Atlee – Page 8 – Public Intelligence Blog

Diversity, like fire, is a powerful part of life. Let us use it well on our shared journey, weaving our unique stories into new possibilities around the great shared fire of life.

DIVERSITY IS AS BIG AS THE UNIVERSE

by Tom Atlee

SUMMARY

Our use of the word “diversity” primarily to address issues of
racism, classism, sexism, and other oppressive isms has blinded us to the fact that diversity is a vast fact of life, deeply embedded not only in humanity but in natural systems and in the very fabric of the universe.

Diversity, like fire and genius, can be problematic. And like
fire and genius, diversity has creative power we can use to
make life better.

Continue reading “Diversity Magic–Breakthrough Possible”

2011/01/212011/01/21

2011 Food Crisis, Urban Gardening, Social Systems

01 Agriculture, 01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 06 Family, 07 Health, 07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, 12 Water, Earth Intelligence

Dear friends,

Food is basic.

Lester Brown — founder of both the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, author of over 50 books on environmental issues, recipient of 26 honorary degrees and a MacArthur Fellowship, and (according to the Washington Post) “one of the world's most influential thinkers” — has just published a cogent article on the rapidly emerging global food crisis in Foreign Policy magazine. He clearly outlines the problem and where attention and resources must be put to ameliorate it.

I knew such a crisis was emerging. I hadn't realized it was emerging so rapidly.

I offer Brown's article here with no further commentary beyond this: His essay — like most other insightful, data-filled articles of its type — omits the key fact that the political and economic systems that generate such situations are not built to respond to them in a truly life-affirming way. “Issues” and “crises” are symptoms of those dysfunctional systems. If social critics and activists spent half the attention and resources on actually transforming those systems that we expend on “issues” and “crises”, we would soon see those “issues” and “crises” being replaced by “solutions” and “creative initiatives”. This is a supreme example of the kind of thing that a wiser democracy — if we had one — would start to address immediately, if it hadn't already done so decades ago.

While many of us work to transform our political and economic systems, we need also to consider what to do in the meantime as these issues and crises continue to grow. So I also offer below two delightful articles on something that we can all do to ameliorate the impact of the food crisis on our own lives and communities. The articles describe not only the functionality of urban gardening but also its enjoyment — and its spread in the face of rising food prices. Significantly, such gardening is a key element in one of the more co-intelligent initiatives I've seen in recent years, the Transition Towns movement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_Towns.

Food for thought… and action… and bellies.

Coheartedly,
Tom

=========================

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/10/the_great_food_crisis_of_2011

The Great Food Crisis Of 2011
By Lester Brown

Continue reading “2011 Food Crisis, Urban Gardening, Social Systems”

2011/01/132011/01/13

Astonishing Facts: America’s Economy & Society

Uncategorized

22 STATISTICS SHOWING THE MIDDLE CLASS DYING

* 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.

* 61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.

* 66% of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.

* 36 percent of Americans say that they don't contribute anything to retirement savings.

* A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.

* 24% of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.

* Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.

* Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.

* For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.

* In 1950, the ratio of the average executive's paycheck to the average worker's paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.

* As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.

* The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.

* Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.

* In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.

* The top 1% of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America's corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.

* In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.

* More than 40% of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.

* For the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.

* This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.

* Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.

* Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.

* The top 10% of Americans now earn around 50% of our national income.

Full Source Online….

2011/01/092011/01/09

Journal: Rise and Role of Concentrated Wealth in USA

03 Economy, Commercial Intelligence

Dear friends,

Most people — at least in the US — think of wealth as a source of happiness. Rich people can, seemingly, get what they want, secure themselves from suffering, and improve the lives of others through their philanthropy. While this story true in many ways, it is also very incomplete. The lives of many rich people can be as filled with suffering, stress, alienation, and constrained humanity as the lives of poorer people.

But beyond these individual considerations, I want to highlight the historic role for concentrated wealth, a role often overlooked in popular imagination. Concentrated wealth has power, and that power inevitably shifts things in the way societies work, for better and/or for worse.

History demonstrates that concentrated wealth plays a significant role in the evolution of societies by being a source of (a) social injustice, (b) distortions of democratic process and/or (c) positive social transformation.

