Public Intelligence Blog – Page 3127 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

0Shares

Giovanni Arrighi

4.0 out of 5 stars Adding Links In Support of Review by Joseph Martin,August 10, 2011

This is how your review will appear:

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Adding Links In Support of Review by Joseph Martin,August 10, 2011

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) – See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (New and Updated Edition) (Paperback)

I wish I could afford all the books I'd like to read. This one was recommended to me and I can certainly see how valuable it must be.

Here are just a few books that I believe strongly complement this one.

The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits
Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History
The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash

A more interesting option for readers is to use the lists of book reviews at Phi Beta Iota (BOOKS), where the list on negative books includes these lists, all reviews leading back to the Amazon Page [at Phi Beta Iota, all links are active in this review].

Continue reading “Review: The Long Twentieth Century – Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times”

2011/08/102011/08/10

Review (Guest): The Long Twentieth Century – Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Capitalism (Good & Bad)

0Shares

Giovanni Arrighi

Product Description

Winner of the American Sociological Association PEWS Award for Distinguished Scholarship: a comprehensive analysis of the development of world capitalism over the millennium.

The Long Twentieth Century traces the relationship between capital accumulation and state formation over a 700-year period. Arrighi argues that capitalism has unfolded as a succession of “long centuries,” each of which produced a new world power that secured control over an expanding world-economic space. Examining the changing fortunes of Florentine, Venetian, Genoese, Dutch, English and finally American capitalism, Arrighi concludes with an examination of the forces that have shaped and are now poised to undermine America’s world dominance. A masterpiece of historical sociology, The Long Twentieth Century rivals in scope and ambition contemporary classics by Perry Anderson, Charles Tilly and Michael Mann.

4.0 out of 5 stars The History of Capitalism,September 7, 2010

By Joseph Martin “pomonomo2003” (NJ, USA) – See all my reviews

Why is this edition “new and updated”? Apparently, because of the 15 page Postscript at the end of the book (pp. 371-386). (I had read the first edition back when it first came out in the nineties but no longer seem to have a copy of it so I cannot compare the earlier edition with this one.) Here in the Postscript Arrighi attempts to sum up what he understands were the three main propositions of his book.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): The Long Twentieth Century – Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times”

2011/08/09

Dolphin: USA’s First Coast to Coast Climate Network

03 Environmental Degradation, Advanced Cyber/IO, Communities of Practice, Earth Intelligence, Ethics, Policies

0Shares

Construction of nation's first coast-to-coast climate network begins

KSL.Com, August 7th, 2011

By Geoffrey Fattah<

LOGAN — Imagine being able to put your fingers on the pulse of America's biosphere — keeping real-time track of weather, water/soil temperature, animal populations and much more. Armed with this information, scientists would be able to detect sudden shifts in climate, perhaps even predict them, allowing the nation to prepare for potential disasters.

climate network — Click on Image to Enlarge

The National Science Foundation has given the financial go-ahead to begin construction of the nation's first coast-to-coast network of observatories, including one in Utah, to measure real-time climate changes.

The National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, is designed to gather vast amounts of data, every second, from around the country using satellites, observation towers, aircraft sensors, mobile motorized sensors and field work by scientists. From insect samples to weather data, the information will be fed into a central lab to build a picture of the nation's ecological health.

What scientists will keep an eye out for are “threshold events,” or sudden changes in climates, that can lead to droughts, floods, even the spread of diseases, said James MacMahon, dean of Utah State University's College of Science and chairman of NEON's board of directors.

Graphic: It’s Official, Al Gore is a Prophet

Balance, Citizen-Centered, Earth Orientation, Political, Reform

0Shares

al_gore_prophet1 — Click on Image to Enlarge

Source

Phi Beta Iota: Within climate change, carbon is less than ten percent of the total spectrum of threatening elements, with sulfer and mercury being considerably more important. Climate change is perhaps ten percent of the larger threat of Environmental Degradation, properly ranked third after Poverty (which does more environmental damage than all corporations) and Infectuous Diseases. It's one thing to proclaim your pet rock from the rooftops–it is quite another to actually have a strategic analytic model backed up by an EarthGame and true cost forensics across all industries.

2011/08/09

Reference: National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (Final Report December 2010)

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Impotency, Office of Management and Budget

0Shares

Free PDF Online

Phi Beta Iota: This report, while responsible (unlike the current food fight a year later), does not go far enough. It allows the borrowing of one trillion a year to continue, while observing that interest on the debt could reach one trillion a year by 2020. The principle recommendations, all sound but insufficient, are listed in the Overview section.

2011/08/09

Penguin: Air Force to Spy on Commercial Aircraft

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, DoD, Intelligence (government), IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military

0Shares

This is the most absurd intelligence item so far this week.

Air Force Tackles New Intel Mission

Carlo Munoz

AOL Defense, 9 August 2011

Washington: The Pentagon's top intelligence official has ordered the Air Force to set up a new intelligence unit to analyze the behavior of foreign-based commercial aircraft and integrate intelligence from the combatant commanders as the planes move through American airspace.

Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers has tasked Air Force Secretary Michael Donley to hand pick a chief for the new intelligence cell.

While USD(I) will be the “focal point in DoD for intelligence on foreign civil aviation-related entities associated with illicit activities or posing a threat to the United States, its allies or its interests,” the Air Force will handle day-to-day operations through the Civil Aviation Intelligence Analysis Center, according to a July 29 memo from Vickers.

Read full article….

2011/08/092011/08/09

Winslow Wheeler: Defense Budget Hysteria

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence

0Shares

WinslowWheeler Cropped — Winslow Wheeler

Defense Budget Hysteria and Business as Usual – or Reform?

By Winslow T. Wheeler

Military.com, 9 August 2011

The rhetoric of people rushing to rescue Pentagon spending from “completely unacceptable” cuts is quite hysterical. Leading the chorus has been Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. He termed the possible defense budget cuts (about $850 billion over 10 years according to most) a “doomsday mechanism,” if the automatic sequestration trigger of Obama’s debt deal with the Republicans in Congress is pulled. Some think tank types, opining in the Washington Post and the New York Times, have deemed these reductions “indiscriminately hacking away” at the Pentagon’s budget and something that could “imperil America’s national security.” Their defense spending allies, including multiple generals and admirals sitting atop various Pentagon bureaucracies, confirm it all with descriptions like “very high risk” and “draconian.”

It should be pointed out that these people are underestimating the size of the potential cuts the new debt deal could theoretically cause. The $850 billion supposition measures the reductions against an artificial “baseline” from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that does not include the actual budget growth the Pentagon had scheduled for itself. Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments tells us in a useful analysis (“Defense Funding in the Budget Control Act of 2011”) that the debt deal’s automatic sequesters, if implemented, would mean $968 billion in cuts over ten years from the DOD budgets heretofore planned – over $100 billion more in cuts.

Read full analysis….