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Ending Anonymity: Why The WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime Threatens The Future Of Privacy

Cyber Polygon

Ending Anonymity: Why The WEF’s Partnership Against Cybercrime Threatens The Future Of Privacy

With many focusing on tomorrow’s Cyber Polygon exercise, less attention has been paid to the World Economic Forum’s real ambitions in cybersecurity – to create a global organization aimed at gutting even the possibility of anonymity online. With the governments of the US, UK and Israel on board, along with some of the world’s most powerful corporations, it is important to pay attention to their endgame, not just the simulations.

Amid a series of warnings and simulations in the past year regarding a massive cyber attack that could soon bring down the global financial system, the “information sharing group” of the largest banks and private financial organizations in the United States warned earlier this year that banks “will encounter growing danger” from “converging” nation-state and criminal hackers over the course of 2021 and in the years that follow.

The organization, called the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), made the claim in its 2021 “Navigating Cyber” report, which assesses the events of 2020 and provides a forecast for the current year. That forecast, which casts a devastating cyber attack on the financial system through third parties as practically inevitable, also makes the case for a “global fincyber [financial-cyber] utility” as the main solution to the catastrophic scenarios it predicts.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, an organization close to top FS-ISAC members has recently been involved in laying the groundwork for that very “global fincyber utility” — the World Economic Forum, which recently produced the model for such a utility through its Partnership against Cybercrime (WEF-PAC) project….

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If It’s Profitable, Is It Really Sustainable?

If It’s Profitable, Is It Really Sustainable?

That an economic activity has to be profitable is considered a truism, something taken for granted and not reflected upon. But what if the opposite is the case?

When I first took up small-scale organic farming in the 1970s, I spent a lot of energy in developing new methods and machinery to increase efficiency in production. The early organic advocates went a long way to assure other growers, farmers, businesses and politicians that organic farming could be profitable, even within the prevailing economic system. Even more so, if externalities would be factored into the price (which they still are not). I see a similar discourse surrounding regenerative agriculture, permaculture, market gardening or artisanal bakery. But perhaps this assurance of profitability was misguided all along. What if profit is not desirable? What if the pursuit of profit is at the core of the ills of society?

There is an ethical perspective on profit that questions if it is fair that capital owners get richer while workers don’t. That question is justified, and could be the subject of another essay, but fairness is outside of the scope of this article. My focus instead is on what implications profit has for the economy and the ever-growing use of resources.

Profit in the sustainability narrative

In the world of business, an enterprise is considered to be viable only if it is profitable. In the prevailing sustainability discourse, we are told that there is no contradiction between profitability and environmental or social progress. On the contrary, profitability is seen a prerequisite for sustainable development. Environmental politics is full of concepts such as “triple-bottom-line” and “people, planet, profit”. But, by and large, this is simply not correct. Profitability is incompatible with sustainability. Let me explain why.

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Disruptive Markets–What Sustainability Really Means For Business

Disruptive Markets–What Sustainability Really Means For Business

Many look around at today’s crises – climate change spinning out of control, inequality driving political instability and our oceans filling with plastic – and despair at the prospects for serious change. Most then try to apportion blame or at least seek to understand why. Business blames consumers. NGOs blame business. Everyone blames politicians.

Almost everyone who is engaged and thoughtful on this, even inside companies, at some level blame capitalism, markets and big business. This is well justified given, after all, it has been the delivery vehicle for all these crises.

But where does that leave us? As a campaigner who has spent 40+ years on these issues, I’m not satisfied with just a problem diagnosis, I need a way forward, a credible path to success. When talking about risks to the future of civilisation, accepting failure is not really a strategic option.

I don’t disagree that capitalism has been the problem. I emphasise capitalism rather than Western free markets – just take a look at China where capitalism took hold and delivered an epidemic of pollution that nearly overwhelmed the country – and still may.

But problem accepted, we have to find a way forward and I would argue that some form of the market system, if guided or constrained by policy, is our best and probably only hope of moving fast enough.

I do not argue this from a love of markets or an inherent belief in the philosophies espoused by many of that system’s advocates. I approach this as a person who lives and breathes the fear of global collapse and I can’t see another viable way forward.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Degrading Newspapers’ Business Sections

Degrading Newspapers’ Business Sections

It’s alarming that there are far fewer media outlets for consumer protection news and features than there were thirty years ago. Recall the huge Phil Donahue Show, the regional radio show and TV news shows, the television networks and syndicated radio shows that would report and interview consumer advocates about the injustice, rip-offs, and harms done to the consumer by unscrupulous corporations. These shows are largely gone now. Shows marked by fluff, narcissism, trivia, and sensationalist, frenetic news bits are their replacements.

