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Journal: Humans as Slaves–Our Global Shame

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Civil Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence
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The word ‘slavery' often conjures brutal images of a long since vanquished historic project, but its practice, more commonly and legally referred to as human trafficking, continues to thrive in every corner of the globe – making it the world's second largest criminal industry.

By Cassandra Clifford for ISN Insights

People are comparatively cheaper than they were in the 1600-1800s, when slaves were purchased for life. Now ownership tends to last only a few months to a few years, making slaves cheaper to purchase and more easily disposable. In 1850 the purchase price of a slave in the southern US averaged the equivalent of $40,000 today. According to Free the Slaves, a slave today costs an average of $90. People have become a disposable commodity, cheap and easy labor one can just toss out when no longer needed. Globalization and the post-World War II population boom have increased access to, and lowered the cost of, transportation, which has in turn contributed to the increased levels of global slavery. Victims are often driven into slavery by severe poverty or acute need for economic gain. Additionally, the ethnicity of today's slave is rarely important.

Read complete article….

See Also:

Review: Nobodies–Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy

Review: The Manufacture of Evil–Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System

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Journal: Weasal words more difficult to get away with

Cultural Intelligence
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Seth Godin Home

Weasel words are more difficult to get away with

I got a note from someone who “helps lead the internet and Media efforts” at a fairly well known venture firm.

A click over to their website indicates that he's not a Managing Director or a Partner, not a Limited Senior Advisor, nor a Founding Strategic Director, Principal, Director of Business Development, Vice President or even a Senior Associate. He's an Associate. Which is fine, of course, unless the first thing you told a stranger is that you help lead an important initiative.

Organizations have always been good at title inflation, because it's free and it serves their purposes. The net, though, makes it easy to see what the hierarchy actually looks like, so it's better to just be clear, I think.

[A few readers have asked what he should do instead. After all, he shouldn't act like a mere, cog, right? My point is that he should tell the truth, a truth that gets better after being googled.

He could call and say, “I work for Joe Jones (brag about Joe for a while). He's open to meeting with you and I can make that happen if it's interesting to you.”

…or he could say, “I'm the junior man here at Tate Industries and my job is to find interesting projects and bring them to the partners. Last year, I started the interactions between us and x, y and z. Is it worth your time to get together and figure out the best way to pitch this project to them?”

In both cases, starting on a clearer footing gives you more power, not less.]

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NIGHTWATCH Extract: Iran-Pakistan, Iran-Turkey-India, Israel

05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Peace Intelligence
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Iran-Pakistan: Iranian officials on 16 December accused Pakistan of being linked to a 15 December suicide bombing in southeastern Iran. Iran's deputy minister and chief of security at the Interior Ministry, Ali Abdollahi, said Pakistani officials had ignored Iranian warnings about bases in Pakistan for anti-Iranian elements and had allowed the terrorists to cross into Iran.

Iranian lawmaker Kazem Jalali said initial reports and confessions from arrested Jundallah leader Abdolmalek Rigi showed that the bombers had been trained in Pakistan. Pakistan must clarify its position on the terrorists and on the Iranian government, Jalali said.

NIGHTWATCH Comment: On the 15th two bombers detonated themselves at a mosque in Chabahar, killing 41 people and injuring at least 50 on the eve of the Shiite holy day Ashura, which honors the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, the grandson of Mohammed.

The results of Iran's custodial interrogation and Iranian accusations against Pakistan are virtually identical in substance to Indian interrogation of the surviving Mumbai terrorist and Indian accusations about Pakistan and terrorists.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota: Iran, Turkey, and India are now seeing common cause with respect to the threat from both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.  We anticipate new forms of multinational information-sharing and sense-making emerging in the region.

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Reference: Citizenship Versus Transpartisanship

Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Methods & Process
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Tom Atlee

TRANSPARTISANSHIP AND MOVING BEYOND PARTISANSHIP

by Tom Atlee

What is “transpartisanship”?  In its most common usage, “transpartisan” seems to refer to partisans from across the political spectrum coming together in civil conversation.

I love the term, but find myself thinking of it as a transitional phenomenon.  A partisan is a strong (even militant) supporter of a party or position.  People assume, in this polarized age, that partisans can't talk and work together.  Bringing opposing partisans into visibly creative civil conversation flies in the face of that widespread assumption, and thus serves to undermine the primary narrative of polarization.  However, it also has a dark side.  Bringing people together as partisans instead of as peer citizens may actually reinforce partisanship as a political reality.  I want to move beyond that, as I believe that parties and positions interfere with our ability to generate collective wisdom.  (See http://co-intelligence.org/CIPol_beyondpositions.html)

Partisanship has a gift to offer to wise democracy.  Partisans invest the time and effort to thoroughly articulate the arguments and evidence for their perspective on each issue.  The problem with partisanship is that the partisans then use those articulations to fight each other and batter the public. The alternative is to use the gifts of partisans to help the mass of citizens move beyond partisanship.

