Paradigms of Failure
Robert David STEELE Vivas
Chapter in ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Earth Intelligence Network, 2008)
Full Text Online to Facilitate Automated Translation
All of America’s institutions have failed us, without exception. They have failed because they have been constructed and managed under paradigms of failure, paradigms that supported mind-sets oblivious to the “true cost” of our policies, our practices, and behavior at home and abroad, and our budget, a budget that is supposed to be of, by, and for We the People, but that has instead been hijacked by corrupt political parties, corrupt corporate chiefs, and corrupt dictators around the world, all but two “best pals” with the incumbent President and Vice President.
Failure of Government
Henry Kissinger, among many others, is on record as saying that our government has failed to adapt to the modern era. It has failed to be innovative. It has failed to apply the best available technologies. It has failed to attract and engage the best and the brightest. It has failed to come to grips with reality by ignoring 96% of the information that is freely available in 183 languages we do not speak. The federal government has become a monstrous irrational insolvent mess, and we will not get into the future with the old government paradigm that got us to this point. While it is a documented fact that Washington is operating on 2% of the relevant information necessary to establish sustainable peace and prosperity, we must destroy the old paradigm of elite misappropriation of the people’s treasury before we can have a Smart Government.
Failure of the Military
The failure of our military-industrial complex is now well-understood, and the recent publication of a thoughtful essay on the failure of generalship marks the end of an era of military bureaucracy, dogma, parochial services, and a greedy sharing of the spoils among the services without regard to what is actually needed. Sam Nunn had it right: to establish the military budget, you must first understand the threat in all its forms, then devise a strategy to meet that threat, then define the capabilities, both hard and soft to address each threat in detail and then—only then—authorize, appropriate, and allocate the people’s blood, spirit, and treasure. This applies to law enforcement as well. Many of us did this in the 1990’s. Many of us understood the imminence of asymmetric warfare, the importance of belief systems, and the urgency of getting a grip on all information in all languages all the time. The generals and admirals and senior executive civilians did not want to hear it. Like Henry Kissinger, whom Daniel Ellsberg warned personally of the dangers of becoming “like a moron,” listening only to internal secrets and disdaining to listen to external experts, they went deaf, dumb, and blind in practical terms.
Failure of Law Enforcement
Law enforcement has failed in multiple ways. Law enforcement cannot deal with anarchy, nor can it deal with organized crime when organized crime has financial incentives including tax avoidance that give it better equipment, better intelligence and counter-intelligence, better and more disposable armies of street people, and a legal environment that not only makes marijuana illegal, but that has created an entire prison-slavery complex that is an eternal shame to all who believe in the spirit of liberty. The Republic has become a cheating society, where cheating is the norm rather than the exception. This moral bankruptcy is not the fault of law enforcement, but rather of the policy-makers who chose to allow illegal immigration, to allow rote learning that is 50 years out of date, to allow corporate white collar crime to steal billions from the individual investors, who allowed Congress to become a crony of the President rather than the separate branch responsible for the power of the purse on behalf of We the People.
Failure of Business
Lee Iacocca is but the latest voice to be heard on the corruption of our corporate CEOs. Despite the fact that 90% of all businesses are small businesses, managed by earnest and proud individuals with dignity, Wall Street and the top CEOs have not only failed to be intelligent and develop holistic 360 degree commercial intelligence, they have looted their companies with exorbitant and unwarranted compensation packages at the same time that they have pillaged the pension funds, stabbed the middle class in the back, enlarged the number of working poor and illegal workers, bribed foreign elites, and looted the natural resources of the Third World. Immoral Capitalism, Capitalism 2.0, replaced its predecessor, and substituted financial and legal shenanigans for real innovation. Everyone loses, including the looters, who will be held accountable in the future as their crimes become more apparent to the many whom they have impoverished. Financial managers have stolen one-fifth of the value from owners, and derivatives have created a global nightmare of fraud, waste, abuse, and loss.
Failure of Academia
Elementary education is a total failure in one third of the individual cases, those who drop out, and a substantive failure for another one third of the individual cases, those who are the best and the brightest but tune out of all the non-digital rote instruction. These “digital natives” recognize their teachers for the anachronisms they are, and reject, at a very important point in their lives, the opportunity to acquire a liberal education in the purest sense of the word. The middle third, the ones who abjectly accept the school prison and learn to excel, are in fact learning to be the drones that will manage all of the institutions in the Republic, lacking both the imagination of the Digital Natives, and the compassion needed to help the drop-outs reintegrate into a vibrant and constantly learning society. Academia has become, at all levels, a factory for sale to the highest bidder, and it has completely lost sight of its deep vital role as the foundation for informed engaged democracy and moral capitalism.
