How I Tested the Boundaries of the Two-Party Tyranny
Reality Sandwich, 24 May 2012
For six weeks in early 2012 I ran for the office of President of the United States of America. I was accepted by the Reform Party (one of six accredited national parties completely shut out of the political process in the US), was listed at Politics1, participated in a WikiNews interview and got my views posted at On the Issues. I created We the People Reform Coalition, and I wrote letters to every single candidate for President including Rocky Anderson and Buddy Roemer, throwing in Dennis Kucinich for grins. This is my report — there are no winners.
Preamble
I was shocked into paying attention by Al Gore's playing dead in 2000 (despite Greg Palast outing the Bush family scheme to disenfranchise 50,000 people of color, doing so three months in advance of election day). I was radicalized by 9/11 — a clear false-flag operation in which elements of our own government were complicit — and infuriated with the ease by which this nation was taken to war on the strength of 935 now-documented lies — lies that no serving officer — including Colin Powell — was willing to confront. Then I lost everything in the 2008 economic crash described so well by Matt Taibbi in GRIFTOPIA — it took two years for my company to go out of business — and along came Occupy. Occupy failed. This is their story and mine. If this story moves you, I believe we have 90 days from today to take seven steps that can bury the two-party tyranny and install an honest coalition government.
2000-2008
For eight years I read and reviewed non-fiction books across 98 categories, including many on impeachment, on secession, and on our corrupt political process. I actually breathed a sigh of relief when Barack Obama promised to run on public funding, matching the promise of John McCain. On that basis, either would have been a very satisfactory replacement for an Administration clearly hijacked by Dick Cheney and the Israeli Zionists and their neoconservative friends. I believe Dick Cheney to have committed over 20 impeachable acts, and I itemize those in my review of VICE: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the Presidency.
Also for eight years I worked with Jock Gill, previously a communications specialist on Bill Clinton's staff, and Michael Cudahy, a senior staff assistant to Barry Goldwater. Together we crafted the twin concepts of a coalition cabinet and a balanced budget. Then I joined with Jim Turner, long ago Ralph Nader's #2, and developed a draft electoral reform act.
2008-2010
I drove to Iowa to support Obama, and even got the room right next to his, aided by a woman of color at the front desk who overturned the Secret Service blocking of that room from rental. She understood my objectives. Once installed, I explained my objective to the Secret Service, and without interference put a memorandum under Obama's door. I never heard from him, nor would David Axelrod or David Plouffe respond to any of my faxes. In rapid secession Obama broke his promise to run on public funds (he still has not accounted for $300 million in contributions); appointed uber Zionist Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff; appointed an imbecile without ethics as the Attorney General; extended Guantanamo and the failed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; expanded the Department of Homeland Insanity; and most recently, embraced CIA programs to kill people with drones, including US citizens who can — when they are not being assassinated by their own government, be detained by the military indefinitely without due process. ENOUGH!
2011-2012
On 26 February 2011, I published an essay written in 2004 and updated for the moment, “Citizen in Search of a Leader” at Greater Democracy. In that essay I outlined four inter-locking reforms required to restore the Republic and create a Smart Nation: electoral reform, intelligence reform, governance reform, and national security reform.
On 6 June 2011, frustrated by the mediocrity (or in the case of Ron Paul, narrowness) of the candidates running for the Republican nomination, and sharing Lee Iacocca's angst from his book Where Have All the Leaders Gone?, I posted “Seven Promises to America” at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog. They included electoral reform; an end to income taxes (substituting the Automated Payment Transaction (APT) Tax which is tiny but covers everything including stock and currency transactions not now taxed); a coalition cabinet to be selected prior to election day so as to participate in cabinet level debates; a balanced budget announced before election day; a commitment to full employment (to which today I would add zero inflation); a commitment to eradicate illegal employment of illegal aliens; and finally; a commitment toward Non-Zero: The Logic of Human Destiny — a world that works for 100% of humanity, a prosperous world at peace.
Then Occupy happened. I noticed them early, then went to New York City to see for myself. My trip report is online. Although enthusiastic about the potential of Occupy, I also foresaw their collapse while speaking on 17 November 2011, on Russia Today TV, and posted a letter and a YouTube message to Occupy suggesting they focus on electoral reform, occupy the home offices of our generally corrupt Senators and Representatives, and strive to raise funds for the unification of all of us against the two-party tyranny that cooks the books, fakes the elections, and has nothing at all to do with the public interest, only special interests. I even arranged for IndiGoGo to create a national page for them, to give them critical mass in fund-raising apart from Occupy NYC.
I crafted the following proposed “program” in an attempt to articulate the foundation for common ground among all of us — Occupy and the Tea Party as catalysts, with the Independents as the broad middle:
CORRUPTION is the common enemy, both in government and in the private sector.
ELECTORAL REFORM is the singular demand.
SUNSHINE CABINET is the method.
INTEGRITY is the core value.
COMMONWEALTH RESTORED is the outcome.
I was so enthusiastic about this that I worked with members of the Occupy NYC Working Group on Electoral Reform, who were doing some great work of their own, got on the agenda, and in early October briefed my concept for Occupy making a Statement of Demand and a draft Electoral Reform Act of 2012 two pieces of paper around which America the Beautiful could be re-united. It took a month for the video of my six minute presentation to get to YouTube, at which point it went viral — and then it died, as did Occupy.
From early March 2012 I contributed a series, Steele on Electoral Reform at Independent Voter Network. That also failed.
