Halstead – Public Intelligence Blog

Amazon Page

First Class Thinking, Morally Sound, Offer Hope,

September 5, 2006

Ted Halstead

The contributing editors, Ted Halstead and Michael Lind, again shine as “hubs” for blending diverse thinkers, including James Pinkerton of the right, and I believe they are completely correct when they say that the State of the Union address has become shallow, partisan, and trivialized. More substantively, they might have offered a piece on the ten reasons to impeach Bush-Cheney, and another on the failure of Congress, which has struck out with the American people: strike one is incumbents shaking down lobbyists for cash; strike two is the extremist leaderships (Democratic as well as Republican) forcing “party line” votes that are totally against the Constitutional intent of having Representatives represent their CONSTITUENCIES; and strike three is the extremist Republicans serving as foot soldiers to a mendacious White House, instead of, as the Constitution intended with Article 1, being the FIRST branch of government. The extremist Republicans (I am a moderate Republican) are nothing less than Constitutional perverts, and I use the term advisedly. (See my reviews on books about these two topics in last two months).

The book is ably summed up in the Preface, which states that neither party has proven capable of offering a coherent, honest, or forward-looking agenda to guide America. Peter Peterson, Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It would certainly agree, as do I. It is my hope that this group might coalesce around someone like Senator Collins (R-MA) running with Governor Warner (D-VA), and announcing a coalition cabinet and one commitment: to electoral reform. Karl Rove knows how to steal close elections, the only way to beat him is to field a multi-party TEAM that can win by a LANDSLIDE. America is ready for that, and the ideas in this book are all implement able by such a team approach to what might be called “networked governance.”

While I have six pages of notes on this excellent volume, still relevant to the future, I will touch on just a few highlights:

1) Mass middle class is vital, and Washington has destroyed that base for democracy.

2) American people are not as polarized as their extremist political leaders

3) Our humans are productive but our processes are not. I am reminded of the book in the 1980's on “Human Scale.” The federal government has indeed become dysfunctional, running at 3-5 mph while the rest of us are going 100 mph.

4) Need a new social contract. Authors identify the first one as building a nation, the second as healing from the civil war, and the third as building a middle class. We need to re-build the middle class with governance that again represents the citizens and their communities rather than predatory corporations.

5) Private sector, not just government, needs reform.

6) Health care can shift from business to government, and in the process we can find $60 billion a year in savings by using information to create metrics to reduce waste and over-treatment. The author discussing this suggests that 20-30% of what we spend on health care is waste. They do not discuss medical tourism, which I find quite interesting as a trend.

7) We need a nation-wide industrial policy that restores the relationship between business, community, and family, while also restricting the mobility of capital unless it restores the social contract with labor.

8) Radical tax reform could yield $200 billion a year (the author's say this is a low estimate, I agree, import-export tax fraud alone is $50 billion a year, I think the number is closer to $500 billion a year).

9) Take back the airwaves in the public interest.

10) James Pinkerton is brilliant in explaining the three eras of education as agricultural (nine-month school year), industrial (rote learning) and experimental (nostrums at expense of basics). See also Derek Bok's piece on “Reinventing Education at Forbes.com. James missed the opportunity to discuss how free universal access to all knowledge, and using serious games to educate on a just enough, just in time basis, in all languages, could reconfigure education world-wide.

11) Matthew Miller (see my review of his superb book, The Two Percent Solution: Fixing America's Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love) outlines what $30 billion could buy in terms of moving teachers up the food chain. Just in passing, if we cut our grotesquely ineffective intelligence community back from $60 billion a year to $30 billion a year, we can create a truly smart nation (see my book coming out on 11 September, THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest and in passing get better secret intelligence in the context of a national Open Source (Intelligence) Network that feeds not only the spies and diplomats, but also the schoolhouses, statehouses, and social clubs.

12) A thread that I found interesting throughout the book is how we lack the information needed to make smart choices. We lack statistical information on medical treatments and results that might allow “evidence-based medicine.” As I have pointed out elsewhere (Google for <ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers>), the U.S. Government is remarkably ignorant and uninformed across all these areas.

