Celebrating Interdependence Day

[Smiley and West]

		Smiley & West celebrate Interdependence Day with an esteemed panel at the New York Public Library in Lincoln Center. Panelists: Howard Dean - Former Vermont governor; DNC chairman; and 2004 presidential candidate Benjamin Barber - Distinguished Senior Fellow, Dēmos; president, CivWorld Carol Gilligan - NYU professor; author, In a Different Voice Khalil Gibran Muhammad - Director, Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture Tiffany Shlain - Director, “Connected”

[Carol D. Durante-Spinner]

Thanks for sharing!

[Candace McCarty]

INTERDEPENDENCE . . .

We have to find ways to speak, to embrace and make them [everyone] part of this revolution.

A small act repeated millions of times can transform the world.

We are responsible for change. Politicians rarely change things.

We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly... MLK

The opposite of dependence is isolation.

We are all needy. We all need each other. We are all inter-connected.

[Sean]

interesting to hear Howard Dean refer to Mitt Romney as 'Brother Romney'. what? did you guys take a soul infusion before the conversation? was he eating collard greens as he said it?

more to the point, do you hear it when you're being pandered to?

[cora leibowitz]

Thank you. I'm in Greece now, so : Efkaristo!

[Sean]

then what's the opposite of independence?

[LibyaWest]

Interdependence 2011 = neo-colonialism, imperialism, bombing, invasion, pillaging, and looting-- the new world order.

[LibyaWest]

And now the sister act. The puppeteers want to teach the mindless 'mericans, and especially the dumbass obomberbots, the words to the new song, the new world order.  Can you say "federal family" instead of "federal government. Well....nah.  Some of us don't like the song, its words, and certainly won't be humming its tune.

[Art Solomon]

Whew! There's as much meat here as a KC stockyard!  I wanted to relisten to this before commenting, but doing so would require a few hundred page response.

 

From a sociological, and Murphy's, perspective, people are going to be for what they think will get them "farther", "faster", "easier", as far as they can tell at the moment.  Human nature.  It's good that we take a moment out to be conscious of how interdependent we are, on any scale, weather we want to be or not.  Doing this is a good reminder of why societies formed in the first place.

 

If we want to really engineer society's structures (i.e. systems) we have to take a look at where we can gain benefit from it and not.  This is what systems engineering does.   This is trodden ground.

 

Where the human touch comes in is applying spin to the cueball at the appropriate time in the appropriate way without messing the whole thing up unexpectedly.   That requires not just knowledge, but experience and a sense of history.   An experienced welder can look at a blueprint and spot a defect because he's seen it before. 

 

This is our problem globally...partly.  We've got so much new stuff and it moves too fast, and all at once.  The old Butterfly Effect is evident on a daily basis in the finanial markets, as an example.   The bottom line is to take control, or at least hold on.  But we've held on long enough. 

 

There's been times in the past when I thought us 'Mercuns would've finally had enough.  Like Watergate, Iran-Contra, Carlysle, Operation Enduring Paycheck, credit checks on all new hires, thead nauseum.   And we just suck it up.  The fact is that someone's gotta do the dirty work, and very few have the moral backbone to say no.   This makes us prostitutes.  I couldn't look myself in the mirror every morning if that's what I did.  Sure there's a lot of grey area, but in some things there's not, like taking someone's job, something I refused to do.

 

Who was it that said we get the kind of government we deserve?  It's really educational to see how far we can be pushed.  Hope someone other than me is learning.  Props to LibyaWest.

 

 

 

[Ben Green]

Can somebody post the two conferences in Philly and DC where Smiley and West will be speaking? It's impossible to skip backwards on the player and I wasn't able to write it down fast enough!

[Penguin Board of Directors]

Opposites of independence? How about we try subsistence, slavish mentality, or parasitism?

Sean said:

then what's the opposite of independence?