What is disturbing is that the major newspapers – the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal—are cutting back reporting on the revelations and doings of active consumers, and consumer organizations. Sure, they do occasional features that may gain them big journalism prizes. But the regular coverage of very important consumer struggles with Congress, the White House, the courts, and the state legislatures has vastly shrunken. Moreover, the media, especially TV, is dittoheading itself with the daily “big story”, as with the Trumpian escapades.

Serious readers are left with the New York Times daily Business pages (the Washington Post dropped its separate, daily business section a few years ago). Of late, the editors of the Times business section have been diluting its contents with what two former reporters called a more “business friendly” priority. My attempts to discuss this problem with their news editors have not been answered.

Last Sunday I picked up the weighty Sunday New York Times and went to the business page (business is often defined as stories about sellers, when it should include buyers and consumers). The cover page featured a huge photograph and article titled: “Tiger Is Back, Will Sponsors Follow?”

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Daniel Nevins: Economics for Independent Thinkers

Daniel Nevins: Economics for Independent Thinkers

It’s time we stop trusting the ‘experts’

Economists are supposed to monitor and analyze the economy, warn us if risks are getting out of hand, and advise us on how to make things runs more effectively — right?

Well, even though that’s what most people expect from economists, it’s not at all how they see their role, warns CFA and and behavioral economist Daniel Nevins.

Economists, he cautions, are modelers. They pursue academic lines of thought in order to make their models more perfect. They live in a universe of equations and presumptions about equilibrium states and other chimerical mathematical perfections that don’t exist in real life.

In short, they are the wrong people to advise us, Nevins claims, as they have no clue how the imperfect world we live in actually works.

In his book Economics For Independent Thinkers, he argues that we need a new, more accurate and useful way of studying the economy:

However far you go back, you can find economists who had a more realistic approach to how humans actually behave, than the way that mainstreamers assume they behave in the models that the Fed uses to pick winners and losers.

You mentioned credit cycles, business environment, and behavioral economics. What I’ve done is to say, “Okay. We know that the modeling approach, the systems of equations approach doesn’t work. But instead of starting completely from scratch, what can we find in the economics literature that is maybe more realistic?”

And the interesting thing is that if you look at the work that was done, the state of the profession before the 1930s, before Keynesianism took hold, you can find a lot of work that was quite sensible.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Operation Choke-Point Is Worse Than We Thought

Operation Choke-Point Is Worse Than We Thought

Operation Choke Point is an initiative of the DoJ that was announced in 2013 which investigates bank interactions with certain businesses believed to be at higher risk for fraud and money laundering. When first disclosed it was heavily criticised for bypassing due process with critics warning that “it’s a thinly veiled ideological attack on industries the Obama administration doesn’t like, such as gun sellers,” and precious metals dealers.However, as Mike Maloney explains, it is far worse than that… “it violates the most fundamental principles of the rule of law and accountable, transparent government.”

*  *  *

From: Staff Report, 113th Congress, December 8, 2014

“At a minimum, Operation Choke Point is little more than government-mandated de-risking.

FDIC, in cooperation with the Justice Department, made sure banks understood – or in their own language, “got the message” – that maintaining relationships with certain disfavored business lines would incur enormous regulatory risk.

The effect of this policy has been to deny countless legal and legitimate merchants access to the financial system and deprive them of their very ability to exist.

Accordingly, Operation Choke Point violates the most fundamental principles of the rule of law and accountable, transparent government.”

*  *  *

We strongly suggest you are not holding anything sharp while you watch these clips….

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The Incredible Lies We Are Told About Wall Street

The Incredible Lies We Are Told About Wall Street

The corporation has become a financial asset to be manipulated by CEOs and institutional shareholders.

Fewer than half of the US population owns a single share of stock and even fewer Americans are in a position to start their own businesses. Nonetheless, at least in rhetoric this nation remains the land of the self-made man — and occasional woman. Many believe they still have the opportunity to be real entrepreneurs — by investing in corporate America through the stock market.

Stock markets provide all our citizens the chance to invest in those companies with promising products and technologies. Companies use capital from the markets and loans from banks to expand plants and innovate. Banks also act as an instrument to screen and evaluate new business opportunities. All of these contentions would hardly survive the usual scrutiny the media give to most economic matters, especially government programs. Why these myths persist is a vital political question.

The stock market today seldom raises capital for real investment. Our economy has become increasingly financialized with speculative activity generating a large share of total profits and also steering — and disrupting — the course of the productive economy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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