Public Intelligence Blog

Economic imbalances and social inequality risk reversing the gains of globalization, warns the World Economic Forum in its report Global Risks 2012. These are the findings of a survey of 469 experts and industry leaders who worry that the world’s institutions are ill-equipped to cope with today’s interconnected, rapidly evolving risks. The findings of the survey fed into an analysis of three major risk cases: Seeds of Dystopia; Unsafe Safeguards and the Dark Side of Connectivity. Report also analyses the top 10 risks in five categories – economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological.

Report

Tip of the Hat to Berto Jongman.

Phi Beta Iota:  The report fails to address the absence of both intelligence and integrity among all “institutions” be they public or private.  This is the entire point of the global Occupy movement.  This is also the entire point of this website, which predates Occupy by some time.

Event: 30-31 March 2012 NYC Participatory Budgeting

21st Century Network Governance – Beyond Participatory Budgeting

Participatory budgeting is a very important step in the right direction, but in the larger context of both obstacles presented by corrupt governance and what is possible enabled by the Internet, it can be taken–quickly–to a higher level.

Participatory budgeting is also somewhat ineffective in that the false assumption of the public and private sectors are accepted.  True Cost Economics is the only possible foundation for a sustainable public sector and a sustainable private sector, and most participatory budgeting projects have no idea what the difference is between the false budget and the true budget.  To discuss budget disposition without seeing, for example, that fracking creates earthquakes and that tar sands consume vast quantities of potable water, is an exercise in futility.

This session will present a very rapid 30 minute overview of the pioneering work done by Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3 with 24 co-founders including Medard Gabel (co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, designer of the current digital EarthGame).  Three integral foundations for effective collective intelligence will be introduced:

Robert Steele

a.  Strategic Analytic Model highlighting the ten high-level threats to humanity ignored by most governments and the twelve core policy areas from Agriculture to Water that are not harmonized by most governments

b.  Six Bubbles consisting of an Autonomous Internet connecting an Earth Intelligence (Decision-Support) Network, EarthGame, EarthPolicy, and EarthBudget, all glued together with transpartisan memetics and transitional facilitation.  Illustration

c.  M4IS2, the new craft of intelligence, no longer secret, expensive or federal–Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing and Sense Making unites the eight tribes of intelligence (academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, non-government / non-profit) to harmonize decisions, policies, budgets, and behavior across all boundaries, by using shared information to achieve shared objectives.

Following the 30 minute illustrated presentation, two discussants will expand on the possibilities, one from a government perspective and the other from a civil society perspective.

The final 30 minutes will be devoted to interactive questions and answers.

It is our hope that the entire session can be video-taped and streamed online for permanent public access.

Robert David STEELE Vivas

Robert David STEELE Vivas, CEO of Earth Intelligence Network (501c3), has spent 30 years in the intelligence (decision-support) field, and the last twenty helping ninety governments get a grip on open sources of information to create Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).  His second book, THE NEW CRAFT OF INTELLIGENCE: Personal, Public, & Political (2002, also free online) remains the primer for public intelligence in the public interest.  He is also the originator of the concept of the Smart Nation, first published in Government Information Quarterly in 1995, and then in THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest (EIN, 2006).  He is a former spy, an honorary hacker associated with Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE), the Silicon Valley Hackers Conference (as started by Stewart Brand), and Hactic / Chaos Computer Club in Europe.  He is also the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, reading in 98 categories, with all of his reviewed accessible online by category at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.  In October he presented his Electoral Reform proposal to Occupy NYC, the six minute video someone else posted went viral. He is one of three candidates for the Reform Party presidential nomination, and has created a web site, We the People Reform Coalition, that represents the next level in participatory governance, integrating Electoral Reform, a Coalition Cabinet and Balanced Budget that are crowd-sourced and presented in advance of election day, and a commitment to True Cost Economics.  In June 2012 Random House / Evolver Editions is releasing his newest book, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust.

Marcus Aurelius

Invite your attention to pages 5 thru 7 of attached which outlines in very clear terms the likely FY 2013 and longer term impacts on the Department of Defense and the Joint Force of the impending sequester brought about by this week’s dereliction of duty on the part of the Senators and Representatives making up the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.

