The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
A tiny handful of stories about what Alvin Toffler called “the rival store”–hence, not something to be embraced by the status quo ante.
Originally cited in 2008 Open Source Intelligence (Strategic).
Above slide in English and Spanish versions can be found within the M4IS2 Brief for South America.
See Also:
Tony Zinni: Background & Confirmation of the 4% “At Best” Quote on Secret versus Open Sources
Phi Beta Iota: Robert Steele, our founder, has asked that we post the following as his testimonial.
If there were one person in America I would gladly sacrifice my life for, so as to give the larger group including my direct family the benefit of his continued wisdom, Tom Atlee is that person. He is without peer, and we are all blessed to have him in our lives and within our Commonwealth. PLEASE contribute to his endeavor–what he does creates real wealth for all of us, and that kind of wealth is the only riposte to the decades of unethical legalized looting that we have tolerated for too long. America the Beautiful is coming back–Tom is walking point and deserves our strongest possible support.
Dear friends,
As America's dysfunctional politics and governance swings wildly out of equilibrium, the Co-Intelligence Institute has increased its focus on the transformation of the way the U.S. does politics.
As we track the transpartisan movement, the Coffee Party, the Tea Party, the No Labels movement, the Palin pre-campaign, the strange shifting dance between the Administration and Congress, and other political currents, we sense an emerging and significant force demanding change in the power relationships between the vast majority of “we, the people” on the one hand, and corporate and government elites on the other.
It is very instructive to watch how this populist energy is being manipulated and co-opted. Many of the politicians positioning themselves as populists — “We're not going to take it any more!” — are themselves active members of the elite class they are supposedly battling, and totally beholden to the financial powers behind the political circus.
Continue reading “Co-Intelligence Transforming U.S. Politics”
Building on last week's REVIEW: Buckminster Fuller's 1928 Ideas & Integrities this week I want to honor one new book and reinforce that book with mention and links to several others, all of which make the same point in different ways: we have the power to design a world that works for all.
Designing a World That Works for All: How the Youth of the World are Creating Real-World Solutions for the UN Millenium Development Goals and Beyond (Volume 1) by Medard Gabel and his many international students is in my view revolutionary — a milestone in human applied thought. Having attended two of his design sessions with some of the students he has mentored in this long-running endeavor, it has been my privilege to share in the “aha” experience when half-way through the session all of the smaller teams working on disparate things like agriculture, energy, transportation, water, etcetera suddenly realize that everything is connected and nothing can be designed properly unless it is understood in relation to everything else.
Medard was the co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, and has recently drawn up the preliminary cost and process estimates for creating the digital EarthGame in which we all play ourselves at every level, with transparent access to “true cost” and all other relevant information.
Separately, in support of a forthcoming book, Medard has documented the reality that we can create a prosperous world at peace for one third the price of what the USA alone spends on elective wars and a global armed secretive presence (over 750 military bases world-wide, all at taxpayer expense). The rigorously researched graphic of relative costs is his, used with permission, all rights reserved to him. Together we all seek to create a Big Bat 21 for the public that funds a World Brain and Global Game such that every public everywhere has better information and more aggregate insight than any government or corporation or international organization.
Medard, who founded and manages BigPictureSmallWorld, has influenced me greatly, as have many others, but few in such sustained depth. Kirkpatrick Sale and his book Human Scale, Paul Goodman and his 1960's bookCommunitas, are among the critical voices that led me to publish Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (edited by Mark Tovey with 55 contributors), and to write and publish Intelligence for Earth: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability; as with all my books, the latter two are free online. It was with all these minds in mind that I recently created a new graphic to depict how ignorant and ill-suited to our needs are the secret intelligence communities of the world (the US is spending $75 billion a year for what one general says is “at best” 4% of what we need while another says it is all completely “irrelevant” to our forces engaged in combat as well as stabilization & reconstruction).
I agree with Gregory Unruh, who has written that transparency is the Internet's killer app, and also with Jeff Jarvis, who writes of the shift in power from secrecy to transparency. Still, I credit Alvin and Heidi Toffler with the earliest and most developed recognition (in PowerShift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Violence at the Edge of the 21st Century) that information is a substitute for violence, wealth, time, space, and labor.
