IMAGINE a Coalition Team led by an Independent but in fact a team of equals whose sole mission in life was to restore the integrity of the electoral process in 2015 and thence of the government, economy, and society in the USA in 2016 and beyond. Below is such a team as a starting point for national Living Room Conversations about the possibilities. The point of this conversation is to talk about how an honest government might function on the basis of ethical evidence-based decision-support, where the public interest, not special interests, are central.
President: Angus King
Vice President: Jill Stein or Elizabeth Warren
ADVISORS: Lee Iacocca, Mike Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, Tony Zinni, Steve McIntosh*
* At some point we need Secretary Generals for Commonwealth, Global Engagement, and Education, Intelligence, & Research. The advisors will help develop toward that end while also helping cut government by 50% in four years (salaries will continue to be paid for one year with retraining also paid for, but the positions will go — this will apply to contractor positions as well).
So, for example, here is a quarter century stable leadership concept:
2016: Angus King – Jill Stein or Elizabeth Warren 2020 Jill Stein or Elizabeth Warren – Dennis Kucincich
2024 Dennis Kucinich – VP1 2028 VP 1 – VP 2 2032 VP 2 – VP 3 2036 VP 3 – VP 4
The core concept is that we destroy the two-party tyranny, restore integrity to the government, make public service transparent, truthful, and trustworthy, and treat government service and particularly elective government service with respect: elect on merit, not money.
NOTIONAL ALLOCATION OF PRINCIPALS POSITIONS
OMB: John Kasich with Dennis Kucinich and Joseph Stiglitz
Agriculture: Jim Hightower
Attorney General: Ralph Nader
Commerce: Clyde Prestowitz
Education: Derek Bok, John Taylor Gatto
Defense:Chuck Hagel and Joe Sestak, JCS James Mattis or Jim Stavridis
Fed: Ron Paul (close it down, then RP to Supreme Court)
Health: Tom Coburn, Howard Dean
Homeland: Steve Flynn (close it down)
Intelligence: REDACTED (restore DCI, close down DNI, NSA, NRO, merge NGA with USGS)
– FBI (needs someone with giant balls able to take down elite traitors — alternate job for Jesse Ventura?)
Interior: Robert Costanza (integrate Energy & EPA with Herman Daly and Gordon Durnil)
Justice: Ralph Nader
Labor: Jesse Ventura
– Access America: William Greider (as suggested by Jim Turner)
– Immigration: Pat Buchanan
– Seniors Unlimited: Warren Buffet
– Veterans Affairs: Max Cleland
State: Jon Huntsman, Gary Hart, Mark Palmer
– Amb to UN: Carol Mosely Braun
– Amb to Israel: Henry Seigman
Trade: Alfred Eckes (fold back into Commece and downsize, end all secret deals)
Transportation & National Design: Jill Claybrook
Treasury: Yves Smith integrating IRS (Grover Norquist, close it down), Fed (Ron Paul*, close it down)
Veterans: Cleland (folk into Labor)
* There will be five induced vacancies on the Supreme Court; Ron Paul to fill one of them.
NEW:
Chaplain: Jim Wallis assisted by Rabbi Michael Lerner
Computational Mathematics Integrity: Stephen Wolfam (UK)
Governor’s Council: Mike Huckabee
Mayor’s Council: Bill DeBlasio
National Research Council: Vint Cerf (integrated budget, focus on tools for peace & prosperity)
Open Source Agency: Robert Steele
Water Conservation Authority: William J. Cosgrove
EMPHASIS:
FBI get serious about counterintelligence particularly domestic enemies
End dual nationals with security clearances
Shut down all agents of foreign powers (financial, religious, ideological)
What is the “substance of government?” Here is a chapter from ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig.
What kind of common sense guidance might a collaborative commons place before such an inspiring team of equals? Here are a few thoughts from Robert Steele's 2012 campaign for the Reform Party's presidential nomination.
COMMONWEALTH
Stewardship of the Commonwealth demands that every decision affecting the human, natural, and intellectual resources of the Commonwealth be subject to two kinds of thinking: first, does this decision conserve the integrity–the wholeness or completeness–of the Commonwealth, or does it diminish it? Second, in keeping with the traditions of the Native Americans whom we genocided, how will this decision play out Seven Generations out?
In that context, exporting jobs and hollowing out our industrial base while playing financial roulette with pension funds and taking Chernobyl-like risks with industrial catastrophe across America can only be seen as treason, plain and simple. Unfortunately, because we have tolerated a corrupt Congress for decades, a two-party tyranny, one bird with two wings, treason has been legal. That ends now.