Failure of the Media
Many books document the failure of the media, which is dying and being reborn as we speak. The greatest and most recent failure of the mainstream media, both print and broadcast, was in relation to the unjust war on Iraq. The media, now five large conglomerates, refused to investigate the lies being told by Dick Cheney and others, and it refused to accept fully-funded $100,000 full-page information advertisements outlining all the known reasons why invading Iraq was not only idiocy, but would bankrupt America financially, morally, and strategically. Digital media is making great strides, but as long as Amazon, Google, the Internet Archives, and Wikimedia refuse to work together for the good of all, we must await a new platform to harvest the global grid and create infinite wealth through social sharing of information and open space dialogs that can harness the Collective Intelligence of the people at every level of society.
Failure of Foundations
Foundations have failed to earn their tax-exempt status. Despite their compliance with a minimalist standard that they spend 5% or so of their endowments on public good, all too often they use this to fund programs that are nothing more than lip-service, and that are not validated by any oversight authority, nor coherent in the larger scheme of things. A Global Range of Gifts Table, and a requirement that 50% of their spending be within that globally-validated needs statement, would be helpful. Think tanks are a separate sub-set of this group, and virtually all of them are fraudulent, substituting dogma and opinion for research and dialog.
Failure of Civil Societies
The failure of civil societies, consisting of political parties, citizen advocacy groups, labor unions, and community-oriented religions, is about to come to an end. The Democratic and Republican party machines and party Mafioso are “running on empty” and have bankrupted the Republic while also making us the most hated imperial power on the planet, guilty of virtual colonialism, unilateral militarism, and immoral capitalism aided by our government’s continued support for forty-four dictators. The two party machines are also guilty of destroying democracy by displacing the League of Women Voters and managing campaigns so as to exclude all other parties such as the Greens, Reforms, Libertarian, and Independents. Not only must this monopoly over the debates end and be placed online, but we must end the foolishness of electing one person who then picks his or her cronies. From today onwards, presidents must select and announce their Cabinets before-hand, and those individuals must be elected individually at the same time. We must also end the winner take all system, with an instant run-off to assure majority winners, and a transpartisan approach to governance in which leadership positions in Congress are allocated proportionally to parties represented, and the Cabinet is selected by the people on merit and without regard to what party anyone belongs to. Transpartisan governance will be a success. Citizen advocacy groups are not a failure, and are about to explode, with Reuniting America and WISER (World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility) being the two most prominent examples of scalable success. Joining them soon will be the Transpartisan Policy Institute and the Earth Intelligence Network, which will also sponsor the EarthGame and EarthBudget (within the EarthGame). Corporations destroyed unions after corrupting the government and legalizing their crimes against the dignity and minimum wage needs of the people, at the same time that they deliberately and with malice aforethought provided every incentive for illegal immigrants to enter, stay, suck the life blood out of our local governments and societies, and eventually be paid to accept amnesty and then vote. Winston Churchill is weeping in his grave over the loss of our Christian English-speaking Nation. The states are fighting back, and we should take the 27 secessionist movements seriously. Finally, we have the religions. Between the Catholic Church preying on children and the Islamic imams in the US calling for the murder of Americans, and the extreme right-wing fundamentalist Christians all to eager to spark a war in the Middle East, whose reading starts with rote memorization of the Bible and ends with the fictional Left Behind series, we have forsaken God and the heaven on earth that respect for God can create on Earth in the form of communities that adopt the Golden Rule and make love rather than war their primordial principle.
Good News
There is good news. Senator John Kerry would have been a placebo President. George Bush in all his idiocy, and Dick Cheney with all his amorality and his high crimes and misdemeanors (all twenty-five of them itemized in my reviews of One Percent Doctrine and VICE: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency), were in my view a necessary evil, an evil so blatant, so visible, so odorous, as to awaken the public. The public is now focused. As soon as the public is brought together by the transpartisan meme epitomized in Reuniting America, we will once again be America the Beautiful, America the Good, America the Inspiration. St.
The author, a recovering spy and former infantry and intelligence officer, is the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, #33 over-all. He is the pioneer for open source or public intelligence, and has created four analytic models in his lifetime, while founding three organizations.