All too often, this evolutionary impact is accompanied by — or even invoked by — tremendous suffering and destruction. If we want societies to evolve more consciously — that is, with more awareness, compassion, intelligence, wisdom, and collective choice — we might work to minimize the injustice and erosion of democracy (a and b) and maximize positive social transformation (c).

CONCENTRATED ENERGY

The concentrated energy contained in concentrated wealth is like the concentrated energy contained in fossil fuels. Coal, oil, and natural gas contain the solar energy of ancient sunlight stored for millions of years and then tapped to fuel the industrial and technological revolutions and the globalization of economy, culture and destiny that have totally transformed our world.

Concentrated wealth contains the energy of billions of laborers, thinkers, creators, and players of economic games. It was born from and feeds the industrial, technological and global revolutions. It is almost as if the concentrated energy of fossil fuels has been transferred into concentrated wealth to induce further transformation of society.

This immensely powerful energy has the potential to release the forces of conscious evolution at the whole-society level. As we know, it also has the potential to accelerate the degradation of our earthly home along with the human communities and cultures that live here. And, of course, it has the potential to become historically irrelevant, to dissipate itself in the pursuit of trivial material pleasures and possessions or in charities that serve only ego, the status quo, or current generations at the expense of future ones.

FOUR ARTICLES

Continue reading “Journal: Rise and Role of Concentrated Wealth in USA”

2010/12/222010/12/22

Tom Atlee Proposes distributed-intelligence, crowd-sourcing participatory think tank for popular common-sense policies, unhindered by party affiliations and ideology

Collaboration Zones, Collective Intelligence, Communities of Practice, IO Sense-Making, Mobile, Policies, Threats

Phi Beta Iota: There is no other person we hold in higher esteem than Tom Atlee. For America the Beautiful, at least, he is this generation's Wise Man. Below in his own words. We urge one and all to contribute to his sustenance.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Dear friends,

I have been talking a lot lately with strategists in the Coffee Party movement (CPM). If you don't know much about the Coffee Party, I urge you to check out their website and Wikipedia's well-referenced short article on them.

While the Coffee Party has definite progressive roots, it also features bright transpartisan energies. Most Coffee Party members — and co-founder Annabel Park — promote civil dialogue about public issues. They also promote democracy-building policies, especially ones to address the democracy-degrading influence of money in politics.

I much prefer the Coffee Party's brand of transpartisanship to the more recent No Labels movement whose goal is “to encourage politicians to come together to develop pragmatic and workable solutions.” Politicians? What about We, the People? What about citizen deliberations and stakeholder dialogues? I can't help but wonder what informed citizen deliberative councils would have to say about the issues the No Labels site addresses…

Although I'm still open to evidence to the contrary, it seems to me that No Labels is trying to co-opt the very real frustration most Americans feel for the political polarization and legislative logjam they see every day. I fear No Labels is cleverly reframing the meme of transpartisanship to rally growing populist energies around a hidden special interest agenda — perhaps building a movement to support a Bloomberg presidential bid in 2012.

Check out “No Labels: What’s Behind “Forward?” Pro-Corporate Economic Policy.” While I don't agree with everything Jim Cook writes or implies there, I think it is significant that all three No Labels co-founders are professionally involved in promoting corporate interests, and that they advocate tapping Social Security to reduce the debt — when SS is not actually a part of the federal budget, per se, but is a collective retirement account into which workers have paid for decades which has lately been ripped off for budgetary expenditures. Their budget concerns do not highlight the gigantic portion of the actual budget that goes to military expenditures — to say nothing of the non-budgeted expenditures for the wars in Iraq and Iran which constitute a gigantic part of the federal debt — military expenditures that are greater than all other military budgets in the world combined. Nor do they feature the many forms of corporate welfare and the option of raising taxes on the hyper-wealthy to the 1950s levels. Notably, they depend heavily on the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a very partisan source, as their favorite budgetary reference.

The whole thing doesn't smell right to me. But I do see it as another indicator of how powerful the emerging transpartisan populist trend is, that so much elite attention is being dedicated to co-opting it.

Continue reading “Tom Atlee Proposes distributed-intelligence, crowd-sourcing participatory think tank for popular common-sense policies, unhindered by party affiliations and ideology”

2010/12/192014/01/01

Tom Atlee: A Whole New Ball Game–Collective Intelligence in ON

Articles & Chapters, Blog Wisdom, Correspondence, Movies, TED Videos, YouTube

Dear friends,

I want to share three videos and one slide show that are having a profound impact on me and my work. They describe different facets of a new realm of understanding and possibility that is making all the difference in the world even now — possibilities that we can help along by taking up the creative challenges these videos present to us.