13) The rest of the book on aging productively, incentivizing exercise and penalizing fast food, on rebuilding the heartland with information infrastructure, on mixed races where third generations inter-marry at a 55% rate, on conflicted Muslims, on “opportunity lost” in foreign affairs and national security, all top notch.

The book ends brilliantly, as it began, with a commentary on the dysfunctional duopology of the extremist Republicans where dogma trumps honesty, and the divided Democrats trapped in the past. As the founder of a small non-rival party blog, Citizens-Party.org, I consider this book, and the New America Foundation, to be the people's voice at a time when the Congress and the White House most certainly are not.

This is it! The opening document for citizen-governance,

November 15, 2001

Ted Halstead

Those who have bought “The Cultural Creatives” by Paul Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson, or “IMAGINE: What America Could be in the 21st Century”, will not only be thrilled by this book, they will understand that the “citizen-centered” system of governance is finally achievable and imminent–we should all try to buy, read, discuss and relate this book to the Congressional elections in 2002 and the Presidential election in 2004.This book is *loaded* with common sense. It is absolutely not a political spin manual, a manifesto for revolution, or a ponderous think tank “blue sky” prescription for curing all the ills of the world. This book has three simple focal points and they are powerful:

1) More Americans identify themselves as Independents than as either Republicans or Democrats, and the way is open for a new “radical centrist” choice of leadership;

2) The original social contract that placed highly educated experts in charge of everything (government, corporations, even non-profits), taking care of the largely ignorant masses, is *history*. The people are smart, the people are connected, and the people want *choices* rather than ideologically-contrived menus.

3) Young adults are the key to the future and will decide the next few major elections, but only (a huge caveat) if leaders of vision and charisma can come forth with truthful options grounded in reality–the authors are carefully critical of political “triangulation” that seeks to manufacture false representations of common interest, only to betray those the moment after election.

The bottom line in this book is that the artificial trade-offs imposed on the people by menu- and elite-driven party politics are no longer acceptable nor enforceable, and the opportunity now presents itself for the voting public to remake the government from the outside in.

They focus on the core segments and core values that make America great: the market with its liberty; the state with its equality of opportunity; and the community (including religions) with its solidarity and nurturing of civic virtues.

Among the core negatives they identify where citizens could and should be free to choose rather than accept imposed combinations, are:

1) Elections tied to rigid political parties that have veto rights over candidates, and selections that allow minority winners where more than two candidates split the majority vote.

2) Pension and health care programs tied to organizations rather than individuals–trapping individuals and constraining innovation.

3) Educational systems tied to mass conformity rather than individual customization–with gross inequalities across counties and states because property taxes fund education, rather than a national normalized program with equal investments for every child.

4) Tax systems tied to loopholes, patronage, and earnings, rather than to consumption and savings (tax breaks for savings).

5) Immigration policies tied to old needs for low-skilled labor instead of new needs for high-skilled labor and the protection of the nation from dilution, disease, and excess demands on our tax-payer funded safety nets.

There are many other gems in this well-written and self-effacing book. The authors come across as very sensible, very devoted to America and its values, and very much ahead of the curve.

They conclude that major renovations of our society usually result from a combination of three factors: an external shock to the system; the emergence of new political alliances, and the availability of compelling new ideas for social reform.

They specifically note that an obstacle to innovation is the lack of a well-formed political worldview among both the new generation of young voters, and the new elites (most of whom have eschewed politics).

While they say that realignments are not excepted in the next presidential or congressional cycle, but rather over the next ten to twenty five years, I believe they underestimate the power of the Internet and self-organizing groups such as represented by the Cultural Creatives.

I hope the authors consider launching a “Journal of Citizen Governance” and a web-site where citizens' can self-organize, because unlike the cultural creatives and the imaginative individuals who focus in niche areas, these two authors have finally “cracked the code” in a common sense manner that anyone can understand and anyone can act upon.

This is a unique and seminal work that could influence the future of national, state, and local politics, and hence the future of the Nation. This is *very* well done.

Tag: Halstead

Review: The Real State Of The Union–From The Best Minds In America, Bold Solutions To The Problems Politicians Dare Not Address (New America Books) (Paperback)

Review: The Radical Center–The Future of American Politics