Dennis Kucinich needs no introduction. I believe we can trust him to stop all of the forms of fraud and to begin the process of stopping and then reversing the centuries of depredation against America the Beautiful and its generations of impoverished, blue collar, and lower middle-class citizens who have been betrayed by a form of capitalism completely lacking in ethics and integrity.
Our agreed upon general marching orders to the Vice President & Secretary General for the Commonwealth, are these:
1. End individual income taxes while implementing the Automated Payments/Transaction Tax (APT Tax).
2. Terminate Corporate Personality, implement national corporate chartering and establish “one set of books” as the standard for retaining a public charter to do business.
3. Every American may be a member of a labor union or professional association within four years.
4. End citizen unemployment, study and define a national population policy within four years. The highest priority for what money we can spent will be on providing a full year of employment for every unemployed person, contingent on their engaging in a full year of training for jobs we need in the 21st century, including manufacturing, software, hardware, and resilience / sustainability across all domains including open source farming.
5. Focus especially on getting the 1.6 million homeless children off the streets, healthy, and into school.
6. Implement a domestic policy model that harmonizes spending toward clean water & local energy. Eliminate the tar sands and other such projects that deceive the public by neglecting to mention the three facts that are relevant: the true cost of the clean drinkable water needed to flush this crude energy source out of the ground; the true cost to America of transporting this, externalizing all the costs to the public; and the reality that America has all the energy it needs, this is a scam intended to provide profits to the energy companies that wish to export refined energy while once again screwing the public.
7. Legalize drugs, empty the prisons, employ every released prisoner, and lock down the borders–illegal immigrants will be deported at the expense of whoever rents to them or gives them work without satisfying the requirement to verify immigration status.
8. Create a national design of medium-size self-sufficient cities linked by high-speed rail.
9. End the Federal Reserve and do a complete audit of the Bank of New York within four years. Utilizing Truth & Reconciliation methods rather than impeachment and imprisonment methods, bring every corrupt Congressman and every corrupt banker before the public for a full accounting and a Presidential pardon contingent on a full public confession in detail of their misdeeds against the public interest.
The Vice President for the Commonwealth will oversee and work with the Secretary General for Education, Intelligence, and Research to shut down the Department of Education while simultaneously creating the 21st Century educational system that is free to all for life, leverages online learning and challenge examinations where possible, integrates apprenticeships in all the trades and professions, and generally leaves no citizen behind. $25 billion a year shall be redirected from secret intelligence systems of no substantive value, toward completely regenerating local to global education. We will disconnect local education from local real estate taxes and local elites cheating their own publics.
More details will be provided as we discuss individual cabinet departments in the context of the ten high-level threats to humanity (poverty is #1, terrorism barely #9) and the twelve core policies that are now being mis-managed, from Agriculture to Water.
GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT
The bad news first:
1) The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) chops immediately to the oversight of the Director for National Research, and simultaneously 50% of its budget and capabilities will immediately begin focusing on how to eradicate the ten high-level threats to humanity by waging peace.
2) Instead of the token 1% cut his predecessor cleverly presented as much greater, Program 50 will lose 20% a year each year for four years running. New initiatives not to exceed 10% each year will be considered; those that are Whole of Government in nature and focused on Stabilization & Reconstruction (S&R) are more likely to receive the approval of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who will have line item veto authority over all federal programs and proposals subject only to Presidential over-ride.
3) We will immediately begin bringing all our troops home, with no less than 25% of all bases and capabilities overseas being eliminated and ideally 100% once we have a long-haul Air Force and a 450-ship Navy. The National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Reconnaissance Agency (NRO) are going to be cut back to 30% of their present budgets; the totality of the “cyber-war” initiative will roll over to be under the oversight of the Director of National Research, with support from the Director of the Computational Mathematics Authority.
Now the good news.
1) Secretary General for Global Engagement will be the primary US Presidential-level participant in all Presidential-level encounters. For all practical purposes, a few situations not-withstanding, Michael Bloomberg will BE the President of the United States of America beyond the water’s edge.