SecDef Panetta to Senator McCain on Sequester (PDF 2 pages)

Phi Beta Iota:  Panetta-McCain may be the toxic replacment to Cheney-Warner.  The letter is without merit.   The acquisition system is so broken now the Navy and Army cannot build anything coherently–the Navy still lacks Naval Gun Fire and the Army still lacks an infantry weapon able to out-gun  the Taliban, while the Air Force continues to stink at close air support and lack both an intra-theater adequacy of lift and a long-haul heavy lift capability (or the ability to be effective above 6,000 ft).  DoD, in short, is a mis-managed mess and Panetta has no idea how to go about fixing that, nor does he want to.  Lockheed Martin and others are quite happy with the way things are, where 50% of every dollar is waste but that waste is profit for them because it includes their overhead.  It is true that the current laws mandated by Congress make it difficult for any Cabinet Secretary to cut waste–this is the same Congress that mandated we pay 100% asking price for Medicare drugs instead of the more common global standard of 2% for generic wholesale.  As long as Congress remains corrupt, and the SecDef remains corrupt, there is no fixing this problem.  The FACT is that we have to cut one trillion a year (what we are borrowing), not one trillion over ten years.  The FACT is that DoD would be much stronger if it could combine both intelligence and integrity and actually create the four forces after next, at a much reduced cost, that those with intelligence and integrity have been discussing for decades, and with greater intensity, since the mid-1990′s.

See Also:

Read the rest of this entry »

Who? Who?

EXCLUSIVE: Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America: Over 1 Million Deaths Annually, 62 Million People With Zero Net Worth, As the Economic Elite Make Off With $46 Trillion

Editor’s Note: The following report includes adapted excerpts from David DeGraw’s book, “The Road Through 2012: Revolution or World War III.”

Release Date: 9.28.11

Analysis of Financial Terrorism in America
By David DeGraw, AmpedStatus Report

EXTRACTS

The following report is a statistical analysis of the systemic economic attacks against the American people.

Currently, at least 62 million Americans, 20% of US households, have zero or negative net worth.

Recently, the National Academy of Science released their latest findings, backing up my claim by revealing that 52,765,000 Americans, 17.3% of the population, lived in poverty in 2009.

In 2005, 25.7 million Americans needed food stamps, currently 45.8 million people rely on them.

…counting the total number people in need of employment, you get a current unemployment rate of 22.5%, which is an all-time record total of 34 million people currently in need of work.

Read the rest of this entry »

John Robb

RESOLVED: The Toyota Prius IS NOT a resilient car

The Toyota Prius, and electric cars in general, are NOT resilient.

Some major reasons why:

1. Global manufacture.  Exotic materials.
2. Replacement and repair.  Cost is high and it requires complex methods/parts.
3. Conditional:  If electricity isn’t produced locally, there is a dependence on a remote power source.

Phi Beta Iota:  This is a good example of “true cost” economics that is not taught in business schools, schools of public administration, or any form of government.  “True cost” and “360 degree cradle to grave” analytics is what a mature intelligence community should be pioneering.

True Cost is called by some a triple-bottom line (physical cost, ecological cost, social cost).  Others talk about true cost to own (including all related fuels or batteries, toxic side effects etc), others talk about cradle to grave accounting to include complete recycling.  Technically, true cost accounting prohibits negative external costs from being ignored.  A gallon of gasoline may “cost” $5.00 to buy, but $12-15 in external costs are being imposed on both current and future publics.  At root true cost accounting is about holistic analytics with absolute integrity.

On the larger web, DuckDuckGo produces True Cost.

One path is to use the directory (middle column, under journal):

True Cost (87)

Another path is to search for <True Cost> without quotes.  That produces the following selection, which has been resorted to have the posts appear in alphabetical order:

Read the rest of this entry »

Chuck Spinney Recommends...

Can the US Have an Expansionary Fiscal Contraction?

All  … the attached essay was written by Simon Johnson, Ronald Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management; Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics; and co-founder of Baseline Scenario.  Johnson used to be Chief Economist of IMF and is, IMO, one of the sanest voices in economics. It summarizes his recent testimony to the Joint Economic Commitee of Congress.  The question is — Should we reduce federal debt to slow the build up of private debt?  He lays out 4 reasons why such a contractionary fiscal policy will create even worse problems.