However, having access to information is not enough. There needs to be a change in mindset and a change of the game such as Gandhi accomplished in India and Tom Atlee has suggested for us in both Tao of Democracy and the more recent Reflections on Evolutionary Activism. As Russell Ackoff urged in his paper “Transforming the Systems Movement,” we have to stop doing the wrong things righter and focus instead on doing the right things. In my view, the two-party tyranny and its shadow substitutes No Labels and Americans Elect as well as IndependentVoting.org, are all efforts to mislead the public into thinking that we can stick with the status quo electoral system that has been thoroughly corrupted, we just need to elect the “right” kind of people. Not so.
Below I list tiny handful of especially insightful books on changing the game, and my two lists of lists that sort all my recent reading in easy to access categories. Designing A World That Works For All boils down to clarity (not the theater we get now from politics and the media); diversity (all of us — every single one of us, as informed participants in our self-governance); integrity (not something visible in any organization with shadowy financial backers and hidden agendas); and finally, a commitment to sustainability (playing for the long term, for our children and their children).
Put simply, and now that the Internet and GroupOn and Twitter and other emergent capabilities make this possible, the time has come to end Rule by Secrecy and top-down decision-making that is not in the public interest. We now have the power–both technologically and financially–to create a Big Bat 21 for We the People (imagine 100 million citizens paying an average of $10 each) to fund a public intelligence network, a public policy network, and a public budget oversight network, all three working at all levels from municipality to county to state to nation to world. Joe Trippi and Zephyr Teachout proved that We the People can–in the aggregate–outspend Wall Street….but we have to want to!
In my view, and I wrote about this as Obama's Choice, we have in the next 30-90 days a transformational opportunity in America. We can demand Electoral Reform (1 Page, 9 Points) of every single one of our Senators and Representatives, and of our President, and we can demand a roll call vote on this simple restoration of public sovereignty — those who vote against it can be recalled by their constituencies and replaced by the 4th of July 2011. Restoring the clarity, diversity, and integrity of our electoral system in time for 2012 is what Buckminster Fuller would call “Prime Design.” It is fundamental. Absent that reform, everything proposed by the government, the corporations, the two-party tyranny, No Labels, Americans Elect, IndependentVoting.org, the churches, the unions — none of it is relevant to getting America back on track. Electoral Reform. Now. “Yes, We Can” Change the Game.
See Also:
Review: The Great Turning-From Empire to Earth Community
Review: Holistic Darwinism: Synergy, Cybernetics, and the Bioeconomics of Evolution
Review: Reflexive Practice-Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World
Review: Society's Breakthrough!-Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
Review: Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)
The author is unemployed and seeking righteous work. Have brain, will travel.
Wikileaks: Power shifts from secrecy to transparencyWelt am Sontag in Germany asked me for an op-ed on Wikileaks. Here it is, auf Englisch. Hier, auf Deutsch.
Government should be transparent by default, secret by necessity. Of course, it is not. Too much of government is secret. Why? Because those who hold secrets hold power.
Now Wikileaks has punctured that power. Whether or not it ever reveals another document—and we can be certain that it will—Wikileaks has made us all aware that no secret is safe. If something is known by one person, it can be known by the world.
Reference: On WikiLeaks and Government Secrecy + RECAP on Secrecy as Fraud, Waste, & Abuse
Reference: Transparency Killer App Plus “Open Everything” RECAP (Back to 01/2007)
Safety copy below the line.
The tech industry has a total crush on Groupon, that darling of the start-up scene that emails you huge discounts on everything from Gap jeans to gym memberships. Now that Google is about to acquire the Chicago-based start-up for billions of dollars, it’s like the tech blogs are all competing to see who can gush the most about how great Groupon is and how smart Google is for wanting to acquire them. It’s really not that big of a deal – how many times have we seen this kind of Cinderella story before?
Though I don’t find the acquisition all that interesting, I’m fascinated by the concept of Groupon, mainly for the incredible opportunity they missed. On the surface, Groupon seems to be about killer deals. They negotiate huge discounts with national and local businesses in exchange for the promise of thousands of new customers – pay $25 and get $50 worth of Thai food, for example, or pay $60 for a normally $250 dental exam. It’s a classic loss-leader tactic – gain new customers at a loss in hopes that they return and generate more business later.
