Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them
Robert David STEELE Vivas
Chapter in ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Earth Intelligence Network, 2008)
Full Text Online to Facilitate Automated Translation
Our plan—eight years in the making and reflecting the insights of over thirty pioneers—has now been accepted by a major national university for implementation as a public policy engagement project. This plan is also ready to be implemented in terms of fund-raising if the third party candidates and/or Mayor Bloomberg will agree to ONE Public Trust that fully funds all third party candidates initially, and eventually ALL candidates—we need to get BOTH the federal government AND corporations out of the campaign finance business.
Earth Game will also be explained, the urgency of addressing the needs of the eight demographic challengers will be touched on, and the Global Range of Gifts Table will be described.[1] All of this has huge Open Money, Open Spectrum, Jeffersonian Local, Natural Cure, and Zero Waste/Clean Energy implications. Here I present the original vision as developed by the 24 co-founders of the Earth Intelligence Network, with important inputs from Joe Trippi (the Liberty Bond subscription under $20 a year) and Jim Turner (make it annual). I conceptualized the migration of this model to the rest of the world. What this does is create an aggregation of both bottom-up funds and bottom-up direct access to information that no one controls—that is completely independent of banks, governments, and Google. It also energizes the potential for giving by one billion individuals, 80% of whom do not contribute to foundations or have a means of identifying micro-cash gift opportunities among the five billion poor.
Figure 1. High-Level Visualization of People's Trust & People's Network
Concept for a Liberty Fund Of, By, and For We the People
It is now public knowledge, courtesy of a leak from a professor at a north eastern university, that the Contract with America led by Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, was the culmination of a deliberate Republican Party campaign to “buy” the US Government “from schoolhouse to White House,” and that the amount of money they calculated was necessary to achieve that objective was $300 million a year. Today that would be $500 million a year, and that is our benchmark.
The Republican Party is just as broken morally and pragmatically as is the Democratic Party, but Republicans are better at statistics, mathematics, and ultra-sophisticated bribery of candidates. The Republicans have not been as effective as the Democrats at election fraud, but with the thefts in Florida (2000) and Ohio (2004) they have learned, albeit clumsily, and in 2008 they are holding their own with the Democrats—one could even conclude that electoral fraud in this election, despicable as it is, has leveled the playing field.
Electoral fraud and campaign finance are the two sucking chest wounds in the Republic. We must eradicate both. The online public policy engagement tool described at the beginning of this chapter does the first, by establishing a universal means (including call centers for engaging the poor who have cell phones and localized caucuses in the workplace for those that do not wish to use cell phones) for engaging every citizen and creating a public transparent statistically reliable baseline that not only makes deliberative democracy and self-governance possible, but also provides a baseline accurate at the zip code and county levels for flagging electoral fraud from voting district to voting district.
That leaves us with campaign finance and abusive political party power, both means of legally—but unethically and unconstitutionally—disenfranchising the voter.
Regardless of how honest a person is on the day they are elected—and we do send honest people to Washington—within a few weeks they realize that they must spend half or more of their time with their hand out, fund-raising, and that taking bribes or “contributions” from corporations is an efficient way of meeting their funding needs.[2]
They also learn that “party discipline” is code for turning over their vote and abdicating their responsibility to serve as an honest broker for their specific constituency. Party discipline, enforcing a party leadership choice rather than a public consensus choice, is the second form of corruption in Washington.
A third form is new, at least in my own lifetime: the complete abdication by Congress of its Article 1 responsibilities to balance the power of the Executive. During the past two Administrations, despite some opposition from a handful of Republican Senators of stature, the Republicans on the Hill chose to become foot-soldiers doing the bidding of the White House. Every single one of them is eligible for impeachment.[3] When the Democrats came to power, however tentatively, they became doormats, and have refused, for example, to act on Representative Denis Kucinich’s valid call for the impeachment of President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney—the first a well-intentioned village idiot; the second a nakedly amoral war criminal.
Concept for Public Engagement in the Policy-Budget Process
Strategic Objective: To use the real US Government Budget as a basis for inspiring policy discussions and agreements among all US citizens regardless of party affiliation, in order to efficiently identify areas of agreement and disagreement on both specific policies and on the relative priorities for spending among the 30 agencies within the US Government that have discretionary spending authority. Ultimately this generic Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) system could be migrated downstream to all state and local jurisdictions, and also exported to other countries to be used to inspire similar bottom-up citizen’s engagement in the political and policy processes of their own countries. At some future date, using the Information Economy Meta-Language (IEML) being developed by Dr. and Professor Pierre Levy, Canada Research Chair in Collective Intelligence,[4] we make this language-independent, and begin cross-fertilizing historical and cultural perspectives with a special focus on migrating as much useful knowledge as possible to the five billion poor, one cell call at a time. Politics done honestly is about group consensus regarding means (revenue), ways (programs), and ends (outcomes), all in the context of a fixed Earth, constrained resources, and a shared commitment about nurturing a community.
