UPDATE: Book is #8 in Civics category at Kindle, today, 26 Feb 2015.
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #68,435 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
This is my first Kindle book, published in conjunction with my briefing it to the Economics of Happiness Conference in Portland, Oregon on 28 February 2015. Below is the full description of the book. Amazon provides Look Inside including the Table of Contents.
Micah Sifry says it best in his new book, The Big Disconnect, when he outlines how all activists are as fragmented and ineffective today as they were in the 1960's. — the two-party duopology and the 42 billionaires behind that two-party duopology have successfully “channeled” all activist groups — including MoveOn and IndependentVoting.org and the Libertarians and the Greens. Everyone is obsessed with “their” hashtag, “their” micro-issues. However well-intentioned they might be, the fact is that we are hanging separately for failure to come together on the ONE THING that we can both all support, and also win: #ElectoralReform.
I have a vision of Jon Huntsman, Elizabeth Warren, Gary Johnson, and Jill Stein coming together with Ralph Nader, Jesse Ventura, Cynthia McKinney, and others, to effect a non-negotiable Statement of Demand for the Electoral Reform Act of 2015, in time for us to elect an Independent presidential team with a coalition cabinet announced in advance of election day. Neither Jeb Bush nor Hillary Clinton have the gravitas to do this.
In this book, a cry from the heart for a free and equal America in which we put the common sense and good intentions of We the People back into governance, I offer several years of work that started with my six minute briefing to Occupy in 2011 that went viral on Reddit and YouTube. I subsequently ran briefly for President, accepted by the Reform Party, so as to create the web site We the People Reform Coalition where I put the four big transpartisan ideas down in black and white: Electoral Reform; Coalition Cabinet; Balanced Budget; and an end to the existing tax system, replacing it with Edgar Feige's Automated Payment Transaction (APT) Tax while also enacting both full employment and a coherent population and citizenship policy.
The two-party tyranny (Theresa Amato's excellent term, in The Grand Illusion) has sold us out. It is stupid and short-sighted to think that addressing political money, or corruption, or any of a thousand other pet rocks, is going to help us in any way. The system is rigged and the system will stay rigged unless we — the 60% that have been disenfranchised — assert our God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, honor the Constitution, abolish the present government in a non-violent manner using Electoral Reform, and MOVE ON.
I open the book with a link and tribute to Eric Lui, whose 17 minute presentation on why citizens need to understand power — and the abject vulnerability of the 1% to structured ethical power exercised by the 99% — can save the Republic and ultimately save the world.
As a former spy who is also an honorary hacker and the #1 Amazon Reviewer for non-fiction, I have been going crazy with pain watching the United States of America self-destruct. In this book I offer two straight-forward ideas that are legal, ethical, actionable, measurable, and time-bounded.
You can take charge of your life — our shared future — or you can continue to be a slave. May God Bless America in her original incarnation, and the incarnation I know we are capable of effecting, an America committed — as Ron Paul puts it — to peace, commerce, and friendship — at home and abroad.