[Bennetta]

In theory, Interdependence sounds very practical, fair, just, moral and common sense for the greater good of the greatest number of people in the world....right?  BUT I think we all know the West is too Ethnocentric in its' world views to ever position itself as just an EQUAL participant in any form of Interdependence.  Besides, you can’t claim Interdependence when YOU ASSUME your version of Democracy is superior to any other nations’ form of government perhaps based on its own culture, economy or belief system.  Lets take the Black Continent for example, Africa actually holds 1/3 of United Nations' technical voting rights/power yet somehow She is constantly being targeted for her resources or attempts made to influence African countries’ choices for its own governmental leadership or declaration of war made against Her, etc. Now that doesn’t sound like Interdependence to me instead it sounds more like world dominance against the world’s very own Motherland.

OR lets consider the injustices, corruption, discrimination, domestic torture/terrorism and lack of civil liberties, civil rights and human rights that take place every day right here in the U.S.  My best example of this would be COINTELPRO, the illegal victimization of innocent U.S. citizens by its own government intelligence agencies (FBI, CIA & Homeland Securities) that discredits, infiltrates, spies on, terrorizes, tortures its own citizens with the help of “paid” hate groups disguised as “Community Policing”....don’t ever believe that BS and don’t ever help FBI and their cousins spy on your neighbors either.  Wake up people....terrible and unspeakable things are happening to these innocent U.S. victims whom have not been accused of nor found guilty of committing any crimes YET they are targeted with 24-hour-a-day surveillance and NOBODY helps them including: local authorities, State Police, Attorney Generals Office, Congress, Senate, Dept of Justice, State Dept, UN, civil rights organizations, civil liberties organizations, human rights organizations nor the Media - ACLU in certain instances has tried taking on some of these very complex cases of human rights violations but not enough.  By the way, most of these victims are minorities, activists, whistleblowers and increasingly Single Women too are now being targeted though most Single Women victims are often chosen based on personal vendettas by someone with governmental influence and power who opts to place their names on FBI’s Suspicious Targeted Individual lists maintained by Fusion Centers that were all built and funded right after the 9/11 tragedy when Congress first gave President Bush a blank check to “keep us all secure” without any oversight.  Then came the “evil” Patriot Act and its many extensions authorized by Bush, the House, the Senate and most recently Obama too extended it for another 4 years allowing the FBI even more power and free will to execute excessive and unchallenged surveillance of anyone they deem to be a threat irregardless of whether or not there is documented evidence of suspected wrongdoing or documentation of investigation and absolutely no judicial nor governmental oversight is required.

I definitely agree with Howard Dean’s assertion that the media is a failed state.  This is just indefensible based on my own observation that NO MEDIA with tiny exception of Washington Post and maybe Aljazeera English and PBS have minimally dared to report on any of the thousands upon thousands of reports of illegal COINTELPRO domestic terrorism of innocent U.S. citizens which by the way includes everything from using military energy weapons to poisoning victims to involuntary human experimentation to use of radiation to do harm to discrediting targets in their own communities to use of “through wall” military weapons that allow vision from the street to right inside target’s own bedroom, etc.  COINTELPRO was supposedly outlawed back in the early 70’s by Congress when it was first determined to have been used on civil rights activists and even pioneers such as MLK and Fred Hampton.  YET today everyone in and outside of Washington knows this harmful form of domestic terrorism still exists and NO MEDIA DARES TO REPORT ON IT NOR CHALLENGE IT.  

 

Tragically I don’t see how any of us can really challenge the bold yet very honest claim made by LibyaWest.....when I read that, I could feel the power and truth in those words though I would have also added Cointelpro, Involuntary Human Experimentation, Organized Stalking and Electronic Harassment to that list.  WE MUST DO BETTER BUT I’M JUST NOT SOLD ON INTERDEPENDENCE AS A REALISTIC SOLUTION AT THIS PARTICULAR TIME IN WORLD HISTORY.

[Sean]

Mr. West sounds a familiar refrain about how our politics have been captured by oligarchs and plutocrats. Was anyone else struck by the fact that Howard Dean, as a career politician and former head of the DNC, represents exactly those interests? Put simply: he knows where the bodies are buried when it comes to big money driving policy, after all, he's the one who took hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes, er, campaign contributions under the auspices of the DNC.

I guess 'speaking truth to power' is easy, unless its sitting right across from you.