Tactical Objective: To help all citizens, beginning with students studying the policy process and how to engage all stakeholders; learn how to access, share, and make sense of relevant information.
Figure 2. Concept for Fully Transparent Budget Dialog & Decision-Making
There is one very important vacuum that must be filled for the above democratic deliberative dialog and decision-making to be successful: the U.S. Government in particular, but all organizations in general, must adopt an “Open Everything” philosophy that shares rather than hoards information, which makes possible the harnessing of the distributed intelligence of all of our communities as well as foreign communities. I want to stress this—we have so many challenges, many of them potentially responsive to low-cost and low-tech solutions that might occur to someone who has not been raised in the USA that we cannot neglect a much broader multinational dialog on all aspects of our future. The Earth Intelligence Network, in partnership with all those organizations and virtual social networking groups that choose to adopt the F/OSS platform for what we now call—inspired by the Swedish military—Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2), is creating a public F/OSS platform in partnership with a major US university, and we hope to make it available, free, within a few months.
We create wealth—what Yochai Benkler aptly has named the Wealth of Networks[5]—by doing what Alvin and Heidi Toffler understood was possible back in the 1990’s: using shared information and open sense-making as a substitute for violence, for wealth, for time, for space, for labor. Among all their books, PowerShift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century,[6] will always have a special place in my heart and head, because it was an influence in my choosing to leave the Marine Corps to pursue my vision, and it was the last book of theirs I was to read before meeting them personally, when they agreed to speak in 1993 to over 800 people from around the world on the topic of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT).
After twenty years of helping 90 governments around the world understand the importance of getting a grip on the 96% of the information they do not have to steal, in 183 languages we in the USA do not speak or understand, I have turned away from OSINT, which has been virtually castrated by the secret intelligence world. I focus now on public intelligence in the public interest, and believe that We the People can put both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Google out of business….and if John Chambers does not produce a router-server with distributed search and at rest encryption, we can put CISCO out of business at the same time.
On this page and the next I will very concisely outline my view of the ease with which We the People could use existing capabilities, notably Amazon, and our own inherent brilliance as human beings, to create Collective Intelligence or Group Genius that is timely, relevant, and infinitely scalable to meet the challenges that bureaucracies and machines cannot comprehend, much less resolve.
Here is a shared vision on what any individual should be able to access from any hand-held device, without giving up their privacy including their location, and without turning a complete copy over to Google to exploit in ways most people do not realize—including sharing with the CIA. In the Figure below are the very basic eight functionalities that any citizen can begin to use and to share. AltaVista was going in the right direction, but Hewlett Packard had no idea what they represented, and Google took them over, which is not a good thing, because Google is focused on control and ownership, rather than low-tech community building able to scale infinitely with human brain sense-making.
Figure 3. Public Policy-Budget Online Deliberative Tool
Here I offer a construct that was originally developed by Diane Webb, then working in the Office of Scientific and Weapons Research (OSWR) in the Directorate of Intelligence (Analysis) at CIA, one that I subsequently modified to reflect what was possible in a cloud-computing environment in which some form of Application Oriented Network (AON) service was available to the end-user, with control provided to each at the point of data creation, not as an afterthought.
Figure 4. Public Intelligence Concept of Operations
There is one reason and one reason only that we do not have all eighteen of these functionalities available to us today via F/OSS, and that is because Microsoft has persisted in migrating and mutating Application Program Interfaces (API) so as to force third-party developers to pay tolls or join the Microsoft conspiracy against free and open information sharing. Bill Gates is reputed to have stated that open source software is communist. That is of course idiocy, but it does make one wonder if Bill Gates is comfortable being regarded as a fascist by the very people that he demeans, people who have given their lives in service to the broader public.
I will not address promising developments in visualization, other than to make the obvious point that most of us are now far beyond data mining, and well into semantic meaning and the integrated use of geospatial and time spectrums combined with powerful combinations of color, sound, and even feel.
As an interim solution for those wishing to combine access to public sources and a handful of analytic tools, I strongly recommend SILOBREAKER, at www.silobreaker.com.
Below I list the functional elements of the public policy engagement platform that is underdevelopment (in beta within the sponsoring institution), and the cover of a sample weekly intelligence report covering the world, where one can drill down into any threat, policy, or challenger to a line item level of detail.