An obvious way to do that is through citizen deliberative councils like Citizens Juries and Consensus Conferences.  (See http://co-intelligence.org/P-CDCs.html)  These councils bring together randomly selected citizens who may be Republicans or Democrats or whatever, but who aren't chosen because of that (except perhaps as part of an effort at demographic balance that includes diverse demographic factors like race, gender, etc.).  They are not treated in any special way because of their political beliefs; they are simply peer citizens with the other citizens in the council.  They are given (a) a charge to come up with something that benefits their whole community or country (a mandate that lifts them above partisanship) and (b) access to briefing materials and experts who represent the full spectrum of opinion on the issue being deliberated.  In other words, the range of partisan viewpoints is represented by their diverse information sources and perspectives, rather than focusing on their positionality as partisan participants.  This approach reflects the ideal of citizens as people with common problems and hopes engaging in conversations that creatively utilize their diversity to discover something greater and better than they all came in the room with.

I wouldn't call this transpartisan deliberation.  I'd call it citizen deliberation.

Continue reading “Reference: Citizenship Versus Transpartisanship”

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Reference: Microsoft, Facebook, & the Future

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, info-graphics/data-visualization, Mobile, Technologies
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Bianca Bosker

Bianca Bosker

bianca@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting

Microsoft's Cracked Windows: How The World's Technology Juggernaut Lost Its Buzz And Became The ‘Underdog'

EXTRACT:  Its stranglehold on the desktop, while hugely profitable, helped turn Microsoft into an out-of-shape competitor focused on defending turf rather than scoring new hits. In seeking to maintain its dominance on the desktop, it failed to anticipate and plan for the spread of computing to mobile phones, handheld computers, the cloud, and Web-based services delivered by companies such as Google. Now, people can write documents, run spreadsheets and browse the Web without indulging any Microsoft software, steering right around the software giant.

EXTRACT:  “It has an executive team that had not truly lived in a world of competition for perhaps a decade, and its performance in the years between 2000 and 2010 have showed this,” says George Colony, CEO and chairman of Forrester Research, a technology and market research firm. “Essentially, the company had no competition for a decade and so it became out of shape and not ready to truly compete.”

EXTRACT: In an op-ed in the New York Times published earlier this year, a former Microsoft vice-president, Dick Brass described the company as “a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.”

EXTRACT:  “Apple builds fanatics,” says MIT's Anderson. “Microsoft builds people who are sullen, but not mutinous. Their DNA is large organizations, operating systems, and applications. Their DNA doesn't understand design and the consumer mind.”

EXTRACT:  The Pew Research Center's 2010 Mobile Access survey found that 40% of adults in the U.S. now use their mobile phone to go online, compose email, or instant message–a number that will almost certainly swell.  “Phones are do or die for Microsoft,” says Foley.

EXTRACT:  The only certainty is this: Microsoft will be around in a major way if for no other reason than the dollars at play.  “They have more money than God,” says MIT's Anderson

Read the entire deep, thoughtful, world-class piece….

See Also:

Graphic: One Vision for the Future of Microsoft

Graphic: Analytic Tool-Kit in the Cloud (CATALYST II)

Worth a Look: 1989 All-Source Fusion Analytic Workstation–The Four Requirements Documents

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Reference: Arianna Huffington–Wikileaks About Trust in Government–Or Not

07 Other Atrocities, Analysis, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Policies, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
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Arianna HuffingtonArianna Huffington

Posted: December 15, 2010 09:19 PM

The Media Gets It Wrong on WikiLeaks: It's About Broken Trust, Not Broken Condoms

EXTRACT:  It's notable that the latest leaks came out the same week President Obama went to Afghanistan for his surprise visit to the troops — and made a speech about how we are “succeeding” and “making important progress” and bound to “prevail.”

The WikiLeaks cables present quite a different picture. What emerges is one reality (the real one) colliding with another (the official one). We see smart, good-faith diplomats and foreign service personnel trying to make the truth on the ground match up to the one the administration has proclaimed to the public. The cables show the widening disconnect. It's like a foreign policy Ponzi scheme — this one fueled not by the public's money, but the public's acquiescence.

The cables show that the administration has been cooking the books.

EXTRACT:  For the Obama administration, it appears that accountability is a one-way street. When he had the chance to bring the principle of accountability to our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and investigate how we got into them, the president passed. As John Perry Barlow tweeted, “We have reached a point in our history where lies are protected speech and the truth is criminal.”

Any process of real accountability, would, of course, also include the key role the press played in bringing us the war in Iraq. Jay Rosen, one of the participants in the symposium, wrote a brilliant essay entitled “From Judith Miller to Julian Assange.” He writes:

For the portion of the American press that still looks to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, and that considers itself a check on state power, the hour of its greatest humiliation can, I think, be located with some precision: it happened on Sunday, September 8, 2002.

That was when the New York Times published Judith Miller and Michael Gordon's breathless, spoon-fed — and ultimately inaccurate — account of Iraqi attempts to buy aluminum tubes to produce fuel for a nuclear bomb.

Continue reading “Reference: Arianna Huffington–Wikileaks About Trust in Government–Or Not”