2) The military will provide the “core force” for Whole of Government operations world-wide. The regional theater commands will immediately begin the process of becoming Whole of Government commands with Assistant Secretaries of State and Assistant Secretaries of Commerce co-located with and co-equal with the Commanding General. Staffs will become both Whole of Government, and multinational in nature. In that capacity, broadened by the other capabilities under the direction of the Secretary General for Global Engagement, it will immediately begin planning, programming, and budgeting so as to restructure to provide the following eight capabilities:
a) Strategists that advise whole of government policy
b) Domestic Threat Response via the National Guard focused on plagues, fires, and disasters
c) Citizen Education bonding the nation through both entry-level and mid-career service
d) Electronic Security reinforcement focused on open standards and open source software–within four years, the entire government will be using open source software, open source hardware, and dumping anything that cannot cut it into the trash.
e) Ground Truth through a warrior’s eyes–24/7, global, down to the district level
f) Constabulary able to stabilize failed states and lead multinational reconstruction endeavors
g) Small Wars force able to contain and remediate random violence including Embassy take-overs
h) Force on Force the big war force, constantly ready, never redirected to other missions
3) With oversight and vetoes of defense planning and programming subject only to Presidential (or Congressional) over-rule, the Strategy Center and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will assist the Secretary General and his Cabinet sub-committee to address the following guidance from Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), then Chairman of the Armed Service Committee (SASC):
I am constantly being asked for a bottom-line defense number. I don’t know of any logical way to arrive at such a figure without analyzing the threat; without determining what changes in our strategy should be made in light of the changes in the threat; and then determining what force structure and weapons programs we need to carry out this revised strategy.
4) For planning and programming purposes there will be four threat classes, each to be addressed by a mix of commercial, diplomatic, and military means: the low-tech brute; the low-tech-seer; the high-tech brute; and the high-tech seer.
5) For government-wide strategic development purposes, there will be five strategies, all five subject to the advice and consent of the Vice President and the two Secretary-Generals, and of course the Congress once approved by the President.
a) Global Intelligence Strategy
b) Global Interoperability Strategy
c) Whole of Government Force Structure Strategy
d) Preventive Diplomacy Strategy
e) Home Front Prosperity & Resilience Strategy
6) The following will be slated for immediate action:
a) Kill 2 theater war and Joint Vision, create long haul Air Force
b) Kill Missile Defense
c) Kill new attack submarine
d) Kill fancy TacAir
e) Build 450 Ship Navy with priority to the Expediter (75 of them)
f) Retool the National Guard to needs of the Commonwealth
g) Redirect Africa Command to become the Stabilization & Reconstruction Command with oversight of the global Ground Truth Force and the Multinational Decision-Support Centre (MDSC)
h) Fund the Open Source Agency at $125M year one growing to $3B by year six, with an emphasis on free global education in top 33 languages at first, all 183 major languages by year six
i) Fund the Digital Marshall Plan that provides free cell phones and cell service everywhere–work with each region to create a Multinational Decision Support Centre that also supports a diversity of online call languages in all regional languages, to educate the poor one cell call at a time, while also serving as a regional early warning network for all ten high-level threats to humanity, and those threats that cannot be anticipated.
k) Fund the multinational diplomatic and economic outreach and rotational program
l) Redirect $2 billion toward Stabilization & Reconstruction Programs directly employing locals
m) Fund the Peace Corps times five and the new Homeland Service Corps–the latter will be initially comprised of prisoners whose personal drug convictions have been commuted, overseen by disabled veterans–every veteran amputee without exception will have a job that challenges them daily.
Now some general guidelines:
1) Speaking a foreign language at the three level (out of five) is required for promotion to field grade or senior staff non-commissioned grade effective in two years; allocate necessary resources, and liberal paid leave, to make this happen. Emphasize recruitment of native language speakers who have mastered English as half the solution.
2) We will stop churning people with clearances immediately. If you leave government service prior to retirement age, or if you leave one contractor position to accept another, you lose your clearances. The exception will be when the government certifies its active concurrence with the early retirement or inter-corporation transfer. This will apply especially to Special Forces and intelligence operations officers.
3) We want marijuana legalized immediately, and some form of intermediate program for other personal drugs.
4) Over-turn the missteps on copyright and patent excessive protection. Use it or lose it, and the original term periods will re-apply. We particularly want Justice to work with the Patent Office under Secretary General for Education, Intelligence, & Research to identify two kinds of patents: those that are keeping useful knowledge from the marketplace; and those that are being used to blackmail legitimate commercial enterprises.
5) Give the Computational Mathematic Authority all the resources it needs to rescue Google and explore an integration of Google with Wolfram Alfa. There’s a pony in here someplace, Google doesn’t get it, let’s treat this as digital gold and go after it.