Click on Image to Enlarge

His penultimate paragraph places the real issue — who is going to pay for the liquidation of the private bubble (see chart below, which I compiled from Fed. Reserve data) into context (the red typing is mine to clarify the ambiguity in his double use of debt).  Also, I urge you to read his testimony (you can download it from the link indicated below) — it is more detailed and he has a brief discussion about how the cost of the financial meltdown (looming private debt liquidations — particularly the bubbles of debt in the financial and household sectors — which Fig 2 shows has not really begun to bite) are being shifted to the middle class.  Note, the rise in the light gray area in Figure 1 is the spike in federal debt that has taken place since the meltdown.

Chuck

The Baseline Scenario

What happened to the global economy and what we can do about it

Could The US Have An “Expansionary Fiscal Contraction”?

By Simon Johnson.  My full written testimony to Tuesday’s hearing of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress is available here.

The US has a large budget deficit and a debt-to-GDP ratio that, in most projections, continues to rise over time.  Some House and Senate Republicans are arguing strongly that this situation calls for large and immediate cuts to government spending, for example as part of any agreement to increase the federal government’s debt ceiling.

The Joint Economic Committee of Congress held a hearing on Tuesday to discuss whether such spending cuts would be “contractionary” or “expansionary” for the economy in the short-run.  My assessment, after participating as a witness at the hearing, is that large immediate spending cuts would tend to slow the economy (a webcast of the hearing is here).

Read full posting….

Home Page

Phi Beta Iota:  Kudos to Christopher B. Bedford for his many contributions, this one in particular is most timely now as a global movement for redirecting the manner in which land (and water) are “owned.”  As with our native forebearers, land can no longer be owned by individuals–community land trusts are the essential way forward.  This is the practice in many countries.  This 37 minute DVD is revolutionary.

Amazon Page

See Also:

E. F. Schumacher Society

Small Is Beautiful, 25th Anniversary Edition: Economics As If People Mattered: 25 Years Later . . . With Commentaries

Obama says ‘Drill, baby, drill.’ Will new oil policy ease gas prices?

President Obama used his weekly address to announce steps to promote greater domestic oil production and reduce the burden of high gas prices. Republicans say it’s not enough.

Big Oil’s Political Ploy

Whatever else we might say about Big Oil in the United States, we have to give the industry credit for one thing: it has mastered the art of scamming us with a perfectly straight face.

Freshmen challenge energy subsidies

Pompeo and Labrador were joined by Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Mike Needham of Heritage Action Fund. The two organizations joined a coalition of conservative groups in March, including Americans for Prosoperity, in a letter calling for an end to energy subsidies.

 

Click on Image to Enlarge

Phi Beta Iota: US politicians have substituted ideology for intelligence (decision-support) and borrowing for thinking.  There is nothing intelligent in US energy policy, because there is no policy–just a long string of subsidies and hand-outs and tax exemptions.  The oil drilling decisions are an example of doing the wrong thing righter, instead of the right thing (Russell Ackoff).  The “policy” decisions are also hypocritical because nothing being decided today will have substantive effect in less than ten years.  Here’s what an intelligent government would use to think about energy futures…and everything else, all together.

Cheery Waves Recommends....

Digging Deeper, Seeing Farther: Supercomputers Alter Science

By JOHN MARKOFF

New York Times, April 25, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO — Inside a darkened theater a viewer floats in a redwood forest displayed with Imax-like clarity on a cavernous overhead screen.

The hovering sensation gives way to vertigo as the camera dives deeper into the forest, approaches a branch of a giant redwood tree, and then plunges first into a single leaf and then into an individual cell. Inside the cell the scene is evocative of the 1966 science fiction movie “Fantastic Voyage,” in which Lilliputian humans in a minuscule capsule take a medical journey through a human body.

There is an important difference — “Life: A Cosmic Journey,” a multimedia presentation now showing at the new Morrison Planetarium here at the California Academy of Sciences, relies not just on computer animation techniques, but on a wealth of digitized scientific data as well.

Read balance of article….

Comment and Seven Graphics Below the Line…

Read the rest of this entry »