“For the past two years or more, I’ve been working on a major research and writing project to try to recover from the mists of history the bits and pieces of what might be called “commons law” (not to be confused with common law). Commons law consists of those social practices, cultural traditions and specific bodies of formal law that recognize the rights of commoners to manage their own resources. Most of these governance traditions deal with natural resources such as farmland, forests, fisheries, water and wild game. Commons law has existed in many forms, and in many cultures, over millennia.
Ever since the rise of the nation-state and especially industrialized markets, however, commons law has been marginalized if not eclipsed by contemporary forms of market-based law. Over the past 200 years, individual property rights and market exchange have been elevated over most everything else, and this has only eroded the rights of commoners, it has contributed to the destruction of the Earth and its fragile natural systems.
In January, attorneys Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran asked me to be the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta that challenged the harsh provisions of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). We filed the lawsuit, worked for hours on the affidavits, carried out the tedious depositions, prepared the case and went to trial because we did not want to be passive in the face of another egregious assault on basic civil liberties, because resistance is a moral imperative, and because, at the very least, we hoped we could draw attention to the injustice of the law. None of us thought we would win. But every once in a while the gods smile on the damned.
Posted on Friday afternoon, the beautiful black and white film shows protesters of all ages taking to the streets to protest the emergency law Bill 78. The Vimeo video quickly began showing up all over Twitter and Facebook.
Bill 78 is being called a draconian attempt to quell massive student protests that have taken over Quebec streets for more than 100 days. The bill limits the ability to protest by requiring groups to get police approval for demonstrations and restricting where they can take place, among other provisions.
So we find ourselves in the midst of economic disruptions that may well foreshadow long-term, whole-system economic breakdowns fed by a full spectrum of emerging dynamics – from resource depletion (especially peak oil and loss of fresh water and topsoil) to climate change, with its extreme weather events and disruptive impact on agriculture – to say nothing of increasing wealth disparity (and its concentration of economic and political power), population growth, and who know what kind of wild cards will show up next from the global financial casino, novel technologies, geopolitical shakeups, solar geomagnetic disruptions… The list goes on, filled with uncertainties.
Times of profound change and challenge are also usually times of rapid social transformation. Such shifts can unfold in positive or negative directions – often both at the same time. Crisis undermines business-as-usual and creates winds of change that can fill the sails of reaction or innovation – or overturn the boat with all aboard.
So I find myself wondering about the role of alternative economic approaches and innovations in catalyzing social transformation in the event of significant systemic collapse. I've been exploring this off and on for two decades, but I've usually put it on the back burner so I can focus on my “wise democracy” work. I've told myself that political and governance systems are more basic since they set the rules of the game. However in the mess of real life, politics and economics are totally entangled, profoundly shaping each other.
“Centralization induces apoplexy at the center and anemia at the extremities.” ~ Lamenais
The present political system is clearly insane. It suffers from schizophrenia. Around the world, almost no one trusts the politicians, yet almost everyone votes for incumbent politicians who promise to reform the government.
Voters now suspect (correctly) that all Western governments are headed for bankruptcy because of the pension programs and government-funded medicine, yet these two programs are politically untouchable. Voters demand them.
For four decades, soft-core critics of the pension/Medicare systems have come to voters with this announcement: “The two systems can be reformed, but we must act now. If we delay, they will bankrupt the government.” Yet the systems are never reformed.
Then, a decade later, the next group of optimistic reformers comes forward with this same promise: “The systems can be reformed if we just act now.” Nobody believes them. Nobody should. If the programs really can be reformed “if we act now,” then the previous warnings were mere scaremongering. There really was no hurry. So, Congress asks rhetorically: “Why should we believe that we need to hurry now?” Result: the systems never get reformed. Congress kicks the can.
THE GREAT DEFAULT
The federal government really is headed for default. The numbers don't lie. This fact produces pessimism in some circles. People who look at the numbers conclude, accurately, that the federal government will not muddle through this crisis. All over the world, national governments will not muddle through. They will no longer be able to kick the can.
I have good news and bad news. The bad news first. If you are dependent on the government for your old age security, you have only one hope: an early death. The good news: when Washington's checks bounce, the bureaucrats will have to go into another line of work. Millions of them. All over the world.
In my last Blaster, I discussed the deficiencies of the Washington Post puff piece on the Obama/Allen triage strategy for exiting Afghanistan. One of the points mentioned was that the NATO/US commander, Marine general John Allen is a student of military history and that he was working to avoid the mistakes the Soviet Union made when it departed Afghanistan, leaving the Najibullah government in power, which lasted three years before succumbing to the ravages of civil war. My blaster elicited the following comment from an Afghan friend, who comes from a distinguished Pashtun family and is well versed in Afghan history, culture, and politics:
Allen’s assumption of similarities between what will happen when NATO withdraws and what happened when the Soviets withdrew does not hold: Najib's regime was dominated by Pashtuns, both in the military and the civilian organisation. Also, the PDPA (People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan) had large capable cadres which were widely dispersed throughout the country. Moreover, there was not such a total disconnect between the ordinary people and the regime. And, Najib’s regime did not have the reputation of being totally corrupt and predatory.