6) Begin the process of stopping all Foreign Military Assistance (FMA). We want a weekly report on this. We want Chuck Hagel and/or Joe Sestak to convert the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence bureaucracy into that of an Undersecretary of Defense for Stabilization & Reconstruction, let Vickers try his hand at that for 90 days, get people like Bob Oakley and Mike Dziedzic and a few others in to reinforce him. He’s losing all the intelligence money, so FMA dollars are all he will have to work with–we want to see a one page draft spending plan seven days from today. Ambassador Mark Palmer will be his counterpart as Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy & Peace.
7) Israel–We want to meet with you and your cabinet heads and Ambassador Seigman right away. We are going to do a number of things quickly.
a) Bring us the Pollard file–as angry as we are over the USS Liberty and Israel’s various predations, it may be time to exile this traitor, co-incident with the cessation of our foreign military assistance to all countries in the Middle East.
b) Identify every individual in the US Government holding dual US-Israeli citizenship. Create a task force to evaluate each one individually, beginning with those in policy positions and with clearances. We’re going to clean house. We will not have Israeli citizens making US policy or sharing US secrets. They can renounce or they can quit and we want blanket counter-intelligence on every one that renounces and stays.
c) We are going to have to occupy Palestine for fifty years (to raise two new generations). Effective immediately we are stopping all US subsidies of the Israeli government, the 20% we pay that allows them to commit atrocities against the Palestinians. That money will now go to Palestine. HOWEVER (the Arabs will not be happy with our cancelling the FMA money, but we could care less), we are also going to demand that they come up with a five year plan for bringing Lebanon and Palestine back into the modern world. We will try a federated two state solution with Gaza going back to holding its share of the waterfront from the maps in Biblical times. We want a regional water authority and we want you to prepare to carpet bomb any new settlements as well as settlements in the occupied territories that are not turned over to the Palestinians for immediate resettlement. This is going to be thorny. A regional and national conference to discuss the whole thing might be worth trying, we will do nothing in secret, everything will be open, transparent, and explained. We will no longer tolerate Israel manipulating the US Government or the US public. All organizations receiving money or direction from the Zionist government of Israel will be immediately registered as agents of a foreign power. These are early thoughts, we rely on you to help us throttle back as needed.
8) Commerce has just one marching order from me: restore the integrity of the national economy. We particularly want to dump all federal regulations written by the corporate monsters (e.g. meat packing) and get back to buy local across the board. Take what works in the Pacific Northwest and New England and spread it out. We want an end to absentee land ownership–you own it you work it or you lose it. We are long overdue for restoring sustainable community in America, this will have our strong personal interest. TRUE COST ECONOMICS will be in effect. Ralph will keep us from going overboard, but from where we sit the Wall Street phantom economy has screwed over the Main Street and Small Town economies. We need to reset the economy. Although the above makes it sound as if Commerce should be under the Vice President for the Commonwealth, that is not our strategic focus. We need to create a global economy that gets back to basics including the creation of infinite wealth everywhere else so we no longer have illegal immigration issues here. We have to restore our economic integrity in the context of restoring our role in the global economy as a force for creative moral capitalism that also keeps all the illegal immigrates happily at home instead of crashing our borders. It’s a tough job. Clyde is going to need your help, both tangible and intellectual. we picked you for this job for many reasons, not least of which we think you are the only person who can pull off a diplomatic, military, and economic tri-fecta.
EDUCATION, INTELLIGENCE, & RESEARCH
The USA in particular, but Europe as well, is coming off a few decades of ethical and intellectual decline. Philosophy has been displaced by ideology, thinking displaced by technology, and particularly the technology for war. America has become a cheating culture, led by a Cheater in Chief (regardless of which of the two party tyranny wings he is closest to) and a Congress of Cheats who abdicate their Article 1 responsibilities and betray the Republic every single day of their pathetic unethical existence.
Although the Vice President for the Commonwealth is the Principal Vice President, the Secretary General for Education, Intelligence, and Research is arguably the most important member of the team in terms of the future, the key figure in rethinking and reinventing and reinvigorating the American body politic. we see each of us serving a four year term as President, providing the Republic–if it desires–with sixteen years of stable leadership and a certain consistent focus on nurturing the Republic back to health.
Access America is placed under this Secretary General’s oversight because citizenship, education, and voting are like the DNA spiral of the Republic. None can exist effectively without the other two.
Faith and culture have been denigrated for too long. Fundamentalism is blind, ignorant, and often racist. Faith is the opposite of fundamentalism — it inspires acceptance of the universal Golden Rule, it inspires clarity, diversity, and integrity. America is one nation, under God, and whether one chooses to believe in the God of collective community on Earth or the God of divine Providence, God is alive and well and America the Beautiful cannot do without God and faith and respect for the sacredness of life.