Much of my work will be weaving these insights into the kind of democracy-shift we need right now. They make it clear that we are, indeed, in a whole new ball game.

Enjoy!

Coheartedy,
Tom

Generation We: The Movement Begins…

Us Now – We're entering an era where more of everything is run by users collectively… (7 parts)

Jane McGonigal: Gaming Can Make a Better World

Michelle Holliday's Humanity 4.0 slide show

Epoch B Swarm Leadership Clean — Click to Enlarge

Phi Beta Iota: Above have been re-sorted to put Information Operations (IO) relevance from top to bottom. The next big thing is a combination of EMPOWERING people, HARNESSING minds, and ERADICATING corruption. GroupOn is the “good” counterpart to WikiLeaks, but WikiLeaks should not be scorned–it demonstrates the perfidy of the Industrial Era “rule by secrecy” top-down elite model that has now been shown to be completely incapable of micro-managing complexity and diversity with ethical integrity. Tom Atlee embodies the future of America and through a restored America the Beautiful, the future of humanity. We respectfully, urgently urge every person to give generously to Tom Atlee and the Co-Intelligence Institute. He has been devoted for decades to the heart of the matter: actualizing the goodness that lies within each of us, and the wisdom that lies within us as the aggregate, Collective Intelligence, Community Intelligence, Integral Consciousness. Giving to Tom is the spiritual equivalent of collective prayer. We need every prayer we can get. Please give to this righteous liberation endeavor. St.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Winter 2010-2011 Co-Intelligence Institute fundraiser progress report:

Funds raised so far: $450 // Target: $15,000
Percentage of needed funds raised so far: 3.0%
People on List: 2045 // Days left in fundraiser: 44

Thank you to the 10 people who have responded so far!

TO SUPPORT THE CO-INTELLIGENCE INSTITUTE & TOM ATLEE'S WORK…

Please send a donation of any amount — $10, $25, $50, $100, $500 or more — to

The Co-Intelligence Institute
PO Box 493
Eugene, OR 97440

or use your Visa or MasterCard to make an online donation at
http://co-intelligence.org/donations.html

Do let me know when you've mailed a donation, so I can add it to our tally right away. Including your email address on your check will help me keep track of your gift.

Graphic: Digital Learners versus Analog Teachers

Interview: Robert Steele on Echo Chamber 2006

2008: Creating a Smart Nation

2008 World Brain as EarthGame

2010/12/062010/12/06

Co-Intelligence Transforming U.S. Politics

About the Idea, Collaboration Zones, Communities of Practice, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, InfoOps (IO), Journalism/Free-Press/Censorship, Methods & Process, Officers Call, Open Government, Policies, Reform

Phi Beta Iota: Robert Steele, our founder, has asked that we post the following as his testimonial.

If there were one person in America I would gladly sacrifice my life for, so as to give the larger group including my direct family the benefit of his continued wisdom, Tom Atlee is that person. He is without peer, and we are all blessed to have him in our lives and within our Commonwealth. PLEASE contribute to his endeavor–what he does creates real wealth for all of us, and that kind of wealth is the only riposte to the decades of unethical legalized looting that we have tolerated for too long. America the Beautiful is coming back–Tom is walking point and deserves our strongest possible support.

Dear friends,

As America's dysfunctional politics and governance swings wildly out of equilibrium, the Co-Intelligence Institute has increased its focus on the transformation of the way the U.S. does politics.

As we track the transpartisan movement, the Coffee Party, the Tea Party, the No Labels movement, the Palin pre-campaign, the strange shifting dance between the Administration and Congress, and other political currents, we sense an emerging and significant force demanding change in the power relationships between the vast majority of “we, the people” on the one hand, and corporate and government elites on the other.

It is very instructive to watch how this populist energy is being manipulated and co-opted. Many of the politicians positioning themselves as populists — “We're not going to take it any more!” — are themselves active members of the elite class they are supposedly battling, and totally beholden to the financial powers behind the political circus.

Continue reading “Co-Intelligence Transforming U.S. Politics”