As Anatole Lieven said, in his excellent essay, Our War Against the Pashtuns, the U.S. intervened in a civil war and took the side of the Tajiks against the Pashtuns. Conversely, the Soviets, better informed or perhaps wiser, admitted that the Pashtuns constituted the absolute majority of the Afghan population, and therefore favoured the Pashtuns during their occupation of Afghanistan. This point was underlined by the fact that one of the languages of the official copies of the Geneva Accord was Pashto, that being the ‘national’ language of Afghanistan during the tenure of the PDPA regime – Dari did not figure anywhere.
To conclude, the US taking sides in this civil war may have seemed a ‘neat idea’ at the time, meant to limit the loss of American blood and treasure, has turned out to have been a pretty stupid idea in retrospect.
Anyone who thinks the Obama/Allen triage exit strategy will leave the Karzai Kleptocracy in a more secure position than the Soviet-sponsered Najibulla government ought also to consider the extent to which Karzai (ironically a Pashtun) and his band of thieves and murderers have enraged Aghanistan's Pashtun community, which is by far the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. Bearing in mind, that the Afghanistan's tribes, especially the Pashtuns, live in accordance with what is the world's most highly evolved tribal/vendetta culture, and the Pashtun code of honor, Pashtunwali, is perhaps the world's strictest tribal code of conduct, the attached article in the Kandahar newspaper Surgar suggests that (1) a harsh Pashtun payback to Karzai and his henchment is in the offing and (2) the Obama/Allen contention that their triage plan is avoiding the mistakes made by the Soviet Union is a fantasy.
This theater of the absurd may play for a time long enough in a tuned-out America to get past the November presidential election, but my guess is that it will not last very long in Afghanistan.
Chuck Spinney
Sanary sur Mer, France
Phi Beta Iota: The current US intelligence concept for “cultural intelligence” is childish–playing cards with table manners. The US IC still does not understand the importance of deep history, of demographic analytics, of assassination matrices, of getting a grip on what is viewed at right or wrong by people who are wired completely differently–they are literally from another planet, a planet we have never understood. It certainly does look as if AF has been a replay of Viet-Nam, supporting the minority corrupt leadership against the bulk of the population that sought to abide by the Geneva Convention and the call for open elections that nationalist Ho Chi Minh would have won.
Below the line: a very long list of Karzai led assassinations — shades of Viet-Nam!
I recently visited my alma mater, the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), where I learned more about the free and open source KoBo ToolBox project that my colleagues Phuong Pham, Patrick Vinck and John Etherton have been working on. What really attracts me about KoBo, which means transfer in Acholi, is that the entire initiative is driven by highly experienced and respec-ted practitioners. Often, software developers are the ones who build these types of platforms in the hopes that they add value to the work of practitioners. In the case of KoBo, a team of seasoned practitioners are fully in the drivers seat. The result is a highly dedicated, customized and relevant solution.
Phuong and Patrick first piloted handheld digital data collection in 2007 in Northern Uganda. This early experience informed the development of KoBo which continues to be driven by actual field-based needs and challenges such as limited technical know-how. In short, KoBo provides an integrated suite of applications for handheld data collection that are specifically designed for a non-technical audience, ie., the vast majority of human rights and humanitarian practitioners out there. This suite of applications enable users to collect and analyze field data in virtually real-time.
KoBoForm allows you to build multimedia surveys for data collection purposes, integrating special datatypes like bar-codes, images and audio. Time stamps and geo-location via GPS let you know exactly where and when the data was collected (important for monitoring and evaluation, for example). KoBoForm's optional data constraints and skip logic further ensure data accuracy. KoBoCollect is an Android-based app based on ODK. Surveys built with KoBoForm are easily uploaded to any number of Android phones sporting the KoBoCollect app, which can also be used offline and automatically synched when back in range. KoBoSync pushes survey data from the Android(s) to your computer for data analysis while KoBoMap lets you display your results in an interactive map with a user-friendly interface. Importantly, KoBoMap is optimized for low-bandwidth connections.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The KoBo platform has been used in to conduct large scale population studies in places like the Central African Republic, Northern Uganda and Liberia. In total, Phuong and Patrick have interviewed more than 25,000 individuals in these countries using KoBo, so the tool has certainly been tried and tested. The team is currently building new features for KoBo to apply the tool in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). They are also collaborating with UNDP to develop a judicial monitoring project in the DRC using KoBoToolbox, which will help them “think through some of the requirements for longitudinal data collection and tracking of cases.”
In sum, the expert team behind KoBo is building these software solutions first and foremost for their own field work. As Patrick notes here, “the use of these tools was instrumental to the success of many of our projects.” This makes all the difference vis-a-vis the resulting technology.
