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Very few people know that I was accepted as a candidate for the Reform Party nomination for the presidency in 2012. I used that experience to seek out wizards across the country and consolidate their transpartisan wisdom (not to be confused with bi-partisan complicity) at one web site, We the People Reform Coalition.
On 28 February 2015 I will be facilitating a workshop on Open Power at the Economics of Happiness Conference, an event I recommend to one and all — Jerry Mander will be there, one reason I am personally excited about attending.
Below are the read-ahead documents I have just finished loading to the event post at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, where I curate over 80 truth-telling editors from around the world, but most true-blue sons and daughters of the USA.
Here and now I want to salute Richard Wolff, whose books on democratic capitalism are starting to take off, and note to my enormous delight that he is now ending his speeches by calling for Electoral Reform as the ONE THING that we can all come together on. He joins Eric Liu, high-school civics teacher, as one of my two most important voices to listen to now.
2015 is the year in which We the People have the power to drop kick our corrupt two-party du-opoly into the ocean. I do not blame the banks, or the corporations, or the foreign countries such as Saudi Arabia and Israel that have bribed our Senators and Representatives — I’m not even sure I can blame our craven corrupt Senators and Representatives: this is on US (pun intended). WE abdicated our power, WE let ourselves get fragmented and distracted by what one great author, Chris Hedges, calls The Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
In my view, there are two people in the USA who have the power to bring us together on this ONE THING: Jackie Salit of IndependentVoting.org and Joan Blades of MoveOn.org. The combination of Jackie — who arguably can reach no less than half of the disenfranchised citizens betrayed by the two-party du-opoloy, and Joan Blades, whose Living Room Conversations are the first manifestation of public sanity I have seen in the past 25 years — could be the lever we have been waiting for.
There are four people I would like to see them bring together to focus on Electoral Reform: Jon Huntsman, Elizabeth Warren, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein…and ideally also a major black leader — Cynthia McKinney comes to mind but I like Al Sharpton and Carol Mosely Braun as well — and a major pair of non-political common sense voices, among whom I find Richard Wolff and Eric Liu most compelling. A separate conversation could and should be sponsored among young activists across all ethnic, gender, and other boundaries.
I’ll be as straight-forward as possible here. If these people come together and agree that Electoral Reform is the ONE THING we can all come together on, it will be no problem to raise $1 million toward an Electoral Reform Summit, and it will be no problem to re-mobilize Occupy to enforce a Statement of Demand and an Electoral Reform Pledge on every Senator and Representatives. I gave the six-minute brief to Occupy that went viral after it hit the front page of Reddit, but Occupy was not ready to listen then, or Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich could have been the leaders of a coalition cabinet elected in 2012 (it did not help that Ron Paul was allowing the Republicans to steal his primary wins, and keeping quiet for the wrong reasons). My seven planning documents are provided below.
We can do this. As I read about all the fragmented endeavors that have the best of intentions — from Lawrence Lessig’s walks to get money out of politics to Avaaz trying to get the SEC to make corporate contributions transparency, I am reminded — former CIA spy that I am — of how CIA and FBI fragmented the student activists in the 1960’s: give everybody a little bit of money, get everybody to focus on THEIR patch, their slice, their issue (today, their hashtag), and keep them all dithering on the margins.
PART I OF OUR WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE DEMANDS CONVERGENCE.
If we do not come together on the ONE THING that is arguably in the best interests of the public irrespective any given ideological, religious, or financial circumstance, we will continue to be destroyed by a system so corrupt that its leading members are easily indictable in any International Tribunal or World Court.
PART II OF OUR WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE DEMANDS TOOLS.
I became a fan of Howard Rheinfold in 1986 when I was assigned to bring CIA into the 21st Century with advanced information technology (I failed) and ready his book,Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology. Subsequently I wrote for Howard, then the Editor of Whole Earth Review, the article, “E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution, & Intelligence,” published in the Fall 1992 issue. Circulated by Dr. Ross Staplen-Gray at CIA (by this time I was the senior civilian co-creating the Marine Corps Intelligence Center), I was told that my former CIA boss, Sandra Cruzman, stated, “this confirms Steele’s place on the lunatic fringe.” Today CIA is both inept at Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that I have been striving to advance since 1988, and they call me “Open Sores.” In 1989 and 1990 I ghost-wrote for the Commandant of the Marine Corps an article on “Global Intelligence Challenges for the 1990’s” that anticipated our need to treat ISIS-like threats as seriously as we treated the Soviet Union, and my own article, “Intelligence the 1990’s: Recasting National Security in a Changing World,” that very accurately identified six interventions needed to make national intelligence helpful to all of us. Today, $1.25 trillion dollars later, the US secret intelligence community cannot claim to be intelligent or have integrity. Similarly, Peter Black (RIP), Winn Schwartau, and I among others — Winn has been the most important with his 1990 early testimony to Congress and his books Terminal Compromise and Information Warfare: Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway — called for attention to cyber-security. All of this 25 years ago. Today, what has just been announced by the President is theatrical crap — read Mark Bowden’s book, WORM: The First Digital World War to understand who really has their act together in this domain, it is NOT, and never will be — the US Government.
I was one of the CIA pioneers, following the incredibly talented endeavor of Diane Webb, Dennis McCormick, and their boss Gordon Oehler, who created the concept for Computer-Aided Tools for the Analysis of Science & Technology (CATALYST). I was a founding member of the Advanced Information Processing and Analysis Steering Group of the US secret national intelligence community. We found no fewer than 20 “all source analysis took-kit” projects across the secret world, all of them corrupt to the bone — one slice with one contractor focused on one data type, none of them holistic in the slightest.