The combined failure — along with the fact that I was unemployed and dismayed about government and media lies (the real unemployment rate is 22.4%, in the youth demographic, and also my (old guys) demographic, closer to 40%) — drove me to run for President. I was most gratified to find the Reform Party leadership to be serious and welcoming. I registered with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), received my national committee identification number [C00507756], and got to work.
I ran for President for two reasons.
First, to create a website where I could put, in Presidential campaign structure, everything I had learned in ten years of thinking — with other colleagues — about where we need to go. It has four pillars, in alphabetical order, with all the information still online-use the Directory to see and link to everything.
Balanced Budget — Coalition Cabinet — Electoral Reform Act of 2012 — True Cost Economics
In addition to these four pillars, a decade in the making, I provided for a very innovative jobs plan to get America back to work, and I provided positions on issues that are based on intelligence and integrity rather than ideology and convenience.
Finally, I remain the only candidate to run as concept-creating a true coalition — instead of for themselves as an individual. If all of us came together to run against the two-party tyranny as I have devised, who is president does not matter because the team would be so steeped in intelligence with integrity, so truthful and transparent, as to inspire the one thing we do not have in our government today, trust. Our logo has a very pissed-off eagle, not my name or face.
Second, to be able to write to every other presidential candidate in my capacity as a candidate.
Here's what I learned about the other candidates, half of them face to face.
They don't care about anything other than their preconceptions. They are afraid of strangers. Their staffs are afraid of strangers. They don't answer the mail. With the exception of Rocky Anderson and Ron Paul none of them are fit to be president, and in the latter two cases, they are only 20% ready because they are running as a man, not as a team with intelligence and integrity up front.
Here's what I learned that I did not expect to learn.
01) Congress has the power to pass a law pertaining to federal elections that would put all six of the excluded small parties (Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law, Reform, Socialist) into every state ballot and every debate at every level, for federal elections.
02) Some form of such a law has been introduced nine times, the last four times by Ron Paul. The two-party tyranny has refused every single time to actually restore democratic access to the ballot and the debates.
03) Americans Elect started out as a fraudulent endeavor similar to NO LABELS, and then lost Michael Bloomberg as its presumed candidate. It is a brilliant idea thoroughly corrupt on the inside, both within its “leadership” ranks and at the technical level, where nothing has integrity. We should hijack it.
04) Twitter — not Google or Facebook — could be the giant-killer. Unfortunately, as with Google and Facebook, Twitter's leadership is reluctant to entertain anything “not invented here” and Twitter lacks both a back office and a global information into intelligence strategy. Twitter makes it possible for all of us to vote on everything always. We are still missing public intelligence in the public interest, but there is no longer any excuse for not going directly to ballot initiatives on everything including budget line items, at every level from local to global.
05) When you post something like the Electoral Reform Act of 2012 online, it attracts serious stakeholders quickly. The current version of the act is crowd-sourced, and far better than what a few of us put together in the first go-around. Still, they are all over the lot — cats on crack.
06) We the People can outspend the banks, corporations, and foreign funds. Just half of our eligible voters paying $10 a year to a Liberty Fund is $1 billion a year.
07) What I have not learned — what I cannot do beyond what I have already done — is how to inspire one altruistic person of wealth, or a sufficiency of individuals combined with one credible candidate, to convene an Electoral Reform Summit in the month of May, so as to present the Statement of Demand, and then in June create a crowd-sourced balanced budget and a crowd-sourced coalition cabinet.
I submit that the deadline for passing the Electoral Reform Act of 2012 should be 4 July 2012, and that whoever is chosen by the public within this larger public movement, should be our presidential candidate and placed on the ballot after we hijack Americans Elect or get one of the existing national parties to nominate our chosen leader who would thus — in combination with the Act, automatically go into every debate and on every ballot.
I am not giving up on America the Beautiful just yet, but I am fed up with a government that lies; with media that lies; with universities that teach crap and run up student debts; with religions that undermine the Republic (interestingly, only the Muslims and the Quakers can be said to NOT be undermining the US government from within); with America as a cheating idiot culture. ENOUGH.
I have learned that the two-party tyranny is an empty shell, a paper tiger we can burn to ashes in an instant. I have learned that none of the candidates — including Rocky Anderson and Ron Paul — have what it takes within them to see all of this. Perhaps neither of them should be our candidate. If I were the candidate, Ron Paul would be in line to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (after I compelled all those voting for CITIZENS UNITED to retire), and I would find a place for all those running for President within the Coalition Cabinet. November 2012 is ours to lose.
We are all hanging separately. This need not be. I have consulted Yoda, and he has said to me:
Robert David STEELE Vivas, born in New York in 1952 (60), has served the US Government in various capacities for over 30 years. A former spy who also worked on technical collection systems and was the senior civilian responsible for the creation of the Marine Corps Intelligence Center, he has testified against secrecy and against torture. Today he is the foremost proponent for M4IS2: Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making. He is the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, with over 1,800 books and some DVDs reviewed since 2000. He reads in 98 categories, with all of his reviews more easily accesses via Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog. See most of his production to date online. His latest book, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust, will be in bookstores and on Amazon from 5 Jun.
Phi Beta Iota: Occupy is a culture hack, not a political movement, but it has failed to seize the lever of the day, electoral reform. There is still time to have a national electoral reform summit, demand the Electoral Reform Act of 2012, and put the two-party tyranny out of business. All it would take is a coalition of patriotic citizens–if Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich refuse to do something like this, it confirms all suspicions that they are and always have been, part of the “controlled opposition.”
See Also:
The Battle for the Soul of the Republic
THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust
