[P2P-F] to Andreas - the p2p community should call on the Correa administration to do a full scale audit of the FLOK project funds was an evaluation of the flok as colonialist

[Andreas Wittel]

Dear Gordon,

thank you for this very interesting comment. I have also read the first
half of your report: excellent and very important information. This i a
must read for everyone who is interested in the background of the flok
project.

I agree that a full scale audit of the project funds is needed. I am sure
that this very much in the interest of those who have participated in this
project, I am sure they will push for such an audit.

Some comments inserted below, sorry have to keep them brief.

On Tue, Jul 8, 2014 at 6:32 PM, Gordon Cook <cook at cookreport.com> wrote:

> 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. ….
>

If this description is correct, the whole framing on this research project
is dodgy, to put it mildly.
I would like to know more about the terms and conditions of this project.
$700k just based on a handshake? Hard to believe. There must a contract
somewhere. A research proposal with aims and objectives, no? Also how much
of this was framed as research, how much as consultancy?

Normally research projects start with a poposal. Normally these proposals
are either  accepted or rejected by funding bodies. Normally the research
director manages the budget.

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.
>

Indeed.


> 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.
>

Spot on.


> 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.
>

Everyone who works in local neighborhoods and communities, in NGOs, trade
unions, polical parties etc knows how damn hard, time-consuming, and
long-term it is to initiate even little changes.

This is one of the things I was trying to bring across in my first post.
Digital technologies with all their global reach somehow make us think that
we can circumvent local engagement, that the revolution will happen online.
Not sure it will.

all best,
andreas (in world cup fever)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20140709/90e56a3f/attachment.htm