a second approval for the Open Source Agency (OSA) contingent on a Cabinet secretary asking for it. There was universal agreement the OSA should not be under secret community management but rather under diplomatic and/or commercial agency auspices. Joe Markowitz and Robert Steele continue to favor Markowitz's original idea, that the OSA be a sister-agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). It would of course provide near-real-time feed of all OSINT to the high side, the secret side, but all OSINT would remain outside the wire for liberal sharing with any other actor US or foreign.

What is known is that DoD treats OSINT as a technical processing challenge (this is ineffective since 80% or more of OSINT is not published, not digital, and not online); that ABLE DANGER was a very expensive program that included both digital OSINT and the digitization of visa application; that Document Exploitation (DOCEX) has received a great deal of investment within DIA, to the point that seriously silly claims have been made to justify new SES/DISL positions, e.g. that DOCEX is its “own” discipline. The two largest contracts in OSINT, both hosed by the client with the contractors going along, are the L-3 provision of OSINT technical and subject matter support to the CIA's Open Source Center (the latter is NOT, by any stretch of the imagination, a national capability, just an over-hyped internal capability whose budget has been cut in half since the conversation from being the Foreign Broadcast Information Service) and the SOS International contract with USSTRATCOM to provide butts in seats that pretend to do IO/online OSINT monitoring (more idiocy).

Over-all, including classified projects, including DARPA and IARPA and hidden relationships with Google, Facebook, and Twitter, among others, and including non-secret non-national security element spending on open sources and what pass for methods, is no less than one billion a year, probably around three billion a year, and when counting all the buried pieces (e.g. contractors doing Mission X and creating their own OSINT support that is still not available for the CIA OSC), perhaps as much as five billion a year. All out of control, lacking any combination of intelligence and integrity, as much if not more of a waste than the $80 billion plus spent on technical collection that is not processed, with little regard for human intelligence and advanced analytics, all to provide “at best” 4% of what the President or a major commander requires to make good decisions.

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2012/06/162012/06/16

Tom Atlee: Emerging Economics #3 – The Sharing Economy

Money

Emerging Economics #3: The Sharing Economy

Dear friends

One of the key features of “the new economy” is sharing. More and more people are sharing housing, cars, bikes, tools, meals, skills, money, books, ideas, music, energy, recreation, projects, transportation, knowledge, problem-solving, visions, jobs, ownership, clothes, stories, time…

Sharing is a resource in hard times as well as a source of intrinsic meaning and satisfaction any time. To an increasing number of people, sharing offers compelling alternatives to the corporate-dominated money-saturated whole-society bustle we normally think of as “the economy”.

They wonder: To what extent would we buy things and work long hours and struggle alone in separate homes and families if we could get our needs met by sharing?

The existing economy is designed to get us to look out for ourselves so that we'll consume, compete and work at paying jobs. It nurtures the illusion that we are independent, building lives for ourselves in a world where everyone else is out for themselves, too. Closer examination, however, suggests that such independence is largely a myth, a well-promoted appearance obscuring our profound dependence on the competitive buy-and-sell economy which, in turn, conceals our dependence on nature, culture, and each other.

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2012/06/072012/06/07

Tom Atlee: The Design Economy – How to Meet the Challenges of the Next Economic Era

Money, Politics

The concepts of “design” and “association” in this article, related so fundamentally to the creation and contextualization of important information, seems closely related to the idea of open intelligence and the larger meme of open everything. So, fyi.

The Design Economy: How to Meet the Challenges of the Next Economic Era

Joe Costello, author of the new book Of, By, For: The New Politics of Money, Debt & Democracy, has a message for America: our political economy must be democratically reformed. As we confront a moment of massive historical change, Costello explores, among other things, how electronic information technologies are transforming industrial economies. He explains how the understanding of this shaping process, or design, can help us meet the challenge of the next economic era. Hint: We're going to have to wake up to our power as citizens to get there.

The following is an excerpt from Of, By, For: The Politics of Money, Debt & Democracy, by Joe Costello (SmashWords, 2012).

“The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods.” — Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man

Humanity's great agrarian era produced agrarian government systems, economies, and cultures. Human life and human identity derived overwhelmingly from the processes of farming. The much shorter two-centuries old industrial era redefined life. The processes of production and consumption became the overwhelming dual identities of individuals and our institutions that evolved to foster the processes of unlimited industrial growth. As we move into the design economy, increasingly the most imperative questions will be what are the roles, identities, institutions, and processes of design.

Continue reading “Tom Atlee: The Design Economy – How to Meet the Challenges of the Next Economic Era”

2012/05/182012/05/18

Michel Bauwens: Creating Sustainable Currencies with Open Source Software – No Printing, No Banks, No Government Abuses…

Money

Your thoughts: Helping sustainable currencies to scale

For the forthcoming International Social Transformation Conference on energy currencies, Community Forge is preparing a paper on grass roots strategies for sustainable currency implementation.

2012-05-18 Helping-Sustainable-Currencies-to-Scale 1.0

Phi Beta Iota: Good ideas overly complicated. The core idea is that software eliminates overhead — no printing of money, full transparency (end to end accountability, e.g. “your” money can be tagged to never fund prisons, wars, or political action campaigns…). The authors fail to review the Open Money source literature, do not link to the many examples they do provide, and completely miss the vital fact that with software, you have both a Global to Local Range of Needs and Gifts Table, and a Global to Local sparse matrix of mixed forms of currency–labor, reputation, location, time convergence, etcetera. While critical of gold, the authors do not make the point that you cannot eat gold, and that the ultimate sustainable currency is one that is immediately and without risk exchangable for goods and services that support a sustainable life. Precious metals do not do that. Right now the money system is optimized for the concentration of wealth, the allocation of funds to pay for wars, weapons, prisons, and many other things that are not needed, and the blockage of needed capabilities such as honest locally-engaged agriculture, energy, and health.

The Lost Science of Money: The Mythology of Money, The Story of Power

Mini-Me: US Dollar Out, Yuan, System D, and Open Money In + Meta-RECAP

Open Source Anonymous Banking….Here Now!

Open Source Governance, Open Source Funding — End of Earmarks, Fraud, Waste, and Abuse