Figure 5. Functional Elements of Public Policy Engagement Platform
What this does, in essence, is this:
1. Anyone can register, free, being asked only to identify themselves by postal code and party if any (totally flexible).
2. They then have access to each of their budgets from municipal to county to state to national, and can create “MyBudget” for each or any one of those levels.
3. These varied choices are then aggregated by postal code and party preference, and the competing aggregate choices visualized as a foundation for appreciative inquiry and deliberative group decision-making, crossing party lines in the context of a balanced budget that forces choices to be made.
4. It is at this point that the citizen is both given access to existing public intelligence sources and analytic tools, and incentivized to discover, discriminate, distil, and disseminate public intelligence in support of their views. Unlike Wikipedia, where any moron can destroy the work of others, we protect all points of view—only moderators and certified non-partisan masters can delete, while respecting the right of all, including trolls and malicious morons, to contribute. Below is a depiction of what this means in terms of increasing the amount of relevant information that can be brought to bear on the public dialog.
5. Not yet developed, but possibly the most exciting and catalyst for human engagement, is the EarthGame™ that will begin as a decision-support platform focused on the ten high-level threats and the twelve policies, and then gradually expand outward, offering its generic open code to one and all. When combined—an infinitely scalable EarthGame™ and an infinite number of human brains engaged in both providing relevant information for sharing, and in collaborative sense-making, I am quite sure we will change both the manner and the outcome of all organizational and group endeavors.
6. After integrating the EarthGame™ and ensuring that it emulates the very high standards set by the open source software community for propagating itself in a trusted manner, the next step will be the migration of the total offering—all free—to other languages beginning with Portuguese, Chinese, and Hindi. Ideally, each of the seven demographic challengers would choose to create a national call center and a national gaming and simulation center, all inter-connected, and all able to both mobilize and inform each of their citizens via cell phone.
7. Finally, the entire package is converted into a Global Range of Gifts Table that is constantly updated and includes every individual with something to offer, and every individual with a need, however small.
Earth Game™
A complete but concise overview of the EarthGame™, under development by Medard Gabel (co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game), is posted online at Earth Intelligence Network. He needs $2 million a year to create the EarthGame™ platform that we would link to, in which every citizen ys themself at every level on every issue of interest to them.
Many people have come to appreciate the value of Serious Games and Games for Change, and I will be the first to say that those two movements inspired me to seek out Medard Gabel and fund the early definition of the EarthGame™. He taught me something very important that I wish to share here.
Medard Gabel taught me that the existing Serious Games cannot be merged to set the stage for a larger EarthGame™ for the simple reason that they were not designed to be inter-operable and do not have the right “hooks” to be integrated. As he said to me, it would be like trying to combine soccer, baseball, football, basketball, wrestling, and swimming into one big game called “Sports.” Won’t work, cannot be done.
What can be done is to create an open source software platform that is stable, transparent, and offers standard settings by which game developers can plug in to incoming data feeds, assumption settings, participation settings, and so on. Read the top-level description for more details. Earth Intelligence Network has no equities in the EarthGame™ other than to hope that it is funded, directly to BigPictureSmallWorld, as soon as possible. If we are able to attract funding sufficient to these needs, the EarthGame is the first element to be funded beyond the policy-budget engagement platform.
Strategic View of Need to Invest in the Eight Challengers
Before concluding with the Global Range of Gifts Table, I want to offer up a visualization of the why and the how of engaging as a Republic with the eight demographic challengers. My reasoning is quite straight-forward. With their demographic mass, each of the challengers cannot be defeated nor even directed by force of arms—the power of people is a power no government can suppress.[7] We must therefore strive to educate all people, and empower them with wealth-creating access to information. Alvin and Heidi Toffler nailed it in War and Anti-War and again in PowerShift: information is a substitute for violence, capital, labor, time, and space. Information can and should create infinite revolutionary the wealth, the wealth of knowledge, the wealth of networks.[8] Put bluntly: we help them create wealth and avoid our mistakes, or we die.
Figure 6. Strategic View of Information Producing Peace and Prosperity
Global Range of Gifts Table
Long ago, while completing my first graduate degree, I learned what a “sparse matrix” is and how it can be used to make possible an infinitely scalable matrix where the empty spaces do not take up precious storage and power and memory. Imagine the below two-dimensional matrix (on the left) as consisting on one axis of everyone on the planet and what they need; on the other axis, all of them again, but this time representing what they can give. Now imagine this being geospatially and time aware, so that the person with the need is matched with the nearest person with a gift to give, e.g. mothers gifting used clothing.
Figure 7. Global Range of Gifts Table Illustrated
There are some impressive pilot projects already going on, but generally focused on single item giving or complex humanitarian assistance. The really elegant and valuable nature of the above is that it provides a single comprehensive view for all stakeholders, and enables any individual, or any Civil Affairs unit sweeping through an area, or any tourist observing a need, to enter that need into the global sparse matrix. This offering is not in competition with existing assistance and charity organizations, it serves as a form of early warning and decision support, while also validating for their tax qualifications their range of contributions.
This planned harmonization system also enables “swarm intelligence” and the orchestration of different forms of giving that come together seamlessly: a canned goods company offers up a truckload of soup; a driver on a deadhead run moves it to an embarkation point; a ship needing ballast takes it on; and on the other end, a cadre of indigenous volunteers receive it, pull 10% as their cut (monitored), and deliver. If most foundations are in fact tax shelters, and if most corporations, e.g. those in the medical field, waste fifty percent of their equity,[9] then the above not only increases assistance to the five billion poor, it also decreases waste among the one billion rich.
Harmonized Investment
Governments, corporations, international and non-governmental organizations as well as private charitable foundations are in the stone age when it comes to proper “intelligence preparation of the battlefield,” meaning a complete shared understanding of the investment target area; and are also in the stone age with respect to orchestrated investments. Take Area Y in Indonesia, for example. It has been suffering from instability occasioned in part by government abuse of a religious minority, and in part of acts of low-level terrorism including the destruction of property. Area Y has natural resources of high value. Imagine the following stakeholder “pie” coming together through the use of Information Peacekeeping. In the graphic to the left I depict how a variety of kindred spirits can come together to achieve a prosperous world at peace. What has been lacking to date has been the public intelligence infrastructure for information sharing and collective sense-making.
Figure 8. M4IS2 Applied to the Harmonization of Investment
In addition, government are operating on 2% of the relevant information, and corporate CEOs generally receive information that is incomplete, late, biased, filtered and more often than not, ignorant of both historical and cultural context, and also ignorant of the totality of the stakeholders, especially those that are indigenous and representative of human networks rather than legal entities. Now imagine if we could increase by an order of magnitude what can be known by who, all transparent, and all devoted to helping each individual and each organization optimize their wealth and security in context, as whole.
Overview of the Future of Wealth
I was deeply inspired by C. K. Prahalad’s book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. [10] His point is clear: capitalism today is oriented toward the one billion rich who have one trillion a year to spend; the future lies with the five billiion poor (1.5 million each in China and India) who have four trillion a year to spend. However, instead of buying sub-zero refrigerators full of toxins, their refrigerators cost $2 and consist of two ceramic jars with long necks and an air gap buried the ground—meat stays fresh for five days. At the same time, I have been inspired and energized by the emerging wave of social entrepreneurs and hybrid networks that meld biomimicry and green chemistry with sustainable design, offer nutricious low-cost foods or very clean inexpensive solutions for local problems, and not only make a profit, but contribute to local employment, learning, and community enrichment.
In my view, the future of wealth lies with humanity, not with machines. It is to be found in education and dialog, not ideology and force of arms. Open Money, Open Spectrum, Open Everything. We can find and create Heaven on Earth, if we commit ourselves to public intelligence in the public interest.
Figure 9. Open Money and the End of Greed, Secrecy, & Corruption
Above I reproduce a wonderful illustration from one of the leading minds in the Open Money movement, According to Michael Linton and Jean-Francois Noubel, who together with Eric Harris-Braun comprise the triumvirate of wisdom on this topic, the current monetary system is based on scarcity and control, and it creates waste, precisely what a “smart nation” must seek to eradicate. It is proprietary; expensive; feudal; occult; enslaving; and unsustainable. In sharp contrast, Open Money is the global infrastructure for the emergent parallel monetary system. It is sufficient; supports the public interest; is democratic; open source; free; and sustainable. What’s not to like? It provides such transparency, and such efficiency, that it eliminates corruption, hoarding , ursury, fraud, and waste.
Other key terms include Community Currencies; Virtual Money; LETSystem;[11] and Digital Money. Key ideas include Open money manifesto; the right of monetary creation – sovereign and universal; and the coming of millions of localized currencies completely independent of old banks. Anonymous Banking, invented by Eric Hughes, is a relevant but separate idea. Money is information, not the physical manifestation; similarly, DNA[12] is information. The World Brain is already emergent, but this project will accelerate the speed and scope of public bottom-up Collective Intelligence or Group Genius.