I mention all that as background for my strong praise of Micah Sifry’s latest book, The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Has Not Fixed Politics (Yet). He focuses on the inability of all of the activist groups to share information, make sense together, or use shared tools and information to come together on the ONE THING that might actually yield political power — he does not himself suggest what the ONE THING might be, only that without such tools, activists will continue to be neutered by a system that controls all information and all tools now. I provide seven links below, two of them honor Micah’s work, two of them are my latests prescriptive documents on the state of the art (abysmal) and where we need to go (open source everything engineering), and the last tells the Decision-Support Story from 1957 onwards, with CATALYST in my view still being the finest functional requirements document in existence. Sadly, I have failed to entice the open source wizards into paying attention to this, and despite many superb apps being out there (see for example Robin Good Enhanced: Top Journalism Tools), the fact is that no one anywhere — from MIT to Stanford to George Mason University — is serious about integrated tools for thinking that also can access all sources in all mediums and all languages. I consider this the supplemental enabler if activists are to come together on Electoral Reform and be effective in 2015 and beyond.
I believe in America the Beautiful. I believe there is nothing wrong with this great country that cannot be fixed — and fixed relatively quickly — by restoring the integrity of our electoral process and hence the integrity of our government — everything else, from, Agriculture to Education to Energy to Family to Immigration to Justice to Water, follows from that ONE THING. #ElectoralReform. You have to want this or it will not happen.
I believe we can make it happen in 2015. My vision calls for a Republican and Democrat to run in their respective primaries and then break ranks to come together to run as a team in the general election — a team that includes a Coalition Cabinet announced in advance* along with a commitment to end income taxes, institute the Automated Payment Transaction Tax, achieve a balanced budget, end all wars not approved in advance by the public (which must also vote for an APT Tax increase to pay for the war), and generally put our corrupt government into the ground, six feet under. I believe we need to abolish the present unconstitutional unelected plutocracy that Matt Taibbi describes so well in his two books, Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History and The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, and that we must do so with a combination of love and fear, committed to non-violence as well as truth & reconciliation. I know we can do this, but all of you have to want this badly enough to stop being complicit drones and stop wasting your energies on isolated reforms that are irrelevant to the future. ONE THING. #ElectoralReform. St.
Additional Readings:
ER 00 Electoral Reform Contacts
ER 01 Electoral Reform Summit 1.5
ER 02 Statement of Demand (2015)
ER 03 Electoral Reform Act of 2015
ER 04 Electoral Integrity Pledge
ER 05 International Electoral Integrity Principles
ER 06 Draft Budget 2015
ER 07 Steele Story (How I Tested the Boundaries)
Additional Readings:
PE 01 Single Slide on Public Empowerment 1.2
PE 02 Draft Budget 2015
PE 03 Mich Sifry on Progressive Activism Lacking Tools
PE 04 Mich Sifry on The Big Disconnect
PE 05 Robert Steele Open Letter
PE 06 CyberOSINT Foreword
PE 07 1957+ Decision-Support Story
*Coalition Cabinet — my first cut for discussion
Vice President &Secretary General for the Commonwealth: Elizabeth Warren or Dennis Kucinich
Assistant to the President on Detail to the Vice President: Steve McIntosh
Agriculture & Water: Jim Hightower
• Water Conservation Authority: William J. Cosgrove (CA)
Health: Howard Dean
• Surgeon General: Jill Stein
Interior: Robert Costanza
• Energy: Herman Daly
• Environment: Gordon Durnil
Labor: Jesse Ventura
• Veteran’s Affairs: Max Cleland
• No Senior Left Behind: Derek Bok
• Immigration: Pat Buchanan
Transportation & National Design: Joan Claybook
Treasury, Yves Smith
• Internal Revenue: Grover Norquist
• Federal Reserve : Karl Denninger
Ron Paul to be nominated to the Supreme Court as soon as he is available and several of the Justices find retirement compellingly attractive].
Secretary General for Education, Intelligence, and Research: Robert Steele?
Access America: William Greider*
Chaplain: Jim Wallis [Rabbi Michael Lerner?]
Culture: Jello Biafra [Stewart Brand?]
Education: John Taylor Gatto
Global Truth & Reconciliation Centre: Lee Kuan Yew (SG), Nelson Mandela (ZA), & Fidel Castro (CU)
Multinational Decision-Support Centre: General Patrick Cammaert, NL RN
National Intelligence: Brent Scowcroft
National Research: Vint Cerf
National Strategy Center: David Abshire and Tony Zinni
Office of Management and Budget: Joseph Eugene Stiglitz and Don Gessaman
Open Source Agency: Carol Dumaine
Patent Office: Lawrence Lessig
* Access America, to implement and sustain Electoral Reform, was added at the suggestion of Jim Turner.
Secretary General for Global Engagement: Michael Bloomberg
Defense: Joe Sestak
Joint Chiefs of Staff: James N. Mattis
Justice: Ralph Nader
• Homeland Security: Stephen Flynn [closing it down gracefully]
• Computational Mathematics Authority: Stephen Wolfram (UK)
State: Gary Hart
• Ambassador to Israel: Henry Seigman
• Ambassador to the United Nations: Carol Mosley Braun
Commerce: Clyde Prestowitz
• Trade Representative: Alfred Eckes
LEARN MORE:
All my Amazon Book Reviews (Lists & Categories)
Open Source Everything Home Page (All Free)
The Open Source Everything Manifesto: Transparency, Truth, & Trust
We The People Reform Coalition (Balanced Budge, Coalition Cabinet, Electoral Reform, Full Employment, Tax Revolution)
Worth a Look: Democracy Lost & Found Essay, Book Review Blurbs and Links [Updated 12 January 2015]