Culture joins with faith as the “glue” of a civilization, and culture, the home for conventions proven over time, is vital to the transmission of the lessons of civilization that are not taught in classrooms, but rather lived in multi-generational communities. One cannot have a Nation without a culture. It is culture that embraces diversity, assimilates diversity, and yet maintains the integrity of the whole.
We know that our educational system is in the basement. It will take a great deal of money to do a complete make-over of our national educational system, one reason why we am so pleased to place the bloated, wasteful, and largely ineffective national intelligence community–and its budget–under the direct influence of Secretary General Michael Bloomberg.
Within intelligence, which is about decision support, not about secrets, we will implement the various initiatives that have been defined in the Human Intelligence Trilogy. The centerpiece of our national intelligence reform will be the Open Source Agency, starting at $125 million a year and growing quickly to $3 billion a year as a sister agency to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), but remaining firmly under the budgetary and policy control of the Secretary General for Education, Intelligence, and Research while also have a direct report relationship with the Deputy Director for Management at OMB, and direct access to the President and all Cabinet Members as needed.
Research is largely dead in America. The universities have sold out to corporations, the patent system is ignorant, corrupt, or both depending on the domain, the “web of knowledge” is virtually non-existent with a plethora of sub-disciplines and no “integrating” umbrella. No one is studying “true cost” of every element of every supply chain, and we only have 67 people studying computer code at the offensive and defensive levels of play. A third of the secret intelligence budget will be used to revitalize research, but in a multidisciplinary, firmly ecological, and very multinational manner. Open Everything will be our battle cry.
The Secretary General for Education, Intelligence, and Research will also oversee the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the new Strategy Center that David Abshire has long championed and Tony Zinni wrote about in The Battle for Peace, and the new Truth & Reconciliation Centre that we invite three prominent internationalists to lead for our common well-being. All three of these are not now, but should be, intelligence-driven organizations. We will of course take a personal interest in all three of these. Before we finish, we will help America achieve a “clean sheet” rebirth as a world power, one that acknowledges the truth of its past sins, and reconciles sincerely toward creating a prosperous world at peace. Information and intelligence, not guns and violence, are the only means to achieve this goal.
We have nine general marching orders.
1. Voting will become mandatory in stages over four years, as part of the Electoral Reform program. Education will make voting a much-desired and appreciated attribute of engaged citizenship. This will only be effective if all eleven electoral reforms remain in place.
2. Education will be year-round, life long, blended with free online learning and call centers.
3. Everyone, including immigrants, will come together in national service at 18 and again at 38, the first time for two years enlisted or four years officer, the second time for one year enlisted or two years officer. To the extent possible, all citizens who wish to do so will be encouraged to remain in the Reserve, inclusive of the National Guard and a new Homeland Service Corps with a strong focus on localized resilience.
4. The Open Source Agency OSA) will empower all eight tribes of intelligence, will be firmly rooted in “true cost” investigations of every product and service, and will have as its objective the use of intelligence to eradicate the ten high-level threats to humanity by harmonizing spending by all across the twelve core policy domains.
5. The OSA will be the parent but not the controller of the Multinational Decision Support Centre and the global network of regional and national intelligence and call centers. The Strategy Center and the Multinational Decision Support Centre will be co-located with the Open Source Center. The World Brain Institute and the School of Future-Oriented Hybrid Governance will be fully-funded arms of the OSA.
6. All research funded by the public will remain in the public domain.
7. Open Spectrum and Free/Open Source Software communications and computing are a priority, with the intent of shifting the entire federal government to open source software and hardware within four years as part of an accelerated “moonshot” toward creating a Smart Nation.
8. Every citizen will have health insurance; we will buy all drugs overseas and at wholesale prices with careful persistent testing, for less than 5% of what our previously corrupt Congress has mandated (the full price without negotiation). Individuals will be held responsible for a healthy lifestyle, organizations for a health environment–natural and alternative cures will have pride of place, with patient and family centered medical and pharmaceutical remediation as the last course.
9. The Strategy & Truth & Reconciliation Centers will have as their objective the creation of a prosperous world at peace within twelve years, 75% within eight years, 50% within four years, using the Multinational Decision Support Centre as the Whole of Government and Coalition Operations support element.
We will address long-needed specifics about the draconian reforms needed in the secret world in a later posting. For now I will simply say that in combination with the above initiatives, we can and should be able to reduce funding for secret intelligence sources and methods to $25 billion a year in 2012 dollars, applying the savings to education and research.
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