It merits observation that the meltdown of the US financial industry over derivatives (not just housing market lending, but everything else, all of which Warren Buffet blew the whistle on in 2003) may well be the last big crash of the old system. Derivatives divorced “currency” from “value.” They were a fiction of greed protected by secrecy and the bribery of our elected representatives who more often than not are about as ignorant about substance as the average toad.
The gap between those with nominal power and those with knowledge has been widened by those with money to buy both, but to keep both separate. We can do better.
The future of true national intelligence is not secret, not federal, and not expensive. WE are the future of national intelligence. Let’s lose the lipstick, kill the pig, and Move On!
ADDENDUM OF 25 September 2008 on the Unconstitutional and Fradulent “Bail-Out” Proposal
Talking Points
- Over 200 economists, who have NOT been consulted by either the Federal Reserve or the Department of the Treasury, say the “bail-out” is not a good idea.
- Kudos to Senator Richard Shelby for listening to them.
- Most Americans recognize that this top-down out of control “bail-out” is proposed by the same experts that destroyed our economy, and benefits only the top people who let their greed get out of control (with permission from the Congress they bribed into complacency).
- We should mandate a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions.
- We should cap interest rates at 10% and stop the criminal abuse that now characterizes Advanta, Chase, Citi-Corp, CapitalOne, and to a lesser extent, Bank of America. Only USAA and the credit unions have remained ethical during this time of troubles.
- We should defer this matter until after the election, and the next President should use the transition period to hold an open fully-public summit while demanding “open books” to be placed online for scrutiny by all Americans and especially by all economists who are not bought and paid for by either of the two parties that are in turn subsidiaries of Wall Street.
- The solution lies in a very small fund that provides assistance to individuals in a bottom-up manner, with a court Master appointed for each state and as necessary, each county. Under no circumstances should we bail out AIG or any Wall Street entity.
We the People should welcome this crisis, for it finally exposes the reality that the Federal Reserve is neither Federal nor a Reserve, and we have all been cheated this past century since very unwisely allowing “central banking” to manipulate our economy on behalf of the bankers. We should also welcome this proof that the Department of the Treasury, the White House, and the Congress—both the Senate and the House of Representatives—are not acting in the public interest. In fact, they don’t even know what the public interest is! ENOUGH!
ENDNOTES
[1] More information is available at Earth Intelligence Network, and as additional information becomes available, it will be posted there. Right now, the ten-page online flyer is our best over-all statement.
[2] I first realized the depth of this Congressional disease when I read John Barr, The Ambition and the Power: The Fall of Jim Wright: A True Washington Story (Viking, 1992). Not only does it document in agonizing detail the degree to which Speaker Wright was always on the move seeking contributions, it also documents how future Speaker Newt Gingrich set out to destroy Speaker Wright in detail. Our political party leadership today is, if anything, both more corrupt and more inept than either of these two gentlemen.
[3] The two most current and detailed books on Congressional dereliction of duty are
[4] Learn more at http://www.ieml.org/spip.php?rubrique6&lang=en.
[5] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale, 2007).
[6] Alvin and Heidi Toffler, PowerShift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century (Bantam, 1991.
[7] Howard Zinn, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress (City Lights Publishers, 2006)
[8] Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century (Diane Publishing Company, 1993). They featured the work of my first company, and called me “the rival store” to the secret intelligence community. Sadly, the secret world took my work as a threat rather than an opportunity, and has wasted a quarter century since then wasting tens of billions of dollars a year of the taxpayer’s heard-earned income. See also Alvin and Heidi Toffler, PowerShift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century (Bantam, 1990). Their third book along these lines, Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives (Doubleday Business, 2007) is equally visionary and deep in insights, but I like to mention two other books that anteceded it, Barry Carter’s Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1999) and Thomas Stewart’s Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the 21st Century Organization (Doubleday Business, 2003).
[9] PriceWaterHouseCoopers documented this for the health industry. See their superb report, “The Price of Excess: Identifying Waste in Healthcare Spending,” posted 2008-05-09. This waste is completed apart from the 99% in wasteful government spending for Medicare and Medicaid because corrupt elected officials have prevented the government from bargaining, or from shopping overseas, where my colleagues have established that every single one of the top 75 drugs on the market today can be gotten for 1% of the asking price in the USA.
[10] C. K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton, 2006). Of course I have read and value the books by Stuart Hart, Jeffrey Sachs, Muhammed Yanus, and others.
[11] LETS is not an acronym, it stands for open permission. Visit http://www.gmlets.u-net.com/home.html.
[12] Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA), learn more at http://www.genome.gov/25520880.