When you take a closer look at Groupon’s phenomenal success, though, there’s a lot more going on than just bargains. Groupon was one of the first companies to successfully harness the power of group behavior across the social web in the name of a common purpose. That’s incredibly powerful! Think of the potential – for the first time in history, the physical barriers to collective, powerful action have been torn down, and Groupon figured out how to focus that power into a single, common goal. That’s huge!
Nov. 29 2010
Fascinating article, including leaks in the pipeline (banks), whistleblowers, censorship, his story, trying to stop leaks, spying, untrustful competitors, secrecy, war, field of intelligence, etc. … “our primary defense isn’t law, but technology…courage is contagious” (p.8) — JAS
Forbes Cover Story . . . Forbes Transcript
Following is an excerpt from page 5 regarding moving in the direction of ethical business — JAS
What do you think WikiLeaks mean for business? How do businesses need to adjust to a world where WikiLeaks exists?
WikiLeaks means it’s easier to run a good business and harder to run a bad business, and all CEOs should be encouraged by this. I think about the case in China where milk powder companies started cutting the protein in milk powder with plastics. That happened at a number of separate manufacturers.
Let’s say you want to run a good company. It’s nice to have an ethical workplace. Your employees are much less likely to screw you over if they’re not screwing other people over.
Then one company starts cutting their milk powder with melamine, and becomes more profitable. You can follow suit, or slowly go bankrupt and the one that’s cutting its milk powder will take you over. That’s the worst of all possible outcomes.
The other possibility is that the first one to cut its milk powder is exposed. Then you don’t have to cut your milk powder. There’s a threat of regulation that produces self-regulation.
It just means that it’s easier for honest CEOs to run an honest business, if the dishonest businesses are more effected negatively by leaks than honest businesses. That’s the whole idea. In the struggle between open and honest companies and dishonest and closed companies, we’re creating a tremendous reputational tax on the unethical companies.
No one wants to have their own things leaked. It pains us when we have internal leaks. But across any given industry, it is both good for the whole industry to have those leaks and it’s especially good for the good players.
But aside from the market as a whole, how should companies change their behavior understanding that leaks will increase?
Do things to encourage leaks from dishonest competitors. Be as open and honest as possible. Treat your employees well.
I think it’s extremely positive. You end up with a situation where honest companies producing quality products are more competitive than dishonest companies producing bad products. And companies that treat their employees well do better than those that treat them badly.
Would you call yourself a free market proponent?
Absolutely. I have mixed attitudes towards capitalism, but I love markets. Having lived and worked in many countries, I can see the tremendous vibrancy in, say, the Malaysian telecom sector compared to U.S. sector. In the U.S. everything is vertically integrated and sewn up, so you don’t have a free market. In Malaysia, you have a broad spectrum of players, and you can see the benefits for all as a result.
How do your leaks fit into that?
To put it simply, in order for there to be a market, there has to be information. A perfect market requires perfect information.
There’s the famous lemon example in the used car market. It’s hard for buyers to tell lemons from good cars, and sellers can’t get a good price, even when they have a good car.
By making it easier to see where the problems are inside of companies, we identify the lemons. That means there’s a better market for good companies. For a market to be free, people have to know who they’re dealing with.
You’ve developed a reputation as anti-establishment and anti-institution.
Not at all. Creating a well-run establishment is a difficult thing to do, and I’ve been in countries where institutions are in a state of collapse, so I understand the difficulty of running a company. Institutions don’t come from nowhere.
It’s not correct to put me in any one philosophical or economic camp, because I’ve learned from many. But one is American libertarianism, market libertarianism. So as far as markets are concerned I’m a libertarian, but I have enough expertise in politics and history to understand that a free market ends up as monopoly unless you force them to be free.
WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical.
But in the meantime, there could be a lot of pain from these scandals, obviously.
Pain for the guilty.
Do you derive pleasure from these scandals that you expose and the companies you shame?
It’s tremendously satisfying work to see reforms being engaged in and stimulating those reforms. To see opportunists and abusers brought to account.
———————————
Thanks to: Dan Drasin via John Steiner.
We now need a movement transcendent of partisan cliques and organized around a broad revitalization agenda and love of country. November 12, 2010
From Bill Clinton’s bridge to the 21st century to President Obama’s new foundation, the next American century is often described vaguely. Here’s why. November 9, 2010
Phi Beta Iota: In a very generic sense, what David Brooks proposes is perfectly aligned with the concept of a Smart Nation and the need to nurture a World Brain and Global Game.
