Andreas you've got me thinking and that is dangerous. I was glad to see your refutation because I thought Michel's rebuttal of your first comment was weak.
I published two issues in 2010 on P2P. The first was August 2 October. They should be easy to find. I think they are even on the P2P wiki. From that work I have a pretty good idea of what Michel was doing up to that point in time. Namely he was gathering collecting and currating of a global basis a very diverse swath of ideas of how to reform an out-of-control global capitalism that was leading to a new feudalism. He was doing such an amazing job that in my opinion he became a target for the forces determined to maintain the status quo. Because his work was showing the world that there were many people who were disillusioned and were developing ideas to replace the ruling order with something better. In 2012 the huge global carrier Orange funded him to develop a handbook summarizing the ideas under his cureration. But that was quickly followed by the attack of Franco Iacomella. And it was less than 10 days after that was announced Daniel Vasquez summoned Michelle Quito to "remake" the entire Ecuadorian nation state. He went and evidently did not even meet Carlos Prieto the Spanish rector of IAEN and budgetary authority for the $700,000 . He had a teleconference with Carlos where Carlos presumably backed up whatever it was that Daniel was telling him. Did michel do any due diligence on carlos and renee ramirez? He has told me that he did not. He felt he could trust these people and that it was not necessary. …. But if he had, he would have picked up warning signs from the quito newspapers of the huge rift that was building between Carlos at IAEN and Ramirez at senesyct. The canadian Bethany Horne had just appeared on the scene and signed on as FLOKs media representative. from what I can tell Bethany was and is an honest and hard-hitting journalist. And for sure once I read of her Newsweek story that appeared in early January 2014 and started studying her links on the web I found a treasure trove of data that bore out the details of Correas borrowing from China as well as material from Amazon watch -- data that shows how the current president has sold out his country's future and is included in my report. I have been sent too much material that documents Daniel Vasquez's total control over everything. And one of the most helpful pieces of information just came from Michel to this list I believe on the issue of the budget. Andres Delgado Ron a young ecuadoran physician who out of idealism with his job to join the project tried to obtain budgetary transparency. That seems not to have been possible. If 26 signatures were required to obtain approval for spending money, one wonders how contrary to what Daniel was telling Michel, the president's office became aware of the project only the weekend before the summit. We will probably never know. We do know that Daniel has Aalabs a free or open source software company and some kind of foundation associated with it. Instead of speculation at this point one can only say that one would hope the Correa administration would insist on and publish and audit of FLOK expenses. What has become clear in the information shared with me is that what Michel refers to as flock management is one person Daniel Vasquez and he alone. The "BOSS". There is a lot of confirming data on this in the COOK Report I published about five weeks ago. And I am getting more all the time. Including a very amusing description of the lengths to which Daniel went to intercept Michel in March when it seemed that he would have an actual meeting with Ramirez in order to prevent the meeting taking place. Apparenttly from the very beginning Danielle placed Michelle in a protective cocoon telling him this person can be trusted or that person cannot - he is a liar. Danielle very skillfully built a wall around Michel to isolate him from the country and people whom he was seeking to understand and help. But with that last phrase "help" i think Andreas that we get to the critical issue on which you were focusing. Who gets to define what help is or the conditions under which should be offered? Throughout the history of the last two centuries at least if not more this is a question most always faced by movements that proclaimed they want to help the people against an oppressive government. In my opinion Michel is trying to hold onto naïve idealism in the hope that something can be salvaged. But given the completely unpredictable behavior of these people and their utter lack of trustworthiness plus the cesspool of debt that Correa has built up in the last five years, the possibility of any good coming from whatever seed were sown by Flok is remote. I look at myself and see the same kind of issues. The government of the United States is now a government not by an of and for the people. Rather it is the government of the banks. A year and a half ago I concluded that with Obama firmly in the hands of Wall Street communities would have to build their own networks. And I have seen that to an extent this is possible I've had a very naïve point of view that it they a just did that somehow things would turn out okay. The question in my mind is far deeper of course than just a network. It is when you have it what you do with it? A year ago in Catalonia Isaac and I had a wonderful introduction to guifi.net. But we never really got to speak to any end-user's in order to find out what it had enabled let alone when the users had any ideas about the practicality of using it to unite against the Spanish government's austerity policies.. In fact it was pointed out that guifinets policies were Neutrality. I suspect that the most important learning from Ecuador is that the idea of transforming an entire nation state into the abstract idealized nirvana of a commons is sheer lunacy. especially when you walk in at the last movement and are sold a bill goods by DV who do then uses you as a front to achieve his own ends. Daniel knows what the score is in Ecuador. Are we to believe that the presidents office would give him a penny to support policies that are aimed and anything other than more of the same - namely the eradication of its indigenous people in the name of the extraction of oil and copper. Of yes ecuador has an advanced constitution. Only problem is whenever Correa feels a need he is allowed to tell the assembly that there is national emergency and the rights of nature in the constitution are removed …simple as that. Looking at the USA I had a naïve hope that if you just bring Internet access to enough poor people who could not afford Google fiber some how you would get a brilliant person in emerging from the shadows who, knowing how to use the appropriate databases, would find out where the wealth was in Kansas City and having found out would show their neighbors what the problem was. Now that is possible but before anything like that has a prayer of happening there are a huge amount of other tasks needing to be done in these tasks can only be done by an alliance of Kansas Cityians working together on the ground day after day and week after week. I learned a bunch of important stuff that I will be writing about that I never could have learned without my visit. Among the learnings are the importance of building a staff of volunteers who will guide users at the open computer centers along a path of discovery that will take them from using tools like Wikipedia to get entries on things like redlining and gerrymandering, two tools of basic economic literacy to avoid payday lenders and deceptive bank loans to greater awareness for example of a member of economics department of the University who is forming a credit union to making available in handing out some of the studies on financial problems done by the occupy Wall Street working groups. I learned a few other things that I had been naïve about and in particular how a vibrant black community in what Anita Dixon of the mutual musicians foundation calls the 3 mi.² was taken apart and hollowed out by real estate developers and their political allies in Washington in the 50 years after World War II. I did achieve with help from my local hosts to meetings with the University of Missouri Kansas City Department of economics which ironically is the most radical in the United States, the first meeting included the departments expert on local economic development by and for the inhabitants and not for outside corporations and Whitney Terrell a member of the literature department and when Kansas City in 2005 published King in Kings County, a fictionalized account of the organized rape of Kansas City's poor people by the developers. The second meeting included Bill Black who working for the US Department of Justice between 1988 and 92 obtained indictments against more than 1000 bankers and sent more than 100 to prison in the savings-and-loan crisis. Now it is possible that if economics department works with the Kansas City freedom network builders that in two or three years they will have enough infrastructure buildout and enough users so that by year three or four the chances of being able to deliver tools into the hands of local residents who want to take their own fate under their own control to the limited extent that may be possible by then may have a small chance of becoming reality. The point is that having written about Kansas City from a distance for year and now having spent eight full days there in person on the ground I have acquired at least a pretty decent beginning foundation of the enormity of the task. Vazquez present Michel with a candy store and mesmerizing him, hooked him, and then when he had him on scene he effectively could control him with the threat not to pay. i ail close by confessing hat if i were in michel's shoes last september i likely would have done the same.
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